"David Solnit: Looking Forward to Copenhagen" (with video)

GRITtv, with video (05:45):

“If we organize and assert our power, we can change things,” says David Solnit, co-author with his sister Rebecca of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle and organizer with Mobilization for Climate Justice.

He is working on the next round of the global justice movement: the Copenhagen climate talks. He joins us from San Francisco to fill us in on where the movement is going now, and to connect the dots between the antiwar, economic justice, worker’s rights movements and more.

Naomi Klein: "Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up" (Updated)

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UPDATE: More Naomi Klein: "Climate Rage--The only way to stop global warming is for rich nations to pay for the damage they've done - or face the consequences" (Rolling Stone).

Naomi Klein (The Nation):

The other day I received a pre-publication copy of The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, by David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit. It's set to come out ten years after a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anticorporate movement.

The book is a fascinating account of what really happened in Seattle, but when I spoke to David Solnit, the direct-action guru who helped engineer the shutdown, I found him less interested in reminiscing about 1999 than in talking about the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen and the "climate justice" actions he is helping to organize across the United States on November 30. "This is definitely a Seattle-type moment," Solnit told me. "People are ready to throw down."

There is certainly a Seattle quality to the Copenhagen mobilization: the huge range of groups that will be there; the diverse tactics that will be on display; and the developing-country governments ready to bring activist demands into the summit. But Copenhagen is not merely a Seattle do-over. It feels, instead, as though the progressive tectonic plates are shifting, creating a movement that builds on the strengths of an earlier era but also learns from its mistakes.

The big criticism of the movement the media insisted on calling "antiglobalization" was always that it had a laundry list of grievances and few concrete alternatives. The movement converging on Copenhagen, in contrast, is about a single issue--climate change--but it weaves a coherent narrative about its cause, and its cures, that incorporates virtually every issue on the planet. In this narrative, our climate is changing not simply because of particular polluting practices but because of the underlying logic of capitalism, which values short-term profit and perpetual growth above all else. Our governments would have us believe that the same logic can now be harnessed to solve the climate crisis--by creating a tradable commodity called "carbon" and by transforming forests and farmland into "sinks" that will supposedly offset our runaway emissions.

Climate-justice activists in Copenhagen will argue that, far from solving the climate crisis, carbon-trading represents an unprecedented privatization of the atmosphere, and that offsets and sinks threaten to become a resource grab of colonial proportions. Not only will these "market-based solutions" fail to solve the climate crisis, but this failure will dramatically deepen poverty and inequality, because the poorest and most vulnerable people are the primary victims of climate change--as well as the primary guinea pigs for these emissions-trading schemes.

But activists in Copenhagen won't simply say no to all this. They will aggressively advance solutions that simultaneously reduce emissions and narrow inequality. Unlike at previous summits, where alternatives seemed like an afterthought, in Copenhagen the alternatives will take center stage. For instance, the direct-action coalition Climate Justice Action has called on activists to storm the conference center on December 16. Many will do this as part of the "bike bloc," riding together on an as yet unrevealed "irresistible new machine of resistance" made up of hundreds of old bicycles. The goal of the action is not to shut down the summit, Seattle-style, but to open it up, transforming it into "a space to talk about our agenda, an agenda from below, an agenda of climate justice, of real solutions against their false ones.... This day will be ours."

Some of the solutions on offer from the activist camp are the same ones the global justice movement has been championing for years: local, sustainable agriculture; smaller, decentralized power projects; respect for indigenous land rights; leaving fossil fuels in the ground; loosening protections on green technology; and paying for these transformations by taxing financial transactions and canceling foreign debts. Some solutions are new, like the mounting demand that rich countries pay "climate debt" reparations to the poor. These are tall orders, but we have all just seen the kind of resources our governments can marshal when it comes to saving the elites. As one pre-Copenhagen slogan puts it: "If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved"--not abandoned to the brutality of the market.

In addition to the coherent narrative and the focus on alternatives, there are plenty of other changes too: a more thoughtful approach to direct action, one that recognizes the urgency to do more than just talk but is determined not to play into the tired scripts of cops-versus-protesters. "Our action is one of civil disobedience," say the organizers of the December 16 action. "We will overcome any physical barriers that stand in our way--but we will not respond with violence if the police [try] to escalate the situation." (That said, there is no way the two-week summit will not include a few running battles between cops and kids in black; this is Europe, after all.)

A decade ago, in an op-ed in the New York Times published after Seattle was shut down, I wrote that a new movement advocating a radically different form of globalization "just had its coming-out party." What will be the significance of Copenhagen? I put that question to John Jordan, whose prediction of what eventually happened in Seattle I quoted in my book No Logo. He replied: "If Seattle was the movement of movements' coming-out party, then maybe Copenhagen will be a celebration of our coming of age."

He cautions, however, that growing up doesn't mean playing it safe, eschewing civil disobedience in favor of staid meetings. "I hope we have grown up to become much more disobedient," Jordan said, "because life on this world of ours may well be terminated because of too many acts of obedience."

Howie P.S.: Naomi Klein talks about the current economic crisis
with two other authors @ the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival, video (10:14).

Amy Goodman: "Seattle’s Lessons for London"

Amy Goodman (Truthdig):

Protests dominate the news as world leaders gather in London for the Group of Twenty meeting. War, the economy, corporate globalization and grass-roots opposition to financial bailouts are at the forefront.

Executives receive golden parachutes while workers and unions are forced to make concessions. President Barack Obama has inherited a slew of deep, interlocked crises, yet elicits broad global hope that he can be an agent of change.

Obama last week held an “Open for Questions” town hall meeting, streamed online, with questions posed by the public and voted on to rank their popularity. Obama answered a question about marijuana:

“Three point five million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation. And I don’t know what this says about the online audience ... this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

That question’s popularity might indicate audience concern with U.S. drug policy, and the enormous toll on our society of the so-called war on drugs.

I am traveling around the country this spring, visiting more than 70 cities. In Seattle, I interviewed a strong critic of U.S. drug laws, who said, “I ... support the legalization of all drugs.”

These words come from an unlikely advocate: former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. Stamper is an advisory board member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and a speaker for the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. He explained:

“We have spent a trillion dollars prosecuting that war ... and what do we have to show for it? [D]rugs are more readily available today at lower prices and higher levels of potency than ever before. So it’s a colossal failure. And the only way to put these cartels out of business and to restore health and safety to our neighborhoods is to regulate that commerce as opposed to prohibiting it.”

As Stamper pushes for reform, his successor as Seattle police chief, Gil Kerlikowske, is, as Stamper blogged, “on his way to the other Washington to assume the mantle of ‘drug czar’ ... to make his case for a continuation of the nation’s drug laws.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted recently, en route to Mexico, “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade.” It also fuels a rising U.S. prison population (some cash-strapped states are simply releasing nonviolent drug offenders to save money), the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the epidemic of drug-related violence in Mexico. Drug cartels purchase AK-47 assault rifles and other arms in the United States, then smuggle them into Mexico. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told me recently, “The folks in Mexico have figured out what criminals in the U.S. figured out a long time ago: Our weak and nearly nonexistent laws in the U.S. are making it very easy for these guns to get to Mexico.”

With the increasing state-by-state acceptance of the medical uses of marijuana, with decriminalization of possession of small amounts in various jurisdictions and with the high cost of imprisonment versus treatment, public sentiment seems disposed to favor a change.

It took Stamper years to learn the hard lessons of the failed war on drugs. Hard lessons seem to be his forte.

He was the Seattle police chief during the World Trade Organization protests of 1999: “I made major mistakes leading up to that week and during that week. ... Not vetoing a decision to use chemical agents, also known as tear gas, against hundreds of nonviolent demonstrators.” He now sounds more like one of the WTO protesters his forces tear-gassed: “We’re now reaping what we have sown in the form of unbridled globalization and unfettered free trade ... it’s time for all of us in this country, as we attempt to pull ourselves out of this global economic meltdown, to really take a look at what issues of social and economic justice mean within the context of globalization.”

The leaders of the G-20 in London, and those at the NATO summit to follow, have an opportunity to learn from Norm Stamper, to instruct their security to put away the Tasers and the tear gas, and to shock the world by seriously considering the voices of the protesters outside.