G20 Resistance Dispatch #2: The AIDS March, the picnic and the police

(Compiled by TCIMC volunteers in Pittsburgh.  Next update anticipated late Thursday.)

As ACT UP! and other AIDS activists gathered on Tuesday September 22nd to mourn the lost lives of those who have suffered from AIDS,  we asked one AIDS survivor and long-time Pittsburgh resident whether or not Pittsburgh wanted the G20 here. 

"Pittsburghers?" he asked, "Or Pittsburgh? There's a difference."

The mock funeral/march beginning at Grant and Liberty in Downtown Pittsburgh drew attention to the fact that global policymakers have not been keeping their promises in fighting the war on AIDS.

Photos: http://twincities.indymedia.org/2009/sep/photographs-pittsburgh-g20-act-march-and-more

"President Obama, Prime Minister Brown, President Sarkozy and the rest of the G-20 leaders [have expressed their commitment] to achieving universal access to HIV treatment. But with no new resources for HIV medication, and in some cases funding cuts, that promise will never be kept," said Mongezi Nkomo of Azania Heritage International.

AIDS activists claim that the G-20 nations "are using the financial crisis as an excuse to cut promised funding for global AIDS programs." People in Pittsburgh living with AIDS will be adversely affected by this lack of global health funding.

So if not to help increase the standards of living in this city, why did Pittsburgh get chosen as the site of the G20?  "Because they shopped around for cities until they found one where the mayor's ego was bigger than his brain," the activist above said, speaking of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

President Obama, too, had a big influence: "Obama has a hard on for Pittsburgh," he said.

Speaking of Obama, the president spoke about the expected protests in light of his past as a community organizer in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Obama told the paper last Friday: "I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference." [ http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090921172443912 ]

At the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project community gathering and picnic in Bloomfield's Friendship Park late on Tuesday afternoon, Dan Sullivan of Pittsburgh expressed a similar sentiment.  After organizers spoke briefly to kick off the gathering, Sullivan got up on a park bench and asked for a chance to speak his mind.  He began by saying he's not a protester - though he meets often with City Council members - and doesn't think protesting is an effective way to make change.  But, outraged, he came here because the night before, the Pittsburgh police came to his house and demanded identification in his own kitchen.

The police, he says, were interested in an extension cord running from his house to his van, which needed a battery charge.  They thought it could be a bomb, and opened his door without a warrant looking for an explanation. Sullivan offered his ID freely, but then the police started to probe more, asking if he knew of any G20 protesters in the area.  He didn't know anything. Later, he says, the police went next door where some visitors from out of town were staying and "gave them a much harder time than they gave me."

[see a video interview with Sullivan at IndyPGH.org/G20]

Both Sullivan and Obama prefer to try and make change (though in Obama's case, what sort of change is questionable) within the system.  But Sullivan and Obama differ in their attitude towards a diversity of methods. Obama's speeches are laden with praises of the virtues of cultural diversity.  But when it comes to social movements, any views outside the cage - and as of today, there really is a cage around blocks of downtown Pittsburgh - of permitted, state-approved dissent are to be dismissed by force. Sullivan, on the other hand, stands with his neighbors - those who protest, those who write letters, and those who just want to get out of the city before the G20 invades their homes.

At the community gathering, we talked to reporters from Pittsburgh, a reporter from the BBC, people from coast to coast, and Pittsburgher after Pittsburgher who were curious about the anarchist movement.  Like Sullivan, many didn't agree with the the prevailing tactics anarchists are typically known for. But they enjoyed the food and the company and wondered why the hell it took four vans with about 25 police officers to pull over a driver from Everybody's Kitchen for an illegal lane change at the east end of the park. These curious community members may well be the people who will make the much-needed phone calls to City Council members later in the week to begin the process of attempting to hold Pittsburgh city leaders accountable in the G20's aftermath.

Sullivan, unlike Obama, still understands the basic principle of community organizing: those in the community should be the ones to make decisions for the community.  In Pittsburgh, even the City Council only found out about the G20 on TV, he said, and the Council's recommendations were unilaterally shot down by federal officials.

The G20 will be here tomorrow, and much like ACT UP! and other AIDS activists have pointed out, these 20 leaders do not have the interest of the people of Pittsburgh - or anywhere else in the world - in mind. As concern for the environment, social justice, adequate health care and economic stability continue to disappear in the interest of saving capitalism, the G20 will stand as a perpetrator in the communities of Pittsburgh in the days to come.