whirlwinds sen

8/14/2019 Whirlwinds Sen

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Basav Sen: Local Struggles, Global Contexts 1 of 15Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Local Struggles, Global Contexts:

Building movements in North Americain the age of globalized capital

Basav Sen

A local government subverts democracy by handing out large portions of a public schoolsystem to private operators. A government joins forces with big corporations to evictlarge numbers of low-income farmers from their land to make way for mining and

manufacturing operations. An international agency compels a government to privatizewater delivery in major cities, benefiting a major multinational corporation.

What is striking about each of these stories is that they have repeated themselves indifferent cities, countries, even continents. The first story is true of Washington, DC. It isalso true of New Orleans, or Dayton, Ohio. The second story is true of India. It is alsotrue of Guatemala and Honduras. The third story could equally well be set in Ghana,Tanzania, Bolivia, Argentina, or the Philippines. Minus the role of the internationalagency, it could also have been New Orleans, Atlanta, or Stockton, California1.

How Neoliberalism Connects the South to the North

Why is it that disparate groups of people on different continents are facing such a similarassault on their homes, their services, and their livelihoods at the same moment inhistory? Why as we shall see is there so much in common between which groups ofpeople are especially targeted as victims of this assault, and what types of entities shapethis process and benefit from it? The answer can be found in the rise of a hegemonicideology that informs policy and politics at all levels from the local to the international, inalmost every corner of the globe. We call this ideology neoliberalism.

At its core, neoliberalism is a belief in the supremacy of private capital, and the private

profit motive, over all else. (In that sense, neoliberalism is a particularly rigid form ofwhat we otherwise know as free-market capitalism.) In neoliberal ideology, capital andits priorities take precedence over human needs, over collective aspirations of peoples,over any value system that values anything for any reason other than its potential togenerate a profit. Ultimately, neoliberalism is the political ideology of the anti-political,

1The privatization of the water supply was averted in all three of the U.S. cities, but not

before a major struggle.


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In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements

www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info


which seeks to depoliticize public spaces and public discourse by claiming, first, that it isnot an ideology, and that decisions flowing from neoliberal ideology are driven instead by rational choice; and second, that the choices dictated by neoliberalism are the only possible rational choices. Neoliberalism reduces political questions to technocraticquestions. Margaret Thatcher summed up this totalizing and anti-political bent of

neoliberalism best in her famous statement that There is no alternative to unrestrainedfree-market capitalism.

As we saw from the examples in the first paragraph, the manifestations of neoliberalismdo not by any means occur only in the formerly colonized nations of Africa, Asia, orLatin America that are collectively called the Global South. The very same mix ofprivatization, deregulation, supply side fiscal and monetary policies, and infrastructuredevelopment in the interest of capital (and to the detriment of the poor majority) isreplicated in much of the wealthy North, from a national to a local level. The Bushadministrations tax cuts and anti-labor policies are straight from the playbook of anInternational Monetary Fund-imposed structural adjustment program, and it makes little

difference to those harmed by these policies whether the IMF was involved or not!

In cities across North America, public school systems are being systematically replacedwith privately operated (sometimes even for-profit) charter schools, unaccountable to thepublic but nevertheless subsidized with public funds. This process is fundamentally thesame as the privatization of water, electricity, and other public utilities across the GlobalSouth at the behest of the World Bank and its regional counterparts. In neoliberalideology, public infrastructure created with public resources is treated as another frontierto extend the reach of the market.

Most major North American cities are being redeveloped for the benefit of the realestate industry and the wealthy elites who work for global capital, displacing long-termlow-income residents in a process commonly called gentrification in North America.Fundamentally, this is the same process by which low-income peasants and fishingcommunities are displaced across much of the Global South to make way for mining,manufacturing, dams, tourism, and other infrastructure for the benefit of private capitaland the wealthy. In both instances, land and other resources are viewed as existing for thebenefit of capital, while people who depend on these resources for their livelihood areviewed as expendable. What is more striking is that the people affected in both instanceshave more in common besides the fact that they are both low income; owing to theracialization of poverty in North America, the people affected are predominantly peopleof color even in North America. (Of course, it goes without saying that the affectedpeople in the Global South are people of color.)

This racialization of poverty in North America is of course not uniquely North Americaneither; it is a regional manifestation of a global phenomenon of racialized inequalities ofwealth and power, a phenomenon that has been termed global apartheid. Globalapartheid is a very useful framework through which to view the commonalities ofneoliberalism and its consequences in both the South and the North. The fact that theGlobal South consists mainly of Africa, Latin America and large parts of Asia is not a


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coincidence but a consequence of the racialization of global wealth and power which inturn is a consequence of the continuing legacy of colonialism.

The identities of the beneficiaries of neoliberalism also have much in common in the North and the South. Capital is globalized and consolidated to the extent that in most

industries, the dominant players worldwide are a relatively small number of multinationalcorporations. The real estate, retail, and hotel corporations benefiting from gentrificationof U.S. cities are multinational corporations, often with interests in the Global South. Theprivate water corporations taking over water systems throughout the Global South are thevery same corporations attempting to take over water utilities in the U.S. Major U.S. banks currently embroiled in the mortgage lending crisis are also multinationalcorporations, and holders of sovereign debt of Global South countries. Many of thesesame banks have been involved in global financial crises such as East and Southeast Asiain 1998 and Argentina in 2001.

Movements and Solidarity: the Potential and the Pitfalls

With the same underlying ideology driving the global assault on peoples lives, and somuch in common between the identities of affected persons and the identities ofbeneficiaries, the potential for building a cross-border, cross-issue movement of globalsolidarity against global capital is immense. To a large extent such a global movement isalready taking shape, with the gathering of worldwide movements at the World SocialForum being just one example. To a significant extent, however, grassroots socialmovements in the U.S. are isolated from global movements. (There are some trulyinspiring exceptions.) Conversely, in the U.S. (as in other Northern countries), there areorganizations and movements acting in solidarity with peoples struggles worldwide,such as the Latin America solidarity movement or the small, relatively new (in the U.S.context) global justice movement, which fights against global financial institutions andtrade agreements, but these movements are often isolated from any real grassrootscommunity base.

The major themes of this article are to explore reasons why this relative isolation of localstruggles from international struggles occurs in the U.S., examine case studies of local-global connections that have been formed successfully by social movements in the U.S.,and attempt to understand what worked for these movements as well as whatimpediments they faced in putting their work in a global context or conversely, buildinglocal roots for their global solidarity work.

It is important to state at the outset that the relative lack of local-global connection in U.Ssocial movements, while a weakness, should not by any means imply that U.S.movements lack the vision or capacity for forming such connections. Speaking frompersonal experience as an organizer who has attempted to build such connections, thereare good reasons why such connections are very hard to build and sustain in meaningfulways beyond mere gestures of verbal solidarity reasons which will hopefully emerge inthe following discussion.


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For reasons that are too complex to analyze in this space, the U.S. is a particularlydifficult terrain on which to build social movements in general. When it comes tobuilding a local struggle in the U.S. that is truly aware of its global context, or a globalsolidarity struggle that genuinely connects with local struggles, the difficulties are

compounded.

Participants in international solidarity movements in the U.S are often from a relativelyprivileged background, for the simple reason that (with exceptions of course) one needsto be fairly privileged to have the luxury to focus ones activist energies entirely onsolidarity with a population halfway across the world rather than the survival of onesown community. This statement is not by any means intended as a criticism given theaggression of U.S. foreign military as well as economic policy, the world needs a U.S.-based global solidarity movement to resist this foreign policy in its home country. AndU.S-based solidarity movements have played an important role in global struggles, suchas the struggle to dismantle apartheid in South Africa. (The exception to the phenomenon

of relative privilege of international solidarity activists often consists of immigrantcommunities, including low income people, acting in solidarity with movements in theirhome countries.) This privileged background can sometimes act as an impediment toglobal solidarity activists seeing the impact of neoliberalism in their own backyard, evenwhen they see it very clearly in Bolivia, Benin, or Bangladesh.

Even when U.S.-based international solidarity activists can theoretically grasp theimpacts of neoliberalism in the U.S., translating this understanding into concrete actionentails overcoming another layer of difficulty. Sometimes, the institutions one confrontsin ones global work have no direct impacts on the local community, and no localcounterpart. Nevertheless, creative ways can be found to integrate global work with localsolidarity in ways that are meaningful, as one of the case studies discussed below shows.

Conversely, local struggles for housing, health care, education, and low income workersrights in the U.S do not always have the easiest time contextualizing their work globallyeither. The analysis of the assault on low income and working people in the U.S as beinga product of neoliberalism and as being fundamentally connected to similar phenomenaelsewhere is relatively new and not widespread. However, as two of the case studiesshow, the integration of locally-based struggles in the U.S. with the global context hasalso been done with considerable success.

The Immigrants Rights Struggle as a Global Crossroads

A key struggle in the United States today, in terms of the urgency of action, theviciousness of the right-wing backlash against it, the popularity and level of participation,and most of all the maturity and depth of analysis informing the movement, is theimmigrants rights struggle. A movement that unapologetically demands full humanrights for all immigrants regardless of their documentation status has been forming and


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growing for years, but it burst onto the national scene with unprecedented strength andcaptured the public imagination in the months of March through May of 2006.

Unlike many other struggles in the U.S., the immigrants rights struggle is by its verynature international. Undocumented immigrants are a population of international origin

who have experienced the ravages of neoliberalism in their home countries in the GlobalSouth, which is what in most cases compelled them to migrate in the first place. In thewords of Maria Elena Letona, director of Centro Presente, an organization of the Latinoimmigrant community in Massachusetts fighting for the rights of the community asimmigrants and as workers, migration flows in the 21st century [are] a direct result ofcorporate globalization. She points out that the displacement of people in the GlobalSouth because of neoliberal policies has been quite radical; for example, in Mexico,about 2 million small farmers have been displaced.

Here in the U.S., immigrants face the impacts of neoliberalism as exploited workersliving in low income communities. Often the corporations exploiting their labor are the

very same multinational corporations who are pillaging the Global South. Immigrantsalso experience the coercive power of the state in the form of ICE raids, detention anddeportation. Very importantly, immigrants in the U.S. are are still very connected totheir families, communities and native countries, as Letona puts it. The sum total ofimmigrants experience inevitably creates an internationalist perspective.

An example of internationalism in the U.S. immigrants rights movement is CentroPresentes work as a founding member of two national networks, the Salvadoran-American Network and the National Alliance of Latin American and CaribbeanCommunities (NALACC). These networks have organized delegations to El Salvador,Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and other countries to network with NGOs there, to promote sustainable community-based development, and to lobby national governmentofficials against free trade agreements and in favor of increased advocacy from thegovernments for the rights of migrant communities from their countries in the U.S.

Centro Presente, along with many other immigrants rights organizations from the U.S.,have participated in the World Social Forum, the Social Forum of the Americas and theSocial Forum on Migration. In 2007, NALACC organized the first ever LatinoHemispheric Summit on Migration in Michoacan, Mexico. The summit drew leaders ofLatino immigrant communities from all over the Americas as well as from Spain andItaly.

In the Washington, DC area, Mexicanos Sin Fronteras (MSF), a Mexican immigrantcommunity organization fighting for the rights of the community, has been very active instanding in solidarity with the peoples strike and revolt in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recently,MSF has also organized an action protesting the Mexican governments treatment ofCentral American migrants.

Internationalism provides immigrants rights organizations with the benefit of linking upwith migrants rights organizations and other social movement organizations in the


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Global South, which, according to Letona, tend to be more creative, out of the box andradical than in the U.S.

For immigrants rights organizations, internationalism also represents an adaptation to achanged reality of a world with globalized flows of capital and goods (endowed with

rights) and of migrants (stripped of their rights). Letona says that corporateglobalization, migration flows and technology are making physical borders obsolete, andthe concept of the nation-state as the way to organize ourselves politically and socially is becoming more of an illusion. She adds, It is urgent that we globalize social andeconomic justice movements. It is urgent that we see our struggles in ways that transcendnation-state borders.

As with most other struggles, attempts to integrate immigrants rights work in the U.S.into an international context can be tremendously challenging. One major challenge iswhat Letona calls the persistent compartmentalization of public policy, especially in theU.S. She gives the example of how, when Centro Presente and allied organizations visit

Congressional offices to lobby on immigration reform and start talking about how theglobal economy and U.S. foreign policy drive flows of migration, invariably we getblank stares and are told to speak to other aides that deal with this kind of policy.

Another impediment is the lack of a well-developed political consciousness in the U.S.;according to Letona, The general public in the U.S. has a tough time grasping thecomplexity of the current global economy and its effects both here and abroad. Thismakes the required popular education work to build alliances much harder. As Letonasays, We continue to struggle with easier, more accessible ways of talking about the broader context in which migration flows and the subsequent exploitation of migrantworkers takes place.

Asserting the Right to the City Globally

The process of gentrification in U.S. cities has been referred to earlier. While affectedcommunities have been resisting it for decades, in recent years there have been two very positive developments. First, there is increasing coordination between organizationsfighting gentrification in different cities across the country. Second, a number of theseorganizations have coalesced around a proactive agenda articulating a Right to theCity. Tired of being limited to fighting defensive actions to hold on to the limited,shrinking space that low-income communities can still live in and access in cities, theRight to the City alliance asserts that, We all have the right to remain and return to ourcities, to take back our streets and neighborhoods, and to ensure that they exist to servepeople rather than capital. The Right tot the City alliance came together in January 2007,and has grown to include more than 25 organizations.

The principles of unity of the Right to the City alliance are a remarkably broad, inclusiveset of principles that place the struggle against gentrification firmly in the wider contextof struggles for economic, racial, and gender justice. The principles make particular


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reference to Internationalism, defined as The right to support and build solidaritybetween cities across national boundaries, without state intervention. The Right to theCity alliance describes itself as providing a framework that connects our fights againstgentrification and displacement to other local and international struggles for humanrights, land, and democracy.

So far, in the less than one year and a half that the Right to the City alliance has been inexistence, the spirit of internationalism of the alliance has manifested itself mostconcretely in the collaboration with urban poor peoples movements in Venezuela and thePhilippines. Activists from these movements have participated in Right to the Cityworkshops at the U.S. Social Forum, and subsequently, the alliance has providedsolidarity for their struggles.

Jon Liss of Tenants and Workers United, an alliance member organization working foraccess to housing, healthcare and democratic rights for the majority of people in NorthernVirginia, attributes the emphasis on internationalism in the alliances principles to

successive waves of immigration, which have resulted in urban working-classcommunities that have an organic link with Global South. Another reason for theinternationalist focus, he says, is that many communities and organizers have radicalroots and see domestic issues and global empire as connected. Further, he states that theinternationalist focus is also self-interested. As an example, Liss holds the influx ofFederal anti-terrorism funding into Northern Virginia post-September 11 as being to alarge extent responsible for fueling the recent wave of gentrification there, by creating a boom of high-paying jobs in the security-industrial complex. This shows how U.S.international policy can have a concrete effect on communities access to housing.

Liss sees clear benefits from internationalism for the Right to the City alliance, includinglearning from advanced struggles in the Global South, which, according to him, have ahigh level of political consciousness, and sometimes a deeper analysis of the politicaleconomy of the United States than U.S. movements. He gives the example ofparticipatory budgeting in Brazil as a strategy for us in the U.S. to learn from Southernsocial movements.

Liss cautions, however, that internationalism has its limitations, and U.S. socialmovements have to be aware of the reality of our political base. He says that there can be a tension between that reality and the demands of solidarity with internationalmovements, as a result of which the international work can become a lower priority.

To some extent, however, this dichotomy between the local and the international ismisleading, because, as Liss says, U.S.-based struggles for housing, health care,immigrants rights, and low income workers rights constitute a social movement that ispart of, and not different from, the universe of global social movements.

Growing Local Roots for Global Justice


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The relatively privileged composition of the global justice movement in the U.S. has beenreferred to earlier. This is (as has also been stated earlier) not necessarily a criticism; it is partly inevitable that a movement focused on foreign policy issues would draw the participation of a demographic who have relatively less at stake in immediate localstruggles. You cant worry too much about AIDS in Malawi or toxic gold mining in

Guatemala when your neighbor is getting evicted and you know you could be next.Conversely, you can worry more about these distant issues when you do not have toworry about where your next meal will come from or how to avoid getting deported. Butregardless of the inevitably more privileged character of a global justice movement in theU.S., it is too important a struggle to dismiss. The world needs a global justice movementin the U.S., to resist neoliberal imperialism in its home base. Since the U.S. governmentand U.S. business interests are major driving forces behind the unjust global economy, itis imperative that people in the U.S. resist this agenda. Simply put, we owe this to the restof the world.

What is a concern, however, is that this relatively privileged composition of the

movement can be a serious impediment to its effectiveness. One of the major limitationsof the U.S. global justice movement has been its small size and lack of a solid base. Thefact that the movement lasted as a powerful force for only about four years from 1999through 2003 shows that it lacked sustainable organizing and base-building. By(largely) failing to connect the struggle against neoliberalism globally with the dailystruggle against neoliberalism in communities across North America, the U.S. globaljustice movement has missed the opportunity to widen and deepen its base, and developstaying power as well as political power.

There have been exceptions, however. Some global justice organizations have attemptedwith varying degrees of success to connect their work locally, and we look at oneexample, based on the authors first-hand experience.

The Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ) in Washington, DC, has been around invarious forms from late 1999 until the present. It started as an ad-hoc coalition tomobilize for the A16 demonstrations at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in April2000, and has since then evolved into more of an organization than a coalition.

Throughout its history, MGJ has made sporadic attempts to integrate its work with localstruggles, but has not done so consistently until about 2005. This article examines abouttwo years of MGJs activities (2005 through 2007) to identify successes as well asfailures in the attempts to integrate local struggles against neoliberalism with its regularwork around the IMF, World Bank, and global trade.

In February 2005, MGJ presented a workshop at the National Conference on OrganizedResistance titled Structurally Adjusting Washington DC. It was at that time conceivedof as a one-time popular education effort to frame the onslaught on communities inWashington, DC as the product of neoliberalism. Specifically, the workshop looked at theeffective privatization of health care in the District (by closing the only public hospital),the publicly subsidized construction of a baseball stadium, and gentrification in city


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neighborhoods. The motivation for doing this workshop was a desire on the part ofmembers of MGJ to begin to connect our work to local struggles.

The interest in this workshop was overwhelming, and a number of the organizations participating in the workshop, including DC Jobs with Justice, the DC Health Care

Coalition, Project South, and MGJ, decided to continue popular education work linkinglocal to global struggles. This informal coalition put together another popular educationteach-in in April 2005, in conjunction with protests planned for the meetings of the IMFand World Bank. What was particularly powerful about this teach-in was that it featureddialogue between visiting activists from the Dominican Republic, South Africa, and thePhilippines, and local activists working for low-income tenants rights, access toaffordable health care, access to education, and environmental justice in Washington,DC. The education was both ways the author remembers vividly how one of theactivists from the Global South came up to him after the event to say that she had no ideathat neoliberalism was ravaging the capital of the United States to quite this extent, northat there was such a vibrant movement here to resist the neoliberal onslaught.

There is a key lesson to be learnt from the experience of the workshop and the teach-in;namely, that there is a tremendous amount of interest among local organizers inunderstanding and discussing the global context for their work. The U.S. global justicemovement has not done nearly enough to tap into this interest. A clear understanding ofneoliberalism and its global nature can help organizers working on local struggles toidentify more strongly with the periodic protests against the IMF, World Bank, WTO, orother trade agreements as part of the same wider struggle, instead of treating them as notrelevant to ones own causes. This addresses a major problem faced by the U.S. globaljustice movement, the problem of relevance. To much of the public, the concerns of theglobal justice movement have appeared esoteric and bearing no relation to their dailylives, while in fact the concerns of the global justice movement are vital to the daily livesof people everywhere, including in the U.S. It is partly our own fault that we as amovement have not been able to communicate the relevance of the issues we work on ina compelling manner.

Right after this teach-in, however, the local-global connection-building work of MGJ hitan impasse. Popular education is a great tool, but ultimately, it has to lead to action for itto serve a purpose. At first we could not collectively figure out an obvious way totranslate our developing understanding of the local impacts of neoliberalism into aprogram of action that would seamlessly integrate our work on the global economy withour work on local struggles.

After much deliberation, we settled on a course of action: reviving the Tax the BankCampaign. Space does not permit a complete discussion of details, but the summaryversion of the campaign is that it seeks to restore fairness by pressuring the IMF, WorldBank, and Interamerican Development Bank to enter into a Payment in Lieu of Taxes(PILOT) agreement with the District of Columbia to make up for their tax-free status.Currently, the three institutions pay no property taxes on the more than one billion dollarsof property that they own; they pay no corporate income taxes; and foreign citizens


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working for the institutions pay no personal income taxes either. The Fifty Years isEnough Network estimates that the combined total of revenue foregone by the Districtbecause of the tax free status of the institutions is $1 billion.2

Earlier, an informal coalition of activists had started and then abandoned the Tax the

Bank campaign, and MGJ decided to revive it. The campaign model we chose entailed building a broad, diverse coalition of labor organizations, housing rights groups,womens groups, environmental justice groups, etc. The level of participation of coalitionmembers in the coalitions activities would be of their own choosing, with theunderstanding that many of the organizations were working on other matters of more pressing and immediate importance, like preventing evictions or helping communitiescope with immigration raids. The model necessitated extensive outreach and populareducation targeted at organizations actively engaged in local struggles, to communicatethe relevance and importance of fighting for PILOTs from the International FinancialInstitutions (IFIs), as well as to communicate an understanding of the imperialist natureof the institutions.

The implementation of the campaign, however, ran into some immediate problems. MGJas a group had built expertise around organizing street demonstrations and direct action,and that is where the collective experience of group members lay. While the organizationin theory endorsed the notion of working on Tax the Bank, it soon became clear that therewasnt a critical mass of members in the group who were comfortable doing the extensivepopular education work and (in the later stages of the campaign) legislative work to bringthe campaign to fruition. After proceeding for some time with very limited participationby most MGJ members, the campaign fizzled out.

The failure of MGJ to successfully work on Tax the Bank points to a major failing of theU.S. global justice movement. The movement has built too much of its history andexperience around organizing street protests. The result has been a movement that isepisodic rather than sustainable, living from one major action to another while neglectingthe required base-building work that needs to happen in between major actions. Evenfrom the narrow perspective of the viability and sustainability of the street proteststhemselves, this approach has been self-defeating.

Another important observation about Tax the Bank, as it applies to the broader questionof integrating local and global action by the U.S. global justice movement, is that it is inmany ways a unique situation. The tax free status of the IFIs has a direct impact on thecity of Washington, DC, by further constricting the resources of an already impoverishedand disenfranchised city. This is a rare example of a direct impact of a global institutionon local communities. Tax the Bank afforded MGJ with the opportunity to take itsunderstanding of the local impacts of neoliberalism beyond analysis and populareducation into action. It is unfortunate that MGJ could not make more of this unique

2 Ugwumba, Chidozie. Freeloading Bankers: How the Global Economys RulemakersThrive on Subsidies from an Impoverished and Disenfranchised City. 50 Years isEnough Network, www.50years.org/issues/TaxTheBank/report.html


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opportunity to engage in local action against a global institution. Other global justicegroups in the U.S. may not be in the position to engage in a similar campaign or action.

The next major foray by MGJ into linking with a local struggle produced one of the mostunusual and important (if small) actions in the history of the organization. In September

2006, while the IMF and World Bank were meeting in Singapore, MGJ linked up withthe Committee to Save Franklin Shelter (CSFS), a local homeless shelter residentsgroup, for a joint action.

The Franklin Shelter is a homeless mens shelter in downtown Washington, DC, housedin an historic school building. For some time, the city administration has had its eyes onthe building, and has made plans to lease it to a developer to turn into a luxury hotel. Theoriginal city plan called for leasing it to the developer at $9 per square foot in an areawhere properties typically leased for about $45 a square foot an 80% discount. Thiscorrupt plan brought together many elements of neoliberalism. It was a classic form ofgentrification, displacing low income (in this case, homeless) people to make room for a

more profitable use of the prime downtown real estate, serving wealthy people. It wasremarkably similar to the displacement of poor, often indigenous people across theGlobal South for more profitable uses of land such as mining, logging, plantationagriculture, and dams. It was a huge public subsidy to a private interest, on the lines ofmuch of the World Banks lending.

A coalition came together to organize a Washington, DC demonstration around theIMF/World Bank meeting in Singapore. CSFS was not one of the organizations initiallyapproached to join the coalition, but they came out of their own interest. There is asizable homeless population in the park outside the lavish headquarters of the IMF andWorld Bank in Washington, DC. The irony of destitute homeless people congregatingoutside institutions who claim to solve the problem of world poverty does not escape thehomeless individuals, and it is this irony that informed the interest of CSFS in takingaction against the IMF and World Bank and linking that action with their own strugglefor shelter and dignity.

The spirited, though small demonstration made a convincing link between the crisis ofdisplacement of poor people of color in Washington, DC, from the Franklin Shelter aswell as from neighborhoods throughout the city, and the worldwide displacement of poorpeople in the Global South through the neoliberal policies of the International FinancialInstitutions. The attendees were a mix of global justice activists and homeless people, nota usual mix at most demonstrations. It had a popular education impact, through handingout hundreds of informational sheets to passers-by. (See box for a sample informationalhandout from the demonstration.)


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The most positive thing about the demonstration was that, at least temporarily, it had animpact. For at least some time, the city dropped its plan to close the shelter to turn it intoa luxury hotel. (Now, unfortunately, the plan has been revived by a new cityadministration.) While this demonstration was certainly not the only factor behind thecitys decision the residents of the shelter had been campaigning for months to keep the


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shelter open as well as to improve services for themselves and for all homelessWashingtonians the spectacle of homeless people joining up with anti-globalizationactivists could not but have scared the powers-that-be in the city.

Months later, in 2007, Empower DC, a local low-income peoples organization,

approached MGJ for help in organizing a joint action with the National Association ofHUD Tenants (NAHT). While the Group of 8 wealthy nations (G-8) met in Germany, NAHT and Empower DC planned to target a German bank, Deutsche Bank, for itslending to AIMCO, a Real Estate Investment Trust that was actively taking over publichousing nationwide to convert into market-rate housing. Through its lending, DeutscheBank was financing this process of gentrification.

This action provided an opportunity for global justice activists to observe a gathering ofglobal capital the G-8 meetings by taking an action that was focused on the impact ofglobal financial capital on low income people right here in the United States. The actionachieved its immediate aim of embarrassing Deutsche Bank into agreeing to meet with

NAHT.

The Franklin Shelter action and the NAHT action on Deutsche Bank are examples of thekind of action, and the kinds of relationships, that global justice activists in the U.S. needto build and participate in on a regular basis if we want our movement to remain viableand relevant. Post U.S. Social Forum, we are in an exciting political moment, withmarginalized peoples struggles, from Katrina survivors struggle for the right to return tolow income urban communities struggle for the Right to the City to Native struggles forland rights to undocumented immigrants struggles for dignity, having forged stronger bonds of solidarity and found a new assertiveness. To remain relevant in this politicalmoment, we in the U.S. global justice movement need to shed old ways of doing thingsand embrace the struggles of the most marginalized people in our own backyards, and notonly the struggles of marginalized people halfway across the world.

Seizing This Unique Moment

The neoliberalnature of the political and economic restructuring of the United States is becoming clearer by the day. While the economy sinks into a recession, and low tomoderate income homebuyers lose their homes to predatory mortgage lenders by thethousands, the government bails out the Bear Stearns of this world much like the IMF bailing out Wall Street bankers while Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia sunk into arecession in 1997-98. The increasingly regressive tax structure of the U.S. issystematically shifting wealth and income from the majority of the population to a smallwealthy minority. The number of workers represented by unions keeps shrinking, asemployers mount vicious (often illegal) anti-union campaigns and the government looksthe other way. Environmental and consumer safety laws and regulations are being guttedto increase corporate profits. At the local level, cities and towns are being taken over byreal estate interests, displacing entire communities to make way for luxury condominiumsand hotels.


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This is why it is imperative for social movements in the U.S. today to place their work inthe global context of the neoliberal assault on peoples rights everywhere. A clearunderstanding and articulation of neoliberalism will help weave different strugglestogether by breaking down the barriers between struggles for housing justice, racial

justice, workers rights, immigrants rights, and so on. Such an understanding will alsodemystify the motives and interests behind the powers that we fight, sharpening ourinsight. As we have seen with the experience of the social movements discussed above,an understanding of the global context of neoliberalism can help social movements in theU.S. find allies in similar struggles worldwide. Finally, an understanding of the domesticimpact of neoliberalism can help rescue a largely moribund global justice movement inthe U.S.

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