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Devin O'Keefe rallying the crowd
Posted on Wed, Sep. 10, 2003
Hundreds protest Iraqi oil Bush's request for $87 billion
prompted the demonstration
By Rebecca Rosen Lum
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
RICHMOND - More than 300 people rallied at Chevron's Richmond
refinery Tuesday night to protest the processing of crude oil
from Iraq and to take aim at President Bush, whom organizers
say has misled the public about the reasons for the Iraq invasion.
The group rallied at 5:30 p.m. at a community park at West
Cutting and South Garrard before walking to the main gates of
the Point Richmond plant, where they were met with flanks of
police in riot gear.
With the aim of blocking any trucks carrying oil out of the
refinery, demonstrators stationed themselves at the main distribution
gates, chanting, "They say war, we say peace" as the
Brass Liberation Orchestra played "Down by the Riverside."
Organizers said Bush's request for $87 billion for the war
prompted the protest. Several people, including a veteran and
the mother of a U.S. Marine, said they had come to mistrust
the president's statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
and later statements that one of the war's goals was to liberate
and democratize Iraq.
"I come back and find out the freedoms I fought for as
a Marine are being taken away by the Patriot Act," said
gulf war veteran Eric Shaw.
"All you hear is 'We want this, we want that, we want
more troops," said Judith Ross of Fremont, whose 20-year-old
son is a Marine. "There is no vision. I feel so betrayed.
There have been so many lies and betrayals. It's our children
who are being shot at every day."
The demonstration had the feel of a country fair. The Brass
Liberation Orchestra regaled the crowd. Children frolicked on
the lawn. Several couples brought babies in buggies, and organizers
supplied fruit and drinks.
"I don't like the idea of Iraqi oil," said Oakland
resident Candy Wright, who teaches school in Hayward. "It
seems like blood oil to me. I'm haunted by what's happened to
children over there as a result of this war, and 10 years of
sanctions."
Several protesters carried signs reading, "No stolen oil."
"I'm not sure what they mean by that," said Chevron
spokesman Dean O'Hair, reached earlier in the day. "We
have purchased crude oil in the past through the U.N.'s food-for-oil
program, and we may very well do so again in the future."
Where the company gets its oil and in what quantities remains
confidential, he said.
He objected to Clarke and others' contention that Chevron has
contaminated the environment or endangered area residents.
"It's not a true statement," he said. "By any
measure, our air quality, water quality and our quality of life
shows we have a very healthy community here in Richmond."
Sean Lynn, who came with his wife, Shannon, and daughter Kaya,
7 months, said his family experienced two shelter-in-place alarms
stemming from accidents at the Richmond refinery in two months.
"It's scary when you're out on a walk and you hear the
sirens," he said. "You try to get home as fast as
possible."
Lynn gazed with apprehension at the lines of officers holding
clubs as he approached the gates. Members of Antioch, Pittsburg
and Richmond police departments, the Contra Costa Sheriff's
Office, and the California Highway Patrol were in evidence.
Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms drove
along in vans and two helicopters circled overhead.
Richmond's acting Police Chief Chuck Bennett said officers
and demonstrators were "matched, about one to one,"
but said he applauded the demonstration and anticipated no incidents.
"This is what America is all about," he said. "The
bottom line is, we're not looking for trouble and this group
isn't looking for trouble, so we're going to have a good time
tonight."
Officers were armed with nothing more lethal than paint ball
guns and bean bag rounds, he said. Several officers milled through
the crowd with digital video cameras.
Although executives had left by the time the protesters arrived,
the refinery operates 24 hours a day.
"The refinery will continue to operate to produce the
fuels the public demands," O'Hair said. "A number
of these folks will have the fuel to drive their cars to the
assembly site.
Reach reporter Rebecca Rosen Lum at 510-262-2713 or rrosenlum@cctimes.com.
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Posted on Sep 20, 2003
Greens call the breakdown of WTO talks a victory for
global democracy
U.S. Greens at the WTO ministerial in Cancun support
developing nations, farmers, and workers in their
resistance to privatization, imposed price reductions
and subsidies, and other corporate enrichment schemes.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Greens called the breakdown of talks at
the World Trade Organization (WTO)
ministerial in Cancun, Mexico a victory for the
movement against globalized corporate power.
Green activists especially praised the resolve of 21
developing nations in resisting the demands from
wealthy nations that they submit to privatization of
water, agricultural export subsidies, and other
schemes to drain resources, create poverty and
dependence, and repeal eco and human rights
protections and democracy for the benefit of western
corporations.
"The influence of Greens around the world, especially
the Greens/EFA group, in cooperation with global
justice movements and developing countries, helped
bring these negotiations to a halt," said Annie Goeke,
co-chair of the International Committee of the Green
Party of the United States and one of two American Green delegates
at the WTO meeting. "We were pleased to see the Kenyan
delegation stand up to intense pressure from the U.S. and European
Union, thanks to Kenyan Green Party Deputy Wangari Maathai,
who serves as Kenya's Minister of Environment. Maathai has worked
for decades to inform Africans and other developing nations
about the destructiveness of corporate control over people and
land."
"It's obvious that the WTO cannot work in its present form,"
said Jim Polk, Virginia Green and the other Green delegate at
the WTO meeting. "Cancun broke down because of injustice,
double standards, and the lack of democracy. U.S. and European
governments have abused the doctrine of free trade to enlarge
the power of corporate elites, and the rest of the world will
no longer stand for it. Elections throughout South America are
showing that the people reject these trade authorities, but
WTO bureaucrats are the last ones to accept the decision of
the people."
However, Greens warn that, with the collapse of
negotiations in Cancun, many developing nations will
be forced to deal with the crushing economic power of
the U.S. bilaterally.
"Greens want fair trade, negotiated democratically,"
said Tony Affigne, co-chair of the International
Committee. "We want trade rules to protect the
environment and labor rights. We want the world's
farmers treated with dignity. Fair trade rules will
let nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
distribute affordable drugs for AIDS and other
diseases. They'll protect the world's drinking water
from ruthless privatization, crops from genetic
engineering, local markets from global price wars."
"But after the collapse in Cancun," Affigne warned,
"a
checkerboard world of bilateral and regional
agreements will pose new challenges for the fair trade
movement. That new struggle is just beginning."
MORE INFORMATION
The Green Party of the United States
1700 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 404
Washington, DC 20009.
202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN
Fax 202-319-7193
U.S. Green report on Cancun
http://www.gp.org/articles/goeke_polk_09_12_03.html
Published on Wednesday, September 17, 2003 by TomDispatch.com
Victory in Cancún
by Rebecca Solnit
Last Tuesday, September 9, 300-400 activists marched to the
Chevron-Texaco refinery in Richmond, California, one of thousands
of actions around the world in opposition to the World Trade
Organization (WTO) as its fifth ministerial opened in Cancun,
Mexico. Richmond isn't how most people picture the San Francisco
Bay Area: it's a poor, mostly nonwhite community whose citizens
are periodically confined to their houses or sent to the hospital
by fumes leaking from the refinery. Because Chevron-Texaco is
refining Iraqi oil, the demonstration let us address at once
local environmental-justice issues, the ongoing war in Iraq,
and corporate pillage.
As Naomi Klein pointed out in a recent Nation column, (Free
Trade Is War):
"After September 11, right-wing pundits couldn't bury
the globalization movement fast enough. We were gleefully informed
that in times of war, no one would care about frivolous issues
like water privatization. Much of the US antiwar movement fell
into a related trap: Now was not the time to focus on divisive
economic debates, it was time to come together to call for peace.
All this nonsense ends in Cancún this week, when thousands
of activists converge to declare that the brutal economic model
advanced by the World Trade Organization is itself a form of
war."
And the war on Iraq is also just a form of colonization and
resource capture for corporate benefit. The profits from Iraqi
oil, should they ever materialize, would go to the 'rebuilding
of Iraq'--a.k.a. to Halliburton and Bechtel. The march included
community members and community activists, three Catholic priests,
white-haired peace activists, environmentalists and a lot of
young radicals connected to Direct Action to Stop War, which
orchestrated the 20,000-person shutdown of San Francisco's financial
district when the bombing began in Iraq last March and called
this action. We paraded to the gates where the trucks take away
the Iraqi oil and found that dozens of police in full riot gear
had already blockaded the place for us. The twenty-two of us
who were willing to be arrested turned our backs on them, linked
arms, and sat down.
Ahead of us in the east as day became night the full moon rose
from a bank of glowing clouds into a clear sky. Whenever I turned,
I saw that the ranks of cops were growing--eventually there
were a hundred of them at our backs, armed with clubs, canister
rifles that shoot tear-gas, beanbags, or various other 'sub-lethal'
devices that can cause blindness, broken bones, severe wounds
and even death. Kids wearing the bandannas over their faces
that signify identifying as "black block"--as the
anarchists who've gotten such an outrageous reputation for property
destruction at demonstrations since the Seattle WTO in 1999--walked
down the line, tenderly kneeling and offering to feed us blockaders
from plates of rice and beans. There was something moving about
that demonstration, something that seemed in a small way to
prefigure the epochal events in Cancún that would unfold
in the days that followed.
The unlikely breadth of our coalition was already a small victory,
as were the few hours we kept the Iraqi oil from going to market.
We had turned our backs on violence and authority and made our
own peace under the open summer sky of that grim industrial
landscape. Though the over-armed cops looked like so many Darth
Vader variations, they never moved on us, and after two hours
of sitting still we declared victory and walked away free. In
Cancún, the victory would be huge.
The World Trade Organization sometimes seems to me to be instating
capitalism and free trade as a religion, one in which the sacred
right of corporate capital to penetrate every corner of the
globe must be enforced by removing national boundaries, environmental
protections, labor standards, local jurisdiction and everything
else in the way. The WTO exists to impose this capital apotheosis,
and its assertion that this will benefit anything other than
multinational corporations is an article of faith blatantly
contradicted by the evidence on the ground.
Corporate globalization is degrading life everywhere -- from
this country where "the race to the bottom" exports
manufacturing jobs to places where wages are measured in pennies
or where industrialized agricultural products undermine the
ability of small-scale farmers to make a living (an economic
disparity enhanced by the $300 billion in subsidies the developed
world supplies to its agriculture). Removing barriers is often
transparently a one-way street in the WTO. Small farmers mean
rural community, continuity, sustainability--the kind of thing
the WTO can't measure as profit. Given its way, the WTO would
suspend the ability of communities and countries to protect
their ecologies and economies. The WTO can rule that local environmental
protections--of air quality, of endangered species--are barriers
to free trade that must be removed. In its essence, the organization
is an attempt to extirpate democracy globally, and in the eight
years of its existence it has been hotly--and effectively--opposed
by activists and many impoverished nations, never more so than
in Cancún last week.
Many of us expected the WTO ministerial in Cancun to fail,
but it has failed more gloriously than anyone foresaw. The WTO
has been staggering since Seattle, and now it's collapsed --
a huge victory for those who would've been crushed underfoot
and who were there to fight it. There were two huge developments
in Cancun. One was the formation of the Group of 22, the developing-world
alliance of 22 nations, led by Brazil, India and China, which
represent more than half the world's people and about 80% of
its farmers, a group strong enough to stand up to the developed
world. The other was a new kind of solidarity between activists,
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and developing nations,
a solidarity that generated a new power to face off against
the developed nations and their financial institutions and corporations.
In earlier WTO ministerials, representatives of developed nations
were good at dividing and pressuring developing-nation representatives
to cave in, but the Group of 22, assembled by Brazil, represents
a profound shift in power and sophistication. At about 3:30
p.m. Sunday, the last day of the Cancún ministerial,
the Kenyan representative of the Group of 22 said, "The
meeting is over. This is another Seattle," and walked out.
With that the talks collapsed. The developing-nation delegates
immediately began holding press conferences while NGO representatives
and activists went wild with joy.
Defiance had been present from the beginning. On the first
day of the meeting, September 10, US activist Stephen Bartlett
wrote his friends:
"About the same time that our great campesino march was
taking place, inside the WTO another act of rebellion was taking
place at the opening speech of the president of the WTO, Supachai
of Thailand. In the middle of his speech, dozens of NGO delegates
stood up, some with tape over their mouths, all holding signs,
and faced the front of the room. Walden Bello of the Philippines,
Anuradha Mittal of Food First and many others from US and European
and other NGOs with the required WTO accreditation had helped
organize this action. Their signs read 'WTO Undemocratic,' 'WTO
Anti-Development,' 'WTO Obsolete.' After a moment, they began
chanting: Shame, shame, shame, shame... Some in the media, turning
to film them and interrupting the speech of Supachai, shouted
out questions to the protesters, and when they were escorted
out, they followed out too for interviews, entirely disrupting
the opening speech."
In another e-mail to friends, Bay Area activist Antonia Juhasz
frames the reason for the collapse:
"The EU announced that it would 'bundle' the agriculture
and 'new issues' (investment is the most important of these).
This means that for anything to move forward on agriculture,
the new issues would also have to be discussed. The developing
countries strongly oppose discussion of new issues while there
are still so many problems with the current agreements -- particularly
agriculture. They said that this is supposed to be a 'development
round,' not a round about new issues. Investment rules are good
for corporations in the EU and US, but not for anyone else.
They reject the negotiations because corporate interests have
been placed above development interests. The negotiations could
only have created more hardship, more desperation, more poverty,
more inequality. It was better to walk out of the negotiations
then to have them proceed and create a worse situation than
that which currently exists."
Juhasz additionally reports:
"A woman from Swaziland turned to a colleague of mine
and told him that the African countries could not have stood
firm against the WTO, the US and the EU if had not been for
the activists in and outside of the convention hall. She said
that our actions in and outside, our words, our pressure - particularly
as they reached the press - gave her and her fellow African
nations the strength to take this historic stand."
Nicole Itano of the Christian Science Monitor considered these
new alliances in writing (At global trade summit, strange new
bedfellows):
"Smaller countries at the summit are increasingly working
with protest groups to get a fair shake from the world's global
trade giants - much the way black South Africans looked to international
activists to help overthrow apartheid. This week, the Group
of 21 developing nations, which includes China, Brazil, and
India, announced an alliance with Oxfam, an international humanitarian
organization based in Oxford, England. The alliance was billed
as a bid to unite antiglobalization opponents with developing
nations."
After solidarity actions around the world on September 9, demonstrations
at Cancun by thousands of activists began on Wednesday, the
10th and immediately took an unexpected turn. Lee Kyung-hae,
a Korean farmer wearing a sandwich board that said, "The
WTO kills farmers," and marching with a large contingent
of Korean farmers, arrived at one of the barricades and climbed
atop it, where he stabbed himself in the heart. His suicide
lent a somber note to the actions, by all reports, but also
underscored the desperate importance of what was at stake, spurring
on rejection of the WTO accords. Lee had been a farmer who received
a rural-leadership award from the UN in 1988, a few years before
South Korea opened its borders to the cheap Australian beef
that bankrupted him and made him a more radical rural leader
and anti-globalization activist.
Earlier, Lee had said that as globalization opened his country's
borders:
"....We Korean farmers realized that our destinies are
no longer in our own hands. We cannot seem to do anything to
stop the waves that have destroyed our communities where we
have been settled for hundreds of years. To make myself brave,
I have tried to find the real reason and the force behind those
waves. And I reached the conclusion, here in front of the gates
of the WTO. I am crying out my words to you, that have for so
long boiled in my body.... My warning goes out to all citizens
that human beings are in an endangered situation. That uncontrolled
multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO Members
are leading an undesirable globalization that is inhumane, environmentally
degrading, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be stopped
immediately. Otherwise the false logic of neoliberalism will
wipe out the diversity of global agriculture and be disastrous
to all human beings."
The Cancun activists made Mr. Lee the presiding spirit of their
demonstrations, chanting:
Todos somos Lee! We are all Lee!
Lee, hermano, te has hecho Mexicano! Lee, our brother, you
have made yourself Mexican.
The direct actions from Wednesday through Sunday were extraordinary,
by all accounts, for their discipline, clear message, general
peacefulness in the face of provocation, and creativity--and
in turn, the Mexican police were startlingly nonviolent. The
media likes to portray the anti-WTO "globophobes"
as a bunch of bratty white kids, but the actions in Mexico were
led by Mexican campesinos and included huge contingents from
the developing world. Subcommandante Marcos sent a message demanding
the globalization of hope rather than death.
One of the ironies of corporate globalization is that while
it preaches opening borders, its representatives are unable
to meet without erecting militarized zones with walls and guards
to keep the public out. As Peter Rosset, codirector of the food,
agriculture, and rights organization Food First, wrote of the
Saturday action at one of the peripheries made of ten-foot cubes
of heavy wire-fencing filled with cement blocks (WTO Derailed
at 'Second Seattle'):
"....Everyone feared the worst sort of confrontation on
Saturday, and the police brought in massive reinforcements.
They tripled the size of the metal barriers, and the provocateurs
showed up in greater numbers, with shopping carts filled with
stones and huge metal bars. But the diverse sectors of legitimate
protestors came together in an amazing plan that produced the
most beautiful, moving and symbolic protest imaginable, so powerful
that we were all sure we had reached and passed the turning
point vis-à-vis the WTO.
"Just when large-scale violence most seemed likely to
erupt, the collective 'we' created a show of unity and power
that left even paid rock-throwers with no recourse but to stand
down. All day and night Friday the Via Campesina and the Korean
delegation led and/or participated in numerous internal and
external meetings, using the moral authority of the farmer/indigenous
peoples' cause and the sacrifice of Mr. Lee to forge a collective
unity with students, black blocks, trade unions, NGOs, you name
it. Saturday showed our strength when we work together.
"With the black blocks providing security from the provocateurs,
and cordoning off the first 10 meters in front of the wire walls,
more than a hundred women went forward with bolt cutters and
began dismantling the walls, bit by bit. What a diversity of
women it was! Indigenous women, punks, students, old women,
young women, Mexican women, American and European women, African
women. Once the wall was weakened, the Koreans supervised the
attachment of 50 meter long, 4 inch circumference ropes to the
top of the walls. Then thousands of people of all nations, races
and cultures, punks, black blocks, peasants, etc., together
pulled the walls down. Quite literally, the power of the people,
united, pulled down the walls of the WTO.
"When the walls finally fell, there stood thousands of
riot police clearly spoiling for a fight, big time. Just when
they thought we would attack them, however, the Koreans who
were on the front line turned their backs on them, everyone
else sat down, hundreds of flowers appeared, and we had a mass
memorial service for Mr. Lee. Marcial of the MST [the 1.5-million-member
Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil] then sang John Lennon's
'Imagine' for the crowd, the WTO was burned in effigy, and we
got up and marched away. The police were left with their mouths
hanging open in shock, with nobody to fight with. The hundreds
of journalists who were present marveled at our collective ability
to do the unexpected, to turn promised violence into moving
peace, and to make a statement so powerful that the WTO could
not hope to resist."
As columnist George Monbiot writes in the Guardian (A Threat
to the Rich):
"At Cancun the weak nations stood up to the most powerful
negotiators on earth and were not broken. The lesson they will
bring home is that if this is possible, almost anything is.
Suddenly the proposals for global justice that relied on solidarity
for their implementation can spring nto life. While the WTO
might have been buried, these nations may, if they use their
collective power intelligently, still find a way of negotiating
together. They might even disinter it as the democratic body
it was always supposed to have been.
"The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had
better watch their backs now. The UN Security Council will find
its anomalous powers ever harder to sustain. Poor nations, if
they stick together, can begin to exercise a collective threat
to the rich. For this, they need leverage and, in the form of
their debts, they possess it. Together they owe so much that,
in effect, they own the world's financial systems. By threatening,
collectively, to default, they can begin to wield the sort of
power that only the rich have so far exercised, demanding concessions
in return for withholding force."
Monbiot might have added that the developing nations found
their power in coalition with the NGOs and with inspiration
and pressure from the activists who pulled down the walls around
the WTO. Tom Hayden got that right when he wrote (Cancun Files:
As Empire Falls, Protesters Celebrate):
"Derailment here today of the Cancun WTO Ministerial caused
gloom in the hotel suites at the convention center - and dancing
in the streets. It was the biggest triumph for anti-WTO critics
since Seattle four years ago, and marked the emergence of a
permanent new power bloc of once-powerless nations defending
the rights of hundreds of millions of small farmers. In particular,
it was a victory for the 'Our World Is Not for Sale' network
of global activists who called for the 'derailment' of the WTO
process months ago when few believed that to be possible."
It's important to recognize that this is two victories in one:
a victory against them --against the imposition of deadly economic
policies on the most vulnerable communities and ecologies of
the earth, like the 1999 victory against the WTO in Seattle.
And something Seattle didn't quite achieve, though it laid the
groundwork -- a victory for us together, a growth in the power
of activists on the ground and NGOs to influence and work with
governments. As with the great peace marches of last winter
or Seattle in 1999, the anti-corporate-globalization activists
represent an extraordinary array of people come together in
mutual trust, in peace, in nonviolent populist power and to
a significant extent, via the Internet, which has revolutionized
organizing in the past several years, making global simultaneous
actions, broad coalitions, and fast-moving alternative media
and communication possible. (Indymedia Cancun, one of more than
a hundred offspring of the Indymedia founded for Seattle in
'99, has been one of the best sources of information for this
dispatch.)
We won. For now. Because global trade talks have failed, the
US will turn to regional trade talks -- notably to the Free
Trade Area of the Americas negotiations in Miami in mid-December.
And the activists will be there too, in force.
Rebecca Solnit is a San Francisco activist, environmentalist,
and author. Solnit has written River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge
and the Technological Wild West and Savage Dreams: A Journey
into the Landscape Wars of the American West as well as five
other books.
Tomdispatch.com is researched, written and edited by Tom Engelhardt,
a fellow at the Nation Institute, for anyone in despair over
post-September 11th US mainstream media coverage of our world
and ourselves.
Copyright ©2003 The Nation Institute
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