Has the American Anti-Globalization Movement Jumped the Shark?
Last week's G20 meetings featured anti-globalization protest shenanigans that have become routine since the genre began in Seattle 10 years ago - anarchists, arrests, misguided vandalism against Starbucks and other alleged symbols of corporate global-greed, English majors unintentionally demonstrating why they're English (and not Economics) majors, etc etc. But lost in the routine media coverage of the anti-trade protests in Pittsburgh was their striking impotence relative to earlier iterations of the "movement."
According to the AFP, Pittsburgh police estimated that up to 4,500 "protesters on Friday flooded into city streets lined with police in full riot gear, still tense after violent anti-G20 protests in the eastern US city late Thursday." Those violent Thursday protests featured only about 400 hooligans and a few dozen arrests, the AFP also reported.
Sounds pretty big, huh? Well, it's actually pretty insignificant when you provide some perspective (instead of just focusing on the protesters' attention-grabbing violence and tomfoolery):
* The granddaddy of the modern anti-globalization movement - the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Meeting in Seattle - drew over 40,000 protesters, according to similar local police estimates. Those protests - featuring the strange bedfellows of US labor unions, anarchists, environmental "advocates," socialists, and "consumer groups" like Public Citizen - really flooded Seattle's streets and literally shut down both the city of Seattle and the WTO meetings themselves.* The follow-up to Seattle - the April 2000 protests against the annual World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington, DC - featured at least 10,000 protesters, summoned about 1,500 additional cops, and shut down most of DC (although the official meetings still managed to happen). I was working in DC at the time and vividly remember how most people stayed home that day in fear of violence (or just really, really bad traffic).
Compared to these protests, the G20 ruckus was pretty tepid. Granted, the devolution of the American anti-globalization movement is not a brand new phenomenon: compared to last April's World Bank/IMF protests - which apparently drew only 150 protesters - the G20 protests were huge. Nevertheless, the G20 meetings were highly publicized, came in the midst of a global recession that's (unfairly) being blamed on "free market policies," and were located in a traditional "rust belt" city with large numbers of folks that are highly skeptical of free trade (Pittsburgh is the national headquarters of the United Steelworkers union, afterall). And the March 2009 G20 protests in London drew "tens of thousands" of protesters.
