For the most part, the New York Times’ story on the World Economic Forum beginning its proceedings in New York is just a gooey report on the men who had the air of money and power hobnobbing inside the Waldorf-Astoria, … like the start of summer camp. Now I really wonder if this sort of fluff reporting on a serious conference of the global economic and political elite is necessary. But, more to the point, the Times has decided to creatively reinvent history:

That has not prevented critics from painting the Forum in the darkest colors. The World Economic Forum will celebrate war in Afghanistan and the Middle East, attacks on civil liberties, and corporate tax cuts, proclaimed a group called A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) in its call for demonstrations which will get under way in earnest with marches on Saturday.

At the New York W.E.F. summit, the world’s richest C.E.O.s will collaborate with the world’s most powerful politicians to set the global economic agenda, declared another group, Students for Global Justice.

Whether the protests reach the violence of last year’s meeting in Davos remains to be seen. Some of the opposition groups acknowledge that a clash with New York’s finest in the aftermath of Sept. 11 would not sit well with the public.

Now, it’s a bit irresponsible to spending only two dismissive paragraphs on the fact that there are, in fact, people who have serious problems with what goes at the WEF, while spending the rest of the front-page story gushing about how elite and idealistic it all is (for more responsible coverage, I suggest the Times’ recent in-depth article on anarchism, buried in the New York Region section). What concerns me a bit more, however, is that they are simply making shit up when they say that the protests at Davos last year had any violence to be reached.

In reality, last year’s protests in Davos featured 250 activists staging a peaceful march. In 2000, the worst violence was a few windows being broken at a McDonald’s. In 2001, the worst violence was snowballs being tossed at police barricades.

Well, I should take that back. There was violence at the 2001 protest. See, the Davos local authorities decided to ban any exercise of the right to peaceful public assembly, so protestors were met by over 1,000 Swiss security agents armed with batons and tear gas guns. The demonstrators’ peaceful march was turned back with police barricades and water cannons. But this isn’t exactly the sort of violence that the Times story was claiming had happened.

This is, unfortunately, part of a general press smear campaign against the globalization movement, which has invented protestor violence out of thin air in protests in Seattle, DC, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia… at all of these there was plenty of police violence against demonstrators but the virtually none initiated by protestors. In Seattle and DC, heavy tear gas bombardments were used; in Los Angeles I watched mounted cops stage dragoon attacks with batons on protestors who had done nothing other than run away from rampaging peace officers. And yet the New York Daily News compared protestors to the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and threatened them, You have a right to free speech, but try to disrupt this town, and you’ll get your anti-globalization butts kicked. Capish?

Sidebar: I’ve noticed that they’ve been awfully cagey about just how many women are at the invite-only WEF meeting; one article lumped in women amidst everyone else in the overwhelming minority at the WEF (third world leaders, human rights activists, union leaders, etc.). The Times’ editorial column said it was some 3,000 Davos Men, and a sprinkling of Davos Women. For all their apologia, it’s really hard to shade just how reactionary in constitution their Good Ol’ Boys meeting is.

For further reading

• For independent coverage of the World Economic Forum and surrounding protests, visit NYC Indymedia.
• For more on the demonstrations and alternatives to the WEF, check out Another World is Possible.
• GT 9/17/2001 Globalization Protestors Targeted in Post-9/11 Crackdown on Dissent
• GT 9/06/2001 Debate Over Reformist and Radical Approaches to Change
• GT 5/29/2001 WTO Protest videogame announced at E3

I am scared, honest-to-God scared, about what is happening in this country.

There are no words for the terror, grief, sadness, rage, and pain of the attack on Tuesday. Perhaps 5,000 people dead. Thousands more wounded. All of us paralyzed by the carnage, the gut-wrenching horror, the crime against humanity that unfolded before us on live television, the Internet, the radio, the choking words between friends and strangers.

And now we have begun to react predictably, tragically, terrifyingly, like a beast stung. It had begun already on Tuesday when pols stood on state house and capitol steps all across the country and belted out God Bless America — as if the motherfucking abstract nation-state identity of America were brutally attacked by three exploding jets, rather than 5,000 innocent people. The flags and the yellow ribbons are appearing everywhere. In an unprecedented act of hatred, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used the 700 Club as a pulpit to blame gays, lesbians, feminists, and secularists for the attacks. I can’t count the number of hateful anti-Muslim or anti-Arab statements I’ve heard person-to-person, or through the mass media. And now the violence has begun. Amateur brownshirts in Chicago had to be turned back by police with machine guns when a mob chanting U-S-A, U-S-A had to be stopped from setting fire to a mosque. A Muslim community center was firebombed. In Detroit, with the largest Arab population in the United States, Muslim centers were subjected to bomb threats and death threats; two young men were arrested after saying they were going down to kill all the Arabs in Dearborn. In Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was murdered because his turban and beard made him resemble the media portrayal of Arabs.

On the radio I hear Sen. Zell Miller (GA) saying that when we find who is responsible for the attack we should Bomb the hell out of them. If that means collateral damage, so be it. What he doesn’t say is that collateral damage is a polite way of saying mass murder of civilians, and when he tries to justify it by saying that They obviously don’t care about our civilians he forgets that the innocents he is so eager to murder had nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11/2001. NATO has already invoked the World War III clause of their charter. The hawks of the Right and Left have cried Havoc, and authorized President Bush with a blank check for military force and billions in new defense spending. They are already preparing us for permanent war against an unspecifiable, unlocatable enemy (a war against terrorism), which they have promised to fight through covert means (over 6,000,000 people worldwide have been killed by United States covert operations since World War II) and have made it explicit that no particular tactic is off the table (for those keeping count, that includes: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, carpet-bombing, etc.). At home, Tim Russert is saying on national Teevee that the line between security and freedom will have to be redefined — meaning less freedom. Already motions are being made to strengthen the police state through imposing new bans on Internet security software, increasing invasive searches and racial profiling of Arabs at airports, and extending the FBI’s wiretap powers. Nobody in the government feels they can afford to stand up to the railroading tactics of the Defense Department and the FBI, and what’s worse, perhaps nobody even wants to.

We cannot ever, ever forget that the warfare State and the spectre of terrorism have been the greatest instruments of fascist tyranny, and the demonic influence of tyranny is hard to exorcise once it makes its way through. The Cheka (Lenin and Stalin’s murderous secret police) grew to power in the USSR through playing on the threat of counter-revolutionary terrorism in the early 1920s. Woodrow Wilson used WWI to force through tyrannical Sedition and Espionage Acts — which somehow failed to be revoked after World War I ended, and were continually used to suppress dissent during Wilson’s term. The supposed threat of Communist conspiracy was used to justify innumerable police state tactics (sometimes illegal, sometimes not) by the FBI, including their surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (who they attempted to blackmail) and Malcolm X (who they may have aided the Nation of Islam in murdering) and their murderous COINTELPRO program which they used to hunt down and kill members of the Black Panther Party and to destroy both above-ground and underground antiwar / radical Left activist groups. And already activists have been given notice to watch their backs, by Rep. Don Young (R-AK):

Young warned against rushing to the conclusion that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible. There’s some possibility, he said that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which [actually, a protest against the World Bank/IMF –CWJ] is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C.

If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there’s some expertise in that field, Young said. I’m not sure they’re that dedicated, but ecoterrorists — which are really based in Seattle — there’s a strong possibility that could be one of the groups.

Never mind that this is a vicious slander against Left-wing activists on the part of Rep. Young. It’s not any attempt to convey information at all. It’s an outright threat: *We are calling for new powers. And we are coming after you, all of you, the Lefties, the Muslim fanatics, the greenies, the anarchists, the militias… it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are opposed to this government and this American form of life, you will be targeted.

I don’t know what to say or what to do. I am physically, mentally, spiritually exhausted by what happened last Tuesday. I am horrified, I am sick, I still need more time to deal with this. But I am also scared, because I know that a lot of people — a lot of innocent Muslims, a lot of innocent people who look like Muslims, people who will be slaughtered in the bombing and covert operations pushed through by the same Reagan-Bush-Bush cabinet that brought you Iran/Contra and the death squads of El Salvador, people who will die in the terrorist retaliation, 18-24 year olds like me who will be sent to fight and die, dissidents like me who will be targeted by a growing, many-tentacled police state. Today I am honestly frightened about the prospect of domestic fascism in the United States of America.

Thousands Feared Dead as World Trade Center Is Toppled [New York Times]. I heard on NPR that it is feared that as many as 10,000 may have died in the explosions, fire, and collapse of the buildings.

The death toll of these dramatic events is still unknown. In a press conference this afternoon, Mayor Giuluiani would not speculate but warned that the numbers "would be more than anyone can bear." There are more than 1500 "walking wounded" being treated in makeshift medical triages around the city, 600 in hospitals and 200 additional victims in critical condition. Many of the wounded and suspected fatalities include medical staff and firefighters who were at the base of the WTC before the buildings collapsed. [NYC IMC]

Several witnesses said they saw bodies falling from the twin towers and people jumping out before the first of the buildings collapsed in a roar of rubble and smoke. The other tower fell about half an hour after that. [New York Times]

I have nothing more to say today. There are no words.

A little while ago I stumbled across a great page on the history of Women and the Labor Movement [TheHistoryNet], including the formative role that women played in labor radicalism (organized industrial work stoppages were going on in Lowell, Massachussetts as early as the 1820s) and the way that the mainstream, AFL-line labor movement conspired with the Progressive regulation movement to cut women out of the labor force in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries through protective labor restrictions which discriminated against women and by excluding women from the mainstream wing of the labor movement, which negotiated itself into a powerful alliance with the bosses and the government (this move, conveniently, induced greater labor shortages and drove up profits for their own all-male membership).

We think of unions as primarily male institutions these days, responding to the problems faced by men in industrial labor, but that neglects the fact that women have always been the first victims of industrialization (through textile mills and garment sweatshops, for example; this is still happening today in Mexico, Indonesia, immigrant communities in Los Angeles, etc.) and therefore had some of the first and strongest incentive to organize. The male-dominated condition of the labor movement and the industrial workforce today is precisely because of to the discriminatory laws that a powerful coalition of male mainstream union bosses, male corporate bosses, and male government officials managed to concoct during the labor struggles of the Gilded Age.

Of course, the ciritical role that women such as Sarah G. Bagley (a leading organizer in Lowell), Rose Schneiderman, Lucy Parsons, the female membership of the Knights of Labor, and innumerable others played in forming the labor movement, are often ignored in mainstream labor history. So are questions of women’s labor, the horrendous conditions imposed specifically on women under industrialization, and the struggles around the question of women’s labor and the anti-woman line that the mainstream male Left took in order to expand working men’s profits at the expense of working women’s (much like they used the racism and nativism of the post-Reconstruction era to exclude Blacks, Chinese-Americans, and poor immigrants from entering into unionized segments of the industrial workforce, thus protecting the profits of American-born white workers at the expense of all other workers). All of this isn’t too surprising, when we consider that the collective consciousness of the labor movement and labor history continues to be defined primarily by male organizers who aligned with the sexist AFL line and supported the discriminatory protective labor regulations that cut women out of the work force.

It’s also worth noting a couple of points about the relationship of all of this to feminism.

1. This unholy male supremacist alliance between mainstream male unions, male corporate bosses and Progressive regulation activists, emerged–like many other anti-woman alliances–during the post-Reconstruction period up to the 1920s, which happens to be more or less the same time as the peak of the struggle for women’s citizenship (with women’s suffrage finally being constitutionally protected in 1920). We may thus add it to the list of anti-woman institutions forming the backlash against First Wave feminism, including such illustrious company as Freudian psychoanalysis, the criminalization of abortion across the Western world, the flourishing of violent rape-based pornography in Victorian cities, and the AMA‘s efforts to seize control of women’s reproductive medicine away from midwives and other women into the hands of male surgeons.

2. The most effective forces in fighting the abuses inflicted on women laborers were organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization allying women of across social classes around the abuse specifically faced by women in the industrial workplace. The WTUL’s organizing efforts galvanized general strikes and other massive actions which eventually helped massively reform the horrendous sweatshop conditions faced by many garment workers (virtually all female) in New York. Not to be monomaniacal or anything, but once again organizing uniting all women on behalf of women (i.e., feminist organizing) was the most effective force in fighting patriarchal power.

Stephen O’Connor points out that President Bush’s faith-based initiatives are nothing new, and some of its likely limitations can be found by examining the history of government-funded religious child welfare groups in New York City [NY Times].