Nation Topics - Movements | The Nation

Call it the Prague Fall: a season not only to test the democratic progress of Central Europe's most favored post-Communist nation but to find out whether a nonhierarchical, nonviolent movement of fair traders, environmentalists, debt-relief activists, socialist workers and revolutionaries can--by applying public pressure to the world's most powerful economic institutions--force real change. Prague proved, if nothing else, that the issues of corporate reform and increased social services have worldwide appeal. Red-sashed Catalonian Marxists marched alongside white-clad Italian Zapatista sympathizers. Nervous Czech environmentalists rubbed shoulders with black-hooded German anarchists. Activists from Greece and Turkey--yes, Greece and Turkey, together--commanded the front line of a march blockaded by police and kept it calm. This was not the globalization of multinationals, but in the words of Scott Codey, a US activist, "globalization of human rights, workers' rights and economic justice."

As Day One of the Initiative Against Economic Globalization in Prague began, all was quiet and orderly. Leaders of nonprofit organizations held thinly attended public discussions. Fourteen thousand dark-suited bankers and politicians yawned through World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meetings with titles like "Building the Bottom Line Through Corporate Citizenship" in a Stalin-era convention hall. Meanwhile, the police looked on benevolently--I saw one Czech lieutenant blithely pop a ball into the air with the inscription Liquidate the IMF.

By late morning, however, activists had begun a three-pronged assault on the heavily guarded Congress Center. One group of mostly anarchists and communists managed to snake its way through police barricades and get within yards of the bankers' meeting hall. It remains unclear how the violence escalated so quickly, but fifty Czech police were injured in a bombardment of sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails. By nightfall, after activists had smashed the windows of a McDonald's on Wenceslas Square, cops were again beaten back, this time by protesters wielding the policemen's own batons. The day ended in a cloud of tear gas, with thousands of World Bank delegates being shuttled in buses, searching for the four-star hotels not besieged by young radicals.

By Day Two, to no one's surprise, the Czech police had abandoned their restraint. I saw officers round up protesters for no apparent reason and cart them off to jail, where things got decidedly worse. Many of the 859 arrested were denied food, water and phone calls. And in numerous cases, they were severely beaten. "The jails here are a place of no control, a place of complete darkness," said Marek Vesely, an observer with Citizens Legal Watch, a Czech nonprofit. "A lot of people who didn't have anything to do with the violence got arrested." In addition to investigating a range of human rights violations, Citizens Legal Watch is trying to determine whether police provocateurs urged on the crowds and whether--as was widely rumored--some activists were turned away at the Czech border based on information provided by the FBI.

But amid the apparent chaos, there were signs of accomplishments. For one, pressure from the streets, building ever since Seattle, finally forced two traditionally secretive institutions to let some critics in the door. Representatives of Transparency International, which is calling for public access to World Bank and IMF documents, along with 350 representatives of nongovernmental organizations, were admitted to meetings in Prague (five years ago, only two NGOs were allowed in). World Bank president James Wolfensohn and IMF managing director Horst Köhler even met with NGO leaders in a public meeting presided over by Czech President Vaclav Havel.

Still, the substance of the new dialogue left much to be desired. "Understand that we are not a world government," Wolfensohn told NGO leaders. "Very often people blame us for the politics in a country when they should really blame themselves." Such defensiveness makes it hard to take seriously the World Bank and IMF claim that they want "to make globalization work for the benefit of all." As Liane Schalatek of the Heinrich Böll Foundation said, "NGOs have pointed out for more than three decades that growth is not just economic growth. We have heard the rhetoric." (Wolfensohn did manage to win over rock star Bono of U2, who left Prague calling him "the Elvis of economics.")

The Italian Zapatistas and Catalonian Marxists have now returned home. Czechs have reoccupied their city. And the jails are mostly empty (as of this writing, only twenty protesters remain in custody). But the Prague Fall is not over. The movement is globalized; critics have been admitted into the tent. And perhaps most important, politicians, central bankers and multinational chiefs are beginning to understand that corporate globalization faces truly global antipathy.

Activists have achieved power. Now they need to figure out how to use it.

In May 1928 Marie Curie, the famed discoverer of radium and double Nobel laureate, received a disturbing letter from an American journalist. It told of young women at a radium watch-dial plant in Orange, New Jersey, who were dying from necrosis of the jaw, a rare degenerative disease. The women would tip radium-laden brushes in their mouths, blithely ingesting this intensely radioactive substance--at levels more than 10,000 times those allowed under today's standards. Plant managers had told them that ingesting radium would enhance their vitality.

At the time, Madame Curie herself was paying dearly for her pioneering work. Reading the letter was not easy, as she suffered from radiation-induced cataracts and from painful radiation burns on her hands. True to form, she refused to accept that her discovery had anything to do with this tragedy and advised the women to eat calf's liver. By 1934 Curie was dead from severe bone marrow damage and America was experiencing its first industrial epidemic of radiation-induced diseases.

Madame Curie's denial of radiation dangers is emblematic of the legacy we now face as America's romance with the atom draws to a close. The once dynamic and sprawling US nuclear weapons program, which underwent spectacular growth in the past fifty years, is winding down, leaving behind a tragic health legacy that, once again, is borne by working people. In the next few weeks, Congress will decide whether to enact a federal compensation program for the 600,000 people who helped make our nuclear weapons.

The current attention dates to the summer of 1999, when the Clinton Administration, spurred on by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, proposed legislation to compensate nuclear weapons workers. In January of this year, a report prepared for President Clinton found that workers at fourteen federal nuclear facilities across the United States have higher than expected risks of dying from cancer or nonmalignant diseases following exposure to radiation and other substances. This official concession that nuclear weapons workers were harmed led to an unprecedented public outpouring in politically conservative company towns near federal nuclear sites. Workers told of being overexposed, getting sick and then having to battle against the government, which spared no expense to block claims. "The people in this area have been forced into poverty--they fall through the cracks, and they die," said Kay Sutherland, a cancer victim, at a meeting near the DOE's Hanford site in Washington.

In June an amendment to the 2001 defense authorization bill offered by Senators Fred Thompson and Jeff Bingaman was unanimously adopted by the Senate. The measure would create a federal program to provide compensation for illness, disabilities and deaths due to exposure to radiation or to beryllium or silica, two hazardous substances. The Senate provision is far from perfect, but it's a good start. However, it looked likely as we went to press that the provision was in jeopardy. Republicans in the House were at work fashioning a symbolic gesture that greatly reduces the benefits and provides no funding to compensate people.

I started working on this issue twenty-five years ago, first as an environmental activist involved in the lawsuit on behalf of the parents of Karen Silkwood, a contaminated nuclear worker in Oklahoma who was killed in November 1974 while trying to deliver safety documents to the New York Times. While it is personally gratifying to see this change take place, it still remains a tragedy for many who could have been helped as long ago as 1951, when the first official recommendations to help sick, overexposed weapons workers were secretly turned down. As we come to terms with the aftermath of the nuclear arms race, it is time for Congress to provide justice to working people who were put at risk without their knowledge and who paid with their health and lives.

Tonight is the finale for insiders and outsiders in Los Angeles this
week: In a few hours, Al Gore will be giving his acceptance speech at
the Staples Center.

"This conference is not like other conferences."

Peace Action (www.peace-action.org), the largest grassroots peace group in the United States, has made stopping NMD and reducing nuclear weapons its top

Jeremy Rifkin wants to rock the world of the jaded reader: He predicts that we're entering a completely new--the final--stage of capitalism.

In a small brick house strung year-round with Christmas lights, behind curtains made of flowered sheets, Jeremiah Smith is listening to his favorite preacher on the radio.

This article is part of the Haywood Burns Community Activist Journalism series.

"You have no idea how much love I got for this," says David Jamil Muhammad, referring to his role as a student organizer of "Hip-Hop Generation--Hip-Hop as a Movement." The conference was held Ap