UPDATE: 3:30pm 9_24:
With the G20, the 19 largest economies in the world and the EU, meeting in the ultimate Rust Belt City - PITTSBURGH, I find myself wishing I was there with my friend Mac. The G20 will be meeting to discuss how to hide the fact that their entire economic system and theory has failed utterly. They will not be seeking ways to help average people and to seek justice, economic or social. Instead they will be attempting to maintain the failed status quo of globalism and to protect the power of transnational corporations. To that end the United States and President Obama will be violating, if not directly certainly in spirit, the Posse Comitatus Act which "prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services (today the Army, Air Force, and State National Guard forces when such are called into federal service) from exercising nominally state law enforcement, police, or peace officer powers that maintain "law and order" on non-federal property (states and their counties and municipal divisions) within the United States." - Wikipedia.
UPDATED 3:30pm 9_24:
Apparently a large group of marchers numbering between 1500 and 3000 left Arsenal Park on a march toward the Convention Center. The marchers did not have a permit. Still looking at the 1st Amendment for where is says they need one. The military and riot police showed up at the park and allowed them to leave which started the march. They went down 39th and 38th toward Liberty where the troops had erected fences across all the streets heading South toward the G20 meeting. The marchers were ordered to disperse as they approached the fences and then the military opened up on them with tear gas, sound weapons, microwave weapons known as IRAD and smoke. The peaceful protesters started fanning out and knocked over dumpsters along the way. Very ugly scene. All this was happening as Obama's plane was landing and the Congress prepared to giveaway billions of dollars to the private insurance leaches in Mandates.
UPDATED 11:45am 9_24: Mac is trying to get to Arsenal Park where the first big protest is scheduled to start, but the entire south bank of the river, aka Pittsburgh, is blocked by armored personnel carriers, humvees and about 20,000 federal troops. When I spoke to him a he was wondering if there are even 20,000 troops in Kabul. There are reports of Black Hawk helicopters everywhere.
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A National Guard combat battalion that has recently returned from the Iraq war will man a perimeter around the center of an American city to keep protesters from exerting their 1st Amendment rights. It has been called de facto Marshall Law. This is a total disgrace for our country and for Obama.
My friend Mac is in Pittsburgh right now and he is going to be uploading pictures and commentary live. Here is his statement for why he is going there:
Why I’m Going to the Pittsburgh G20 Summit
I.
On Tuesday, September 22, Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an editorial by David M. Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, entitled, “High Stakes in Pittsburgh.” In this editorial, Shribman discusses the importance of the G20 summit meeting of the 20 world leaders as well as the heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)and the World Bank (representing 85% of the world’s economy), to restore the public’s faith in globalization:
“What the world yearns for is a sense of stability and confidence, two elements that have their utility in the emotional world but that also provide the oxygen for the commercial and investment worlds. Nothing moves in a positive direction- not the stock market, not consumer goods, not the overall economy- without those two things.”
One of the key organizers of the G20’s opposition, the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project has a downloadable poster on their website that reads:
“Capitalism isn’t in Crisis- Capitalism is the Crisis.”
II.
Ten years ago about 50,000 people from all walks of life gathered on the streets of Seattle to defy the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). There were unionists, environmentalists, students, musicians, farmers, immigrants, indigenous peoples, even the Raging Grannies showed up and shut down the meeting.
The opposition’s message then in Seattle is the same today in Pittsburgh- corporate globalization ruins homes, communities, nations and the planet.
Everything that the global justice movement was saying then and warning the world about in terms of corporate globalization- mass loss of jobs, weakening of environmental standards, weakening of unions, growing poverty, increased militarization and destruction of local economies has come to pass. None of the touted “benefits of globalization” those neoconservative pundits, bankers, and economists promised ever arrived.
So, when Mr. Shribman says “High Stakes in Pittsburgh” he is indeed correct. There are high stakes for the global justice movement to remind America and the world that institutions like the G20, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization are not the solution- they are the problem. It is these organizations and trade policies which removed trade barriers, gutted our manufacturing sector, pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into speculative credit schemes and emasculated the American people into an economy of consumers of cheap plastic junk and expensive metal “toys.”
As the global justice movement has now been loudly stating for over a decade- there is no solution to be found within the G20’s closed doors in Pittsburgh or wherever else they choose to hold their meetings. The solution to America’s and every nation’s problems lies within the communities who have to deal with them on a daily basis. Continued corporate globalization is only going to further hurt this country and others across the planet.
III.
When these large international summit meetings happen, it also provides a summit meeting for the peoples on the streets. Pittsburgh provides a venue for us, the large and diverse mass which make up the global justice movement, to demonstrate to the world our dissent.
At no point in the past decade has the time been more ripe to stage our grievances with corporate globalization. And the powers that be are well aware of this; the city if Pittsburgh has completely closed off a three block radius of downtown (surrounding the David L. Lawrence Convention Center), guarded by 2,000 National Guard troops, 4,000 Pennsylvania State Troopers, 1,000 Pittsburgh City Police and an undisclosed number of federal law enforcement agents.
They clearly anticipate our public disagreement.
Thus the “High Stakes” are even more so upon us. Groups including the Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh Indymedia, CODEPINK, Pittsburgh Organizing Group, Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project, Amnesty International and a host of other clusters have been spreading the word and preparing actions for months.
Will activists heed the call?
Big marches and actions are planned all over the city Thursday, the 24th to coincide with the Summit’s opening and on Friday, the 25th. Soon enough, we’ll see the state of the global justice movement.
Let’s pray we’re still singing loud with our fists raised.