It was a fun, even whimsical time. I'm proud that I was a part of it, even if it was eventually overshadowed by property damage and tear gas. The voices were many and varied. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, was talking about that term, "globalization," when he said that never before has a word gone so quickly from meaning nothing to meaning everything. That is, a couple decades ago, you would just scratch your head if someone used the word globalization, and now it seems to encompass everything from the internet to McDonalds to worldwide jihad. So when all those people came together in Seattle, there wasn't much of a unified message beyond, "we're paying attention, and we don't like what we see."
That said, the vast majority of those gripes are rooted, I think it's fair to say, in the liberal trade policies that have made the United States of America the wealthiest, most dominant nation of all time. The people who run the United States are smart. They know they've got a good thing going, and they know how to make it even better. That's why the ideology of free trade is nicknamed the "Washington consensus." Remember that all those protests were directed at President Clinton. There's practically no difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to trade. (Nor on the military, really. As my pastor once said, putting a Democrat in the White House wouldn't do anything more than put a happy face on the American empire).
There is a vocal minority on each side of the isle that is plenty angry about losing jobs to China or environmental degradation, to be sure. But is there any chance in these modern times that someone could get elected to the highest office and actually treat the concerns of poor Americans (either in the national or the continental sense) as anywhere near on par with the concerns of the business community? I think not. Especially when the academics are backing them up all the way with endless charts and graphs that all say one thing: don't worry, we're still getting richer.
Inequality is growing everywhere?
Don't worry, on average we're still getting richer.
Glaciers are melting and storms are getting more extreme?
Different scientists have different opinions. The predictions are pretty speculative. But I've got good news: these numbers right here tell me that we're still getting richer. Besides, we're going to invent a way to make energy from garbage, like in Back to the Future.
We're spending more than we're making and we're only getting away with it because China and Japan are buying treasury bonds and financing our irresponsibility?
I know! Isn't it great? It's almost as if there's nothing we can do to stop getting richer! Woo hoo!
So anyways, as you might have guessed, Haiti hasn't been one of the big "winners" in the game of globalization. Most people would imagine that because of this, Haiti is nothing but a drag on the world economy. As Paul Farmer and Noam Chomsky have argued, however, there are plenty of ways to make money off of a pariah state like Haiti. The bourgeoisie do it. The Dominican Republic does it. And the United States does it. Well. And they all do it with a pitying attitude, like they deserve a pat on the back for finding ways to squeeze wealth out of the poorest people in the hemisphere.
I bring all this up to say that it could actually get worse. There's a free-trade agreement being proposed between Europe and poorer countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific rim. The agreement would only further weaken Haiti's feeble industry by reducing or abolishing tariffs on imports. Before it signed similar trade deals with the United States, Haiti was able to feed itself. Now it is the dumping ground for subsidized rice and any other product that can't compete in markets elsewhere. Supposedly it's worth it to undersell the local producers and put them out of business, because at least it brings prices down for consumers. But in reality, the consumers see very little change in their purchasing power, and it's the importers and retailers that make a killing.
So a lot of activists in countries that would be affected by this agreement have been staging protests. Luckily I got to see some of the action right here. Haitians love protesting even more than those ragamuffin Seattle people. My organization collaborated with other NGOs to do a press conference, a big concert, and, of course, a march. In another odd similarity between my life here and in Seattle, there are steep hills everywhere. In Seattle the protesters usually try to stick to the flatter parts of the city. But here, last Tuesday, I found myself trudging up an urban mountain, sweating profusely, carrying part of a banner that said, among other things, "BARE APE!"
It had nothing to do with primates. APE stands for Accord Partenariat Economique, which is French for "trust me, it's a win-win situation!'' "Bare APE" is Creole for "Block the Economic Partnership Agreement." The march was a lot of fun. There were between 50 and 100 of us for most of the time. We chanted, we sang, we danced. At one point we came across a completely unrelated protest and we stopped and pumped each other up to carry on our spirited, yet peaceful display.
The march almost got a ugly at one point. We stopped in front of the French embassy to register our outrage. At that moment, a UN vehicle came down the driveway to leave. We sort of got in their way and made them listen to what we had to say. Eventually, the big white SUV pushed its way through, and just as it broke free of the crowd someone threw a rock through the rear window.
The culprit--a one-handed man, incidentally, who was not part of the march--was immediately surrounded and loudly denounced. That didn't stop a Haitian website from posting a big picture of the shattered window (I also appeared in a photo attached to the same story, marching along with one fist in the air). And later in the day, probably as a result of the rock-throwing incident, a couple of guys with guns showed up. Lindsay and I got our picture taken with this nice gentleman because he was also an American:
The only way I knew his nationality was a little flag sown on the back of his kevlar vest. He had no official markings of any police or military agency, which makes me wonder if he was a private military contractor à la Blackwater. He kept his finger on the trigger like that the whole time, and muttered at one point that if anyone got out of line he was going to "kick some ass." His colleague, a slightly less evil-looking Austrian man, asked us how much we paid all of these Haitian people to protest with us. Charming.
All in all it was a good day of protesting.
A week and a half before that, the MCC volunteers in Port got together to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving -- or as the Canadians referred to it, "Thanksgiving." I know, weird. And we did our part to make it as local as possible. Josh and Marylynn even killed and plucked the chickens themselves. I made a fudge/mousse sort of thing using Haitian cocoa and avocado. You can read about it on the website for the 100-mile diet here. We're about a quarter of the way down.
