By Seumas Milne
When mass protests exploded on the streets of Seattle in 1999 against the kind of globalisation embodied in the World Trade Organisation, their anti-capitalist message was widely portrayed as utopian. A decade on, as anti-capitalist demonstrators vented their fury yesterday on the social and ecological vandals of the City and prepared to do battle today outside the G20 meeting in the heart of what was once London’s docks, it looks more like common sense.

The wreckage of the neoliberal order – which reached its zenith in the wake of Seattle and has generated the greatest global economic crisis since the 1930s – is now all around us. World trade is in free fall and, by some measures, collapsing faster than at the time of the Great Depression. While G20 leaders talk of saving or creating 20 million jobs, 25 million are expected to be lost in the wealthy OECD states alone, whose main area of competition now seems to be their relative rates of economic decline. And what in the richest economies means mass unemployment and rising poverty translates into destitution and rising death rates in the developing world.

So it can hardly be a surprise that some people end up trashing the homes or offices of bailed-out bankers – or that French workers have taken to “bossnapping” executives handing out mass redundancies, as has been the experience of astonished Caterpillar and Sony executives in recent weeks. As unrest over the impact of the crisis has grown across Europe, workers are increasingly resorting to direct action against closures and following the example of the successful occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, backed by Barack Obama last December.

The night before last, workers occupied Belfast’s Visteon car components plant after 565 out of its 610-strong UK workforce were sacked on Tuesday, and by yesterday morning the action had spread to its factories in Enfield and Basildon. There is likely to be plenty more of this kind of thing to come, as conflict over who carries the costs of the crisis becomes more overt – and so there will have to be if we are to avoid the return to business as usual that politicians and corporate powerbrokers evidently still envisage across the western world.

Of course, all the talk at the ExCel centre is of regulation, a green New Deal and “partnerships of purpose”. Champions of the failed free market are thin on the ground anywhere these days – even Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson, the Thatcherite architects of the 1980s Big Bang City deregulation, this week turned their backs on the financial mayhem they unleashed. But the fact that many of those presiding at the G20 are the same people who brought us to the present catastrophic pass scarcely inspires confidence in their ability to overcome the crisis.

No doubt some modest progress will be made on bringing hedge funds and tax havens under control, though the US and Britain are holding out against tougher regulation. The transatlantic battle over regulation versus co-ordinated expansion is in any case largely a phoney one. Obama is right that the US can’t be the sole engine of global recovery, but then Germany’s own fiscal stimulus is a good deal larger than its politically hybrid government likes to let on. And if demand is boosted simply to refloat the existing failed economic model – which in the US and Britain includes a crippled, corrupted financial system – it won’t work anyway.

The same goes for G20 plans to inject extra cash into the International Monetary Fund, which claims to have changed the nefarious neoliberal ways that made it a target for the protesters of the 1990s, but is in fact still imposing the kind of structural adjustment conditions which are the opposite of what is needed to pull countries out of the slump. As for today’s expected declarations on action against global warming, they barely count as political window-dressing.

All the signs are that most of the politicians playing to the gallery in London today have yet to face up to the full scale of the crisis, or what will need to be done to overcome it. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and President Lula are right to single out the Anglo-Saxon model and “white men with blue eyes” for the meltdown – even if that underplays its systemic nature. But this isn’t only a crisis of capitalism or of a particular form of capitalism after all, it’s one of US economic and global power as well.

That’s because it’s the product not just of financialisation and deregulated markets, but also of chronically low American savings and unsustainable levels of consumption – including the massive military expenditure that has underpinned US wars and global overstretch in the years since the end of the cold war. The deficits they’ve generated have increasingly been financed by China and the fact that today’s meeting is of the G20 rather than the G7 – and that its most important meetings are between Obama and President Hu Jintao – is a symbol of the decline of American economic power exposed by the crisis.

The rebalancing of the US relationship with China, which is so far riding the economic storm somewhat more successfully than its western counterparts, can play a part in overcoming the crisis. But right now recovery is being held back by the failure of the US, and even more precariously Britain, to intervene decisively in the financial sector to drive up lending – rather than pour cash into the black hole of bankers’ gambling debts. In both countries, the combination of halfhearted quantitative easing and a refusal to take control of the banks is stifling the impact of tax cuts and extra public spending. In Britain in particular, the limits of crude Keynesianism – rather than direct intervention and nationalisation – are clearly being reached.

Meanwhile, market enthusiasts have once again been complaining, as they did at the time of Seattle, that the G20 protesters have no alternative. It was never true in the 1990s, but now such claims are simply ridiculous. The policies and programmes now pouring out of the international trade union movement, NGOs, political parties and thinktanks – on climate change, jobs, green investment, public services, trade, finance, international institutions and global justice – are voluminous and serious. The problem is not a shortage of alternatives, but a lack of political muscle so far to make them stick.

By DEAN CARSON

LONDON (AP) — Tens of thousands of people marched across central London Saturday to demand jobs, economic justice and environmental accountability, kicking off six days of protest and action planned in the run-up to the G20 summit next week.

More than 150 groups threw their backing behind the “Put People First” march. Police said around 35,000 attended the demonstration, but there were large gaps in the line of protesters snaking its way across the city toward Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park.

The marchers are pushing for a more transparent and democratic economic recovery plan.

“The whole economic meltdown … There’s a really good opportunity for governments to get together and invest in a sustainable future,” said unemployed Steve Burson, 49, marching with the protesters.

The biggest groups backing the demonstration include the Stop The War Coalition, whose supporters marched under the slogan “Jobs Not Bombs,” Friends of the Earth, and the Trades Union Congress, an umbrella group of British trade unions, which is calling for Britain’s crisis-hit manufacturing base to share in country’s banking bailout.

“They should be solving (the crisis) in the interest of working people,” said Andy Bain, the president of Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association. “All the money is going to the rich.”

Protesters whistled and booed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 10 Downing Street office — with one shouting: “Enjoy the overtime!” as they filed past.

Security was tight around a small group of people waving anarchist flags Saturday. Anarchists and others have promised violence before the G20 meeting Thursday, and the British capital is bracing for a massive police operation as representatives of the world’s 20 leading economies fly in for a summit on the financial crisis. More protests are planned Wednesday and Thursday, while left-leaning teach-ins, lectures, and other demonstrations are scheduled throughout the week.

Other demonstrations aimed at the G20 summit took place in Europe on Saturday.

Berlin police estimated that around 10,000 people gathered in front of the capital’s city hall and more than 1,000 in Frankfurt, Germany’s banking capital, for similar demonstrations under the slogan: “We won’t pay for your crisis.”

Some demonstrators in Berlin sported headbands reading “pay for it yourselves” and carried placards demanding: “make capitalism history.”

As many as three million people took to the streets across France on Thursday to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis and demand more help for struggling workers.

The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy’s pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs. Bright spring sunshine helped the turnout and the total reported by union organisers surpassed the 2.5 million seen on an earlier day of protest on Jan 29.

Streets in central Paris were packed with protesters waving anti-Sarkozy placards and chanting slogans, with badges reading “Get lost you little jerk!”, the now infamous comment made by Sarkozy to a protestor at an agriculture show, much in evidence.

“There are more and more workers who feel they are not responsible for this crisis but that they are the main victims of it,” said Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT, one of the eight trade unions organising the strikes. More than 2 million people are out of work in France and despite an easing in inflation, even many with a job struggle with the high cost of living. A large public sector payroll and a relatively generous welfare state has kept French people better protected than many in other countries but there has been deep public anger at plant closures and stories of corporate excess.

Sarkozy, elected in 2007 on a pledge to shake up the French economy, has seen his approval ratings plunge as he has poured billions into bailing out banks and carmakers but rejected union demands for higher pay and tax hikes for the rich.

“People are in the streets and they are suffering, there are more and more people out of work and something has to be done,” said Sylvie Daenenck, marching in Paris. “We shouldn’t just be giving money to the bosses.”

Sarkozy’s room for manoeuvre has been limited by the dire state of French public finances, which have been drastically strained by the need to prop up the fragile financial sector. But a series of disputes, ranging from strikes by university staff to unruly protests by workers at a tyre plant in northern France, have underlined a worsening climate of discontent that the government fears could escalate.

Workers at the Continental tyre factory pelted managers with eggs at the protest this week and the government and business leaders have been acutely aware of the danger of unrest spilling over into the kind of violence seen in the urban riots of 2005.

Transport, energy and some government offices were all affected and unions said there was also strong participation by workers from the private sector, although there was no general shutdown of the economy. Most businesses and public services functioned at close to normal levels.

The unions have presented a long list of demands, including a boost for the lower salaried, more measures to protect employment, a tax hike for high earners and a halt to job cuts planned in the public sector. The government has introduced a 26 billion euro ($36 billion) stimulus plan aimed at business investment, and after the Jan. 29 strike Sarkozy offered 2.65 billion euros of additional aid to help vulnerable households weather the storm.

But there is little prospect of an improvement in the situation, with many analysts predicting the economy will contract by 2 percent this year and unemployment will jump 25 percent to almost 10 percent.

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Police warn of G20 protest scale in London

Known activists are planning in an “unprecedented” way ahead of next month’s G20 summit in London, the Metropolitan Police have warned.

Cdr Bob Broadhurst, in charge of the policing operation, said anarchists and environmentalists were plotting a series of demonstrations. Groups active in the late 1990s were re-emerging and forming new alliances to protest at the meeting, he said.

The operation will involve thousands of officers and cost an estimated £7.2m. World leaders, including US President Barack Obama, will begin to arrive in the UK on 31 March. The next day campaigners are expected to target the City of London in a series of anti-globalisation and climate change demonstrations.

As the G20 summit begins on 2 April, protests are also planned at the Excel conference centre in Docklands. The G20 countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the US and the EU.

Cdr Broadhurst said officers from six forces would be involved in a massive security operation before and during the summit. However, it was difficult to estimate how many protesters would actually turn up on the main day of activity on 1 April.

“Clearly there are some very innovative and clever people and they know our tactics,” Cdr Broadhurst said. “They want to stop the City on the Wednesday – that is their avowed intention.”

He said it was his aim to “facilitate lawful protest” and he revealed plans for a special demonstration pen near the Excel Centre to accommodate a few hundred protesters. But while police had worked closely with some campaigners, the plans of other groups were harder to ascertain. “Anarchists by definition won’t come and see us,” he said.

He said there was no intelligence to suggest there was a terrorist attack planned, but there was evidence that groups not seen since the 1990s, such as direct action exponents Reclaim the Streets and the Wombles, were re-forming and planning activity. Students were also involved in larger numbers than before, he said, and there was some evidence that foreign activists were heading to the UK to take part in the protests. Police are expecting activists to block streets and hold demonstrations heading in several directions at once.

Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson admitted policing the summit and protecting the 20 world leaders and 40 delegations was a “huge challenge”.

A history of violent protest at world summits

Violent protests at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999 caught everyone by surprise. Tens of thousands of anti-globalisation protesters descended on the city, overwhelming an unprepared police force.

The National Guard was brought in to restore order and the mayor imposed a curfew. The summit ended with hundreds under arrest and numerous symbols of American corporate power — McDonald’s restaurants, Starbucks coffee shops and Gap stores — in ruins.

Activists opposed to unfettered free-trade “neoliberalism” besieged all manner of economic summits over the next few years. Meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the IMF and World Bank in Prague and the Summit of the Americas were all targeted.

In 2001, about 400 were arrested during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City that April. At an EU summit in Gothenburg in June, three activists were shot and injured as hundreds of protesters rampaged through the streets.
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Then, in July 2001, an anti-globalisation activist was shot dead during the G8 summit in Genoa after days of battles between protesters and police. Hundreds were arrested, dozens were treated in hospital and allegations of police brutality flew.

From then on the trend was towards remote, isolated summit venues that protesters would struggle to reach, and where anarchists would find few things to smash. In 2002, the G8 met in Kananaskis, a remote Canadian ski resort. Checkpoints were in place to hold back any undesirables long before they got anywhere near the meeting. It passed off smoothly.

After renewed clashes in Evian in 2003, the security effort was stepped up again in 2004. That year, the G8 summit was held on an island 80 miles off the coast of the US state of Georgia. Even then, the American authorities took no chances. Sea Island was sealed off by land and sea. Surface-to-air missiles were in place along the coast to enforce a no-fly zone. Catering staff allowed on to the island had to undergo rigorous background checks. Coastal towns nearby were swept by secret service agents with metal detectors and sniffer dogs. Locals said the area had turned into an “armed camp”. There was no trouble.

Although some of the violent fervour seemed to have gone out of the anti-globalisation movement in recent years, the authorities could not relax. In Gleneagles in 2005 — again the G8 was held far from major population centres — 91 people were arrested and weapons seized as protesters tried to reach the venue. Two years ago in Heiligendamm, Germany, almost 1,000 people were injured, including 146 police, during street fighting.