Boston’s Independent Media Center

Emily Allen-Wiles is a sophomore at Earlham College, and a recent Peacework intern.

Activists founded the first Independent Media Center to cover the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in November of 1999, using print, audio recordings, and video footage. The theory behind this project was that the mainstream media had conflicts of interest between covering the protests fairly and their own connections with big business. The center offered constantly updated information during the protests, disseminated largely over the Internet. The web site stayed up after the demonstrations, and the IMC eventually spread to other cities.

The Boston IMC began during the Biodevastation protests in March of 2000. One of the strengths of IMCs is their local coverage of local events, which can then be spread to a larger audience. In October of 2000, the Boston IMC was issued over 100 media passes to document the Nader protests during the presidential debates at UMass Boston. Unpolished pieces went directly onto the web, and the site was updated every few minutes.

The IMC has found its place during large protests, but what its role as an alternative news wire is the rest of the time is still being worked on. For Boston at least, there are two interconnected routes that are being taken. One is in-depth reporting by people with considerable knowledge of a given topic. The other is any person being able to publish whatever they wish. Both are different aspects of community journalism.

The fact that you can publish anything on the web site is a crucial part of the organization. The source code is openly available on the web site. Anyone with access to a computer can post something. If the opinions in a piece clash with the values of the organization as a whole, or there are factual errors, the only way to correct a story is by posting another story. Transparency is also key to the IMC, with a global list-serve as a way of documenting who said what. All decisions at the center are made through consensus.

Considering that the IMCs have been around for less than two years, their progress is amazing. Many IMCs have expanded their news productions past the original web site roots. IMCs have produced videos with footage from major protests, including those in Seattle and Prague. These serve as both outreach and fundraising tools. The Boston IMC, and others, have put out newspapers. The Independent Media Center is becoming an ever more important news source for socially concerned communities on a local, national, and international level.

The Independent Media Center’s web address is www.indymedia.org. You can visit the Boston IMC at www.imcboston.org.

What the Protesters in Genoa Want

Excerpted from an op-ed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, New York Times, July 20, 2001

Those demonstrating against the summit in Genoa...know that a fundamentally new global system is being formed. It can no longer be understood in terms of British, French, Russian or even American imperialism. The many protests that have led up to Genoa were based on the recognition that no national power is in control of the present global order. Consequently protests must be directed at international and supranational organization, such as the G-8, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.

The protests themselves have become global movements and one of their clearest objectives is for the democratization of globalizing processes. It should not be called an anti-globalization movement. It is pro-globalization, or rather an alternative globalization movement, one that seeks to eliminate inequalities between rich and poor and between the powerful and the powerless, and to expand the possibilities of self-determination.

If we understand one thing from the multitude of voices in Genoa, it should be that a different and better future is possible. When one recognizes the tremendous power of the international and supranational forces that support our present forms of globalization, one could conclude that resistance is futile. But those in the streets today are foolish enough to believe that alternatives are possible; that "inevitability" should not be the last word in politics.

State Suppression of Independent Media Sessions

From the Independent Media Center’s Press Release on the Genoa Raid, 7/23/01. For more, visit www.indymedia.org.

The recent raid on the Independent Media Center in Genoa is the latest in a series of intimidating acts and threats to the movement of independent media centers.

As the independent media movement has grown, it has been subject to increasing repression. From the first days in Seattle, when the IMC received a tear gas attack, there have been indications that authorities identified the IMC movement as a target to intimidate and silence.

At the IMC in Los Angeles during the August 2000 Democratic National Convention, a police raid closed down the satellite van that was scheduled to uplink live IMC television to a national grassroots community television network. In Prague, the Czech police raided the IMC offices, harassing and intimidating journalists and others. During the days preceding the Bush inauguration, DC police sent spies and provocateur agents to IMC-DC meetings.

More recently, during the FTAA protests, the FBI visited the Seattle IMC with a request for all computer logs and a gag order injunction demanding that no news of the request be made public on the net. The IMC in Quebec also suffered police harassment and an attack in which tear gas was fired into the center.

The IMC gained a victory for the independent press community when these injunctions were withdrawn by the FBI after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center intervened to support the IMCs.

The IMC global network will continue to fight to protect the rights of independent journalists around the world.

"Everyone has the right to the freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." —Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Time for a Real "Diversity of Tactics"

Roy Morrison is a nonviolent activist and the author of Ecological Investigations (Glad Day Books, 2001).

Within a diverse anti-globalization movement, there are substantial numbers of aggressively organizing groups who disagree fundamentally with the tactics and strategies of mass nonviolent action. The well established use of "a diversity of tactics" for marquee anti-globalization mass actions focused on blocking meetings of the leading globalization perpetrators will not end, whatever nonviolent activists and groups counsel or decide. The Black Bloc and its allies will not listen to us. We cannot make them stay home, follow guidelines, or join us.

IS welfare rights protesters have a global message. Photo: courtesy Applied Research Center

I suggest that what’s called for, instead, is strategic jiu-jitsu. I propose that the anti-globalization meeting actions, the ever-traveling demonstration, be ignored as a major organizing focus for mass nonviolent direct action. Let the Black Bloc and friends do their thing without our attempted restraints and confused messages. Maybe they are right and will succeed. We should instead begin a focused, determined, creative, and long-term nonviolent campaign, starting with modest size and growing. This is just our wimpy nonviolent stuff. We leave the headline actions to the Black Bloc. And they let us do our thing at times and places of our choosing. That’s the only real way, I believe, to embrace a diversity of tactics.

There’s some precedent. For example, a few weeks after the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook (CDAS) was cutting through the fences at Seabrook NH in October of 1979, the Manhattan Project, an action coalition formed through the initiative of the Clamshell Alliance, conducted an effective and well-disciplined mass nonviolent blockade of the New York Stock Exchange, in opposition to nuclear investment, on the 50th anniversary of the Great Crash. CDAS and Clam didn’t think too highly of one another. But for that time, at least, we were able to leave each other mostly alone.

For building a mass nonviolent movement against globalization I think we should pick one or more focuses for persistent nonviolent action. For example, International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters and offices, where the everyday work of imposing and managing corporate globalization proceeds. But we need not be limited in our thinking to such government sites. Corporate behemoths, like Exxon Mobil, for whose benefit much of this happens, are getting an awfully free ride.

Let our planning and organizing for a disciplined nonviolent campaign against corporate globalization and for a just sustainable and ecological society proceed. Let’s have a real diversity of movement tactics. Let the Black Bloc organize their actions, and also let a thousand nonviolent flowers bloom in other places and at other times. Peace.

Blood in the Streets: Reflections on the Terror in Genoa

Sean Donahue is a nonviolent organizer and writer who can be reached at Peace Action New Hampshire, POB 771, Concord NH 03302.

For those of us who have always said that solidarity means sharing in the risks of the poor, the violence in Genoa is a chilling reminder that when we challenge the most powerful people in the world, our privilege will not always protect us. The reality of globalized repression is coming home.

In the face of such violence, it is tempting to respond by becoming more militant in our tactics. Many on the left are calling for people to begin wearing defensive armor and learning techniques for fighting back against the police.

I love and respect many of the people in the movement who are putting forward these appeals. I understand the hurt and rage they feel looking at pictures of Carlo Giuliani lying in a pool of blood. And I don’t want to align myself with armchair critics who assail the masked members of the "Black Bloc" for destroying property. I find it bitterly ironic that many people are willing to spend more time worrying about a few broken windows than about global warming or the murder of union organizers in Colombia.

That said, I think it is time that as a movement we take a hard look at what kind of action will bring us forward in our struggle for justice—and, to me, it is clearer now than ever that we need to make a firm and unyielding commitment to nonviolence.

Many frustrated activists decry the idea of accepting suffering without returning it, saying that we have a responsibility to defend ourselves and each other from police attack. But what is the most effective defense? Nonviolence may not guarantee that no-one will get hurt, but fighting back has not proven any more useful in stopping police violence. The rocks and bottles thrown in Quebec and Genoa did nothing to slow down the police onslaught. In some cases, these tactics led to increased brutality because they scared and angered the police. We will never be better trained or better equipped for street fighting than the police. Nonviolence at least offers us the chance to try to de-escalate the situation by trying to make a human connection with the police.

More importantly, we need to remember that our goal is to undermine the legitimacy of the system, and that in order to do that we need to hold a certain moral high ground. If the public sees images in the media of people dressed in body armor throwing stones at the police, they will assume demonstrators instigated violence and will tend to accept official police justifications for brutality. We need to deny the media those images. It is inevitable that the police will beat us and gas us. The question is will we allow them to get away with justifying their actions by responding with the retaliatory violence they expect from us, or will we turn the tables by taking the pain and not backing down, allowing the public to clearly see the state’s brutality, undermining the perceived legitimacy of the state? Our actions need to be bold, creative, dramatic—and nonviolent.

Property destruction fits in a gray area here. Targeted, strategic property destruction can sometimes immediately prevent violence, (if what is destroyed is a weapon, for instance), or send a powerful symbolic message about stopping the violence of governments and corporations. But in the context of mass actions, I think, property destruction is more likely to cause panic and confusion than to awaken anyone to the suffering the property is being used to create.

Most of all, we need to understand that the means we use determine the ends we achieve. This is the most fundamental and radical insight of Gandhian nonviolence. Fighting pitched battles with cops in the street does nothing to build the world we want to live in. Locking down at an intersection with trusted friends and being beaten without returning the blows, tending to wounded sisters and brothers in the streets, cooking meals together, producing our own media, placing flowers in the barrels of guns, building tent villages of forest defenders in wild places that are about to be destroyed, all model the world we are trying to create. That world will only become real if we make it real, and we can only make it real by letting the way we carry out the revolution reflect the values that inspire us to rise up against corporate domination. Nonviolence is no longer an option we can accept or reject—it is the only way our movement can move forward. I will continue to feel love and solidarity for those who choose otherwise, but I cannot see any way forward except through adhering to clear nonviolent discipline.

After Genoa: Why We Need to Stay in the Streets

Excerpted from Starhawk’s webpage <www.starhawk.org>

Since Genoa there has been lots of healthy debate about where the movement needs to go. Large-scale protests are becoming more dangerous and difficult. Summits are moving to inaccessible locations as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the G-8 and the World Trade Organization continue to do their business. Are we being effective enough to justify the risks we’re taking? Should we be focusing more on local work, building our day-to-day networking and organizing? I was in Genoa. And because of what I experienced there, including moments of real terror and horror, I am more convinced than ever that we need to stay in the streets.

We need to continue mounting large actions, contesting summits, working on the global scale. Our large-scale actions have been extraordinarily effective. I’ve heard despairing counsels that the protests have not affected the debates in the G-8 or the WTO or the IMF/World Bank. In fact they have; they have significantly changed the agendas and the propaganda issuing forth from these institutions. In any case, their actual policies will be the last thing to change. But for most of us on the streets, changing the debate within these institutions is not our purpose. Our purpose is to undercut their legitimacy, to point a spotlight at their programs and policies, and to raise the social costs of their existence until they become insupportable. Contesting the summits has already delegitimized these institutions in a way no local organizing possibly can. The big summit meetings are elaborate rituals, ostentatious shows of power that reinforce the entitlement and authority of the bodies they represent.

Starhawk

When those bodies are forced to meet behind walls, to fight a pitched battle over every conference, and to retreat to isolated locations, the ritual is interrupted and their legitimacy is undercut. Agreements that are being negotiated in secret are brought before public scrutiny. The lie that globalization means democracy is exposed.

Local organizing simply can’t do this as effectively as big demonstrations. We can’t and won’t abandon local work, and in fact never have; many of us work on both scales. No one can go to every summit: we all need to root ourselves in work in our own communities. But many of us have come to the larger, global actions because we understand that the trade agreements and institutions we contest are designed to undo all of our local work and override the decisions and aspirations of local communities.

No Safe Places Any More

Of course, the more successful we are, the meaner the opposition will get. But when they use force against us, we still win, even though the victory comes at a high cost. Systems of power maintain themselves through fear of the force they can command, but force is costly. They cannot sustain themselves if they have to use force in order to accomplish every normal function.

Genoa was a victory won at a terrible price...I ache and grieve and rage over the price. I would do almost anything to assure that no one, especially no young person, ever suffers such brutality again. Almost anything. Anything except back away from the struggle. Because that level of violence and brutality is being enacted, daily, all over the world.

I don’t see that there is a choice between the danger of a large action and safety. I no longer see any place of safety. Or rather, I see that in the long run our safest course is to act strongly now. The choice is about when and how we contest the powers that are attempting to close all political space for true dissent. Genoa made clear that these powers will fight ruthlessly to defend the consolidation of their power, but we still have a broad space in which to organize and mount large actions. We need to defend that space by using, filling, and broadening it. Either we continue to fight them together now when we can still mount large-scale, effective actions, or we fight them later in small, isolated groups, or alone when they break down the doors of our homes in the middle of the night. Either we wage this struggle when there are still living forests, running rivers, and resilience left in the life support systems of the planet, or we fight when the damage is even deeper and the hope of healing slim.

We have many choices about how to wage the struggle. We can be more strategic, more creative, more skillful in what we do. We can learn to better prepare people for what they might face, and to better support people afterwards. We have deep questions to consider about violence and nonviolence, about our tactics and our long range vision.

But these choices remain available only so long as we keep open the space in which to make them. We need to grow, not shrink. We need to explore and claim new political territory. We need the actions of this autumn to be bigger, wilder, more creatively outrageous and inspiring than ever, from the IMF/World Bank actions planned for Washington, DC at the end of September to the many local and regional actions planned for November when the WTO meets in Qatar. We need to stay in the streets.

Another World is Possible: Scenarios for Change

Dave Lewit is co-chair of the Boston-Cambridge Alliance for Democracy, and co-chair of the international Campaign on Corporate Globalization and Positive Alternatives. For the full version of the presentation from which this article is excerpted, and for copies of the documents discussed: Dave Lewit at 271 Dartmouth St. #2H, Boston MA 02116; 617/266-8687; dlewit@igc.org

"There is no alternative. Global free markets are inevitable." Thus spake Margaret Thatcher. More and more, ordinary people have been willing to come forward to challenge the Thatcher/Reagan dogma and its destructive effects; now a variety of analyses, alternative charters, and a few model, people-friendly agreements are emerging. Let’s have a look at four.

Alternatives for the Americas, a response to the Free Trade of the Americas Agreement (FTAA), is a collaboration by members of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, a Canadian ecumenical coalition, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, and several others. Its seven chapters follow the seven areas of the FTAA agenda: investment, finance, intellectual property, agriculture, market access, services, and dispute resolution. It also adds six more chapters on concerns left out of the FTAA agenda: human rights, the environment, labor, immigration, gender, and the role of the state.

From the section on investment: "Investment should generate high-quality jobs, sustainable production, and economic stability. Governments should have the right to screen out investments that make no net contribution to development, especially speculative capital flows. Citizens’ groups and all levels of government should have the right so sue investors that violate investment rules."

Unfortunately, the document stops with objectives, without going on to suggest how to replace the free trade system.

Facing the Challenges of Globalization, 14 pages, was produced by 37 citizens from around the world. It includes problems to be confronted, areas for "Reshaping the Global Political Economy," and lists of demands for the UN, member states of the UN, and civil society.

For starters, all these demands would make excellent topics for citizen group discussions.

Alternatives to Economic Globalization is by a team from the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), including Tony Clarke, Maude Barlow, Walden Bello, and Vandana Shiva, and stresses a two-pronged strategy:

1) Eliminate corporate welfare, the concentration of corporate power, special corporate rights and exemptions, and the mechanisms by which corporations exert inappropriate influence over public policy.

2) Develop national policies and strategies that support the rebuilding of national and local economies and communities responsive to the needs of the people.

The last chapter of Alternatives recommends strengthening powers of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the International Labor Organization, the UN Environmental Program, and others—going in a direction very different from the free trade agenda. Finally, the IFG working group would create new global institutions, including an International Insolvency Court to free debt-burdened nations, regional Monetary Funds, and an Organization for Corporate Accountability under the UN.

Common Agreement on Investment and Society (CAIS), from the Alliance for Democracy, was created by a 14-person group including a coffee importer, a sheep farmer, a public health physician, and other citizens. It is a model treaty, with 191 provisions so far.

CAIS presents a blueprint for a democratic system—not to force efforts to bring it into being, but to give people an architect’s rendition of what might be, and so to encourage hundreds of local efforts to design systems agile enough to challenge the megacorporate juggernaut, and to get beyond its free-trade fakery.

In addition to these collaborative efforts, there are also several important individual works; those listed here all propose solutions which stress localism:

The Free Trade Adventure by Graham Dunkley, advocates "a Managed Trade system centered around moderate planning, less growth-oriented goals, and a carefully targeted tariff-subsidy system, which also could incorporate some fair trade and self-reliant trade features in the longer term."

Localization: A Global Manifesto is by Colin Hines, whose motto is "Protect the local, globally." He is careful and inspiring about money matters—currency, loans, taxes, and deflation.

Going Local by Michael Shuman is exciting and informative, and includes an appendix listing over 300 organizations under headings like Mass Transit, MicroEnterprise Funds, and Model EcoVillages.

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