Georgetown students joined hundreds of D.C. residents Saturday as they marched downtown to protest a summit on the global financial crisis held by the Group of 20, a collection of leaders and representatives of major industrialized and developing countries.
Self-proclaimed anti-capitalist activist groups Global Justice Action and D.C. Students for a Democratic Society organized a number of events to coincide with the Nov. 15 summit.
GJA held a “people’s banquet” outside the White House Friday night, which coincided with a gala hosted by President Bush. The organization served rice, beans and bottled water to protesters and passers-by to criticize what they claimed to be the extravagance of Bush’s dinner.
According to a press release on the White House Web site, the G-20 dinner included “fruitwood-smoked quail with quince gastrique . thyme-roasted rack of lamb . [and] baked Vermont brie with walnut crostini.”
“We believe that this is just a huge bit of symbolism of the difference between how we envision society being and how the G-20 and George Bush envision society being,” GJA Organizer Lacy MacAuley said. “We think that the grand table of the earth’s resources should be served to everyone.”
GJA and DCSDC led protesters from Murrow Park to Thomas Circle Saturday morning before the summit began, in an event DCSDC called a “Funeral for Capitalism.” After the march, GJA staged a “people’s forum” in Thomas Circle, where a panel of “experts in alternatives to the world economy” discussed the financial crisis with attendees, according to MacAuley.
Katy Berglund-Schlesinger (GRD ’09) attended Saturday’s events to oppose the summit. Its purpose, she said, was to “illuminate the current economic crisis as a symptom of societal and economic ills, rather than the disease itself.”
“We broke out into separate groups and had workshops. One was on housing, the mortgage crisis, how it’s affected D.C. and what it has to do with the global economy,” MacAuley said. “One was on the world oil crisis. Then we had a discussion on international finance.”
acAuley said GJA voiced three demands during the protest: that the G-20 “restructure the global economy,” that the group “consider people over profit as they make their decisions” and that the group instate democracy, by giving individuals, and not major institutions, the power to control global resources.
“Decisions are made based on what is most profitable, and that is often at the extreme expense of what is best for most people,” she said. “The decisions that are profit-based are really making [it] a lot harder for the majority of people.”
acAuley did not specify what policy changes these demands would necessitate, and while she did not cite any reaction to the protest on the G-20’s part, she said she felt the protests were a success. She said the protests were “very inclusive” and “in keeping with the vision of how we think the world should work.”
While the GJA’s Web site offers few details as to what political and economic reforms this vision entails, MacAuley said the group’s desired change involves instituting “alternatives to capitalism.”
Politicians can talk about Wall Street and Main Street, but what about the man sleeping on the street? At this moment we may have the opportunity not only to recover the economic status quo, but to put people before profits, and to rectify some of the economic injustices that continue to plague our nation and our world,” Berglund-Schlesinger said.
The G-20 summit, proposed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and hosted by Bush, was held behind closed doors. The public and the press were both denied access to the meetings.
According to Reuters, the G-20 was able to “set out plans to toughen oversight for major global banks, study limits on banker pay and try for a breakthrough by year end in global trade talks.”
DCSDC protest organizers could not be reached for comment.
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