Why do people protest the G8 summits?

Globalization, enhancement of the power of corporations, and lack of local autonomy seem to be the most egregious offenses being protested against.

Because the G8 represents the world’s major power structure so if you are protesting your cause, you are (hopefully) getting the attention of the world’s leaders.

But what are the protesters trying to accomplish? Are they fighting for a cause? What exactly are they trying to do? If you don’t like a certain product, then STFU and don’t buy it, what will throwing molotovs and rock at the police accomplish?

BTW wouldn’t being one mean we’re closer to world peace? Wtf is going on in the world?

“Globalization” generally hurts the working class, bringing down salaries, ensuring worse working conditions, sometimes contaminating residential areas and some misguided people object to these facts.

Whether you agree or disagree with their motivation and modus operandi, it draws the media’s attention and thus the public’s attention… there will always be people who respond to situations in radical ways, it’s the equivalent of asking a high price for something you are selling, knowing that what you will actually get will be much less… it is part of the process of achieving change…

@windex Because of the unorganized format of the protests, they aren’t trying to accomplish any set goal with this particular protest other than rising awareness to their cause. Sometimes they’ll try to be disruptive enough that many of the deals that are set to be made during the summit won’t be because one or more parties couldn’t get there because the riot blocked their path.

Watch “Battle In Seattle” with Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson, it does a pretty good job of explaining it, as does The West Wing episode “Somebody’s going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” (best convo below):

RHONDA
So, Toby?

TOBY
Officer?

RHONDA
Since you’re not really doing anything right now, I was wondering, what’s this all about?

TOBY
It’s about the WTO, Rhonda, the World Trade Organization.

RHONDA
Well, I get that from the signs and the newspapers.

TOBY
The World Trade Organization’s a group of 140 countries who have agreed to specific trade
policies.

RHONDA
So, what’s wrong with that?

TOBY
Nothing’s wrong with that.

RHONDA
What would they say if I asked them the same question?

TOBY
They’d say the WTO benefits corporations and not people.

RHONDA
Does it?

TOBY
Benefits both. [pause] Look at them.

RHONDA
Yeah.

TOBY
Philistines.

RHONDA
Take my nightstick and go kick their a$$.

TOBY
Yeah, make all the jokes you want but let me tell you something they claim to speak for
the underprivileged but here in the blackest city in America, I’m looking at a room with
no black faces. No Asians, No Hispanics. Where the hell’s the Third World they claim to
represent?

RHONDA
Lot of Third-Worlders in the Cabinet Room today, were there?

TOBY
You’re starting to bother me.

RHONDA
That’s `cause I’m armed.

TOBY
No, I like that. [pause] I’m going outside.

@Minute_And_A_Huff That’s a great episode. My favorite conversation is this one:

TOBY
It’s activist vacation is what it is. Spring break for anarchist wannabes. The black t-shirts, the gas masks as fashion accessories.

SACHS
These kids today, with the hair and the clothes…

TOBY
All right, that’s it, flatfoot.

SACHS
I got great feet.

TOBY
You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper.

SACHS
Yes.

TOBY
Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That’s ‘cause I’m a speechwriter and I know how to make a point.

SACHS
Toby…

TOBY
It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with ‘lowers’ and ‘raises’ there?

SACHS
Yes.

TOBY
It’s called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites and now you end with the one that’s not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that’s it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace. I’m sure I’ve seen that on a sign somewhere.

SACHS
God, Toby… Wouldn’t it be great if there was someone around here with communication skills who could go in there and tell them that?

TOBY
Shut up.

So, in summary, globalization does have its negatives, as @dpworkin said, but it also has a lot of benefits, raising the standard of living in developing countries. Nothing in life is perfect.

Protest are great vehicles to create greater discussion of polemic topics in other venues. For example, the editorial page of the nyt only really began to critically question IMF projects after the big protests in 2000–2001. The protesters forced an opening to allow journalists, academics, civil society leaders, unions, etc to participate in the conversation in a more significant way. The G8 generally backs an economic agenda that is very detrimental to the economies of developing nations to benefit the us and western European economies. Not that working people in the us and Europe benefit all that much from the so-called neoliberal agenda espoused by G8, but it is very bad for working people everywhere else. The beneficiaries are corporate leaders in the west and very small elites in the developing world, hence the mass protests

@Flavio I disagree. Take call centers. The people working there (in places like India or Mexico) benefit from globalization, and they certainly are not part of the elite. The guy in the US who used to work at a call center will understandably be unhappy about having lost his job, and he will probably not keep quiet about it.

The purpose of the meetings is to channel funds into smaller circles. Any benefits derived from third world countries is temporary since the goal is to screw the working class.

@Flavio

And they can prove that??

@bob and @captainharley
interestingly, at the end of 2003, the IMF itself published a report concluding that neoliberal globalization and financial deregulation had a net negative impact on achieving substantial improvent in People’s lives. This report was a response to a growing body of scientific evidence that only saw the light of day in the major venues as a result of the debate generated by the protests.

I wonder why these are not done on a small island or via video conference. Toronto spent a billion on security for a few hundred people to get together. This is nonsensical.

My theory is that people burning cars keeps the media distracted from what is going on inside the actual meetings. Ally you know is that there are protests and that is great TV. But the majority of people don’t know what is actually going on.

I figure they’re either paid stooges or a group looking for an excuse to vandalize.

Because Globalisation is an absolute menace to Humanity, like Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

@Flavio

Fascinating! : )

First, economics is hard. You will want to do a lot of reading and learning before forming an opinion on things like globalization. If you really want to get into details, Donald Boudreaux has a book called Globalization that really gets into the science of the issue. For those that want a more casual experience with the issue, try the novel The price of everything by Russ Roberts. The space required to respond to a statement such as @dpworkin ‘s is too large and takes too much of a commitment, and really Russ and Donald are much better writers (omg globalization at work!).

Now, addressing things like the G8 and similar forums. Here is the connection: The G8 wants to appear relevant to the newest fad issues, and the protesters don’t want their grassroots efforts dominated by the big and evil guys.
The G8 is really nothing to fear. A bunch of people blowing smoke up their a**es, making non binding commitments that they will never have to follow through on, all in an attempt to improve their status. The topics are usually over things that have captured the attention in the news.
WTO protests are a different issue. There are actual things being decided and enforced there, and a lot of special interests having favorable terms carved out for them. Protesters are usually protesting the companies in general, while I would be more impressed if they were protesting the special deals they get.

I rated this a Great Question yesterday, because I wondered too. I didn’t have an answer then, but found this article today in the BBC.

The main uniting thread of the protests seems to be “Put People First.” That breaks down into the following initiatives:
*—Democratic governance of the global economy
*—Decent jobs and public services for all
*—An end to global poverty and inequality
*—Establishment of a green economy.

The pain of the global recession has added fuel to this fire. An ActionAid spokesperson sums it up, “We urge the G20 to lift the veil of secrecy that makes it easy for companies to avoid tax. This would allow developing countries to claim the money that they are owed, so they can use it to build hospitals, dig wells and employ teachers.”

Of course, mixed in with those bearing legitimate complaints you are going to find anarchists, destructive punks, and fringe groups of every ilk thinking that burring some police cars will spark the world revolution and bring all power finally into their hands. It does tend to obfuscate any rational message the protesters might have.

Globalization has a track-record of chasing the cheapest, most-exploitable labor, which means that it abandons huge groups of workers suddenly and with no provisions for a transitional process. See the Maquilladora program on the Mexico-California border for a poignant example.

People who don’t understand why someone would want to throw a brick at a cop have never been poor. Sorry, if you haven’t experienced it, I can’t explain it to you. You’ll live and die believing in Officer Friendly and nothing I or anyone else can say to you will make the slightest difference. You’ll still no doubt be baffled and disapproving when the bullets start flying and people are dying all around you.

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the street, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.” — Eric Hoffer

I tend to agree with @ETpro. Sometimes it seems that the protesters are following Abbie Hoffman’s dictum of “Revolution For the Hell of It.” Or maybe they’re having a bad hair day, or just have too much time on their hands.

I’ve been so poor that Ramen Noodles seemed like a TREAT, so I don’t wanna hear it about “being poor leads to revolution.” In MY book, there’s only one thing that justifies revolution and that is the denial of freedom.

@CaptainHarley We’ve lived for a few weeks at a stretch on Ramen Noodles and rive with an egg.

These global questions on distribution, poverty, and social justice are so important that anyone and everyone has legitamacy to give new info or give an opinion. No one is served if we start delegitimizing each other or trying to prove one is more affected or authentic than another

@Flavio I’ve been an activist and organizer for the last 20+ years. The simple fact is that in my long and extensive experience, people who lack the empathy necessary to understand why some of us are furiously and often violently angry can never be made to understand. There is something broken in their limbic systems, in the social, primate part of their brain responsible for making people feel connected to their fellow monkeys. Their “I got mine” sense of entitlement causes them to believe that they earned their privilege, and that everyone else must be lazy or stupid or incompetent if they don’t have the same.

These people wander around in a perpetual state of befuddlement, because their blind ignorance makes them incapable of even conceiving of the actual reasons why others might be angry. They are reduced to making up bizarre and laughably implausible comic book rationalizations for the motivations of others: “They hate our freedom!” “They want to make our children homosexual!” “Their skin colour makes them violent/lazy/dishonest!”

The fact of the matter is that these people are mentally ill, and short of intensive psychiatric treatment, there is no way they can ever be made to understand why we’re so angry. The best thing to do is just ignore them or pity them. Or, if they get in your way, hit them.

@SmashTheState

So if I understand you correctly, if I DON’T agree with you, I’m insane?

@smashthestate
it seems that we have a similar political orientation, but I disagree with your analysis. I am a psychiatrist and while I think chrononic fear does play a large role in the conservative mindset, mental illness cannot explain bad political-economic policies that hurt working people. I invite you to review your favorite progressive thinker on political economy and class warfare. Furthermore, probably the vast majority of the population (including all participants in this discussion) hold very comfortably conflicting opinions about the world on our heads. For example, your description of the entitled people who irk you is utterly devoid of empathy, yet your goal is a more empathic and humane world. Odd, no?

Because – ” It is better to light a candle, than to sit and curse the darkness.”

@lloydbird

That’s not a reason. It’s a paltitude. There are a number of us on here who really would like to understand this. I can understand if something you value is being taken away from you, say like your freedom. I would be angry too. I would also be angry if I were being denied a decent wage, or an opportunity to become educated ( Although I don’t know if I would be angry enough to protest about those last two ).

@johnpowell – Your response was noncommittal so I don’t know which side of the WTO fence you’re on, but it reminded me of a Dylan line – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

@CaptainHarley Something of value is being taken away from most of us here in the USA. We have been edging ever closer to a corporatocracy where we move to “Government of the people, by the corporations and for the corporations. Our liberty is slowly slipping away. Our jobs are slipping away. Over the past 30 years, real wages for the bottm 60% have DROPPED. The next 30% have just held their place. The top 10% have gained, and the top 1/10th of 1% have seen their holdings of the nation’s wealth skyrocket. This is a formula for the creation of a banana republic.

That’s what the protesters are angry about. They don’t want a banana republic.

Our government tried to taunt protesters at the Montebello Summit into violence. There is some talk that there were agents provocateur at this summit. Deplorable actions imnsho.

@Flavio The link between conservatism (at least, conservatism as recognized in Amerika) and mental illness is very clear. For example, Jost (Stanford) and Glaser (Berkeley) wrote a paper clearly demonstrating that conservatism itself is a form of mental illness:

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r
.50); system instability (.47); dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (–.32); uncertainty tolerance (–.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (–.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (–.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

Furthermore, Vail (University of Missouri) has written a paper suggesting that conservatism is a treatable mental illness. It can be cured with treatment. When I wrote that people who are utterly baffled by anyone who is angry enough to risk their lives and liberty assaulting a cop were mentally ill, I was not engaging in hyperbole. They really do lack human empathy. Capitalism rewards sociopathic behaviour and punishes altruism. It should come as no surprise that our culture produces vast numbers of sociopaths, then, who tend to be financially comfortable.

@SmashTheState Very interesting info. Thanks.

For those who haven’t read it, Dr.Robert Altemeyer did some pioneering work on a psychological type he identified as the Right-Wing Authoritarian Follower. Such personality types make up a large portion of today’s right. You can grab the free PDF of his book, The Authoritarians here.

This smacks of more pseudo-intellectual far leftism. The premise here is that if you don’t like your political opponent, then do your best to label him as “mentally ill.” I submit that on the face of it, a protester who assaults police, burns cars, destroys windows and buildings, is closer to being a sociopath than is someone who wants merely to be left alone to run his ( usually small ) business.

I am not a conservative, although as a Libertarian I have some sympathy for some of the tenets of conservatism. Your cited polemics indicate that conservatives fear death ( uh ,,, fear of the unknown is a normal human response, but at the personal level, I have been too close to death too many times to fear him ), lack empathy ( I am one of the most empathetic people I know; sometimes my wife has to caution me not to give too much of our income to various charities ), and dogmatic ( if you knew me, this would be laughable ).

I’m still waiting on an explanation of why you are so willing to engage in violent protest. Are you simply interested in destablizing the current culture? To what end, your own enthronement as Dear Leader? The institutionalization of anarchy? ( Which sounds like an oxymoron. )

What… do… you…want? It’s a simple question. Are you afraid we won’t like your answer? Or do you not HAVE an answer?

He’s stuck in 1968, and the world has passed him by. There are always a few leftover outliers after everyone else has learned the folly of old fashioned, agit-prop, man-the-barricades politics.

@CaptainHarley Instead of talking in generalities, I’ll give you a specific anecdote and see if you have as much empathy as you claim. As I’ve previously mentioned, I am an organizer. My area of activity is the street. I organize the copwatch program here, and I’m the spokesperson for a group which organizes panhandlers, buskers, and others who make their living on the streets.

In the city where I live, the police department puts all their meatheads in the downtown core, where all the homeless shelters and soup kitchens are. They’re like cookie cutter clones, all steroids and short gel hair and Terminator shades — and the brains of a retarded soap dish. There was one particular cop who, for years, used to enjoy beating the shit out of street kids. He’d drag them into parking lots at night and just thump the living shit out of them. He was a fucking monster, all steroids and truck-fender shoulders. The businesses loved him because he drove “undesirables” from the city, and to his fellow cops he was a big fucking hero.

We organized the street kids and we marched on the police station. The first time, we got everyone masked up, marched down the middle of the street, and locked down the street right outside their doors, shutting down all traffic in both directions. We wear masks to protect us from reprisals by police, since we can be picked off easily when we’re not in large groups. We told police that they were to get rid of Officer Meathead or we’d be back.

They didn’t, so one month to the day, we were.

The second time, there was a massive police presence. They had a water cannon, huge numbers of cops, paddy wagons standing by for mass arrests, and a whole busload of riot cops prepared to smash us down. Many of the street kids were frightened away by this, so we had a smaller—but more militant—group this time. We started by snake-marching through the downtown core, snarling traffic. We use snake-marching as a tactic because it’s difficult for the police to stop, and it allows us to evade direct confrontations with their vastly superior force. After managing to get some of the cops out from underfoot, this time we marched right inside the police station and locked down their lobby. Surrounded by hundreds of furious cops, I read our demands over a megaphone, they being: the police must stop breaking the law, and Officer Meathead must resign or be fired.

We had only one arrest, and we got him sprung by refusing to leave until they released him. And this time the police acted: they promoted Officer Meathead to detective to get him off the streets. That’s fine. We understand that it’s easier to promote them than to fire them, and as long as he’s not smashing young girls in the face for the crime of being homeless, we don’t give a shit what they do with him.

During our actions we scuffled a few times with the police, largely as a result of police deliberately antagonizing us (such as by walking right into the middle of us as we’re trying to talk and make decisions). A few of the street kids threw bottles at the cop cars which ringed us.

I can already hear your objections, because I’ve heard them so many times before. “Why don’t you file a complaint?” I’ve filed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of complaints. I’ve lost track of the number of people for whom I’ve advocated. I can tell you from long, bitter experience that police complaints are an utter waste of time. I have never had a single successful case in which formal action was taken against a cop, no matter how egregious the behaviour. Police complaints are investigated by… the police. Amazingly, police never seem to find any problem with the behaviour of police.

“File a lawsuit!” I have been part of several lawsuits, one of which made international headlines. We have been fortunate that we have several civil rights lawyers who donate their time to us, but they have limited time to offer. Lawsuits are costly, even when you don’t pay for a lawyer; even the cost of filing briefs is far beyond our means, and the State has infinite money to bury you in briefs, each of which requires a response. Because lawsuits are so expensive and require so much of the meagre legal resources available to us, we have to be extremely careful about which cases we choose to fight through the courts.

“Go to the press! Go to the politicians!” According to the corporate media, I am either an extortionist or mentally ill. Or both. And our mayor made headlines when he referred to panhandlers as “pigeons,” saying that they’ll go away if you stop feeding them. He also compared street people to seagulls at the dump, explaining that “you need to shoot one every now and then to keep the rest scared.” The city councillor for the downtown ward has gone on record repeatedly as saying “citizens” have the right not to feel intimidated by the presence of poor people—the subtext being that poor people aren’t citizens. He stopped this only after I addressed city council and warned him that the Elections Act requires politicians to represent the entire electorate, and that failure to do so is a criminal act under Malfeasance of Office. Now he still oppresses the poor (we are currently fighting his most recent proposed bylaw, which would allow police to issue a $300 fine to anyone who swears or shouts on a public street, or does anything a police officer considers to be a “nuisance”) but he’s careful about not implying that the poor aren’t citizens.

I suspect my phone is tapped. The last time I was arrested, they tried to give me bail conditions which would have effectively banned me from the city; I went to prison instead and started organizing the inmates, causing them to throw me out without conditions. We know for a certainty from court documents filed by the police that they have a snitch salted inside our organization. I have to carry a voice recorder with me at all times to ensure that police can’t lie about our interactions, and they’ve followed me down darkened streets more than once, causing me to flee for my safety.

That’s one single anecdote out of hundreds. Do you understand why some of us might be a bit angry? Why we might be willing to break a window or throw a brick?

Of course I can understand why you’re angry. I would be too. If I knew what to do about this, I would do it. But as I’m sure you know far better than I do, this sort of problem does not admit of an easy or quick solution. Police brutality exists. Homelessness exists. Those at the bottom of the socio-economic structure are largely powerless. But is violent protest the best way to ameliorate these problems? I honestly don’t know.

I have to ask this… how do the problems you mention here relate to the meeting of the G-20, and to the protests there?

I’ve been sitting here for about ten minutes, tentatively starting to write something only to delete it and start again, and finally just staring at an empty screen. Rather than answer your question, I’m going to try to explain why it’s so difficult for me to answer. If I still feel energetic when I finish, I may take a stab at it.

The problem is, I can’t answer your question simply. There are no short, pithy, talking point answers. There’s a whole web of interconnected issues, and each on their own makes no sense unless they are presented in the context of other connected issues. I’ve had the same discussion I’m having with you literally hundreds of times. And not just with you; I am often called upon by the media to answer the same or similar questions in my capacity as spokesperson. The explanations are lengthy, and require circuitous routes through a lot of necessary background. With the media, they generally lose interest after the first 15 seconds. And for everyone else, I know from bitter experience that after wasting an hour or two or three trying to explain some of this stuff, nine times out of ten the person I’m talking to has either completely ignored what I said because it contradicts their closely-held personal beliefs about the world, or they already understood and are simply too callous amd sadistic to care. I have a limited amount of time and effort, and my experience has been that trying to explain complex sociopolitical and psychological explanations to people whose primary mode of engaging the world is emotional is like throwing my resources down a bottomless hole. Right now, as I type this, I have two posters which need to be designed and printed; identifying vests which need to be ordered for the copwatch program; mugs with our logo printed on them for tabling at events need to be priced from a local, unionized print shop; I have a formal letter which needs to be written to the police department from our organization (and then brought back to committee for approval); an agenda for our next meeting which has to be drawn up; and businesses which need to be courted to provide space for a street market we want to set up for street artists and craftspeople. And that doesn’t include any of my own personal problems, which always get pushed to the bottom of the list, and so end up eventually becoming critical emergencies which have to have duct tape slapped over them to keep from becoming homeless again myself. I have to ask myself whether the hour it’s going to take me to take a stab at answering your question is the best way I could spend that time.

Since I’ve already invested so much time answering, I’ve decided that I may as well spend a little more and try to follow at least one strand in the web for you. (I invite you to notice, however, that the last answer I gave has more or less shut down the entire thread. People see a wall of text, their eyes glaze over, and their pointer lurches for the little [x] in the corner.)

Let me try to link the G8/G20 to some of the problems I’ve already mentioned. Remember that those of us who are already fighting these fuckers know all the stuff I’m going to try to explain to you. We get frustrated when folks like you ask us why we’re doing this because to us, it’s obvious and right in front of our noses.

To follow just one strand of this tangle, I have to start in the early 1990s here in Ontario. In a surprise result which shocked everyone, Mike Harris and his “Common Sense Revolution” Conservatives took power in the provincial election. Harris was the poster boy for neo-conservatism. He won the election on a platform of privatizing everything, cutting taxes, and punishing poor people. The first week he was elected, he cut welfare rates by 22% and arbitrarily threw 300,000 people off welfare. Then he closed thousands of beds allocated for mental health issues in hospitals.

Two years after these cuts, statisticians became alarmed when they realized that 100,000 people had simply… disappeared. Harris and his Conservatives crowed and celebrated, saying these people had obviously never existed to begin with, and they had put an end to massive (and somehow previously undetectable) fraud. However, during this period, homelessness exploded. Where homelessness had been a relatively small problem before Harris arrived, suddenly police were firing tear gas into vast tent cities which began to spring up around Toronto, and at the same time Harris was cutting funding to homeless shelters, they were now operating well past 100% capacity. They started scraping bodies off the street on a weekly basis in the harsh Kanadian winters, something which had been a very rare occurrance before.

The man Mike Harris put in charge of social services was Dave Tsubouchi, a chauffeured socialite who knew absolutely nothing about it. After the radical cuts to welfare and disability payments, the media approached Tsuchouchi and told him that the province’s own health department was reporting it was now physically impossible to eat three square meals a day on what welfare paid, even if every single penny was spent on nothing but food. His response was that people should “eat more tuna, tuna is cheap,” and that they should “haggle with supermarkets for better prices.” When the media asked Mike Harris about it, he said that people “should eat balogna, nothing wrong with balogna, I grew up eating balogna.” (When media interviewed his mother, she was outraged and said she never served her children balogna.)

As a result of all of this, the streets became a cruel, vicious, dangerous place. With the vast numbers of desperate people living in the street, a new drug economy sprung up, and with it came all the petty crime. Pawn shops—which hadn’t existed even in small numbers before—suddenly exploded like mushrooms, everywhere. Businesses screamed to their city councillors about all the panhandlers and street kids suddenly thronging the streets, the city councillors screamed to the police chief, the police chief screamed to his officers, and soon we had a class war in our streets, with Officer Meathead dragging street kids into parking lots to kick their teeth in.

So how does this connect to the G8/G20? Well, Mike Harris preached the “free trade”/globalization neo-con agenda of eliminating subsidies (such as welfare) and cutting taxes (for the rich) and deregulating business (such as eliminating rent controls). What the poor experienced here in Ontario was a taste of what the IMF and World Bank had been doing to developing nations for decades. The Mike Harris years permanently changed the entire face of Ontario, especially in the large cities which now resemble Amerikan cities with their enclaves of wealth surrounded by dirty, poorly-maintained ghettos where the only road to material wealth is selling crack or meth. Many of us who suffered terrible deprivations as a result of Harris’ malfeasance (like many of my peers, I suffer from several chronic and incurable medical conditions as a result of so many years of poor diet combined with relentless stress and substandard living conditions) are furiously angry, and when we look at the G8/G20, we know that these evil fucks are trying to do to the entire world what Mike Harris did to Ontario.

For me, personally, I need to give you a bit of background about me. I was a minor child prodigy; I taught myself to read and write (cursive at that) at the age of two. I could have been anything: a doctor, a surgeon, a scientist, a statesman, an engineer. Instead, I’ve been forced to spend my genius fighting a losing battle against an increasingly oppressive and sadistic government, while watching people I care about suffer and die. People ask me how, with all my problems, I manage day after day, year after year, decade after decade to crawl out of bed and offer another day of defiance against the State. The answer is simple: Hate. People make a lot of noise and squander a lot of poetry talking about the power of love, but I can tell you from personal experience that hatred will keep you going long, long after love is nothing but ashes in your heart.

And that’s why we’re out there breaking windows and throwing bricks.

You are an eloquent spokesman for your cause.

These are things about which I have only thought in passing, I suppose because the homeless and underprivileged either did not appear in the places I have lived, or were non-existent ( something I find most unlikely ).

As I mentioned above, these are intractable problems which have been with us for as long as we have been a Nation, and with humanity for far, far longer than that. I don’t have any answers.Would to God that I did.

@CaptainHarley Re the legitimacy of the research on conservatives, I can’t vouch for the paper by Kenneth E. Vail III and Jamie Arndt, Matt Motyl, and Tom Pyszczynski. The link leads only to an abstract and I have yet to read the paper. But I can assure you that while Dr. Altemeyer does not claim all conservatives are mentally ill, what he does claim about the personality type, right-wing authoritarian follower, is thoroughly researched and solid as a rock. If you read his book, available free in PDF form, you will recognize people who fit the description to a tee.

“Right-wing authoritarian follower” is only a partial subset of the category “conservative.” It does not define the category. As I have been at pains to point out, I consider myself neither liberal nor conservative. I’m not sure I fit any political mold, but I most closely fit libertarian… I think! Heh!

@CaptainHarley I mentioned in my first post about the topic that they are a subset, but a very vocal subset, of the current conservative movement. The classical conservatives like William F. Buckley that used to act as gatekeepers baring far-right nuts like the John Birchers are now marginalized or dead.

To have a voice in pluralistic society. It’s grassroots lobbying activities complementing corporate lobbying activities.

@SmashTheState
I understand your anger and I know what it means to go against policy makers who are owned by moneyed or property-ed interests. I also know your constituents well, working in a large county hospital that caters exclusively the the uninsured and medicaid recipients, I am the guy that stitches them up after police brutality incidents or other trauma; I am also the guy that cares for your those of your constituents who have serious mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, substance dependence, dissociative syndromes, suicidality) when they decompensate in the street. I also have filed dozens of reports on police violations, both in and out of jail, and have never seen any change come from these (although I do recognize that when I am around, they are all on their best behavior). These folks are the most vulnerable people in society and they are the punching bag of every aspiring downtown politician. I admire your work and I think it is critical that these folks develop bigger political muscle. This is the only way that these abuses will diminish.

I completely disagree that our opposition does what it does because of mental illness. I see that you are invested in a psychological explanation for this anti-human behavior, but you cannot chalk this up to sociopathy. First, it gives them an easy way out, “it’s the illness, not me”. Second, their behavior is working really well for them and it is totally adaptive given their background – they are not ill. Third, while I know there are folks who try to understand the psychology of politics, this is very different than saying that there is a brain/mind dysfunction that causes these behaviors.

I agree that therapy to reduce overall levels of fear of “the unknown” or of “the other” would reduce tendencies for people to be conservative, it would take A LOT of therapeutic work to break life-long schemas that are deeply tied to individuals’ core identities and their identification with current or childhood communities. And even if you got people to engage in this therapy, would it not be a waste of resources? Better to use the therapist’s time to treat your constituents so they develop better coping skills to their daily, ongoing trauma. Or, as I have been advocating for a long time, for progressive activists who suffer a high degree of burnout, frustration, isolation, loneliness, anger and engage in terrible self-destructive behavior (poor eating, poor sleeping, smoking, drinking, etc) because this work that you do is so, so hard.

On violence. I can’t blame you for feeling that smashing windows, etc is a viable way to get heard because there are so few ways to get heard. I am sure you know this, but there is a big difference between civil disobedience aimed at a target who can give you what you want vs random violence towards a symbolic part of town or a symbolic type of business. I think the latter is more destructive than helpful. Overall though, the question I always ask myself is, “will this tactic help me achieve my overall goal in a way that best prepares me for the next tactic and costs the fewest possible resources?”. I feel that tactics don’t have intrinsic value, but always have to be weighed against the overall political context.

I liked your sit-in in the police station, although I hope that you would consider reaching out and developing connections with local progressive health care groups who could sit in with you and help provide some cover. It takes a lot for the police to assault a doc or a nurse (although they will always press charges against the token liberal professional, so organizational, preferably union, backing is a must) and having a doc or a nurse present really raises the ante for them to assault anyone else. In a much less confrontational action, in order to protest cuts to mental health services, we took hundreds of my city’s most chronically mentally ill, mostly homeless patients to a public hearing on the impacts of the cuts. Needless to say, city hall was pure pandemonium while we were there (we can’t control these folks), but most of them testified and we made the hearing last approx 10 hours – a wonderful and totally frazzling experience for me. I don’t know if the council will find the money (mayor says no to new taxes), but there have been several press conferences where individual members publicly denounced these cuts. One great benefit that already has come from these actions is pride in the patients that testified. This is not a common sentiment for them, and it’s a great therapeutic “in” for me.

Your last paragraph above about hate vs. love deeply saddens me. I am reminded of the Che Guevara quotation that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love”. Also, how do you feel about your constituents? I hope that it is more than a dreary sense of duty. I think I saw in another post that you are a member of the IWW. I am not, but appreciate the wobblies’ musical contributions. When was the last time you listened to the songs by Joe Hill? He was angry, but what permeates his music is a deep sense of love for the working people of the world. All in all, it is easier to do this work if we find the beauty in the everyday and feel a sense of compassionate love for those we work with, those we organize (and I treat), and even those we fight against – because we want to build a better system for workers everywhere, not merely beat the bosses.

@Flavio

Please don’t be offended by what I am about to ask you. It’s simply an attempt to clarify my own thinking.

What motivates you to care about the people of whom you speak? Why are you willing to “take on city hall” on their behalf?

@CaptainHarley
that’s a good question. when I meet a new patient, I feel intense curiosity about how their life brought them to this intersection with me. The more I learn about them, the more they trust me with their pain, their worries, their trauma, their insecurities, (and their strengths, their achievements, their humor, their unique flair), the more I feel committed to repaying their trust. It’s a pact, a bond that is ancient and sacred and I am deeply motivate to uphold my end of the bargain.
Also, the more I get to know folks, the more I find to like. Underneath all the hurt and pain and betrayal is always a glimmer of who they really are. I LOVE connecting with that and helping people who have been brutalized their whole lives feel from me what it’s like to be respected and cared for.
Of course, there are a few patients who I really connect with and come to really enjoy spending time with. I don’t know what it is about these folks. Maybe its a coincidence of where my head is that morning and where they are in the course of their illness, but some folks really crack me up and give me a thrill when they are doing better and develop a more hopeful outlook.
So here is a lot of rambling. Clearly I there is something that is still buried in my subconscious that I have yet to access for a more decent explanation.