The Anti-Globalization Movement Strikes Back

Back in the proverbial day, I was involved in a campus living wage campaign organized on the student side by a group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement that was also bound up with the Students Against Sweatshops movement and thus through the “anti-globalization” movement that was very prominent in the late-1990s. I always had very mixed feelings about this movement, whose heart I thought was in the right place but whose particular locus of organizing seemed dangerous to the actual interests of third-world workers. Then along came 9/11. Peter Beinart wrote a somewhat obnoxious and lost to linkrot article (you can find references to it here) about how 9/11 would kill the anti-globalization movement off. Analytically speaking, he was correct, though not always for the right reasons. But however you look at it, energy went into anti-war activities and off the WTO/IMF suite of issues.

Having dialogued yesterday with some folks involved in the 99 Percent Movement, it really struck me the extent to which what we’re seeing is basically a new version of that same impulse. A new version but also, I think, a better one. One with a better thematic focus (“Wall Street”) and a potentially much broader reach into the workaday concerns of average Americans. It brought me, personally, all the way back to the aspect of PSLM that I really liked — the idea that we had this big, rich, powerful institution (Harvard) and that it ought to be made to expend its resources in a more broadly beneficial way. I think it’s pretty exciting, and I hope that wonkier types will engage with the movement that’s emerging rather than condescend to the lack of policy sophistication. There seems to me to be a lot of openness and a lot of desire to try to process different ideas about solutions, but also to combine that with an insistence that the powers that be do something to resolve the problems afflicting the country.

My obsession, obviously, is with the Federal Reserve and not in a Ron Paul kind of way. The unemployment rate is 9 percent. But it’s not evenly distributed. The unemployment rate of the kind of college educated middle aged white people who run key institutions is much lower than that. I simply find it impossible to believe that if 9 percent of Richard Fishers friends were unemployed, that we’d be getting the same outcomes. If 9 percent of Ben Bernanke’s family members were unemployed, he’d be dusting off old papers about “Rooseveltian resolve” and “self-induced paralysis.” Protesters in the streets probably aren’t going to solve our problems, but if they can bring some sense of urgency to the people in power, they’ll be doing the world a huge favor.