At Base-Camp
G8 From The Ground

The truth about holding on to expectations is that quite often things just don't come out the way we plan. It has been said before that life is what occurs when we are busy making preparations for other things. This simple axiom can be extended to include the entirety of last week's G8 Summit held in the coastal low country of Georgia. On both sides of the spectrum, from the police to protesters, the whole show failed to live up to the hype. And as an active participant in the anti-globalization events surrounding the official Summit, I would have to say this might very well have been a good thing.
While the turnout was small, those activists who did show up were committed to having their voices heard in a peaceful manner. And although there was a general fear of a heavy-handed police response, the officials on site were as equally committed to allowing the demonstrators their chance to exercise the right of free assembly. It can be summed up by a favorite stand-by in the repertoire of activist chants: "This is what democracy looks like."
For weeks in advance of the G8 Summit the people of Savannah and Brunswick had been bombarded with images of police in riot gear battling protesters. In late May, Governor Sonny Perdue issued an executive order declaring a "state of emergency" for Chatham and Glynn Counties. Businesses boarded up their windows.

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Entire families left town for an early summer vacation. Both cities resembled areas of complete martial law as police and National Guard troops made a concerted show of force. And while a handful of demonstrators committed to civil disobedience did manage to get themselves arrested sitting down near the check-point onto Sea Island, the most striking image from the whole week was an impromptu game of duck-duck-goose.
Tuesday, June 8 marked the beginning of the G8 Summit as the leaders of the world's richest nations arrived by jet to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. Kellie Gasink of the locally-based Labor and Action Research Project organized a march to coincide with this official start and to kick off the week-long People's Political Summit held in Forsyth Park. Approximately 200 people, many of whom sported bandannas over their faces and other implements of the anarchist fashion sense, paraded through the streets of Savannah. Most chanted anti-corporate slogans, while others banged on buckets and drums. A virtual army of press followed every move of the protesters, while police in full battle dress kept pace with the march. At the conclusion of the peaceful parade, as a collective out-breath was taken, a group of about a dozen members of the much-ballyhooed anarchist black-block commenced to running in circles around the park playing a children's game. All the while this went on a bevy of bewildered press snapped away with their cameras. Millions of dollars spent by federal, state, and local government for security and in the end what we got was a game of duck-duck-goose.
While street theater and general silliness added a measure of calm and levity to a much-anticipated and feared week, not everything was about fun and games. The marches and vocal protests in the park were but one aspect of a convergence of people who believe that globalization and the policies of the G8 are detrimental to our world. At the Sentient Bean coffeehouse and other locally-owned venues around Savannah and Brunswick, the hard work of teach-ins and educational presentations went on every night. While the leaders from the group of eight nations talked about how they were going to manage the mess the Iraq war has become, organizations ranging from Greenpeace to the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition held their own conferences detailing how and why the flawed economic policies of the industrial nations have led us to this bloody impasse in the deserts of the Middle East.
When asked about the mainstream media's focus on the small turnout in the number of protesters, a young woman from Milledgeville, Georgia named Merritt Melanchon stated an often repeated mantra among those present: "There may not be a whole lot of people down here, but look around: the folks who did come are really motivated to change our current way of doing things."
Displaying a great deal of motivation were 20 or so foreigners I encountered over the course of the week who had taken the time, money, and effort to travel to America to have their voices heard among the chorus of dissent over G8 policy. I talked extensively with a woman from Finland named Johanna Nourteva who made the statement, "So much of what goes on in the world is done to benefit large corporations, and so many of these corporations are from here in America. In Europe we see what is going on and do not like it. Americans do not get a good picture of how these things look to the rest of the world."
To get a better picture myself, on Wednesday, I ventured down Interstate 95 out of Savannah to Brunswick in an effort to gauge the measure of the protests going on closer to the actual site of Sea Island in the midst of the heaviest security. On the campus of Coastal Community College, an activist group based out of Athens called Common Ground had helped to coordinate the Fair World Fair as an antithesis to the summit going on just miles away on the most heavily guarded island in the world at that moment. Underneath a large white tent, people were free to come and go, sharing ideas or one of the vegetarian burritos that were provided free of charge by an organization called Food Not Bombs. Here I encountered a man who claimed to be able to change any diesel car over to a biological fuel based on used cooking grease.
"We can't ignore the fact that a large part of why we are in Iraq right now has to do with control over resources," he said, as I looked over a converted older-model Mercedes-Benz that did in fact burn and run on bio-fuel.
That same day, a group of around 150 protesters met to display their displeasure over the environmental degradation that has occurred locally in Brunswick due to the actions of big business motivated by the bottom-line. This group of colorful individuals, some dressed in hazardous-material suits, proceeded to march down the side of the main road leading to the causeway to the front of the Hercules powder plant.

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After a simulated "die-in," where demonstrators suggested by lying prone on the ground that the polices of the G8 and some large corporations have led to environmental conditions that are likely to bring on an early death, the police moved in to clear the road of protesters. It was at this time that lines of communication were opened between one Lisa Fithian on the side of the activists and a captain with the police response on the other end. Through negotiations, an adequate compromise was reached whereby both sides of the situation achieved some measure of their needs and wants. The police stressing the importance of the orderly flow of traffic while the protesters maintained their desire to get their message out. After a little bit of back and forth the demonstration ended without any violence or arrests.
The same could not be said about the next day in Brunswick. On Thursday, June 10, the last official day of the Summit, a group of demonstrators made a move toward Sea Island with the goal of blocking traffic and shutting down the only road on and off the island. Committed to an action of non-violent civil disobedience, this group of mainly young people proceeded to sit down in the road until the police moved in and arrested a dozen protesters.
Back in Savannah, a strange sight developed at the rear of Forsyth Park. In a demonstration that has seen everybody from black-clad anarchists to hemp wearing environmentalists gather under the same banner decrying the over-powerful influence corporations exercise in our daily lives, a very different cut of cloth was emerging to show itself. The sarcastically tongue-in-cheek group "Billionaires for Bush" showed up at the park in a long, black stretch limo to engage in a little political high comedy. These folks were dressed to the nines, and looked like they were out for a round of evening cocktails on Sea Island itself. In a week that has seen everyone who wished to participate in the People's Political Summit able to exercise their freedom of speech, this group spoke to the audience in Forsyth of the need to vote for G. W. Bush in 2004, because in the words of their closing song "It's all about the money, honey."

Jonathan Robert

UGA alum Jonathan Robert is a writer at large.

Shameful Legacy
Mourn Us, Not Reagan

For a few weeks, it became routine. I heard them dragging luggage down the hall. They paused in a little lounge near the dormitory elevator to bid farewell to people they'd met during their single semester. Those I knew knocked on my door. "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Where are you going to go?" A shrug. They were 18 years old and their bright futures had evaporated. They had worked hard in junior and senior high school, harder than most, but none of that mattered now. President Reagan, explained the form letters from the Office of Financial Aid, had slashed the federal education budget. Which is why the same grim tableau of shattered hopes and dreams was playing itself out across the country. Colleges and universities were evicting their best and brightest, straight-A students, stripping them of scholarships. Some transferred to less-expensive community colleges; others dropped into the low-wage workforce. Now, nearly a quarter century later, they are still less financially secure and less educated than they should have been. Our nation is poorer for having denied them their potential.
They were by no means the hardest-hit victims of Reaganism. Reagan's quack economists trashed scholarships and turned welfare recipients into homeless people and refused to do anything about the AIDS epidemic, all so they could fund extravagant tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the ultra rich. Their supply-side sales pitch, that the rich would buy so much stuff from everybody else that the economy would boom and government coffers would fill up, never panned out. The Reagan boom lasted just three years and created only low-wage jobs. When the '80s were over, we were buried in the depths of recession and a trillion bucks in debt. Poverty grew, cities decayed, crime rose. It took over a decade to dig out.
Reagan's defenders, people who don't know the facts or choose to ignore them, claim that "everybody" admired Reagan's ebullient personality even if some disagreed with his politics. That, like the Gipper's tall tales about welfare queens and "homeless by choice" urban campers, is a lie. Millions of Americans cringed at Reagan's simplistic rhetoric, were terrified that his anti-Soviet "evil empire" posturing would provoke World War III and thought that his appeal to selfishness and greed - a bastardized blend of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand - brought out the worst in us. We rolled our eyes when Reagan quipped, "There you go again." What the hell did that mean? Given that he made flying a living hell (by firing the air traffic controllers and regulating the airlines), I'm not the only one who refuses to call Washington National Airport by its new name. His clown-like dyed hair and rouged cheeks disgusted us. We hated him during the dark days he made so hideous, and, with all due respect, we hate him still.
Not everybody buys the myth that Reagan won the Cold War by demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this [Berlin] wall" or bankrupting the Soviet Union via the arms race - Zbigniew Brezinski's plot to "draw the Russians into the Afghan trap" by funding the mujahedeen. Chernobyl and covert U.S. schemes to destabilize the ruble had more to do with the end of the USSR. Gangsterism replaced the ossified cult of the state, millions of Russians were reduced to paupers, revived radical Islamism in Central Asia and eliminated our sole major ideological and military rival. That increased our arrogance and insularity, left us in charge of the world and to blame for everything, paving the road to 9/11. (Reagan even armed the attacks' future perpetrators.) Anyway, the Cold War isn't over. In which direction do you think those old ICBMs point today?
The lionizers are correct about one thing: Reagan was one of our most influential presidents since FDR, whose New Deal safety net he carefully disassembled. He pioneered policies now being implemented by George W. Bush: trickle down economics, corporate deregulation, radicalizing the courts, slithering around inconvenient laws and international treaties. On the domestic front, he unraveled America's century-old social contract. What the poor needed was a kick in the ass, not a handout, said a president whose wealthy patrons bought him a house and put clothes on his wife, Nancy. National parks were to be exploited for timber and oil, not protected. The federal tax code, originally conceived to redistribute wealth from top to bottom, was "reformed" to eradicate social justice.
Bush also models his approach to foreign policy on that of the original Teflon President. Reagan elevated unjustifiable military action to an art. In 1983, anxious to look tough after cutting and running from Lebanon, Reagan sent marines to topple the Marxist government of Grenada. His pretext for invading this Caribbean island was the urgent plight of 500 medical students supposedly besieged by rampaging mobs. But when they arrived at the airport in the United States, the quizzical young men and women told reporters they were confused, never having felt endangered or seen any unrest.
In a bizarre 1985 effort to free a few American hostages being held in Lebanon, Reagan authorized the sale of 107 tons of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, at the time one of our staunchest enemies, with the proceeds to be used to fund rightist death squads in Nicaragua - something Congress had expressly forbidden him to do. Evidence strongly suggests that Iran-Contra was at least his second dirty deal with Islamic Iran, the first being the October Surprise, which delayed the release of the Iranian embassy hostages until after the 1980 election was over. Ronald Reagan eventually admitted to "trading arms for hostages," yet avoided prosecution for treason and the death penalty.
Reagan, like Bush 43, technically served in the military yet studiously avoided combat. Both men were physically robust, intellectually inadequate, poorly traveled former governors renowned for stabbing friends in the back: Reagan when he named names during McCarthyism. Both appointed former generals as secretaries of state and enemies of the environment to head the Department of the Interior. Both refused to read detailed briefings, worked short hours, behaved erratically in public appearances, ducked questions about sordid pasts, and relied on Christianist (the radical right equivalent of Islamist) depictions of foes as "evil" and America, invariably as embodied by himself and the Republicans, as "good." Based on intelligence as phony as that floated to justify the war against Iraq, Reagan bombed Muslim Libya.
That the world would have been better off without a Ronald Reagan is arguable. His greatest legacy, convincing Americans to hate rather than care for their fellow citizens, is a constant reminder of that.

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is the author of Wake Up, You're Liberal!: How We Can Take America Back From the Right."