This past Monday, a $13 million settlement was announced in a lawsuit over illegal arrests at protests in Washington DC in 2000 against the World Bank and the IMF meetings. But this description vastly understates the scope of repression of basic democratic rights that were involved, as do the very short news briefs from AP and By Agence France-Presse. The AFP story gives a hint of what was involved, stating:
"We think it's an historic settlement. It's the largest settlement for a protest case in Washington D.C. and we believe in the country," Partnership for Civil Justice, which filed the class action lawsuit, said in a statement.
The settlement after nine years of legal action was signed Monday and needs to be confirmed by the courts in the coming months, Partnership spokeswoman Mara Verheyden-Hilliard told AFP on Tuesday.
Around 680 demonstrators and some unsuspecting tourists and reporters were arrested in April 2000 during World Bank and IMF meetings in the US capital. The marches followed similar protests during a World Trade Organization meeting months earlier in Seattle, Washington state.
"Some of them were held on a bus with their hands tied behind their back for up to 12 hours. They were denied food, water, people were not allowed to go to the bathroom. People on the bus would be forced to urinate on themselves," the spokeswoman said.
None of the people arrested were charged. Verheyden-Hilliard said the police action as a "mass false arrest."
But it wasn't just a mass false arrest. It was a mass false following weeks of pre-emptive harassment and disruption of people intent on exercising their First Amendment rights. And the pre-emptive attacks on people's First Amendment rights had evolved over a period of months as a coordinated government practice--under President Bill Clinton--to stifle protests against global neoliberalism. These protests were part of series of related protests with a long history outside of the United States, but which had only become established here a few months earlier with the so-called "Battle In Seattle" which occurred in November, 1999, the 10th Anniversary of which is this coming Monday.
The "Battle in Seattle" touched off a series of protests against corporate globalization and neoliberal ideology which meet with intense levels of political repression, police violence and massive media disinformation--all of which was seemingly quite at odds with the neoliberal mythology that "free trade" was, in fact, an expression of "freedom" that purportedly abhored the sort of paramilitary force displayed and the arbitrary suspension of basic democratic rights, which were, in fact, necessary in order to defend the actually existing nature of neoliberal "freedom." It would be years before Naomi Klein would detail the contradictions involved in her book, The Shock Doctrine, but the stark contradiction of police repression in defense of "free trade" was fully visible in police repression of a series of major demonstrations in Canada and Europe as well as America over a period of almost two years.
The wave of protests touched off in Seattle would not subside until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 provided a pretext for the much more hardline repression of neoconservatism to take over from its neoliberal predecessors. However, the nature of the repressive tactics seen before 9/11 is but one of several lines of evidence that strongly suggests that there is much more in common between neoconservtism and neoliberalism than there is that divides them, despite the purported differences in their ideological justifications. This, in turn, may help to explain why the presidency of Barack Obama has begun to show much more striking signs of continuity with the Bush regime than the promised "change you can believe in" that Obama campaigned on.
While I will deal some of those continuities elsewhere this weekend (already begun with "Afghanistan: Obama vs. Martin Luther King "), in this diary, and two others to follow tomorrow, I will retell some of the story of what happened at Seattle and thereafter which shows the development of a repressive police/political/media apparatus during the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, at a period of time when the neocons were nowhere close to controlling the levers of power. I will be reprinting portions of a document I wrote for LA Independent Media Center in August 2000, just prior to the protests at the Democratic National Convention in LA, "The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest From Seattle To L.A." Despite the subtitle, my concern was not solely police repression, but rather the way that it was deployed as part of a larger political plan to suppress basic democratic rights, in tandem with justifications and biased, even delusional reporting by the corporate media. The media coverage played an invaluable role in enabling the continuation, and even escalation of the political repression and police violence that was only cut off by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which opened the door for much higher level of political repression on a what appeared to be a completely different basis.
Now, just over a year after the election of Barack Obama put an end to the neoconservative dominance--at least for now--it's a particularly apt moment to look back 10 years and see just what the neoliberal style of repression was like, and how it responded to a diverse coalition of actors calling for global justice--a call that's re-emerging now in another form, the call for climate justice in dealing with global warming in a way that doesn't punish the poor people of the global South for the irresponsible development practices of the global north. The kind of repression seen back then may help people newly activated in political struggle to better make sense of the perplexing continuities between the Bush and Obama eras. This diary begings I am posting a series of three diaries based largely on excepts from "The Empire Strikes Back," this first one containing the entire introduction, a second one dealing with Battle in Seattle, and a third one dealing the DC World Bank/IMF protests that were the occasions for the arrests that resulted in the $13 million settlement announced on Monday.
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