Let me sum up the biggest difference between the anti-capitalism protesters and the big-business honchos who are their targets.
The business leaders know what they want. The protesters don’t.
The honchos assembling at the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue meeting here want more trade, fairer rules, more sales and bigger profits.
The protesters want–well, they want to protest.
In a strange way, though, the two groups are made for each other. Sure, the protesters shake their fists, and the business big shots turn up their noses. But they’re really co-dependents.
Without protesters, a meeting like this week’s session is little more than a dreary exercise in corporate lobbying.
But introduce the threat of placards and chants and marches, and the captains of commerce suddenly see themselves as heroes. They’re carrying the cause of capitalism in the face of furious opposition.
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And the protesters?
Without the craven capitalists, there would be nothing to shake their fists at. Except maybe their parents.
In short, the business leaders serve the role of villainous foils. Protest organizers at a Wednesday news conference vented their general frustrations about our capitalistic society. But when it came to their basic task–identifying issues that are relevant or policies that should be changed–they came up short.
Just what are the protesters protesting? It wasn’t easy to tell, even after their leaders tried to explain.
Dorian Warren spoke on behalf of affordable education. He fears a world in which “only the sons and daughters of CEOs at the closed-door meetings will be able to attend college.”
But education is not on the business leaders’ agenda.
Anarchist Robert Ebright envisions “a world in which there is no boss telling you what to do, stealing your ideas, taking credit for them and taking your time.”
In other words, he’s against employment in general. Not just the global business group meeting here.
Then there was Cliff Willmeng, a labor activist. “We are not seeking to sit at their table and have a friendly conversation about the commonalities between working people and CEOs,” Willmeng observed. “There is a reason behind this: We have no commonalities.”
A hopeful sign of some common ground: The honchos don’t want to sit down with Willmeng and his cohorts, either.
In fact, the business dialogue delegates don’t want to break bread with anyone who can’t write a trade rule or strike a deal with them.
Every delegate I talked to Thursday insisted that the meeting was part of a “transparent” process. That’s business-speak for “open and fair.”
Then they shut the doors, went into their private meetings, and started divvying up the winners and losers on issues including genetically modified food, steel tariffs, drug regulation and environmental standards.
The protesters could have had a point, if only they had bothered to look for one.
The issues on the meeting agenda are important, even if they’re arcane. They have to do with pollution from chemical factories, the risks of genetically modified foods, the lack of global accounting standards and the costs of trade barriers.
There also is the legitimate issue of the public’s right to know what’s really going on inside the Sheraton Chicago and Towers. Whenever groups of government officials meet with groups of business leaders to build an agenda that soon will dictate the rules of world trade, people in civil society have a right to know what’s being said.
But the protesters don’t want to focus that way. They choose to clog the streets with more masses than meaning. And not many masses, at that.
Even the Seattle protesters at least had a clear agenda before their efforts to disrupt the World Trade Organization meeting spun out of control.
Protest leader Dave Ranney defends the Chicago group’s lack of focus. “The variety and multitude of issues is a function of democracy,” he says.
It’s true that everyone in a democracy is free to complain about whatever bothers him or her. But only those who know what they want have any chance of getting it.