Pittsburgh protesters aren't looking for another Seattle | News ...

by Brentin Mock

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last Friday about this week's G-20 Summit, President Barack Obama indicated that he wasn't a fan of the raucous sort of mass protests seen at previous world gatherings. The G-20 arrives with a reputation of drawing demonstrations of both the peaceful and not-so-peaceful kind, as remembered from the "battle in Seattle" protests, which spawned not only social justice advocacy, but also a melee between protesters and police. President Obama has said that such protests are ineffective.

"[H]aving protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism... generally is not going to make much of a difference," Obama said in the interview.

But global capitalism is not seen as just an abstraction to many of the organizations assembling in Pittsburgh this week. For many, capitalism is the problem.

People's Voices, a broad alliance of organizations coalesced to highlight community struggles, states on their website: "The G-20 promotes policies that 'put profits first' through deregulation, privatization, and 'free trade.' Their agenda has harmed working-class communities in the and around the world."

Some demonstrations have already started. A "March for Jobs" took place Sunday, where a huge assembly of various organizations, local and non-local, gathered at Freedom's Corner, the historic block where many 1950s and 60s civil rights marches started in the predominantly African-American Hill District neighborhood. It was a peaceful march where people waved posters with messages no more radical than "A Job Is A Right" and "Bailout the People."

There have been concerns that more militant outfits are seeking the kind of carnage witnessed in Seattle, and the city government has acted cautiously, denying many applications from organizations planning rallies near G-20 meetings. Many local community organizers say the kind of protests Obama disfavors aren't their main focus anyway.

"We're doing a series of events drawing the links between what goes on in our communities and what's happening in the developing world," said Rachel Canning of People's Voices. "We're doing teach-ins and some of our coalition partners are doing green jobs rallies," but as for those looking to march through the streets, "I think it's mostly people coming in from out-of-town for the spectacle of the G-20."

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