>
> WW News Service Digest #78
>
> 1) Mass Arrests at DC March
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 2) IMF Exposed by Militant Resistance
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 3) Mumia Salutes IMF Protesters
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 4) Workers World Candidates Arrested in DC Protest
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 5) DC Protest: Minors Majoring in Militant Struggle
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 6) In the Streets Around the IMF
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 7) Anti-IMF Protests: April 17
> by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>MASS ARRESTS AT MARCH AGAINST POLICE REPRESSION
>
>By Brian Becker
>Washington
>
>[Becker is co-director of the International Action Center.
>He was arrested with 678 others on April 15 in Washington.]
>
>Hours after Washington police carried out a raid on the
>morning of April 15 on the Convergence Center, closing down
>the headquarters of the protests against the International
>Monetary Fund, the same police illegally arrested nearly
>700 people.
>
>The mass arrests followed a demonstration to shut down the
>prison-industrial complex and free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The
>demonstration had been called by the New York-based
>International Action Center.
>
>Shoppers, passersby and even some members of the press
>were among the 678 who were swept up and detained for as
>long as 20 hours. The mass arrests were part of a policy
>that Washington Mayor Anthony Williams described as a
>"proactive, precautionary and preventive" police strategy.
>
>Put differently, this strategy amounts to an
>unconstitutional "preventive detention" policy. Opponents
>of the U.S. government are arrested not for what they've
>done but for who they are. Most of the 678 arrested people
>had planned to join protests against the pro-capitalist and
>anti-people International Monetary Fund and World Bank the
>next day.
>
>The April 15 sweep was one of the biggest political mass
>arrests in recent U.S. history.
>
>The arrests took place after a spirited and lawful march
>from the Justice Department at 9th Street and Pennsylvania
>Avenue NW to 20th and K streets NW.
>
>Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey later tried to justify the
>mass arrests when he told reporters that the marchers were
>"parading without a permit and refused a police order to
>disperse." This explanation is simply false.
>
>Hundreds of eyewitnesses dispute the police account. The
>New York Times, Washington Post and National Public Radio
>carried major stories that conflict with the police
>account.
>
>THE FACTS
>
>What are the facts?
>
>The International Action Center had obtained a permit to
>hold a rally at the Justice Department. It is not necessary
>to obtain a permit to hold a sidewalk march in the District
>of Columbia.
>
>The IAC organizers, this reporter included, negotiated an
>agreement with the police to conduct a march to the area of
>the IMF headquarters and end with a follow-up rally at
>Dupont Circle.
>
>It was obvious that the police agreed to the march. Many
>police cruisers and foot cops were in the front of the
>march. They stopped vehicular traffic at the intersections
>so that the demonstration could proceed on the route
>between the Justice Department and the area around the IMF
>building.
>
>When the march reached 20th and K streets, NW, just a few
>blocks before arriving at the final destination of Dupont
>Circle, it was halted. A line of police in riot gear
>blocked the marchers from proceeding forward.
>
>The police line stretched from corner to corner. No one
>was allowed to leave. At the rear of the demonstration
>another line of police started advancing.
>
>The IAC organizers explained over a loudspeaker system
>that the police were setting a trap for large-scale
>arrests. They asked people whether it was better to end the
>demonstration so that everyone could be available the next
>day, April 16, for the mass actions to shut down the IMF.
>
>The demonstrators acted with great discipline, verbally
>agreeing to immediately end the protest and disperse in
>small groups as protection against police harassment.
>Hundreds actually made it out of the block to the south of
>the police line located at 20th and K Streets.
>
>The police command, realizing that the organizers had
>ended the activity, quickly assembled a solid wall of cops
>stretching across the southern end of the block. Within
>minutes they had sealed the whole block and refused to let
>anyone else leave.
>
>The police never ordered people to disperse. Just the
>opposite. Without explanation they refused to allow anyone,
>except credentialed media, to leave.
>
>IAC organizers explained to the trapped crowd assembled
>peacefully on the sidewalk: "We are insisting on the right
>to leave. The police are fundamentally violating our
>rights. This was a legal demonstration; it was entirely
>within the law. There has been no property damage. The only
>people possessing weapons are the police. Yet, we are
>illegally detained here and the police are bringing in
>buses to transport us to jail.
>
>"This is a gross violation of people's right to free
>speech. The police are acting as agents of the IMF and the
>capitalist establishment. We will remain calm and strong
>and determined never to be intimidated by these illegal
>tactics."
>
>The highly spirited crowd of mostly young people responded
>with the chant, "There ain't no power like the power of the
>people 'cause the power of the people won't stop!"
>
>ILLEGAL MASS ARRESTS
>
>An hour after the police sealed the block at 20th and K
>streets, a commander bellowed "Platoon!" Without warning,
>the police at both ends of the block started marching on
>the trapped protesters, using riot clubs to push them
>together into a tighter and tighter pack.
>
>Then the arrests began. Three at a time, people were led
>away into waiting school buses.
>
>The 678 people were taken to various jails and remote
>police academy stations. Many were kept confined on the
>buses with their hands cuffed tightly behind their backs
>for more than 12 hours.
>
>Workers World Party presidential and vice-presidential
>candidates Monica Moore head and Gloria La Riva were among
>the arrested. Also confined with them were Teresa Gutierrez
>and other leaders and members of the Party. They were
>confined in a small room at a Washington corrections
>facility that was splattered with blood and vomit.
>
>The mass arrest was illegal. The police of course knew
>this. So throughout the next 24 hours the prisoners were
>encouraged to immediately pay a "post and forfeit" $50 fine
>to the charge of parading without a permit. This would not
>be an admission of guilt and would close the case. For most
>of those arrested, who live outside Washington, they could
>get released and not have to come back.
>
>The advantage for the police was that they would not have
>to answer in court for their illegal actions. The police
>maintained the prisoners in conditions of maximum
>discomfort so that they would "post and forfeit."
>
>PRESSURE TO `POST AND FORFEIT'
>
>This writer was among those who refused to "post and
>forfeit." We were subjected to on-the-spot punishment
>carried out by the Washington police and U.S. Marshals.
>
>We were shackled firmly, right hand to left foot, for
>three hours. Then we were placed on a bus and driven to an
>underground garage.
>
>There the police refastened the handcuffs to the tightest
>setting and left us again to sit on the school bus until 7
>a.m., when the demonstrators were turned over to the
>custody of the U.S. Marshals.
>
>The marshals slapped prisoners, pushed them into walls and
>put them in heavier leg and ankle chains if they protested
>this treatment. Although there were many vacant cells, 13
>of us were confined together in a six-foot by 13-foot cell.
>
>When we appeared at arraignment court on Sunday afternoon,
>April 16, our charges were changed from "parading without a
>permit" to "disorderly conduct."
>
>The parading without a permit charge was simply a
>smokescreen for one of the biggest "preventive detentions"
>in recent years.
>
>Why were the April 15 demonstrators illegally suppressed?
>
>"We were protesting the ever-expanding prison-industrial
>complex and police brutality," said Larry Holmes, an
>International Action Center leader and an organizer of the
>April 15 protest. Holmes was among those arrested.
>
>"The demonstration grew from several hundreds to more than
>a thousand youth with its spirited opposition to the
>prisons, police terror, racism and capitalism. The police
>hated the message of the demonstration and they wanted to
>start the weekend by publicly displaying that they would
>use aggressive, even brazenly illegal, tactics."
>
>The mass media are now putting a positive spin on the
>police conduct in Washington. They are giving the police
>"high marks" for "good tactics." They are even spreading
>the lie that "many of the protesters" thought the police
>treated them well. This is a fabrication.
>
>The police role included: illegally raiding and shutting
>down the Convergence Center protest headquarters on
>Saturday morning, April 15; preventive detention arrests of
>678 peaceful protesters at the demonstration that same
>afternoon against the prison-industrial complex; severely
>mistreating these demonstrators in an attempt to force them
>to "post and forfeit" for a crime they never committed;
>beating, pepper spraying and other abusive conduct against
>hundreds of protesters on April 16 and 17.
>
>In addition to carrying out mass arrests and beatings,
>police raided and ransacked the homes of political
>activists in Washington in the days leading up to the pro
>tests. Secret Service agents stopped and searched
>organizers' vehicles without cause.
>
>The repressive apparatus consisting of the police, prison,
>courts and army revealed itself for what it really is: not
>an impartial arbiter maintaining public order and safety in
>society, but a tool of class violence and coercion. This
>apparatus is employed every day in a virtual war against
>the youths of the African American and Latino communities.
>
>The battle in Washington revealed that the capitalist
>political establishment uses this instrument of force
>against any who seriously challenge the "smooth operations"
>of the profit system. The new movement for social change
>must draw all the political, theoretical and organizational
>implications of the reality presented by the state
>apparatus.
>
>[The IAC is collecting eyewitness accounts from people who
>were arrested or witnessed arrests. This information will
>help organizations preparing a class action suit on behalf
>of all those arrested. Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] or call
>(212) 633-6646.]
>
> - END -
>
>(Copyleft Workers World Service. Everyone is permitted to
>copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but
>changing it is not allowed. For more information contact
>Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message
>to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org)
>
>
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 21:38:06 -0400
>Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
>Subject: [WW] IMF Exposed by Militant Resistance
>Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>-------------------------
>Via Workers World News Service
>Reprinted from the Apr. 27, 2000
>issue of Workers World newspaper
>-------------------------
>
>IMF EXPOSED BY MILITANT RESISTANCE
>
>By Fred Goldstein
>Washington
>
>The April 16-17 days of struggle in Washington, D.C.,
>against a meeting of the International Monetary Fund and
>the World Bank were a major success-for the demonstrators
>and for the cause of the majority of the world's people.
>
>Bankers and finance ministers are not accustomed to
>answering to the people. But since the protests they have
>had to go on television over and over again. This time it
>was not to talk about "macroeconomic reforms,"
>"strengthening the world financial system," "greater
>transparency," or other bankers' double talk they are
>accustomed to giving out.
>
>Instead they have had to answer charges by the April 16
>movement that they are impoverishing the people of the
>world with usurious debt, destroying the environment,
>funding the global sweatshop economy, destroying the social
>safety net of the Third World, vastly expanding world
>unemployment, and in general acting as instruments of
>exploitative capitalist globalization.
>
>To add to their humiliation, on April 16 they had to sneak
>into their own meeting at 5 a.m. under police escort, and
>then sit for four hours waiting for it to begin. Several
>finance ministers--including the French, Brazilian and
>Portuguese--could not overcome the habit of keeping
>bankers' hours. They slept late, missed the police escort
>and had to hole up in the Watergate Hotel for six hours
>until the cops could finally secure safe passage for them.
>
>This is a first. None of it would have happened without
>thousands of young people conducting militant resistance in
>the streets. They heroically put their bodies on the line
>in their determination to obstruct the meetings of these
>high and mighty bankers and ministers of finance-the
>exploiters of the world.
>
>The capitalist media have worked overtime to portray the
>demonstrations as a failure, on the grounds that the
>protesters were unable to stop the meeting from taking
>place. But while the tactical objective of the
>demonstration was not technically fulfilled, the political
>objective was met quite successfully.
>
>PROTESTS THROW BANKERS ON DEFENSIVE
>
>Under protection of hordes of police, the bankers may have
>escaped the ultimate humiliation of being locked out. But
>the IMF and the World Bank have been thrown onto the
>defensive and exposed on the world stage as a fundamental
>source of world poverty and misery.
>
>In this sense, the demonstration was every bit as
>successful politically as the Seattle demonstrations last
>November/ December.
>
>The goal in Seattle was to expose how the World Trade
>Organization is the enemy of the oppressed countries and of
>the working class. Seattle showed that the WTO uses the
>"free market" as a cover to help transnational corporations
>take over national economies in the Third World through
>ruthless trade policies.
>
>In the same way the IMF and World Bank have now been
>exposed as hypocrites that create poverty and destroy the
>environment under the cover of "structural adjustment" and
>"development aid."
>
>The media's take on the Washington demonstrations--that
>they failed to stop the meeting--is faulty. There are many
>reasons this was accomplished in Seattle and not in
>Washington. In Seattle the movement's energy and
>determination took the local authorities by surprise. That
>element was lost in Washington; the police there had five
>months to prepare.
>
>Second, downtown Seattle has narrow streets and populated
>neighborhoods from which to get sympathy and
>reinforcements. This made it easier to concentrate protest
>forces and keep them moving around.
>
>In Washington the demonstrators had to cope with vast
>unpopulated boulevards and few witnesses to the repeated
>acts of police brutality. The demonstrators were basically
>on their own. Because of how the capital's streets are laid
>out, many widely separated points had to be secured.
>
>In fact, the demonstrators barricaded 18 intersections
>using an ingenious web structure. They used mobile
>tactical-support units and complex field communications
>that combined bicycles and electronics. All this worked
>very well to overcome problems inherent in the terrain. But
>the Washington protests were still a lot more difficult
>tactically than Seattle.
>
>Most of all, of course, the federal government has vast
>police resources at its disposal compared to Seattle. And
>it used these forces violently against the unarmed
>demonstrators.
>
>Another important factor was that the AFL-CIO leadership
>chose to hold a reactionary, irrelevant, anti-China rally
>on April 12 and then was totally and ignominiously absent
>from the field on the days of battle. This is not what
>happened in Seattle. There, thousands of workers came into
>close proximity with the youth demonstrations. Many workers
>were enthused by the struggle and joined in, as they
>undoubtedly would have done on April 16-17 had labor
>mobilized for those days.
>
>The labor movement as a whole was a source of
>encouragement to the demonstration in Seattle. The union
>leadership must be called to task for abandoning the
>important April 16-17 demonstrations in Washington, which
>spoke to the needs of millions of workers all over the
>world.
>
>TRULY REMARKABLE RESISTANCE
>
>Despite all these drawbacks the April 16-17 demonstrators
>blocked vans, police cars, buses with media, delegates and
>government officials. They braved beatings and pepper
>spray.
>
>They held their ground against advancing lines of foot
>cops, mounted police, and even police cars and vans that
>were trying to plow through the human barricades.
>
>If the police had to contain themselves to isolated
>beatings on Sunday, April 16, it was only for fear of
>igniting an even greater struggle with the thousands in the
>streets. The demonstration's accomplishments, given the
>relationship of forces, were truly remarkable.
>
>Indeed, if there was any strategic failure in Washington
>on April 16-17, it was the failure of the government and
>the banks to stop the demonstrations and the onslaught of
>political exposure that targeted the IMF and World Bank.
>
>For weeks television news shows ran stories about how the
>Washington cops were studying Seattle. The media showed
>many clips of cops training in riot gear, preparing for the
>demonstrations. But this did not intimidate the thousands
>who came.
>
>At the last minute the government tried to undermine the
>demonstration with an illegal raid on Saturday, April 15.
>They shut down the Convergence Center--the headquarters of
>the April 16 mobilization--and raided people's homes on
>trumped-up charges.
>
>Later that afternoon the police carried out one of the
>biggest mass arrests since May Day 1971. In a pre-emptive
>strike, they jailed more than 600 militants who were
>marching under the banners of the International Action
>Center and Millions for Mumia.
>
>The protest, which had started at the Justice Department,
>linked the IMF's international policies to the prison-
>industrial complex, the case of political prisoner Mumia
>Abu-Jamal and racist repression at home.
>
>Despite their best efforts to disrupt the organizers by
>arresting hundreds of militants, the police failed to
>hamper the demonstrations.
>
>Having failed to stop them through repression and
>intimidation, the government and the media have now begun a
>campaign to demoralize and undermine the movement. They are
>using a multi-layered approach.
>
>They want to convince the movement that it is ineffectual
>through false comparisons to Seattle. They say the movement
>is barking up the wrong tree because the bankers are the
>only ones with the resources to deal with poverty.
>
>What it all boils down to is that the government wants
>this movement to fail--and, together with its kept, big
>business media, will do whatever it can to try to undermine
>it.
>
>SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH DIRECT ACTION
>
>They want the movement to fail because the ranks of this
>movement base themselves on the concept of direct action--
>resistance--as the primary instrument to bring about social
>change. The movement is struggle-oriented. It has shown a
>remarkable heroism and willingness to sacrifice in pursuit
>of its goals.
>
>The government wants it to fail because the vast majority
>of the youths now in motion are directing their hatred at
>the most disgusting features of triumphal capitalism: its
>sacred global instruments of exploitation like the IMF, the
>World Bank and the WTO.
>
>This movement is revolted by ruling-class society, which
>revels in obscene wealth and luxury born out of the poverty
>of the world's masses. The movement despises this society's
>worship of the stock market, its repression and racism, as
>well as its sexism and oppression of lesbian, gay, trans
>and bi people.
>
>The government wants the movement to fail because this new
>generation of activists sees through the fraud of
>capitalist democracy. It is orienting away from the trap of
>the two big-business parties and capitalist electoral
>politics in general and moving toward some formation based
>on the people.
>
>The government wants it to fail because it knows that even
>though the movement now is overwhelmingly composed of white
>students, the most progressive forces within it will
>inevitably make the transition to the struggle against
>racism, national oppression and exploitation in the United
>States, just as they went from fighting sweatshops and
>environmental devastation to fighting global capitalism.
>
>And above all, the U.S. government knows history. The
>rulers do not want a movement of resistance against
>capitalism to grow and flourish at a moment when capitalist
>stability is more and more in doubt with every gyration of
>the stock market.
>
>Such fiery resistance now, in a period of capitalist
>prosperity, can light a prairie fire in a later period of
>capitalist crisis. The bosses know that.
>
>For all these reasons it is the obligation of all
>progressive and revolutionary forces to support the
>movement and see that it broadens, deepens and intensifies
>in the spirit of struggle against capitalism.
>
>To attain its goals, this movement will have to engage the
>workers and the oppressed in the struggle to overturn the
>entire capitalist profit system, which is the ultimate
>source of all the evils it is fighting.
>
>For now the movement, as it is coming together, is at an
>early stage. It is ideologically diverse. It contains
>liberals, pacifists, anarchists, social democrats,
>religious forces, communists and environmentalists, among
>others.
>
>
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