Reviewed by Jason McQuinn of The Alternative Press Review and Anarchy magazine
Breaking the Bank (produced by Big Noise Productions, Changing America, Deep Dish TV, Headwaters Action Video Collective, Paper Tiger TV, Sleeping Giant, Whispered Media and Wholesome Goodness Productions / available from any of the coordinating producers, 2000) 74 minute video, $25.00 + $3p&h for individuals, $15 + $3p&h low income, $150 + $3p&h for libraries/institutions.
Alive! in the Streets: DNC 2000 (Cascadia Media Collective, POB 703, Eugene, OR 97440, www.cascadiamedia.org, 2000) 30 minute video, $15.00.
The biggest alternative media success story since the Seattle blockade of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in November, 1999, has been the birth, spread and growth of Independent Media Centers (IMCs) around North America and around the world. Breaking the Bank is a demonstration of just how incredibly effective IMCs can be in documenting and explaining the current wave of anti-globalization demonstrations aimed at the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). While Breaking the Bank is the creation of a network of video projects, it wouldn't have come together if it wasn't for the street-level organizing done by the Indymedia Center-DC (which itself, is the feature of a short trailer to the video titled "Inside IMC-DC").
In April 2000 the International Monetary Fund and World Bank met in Washington, DC. Starting at the intersection of 18th & I at dawn with a street-level affinity group discussion of where to go and what to do, the video effectively integrates shots of the blockades and explanations of the most important problems of globalization, all while giving a variety of demonstrators repeated chances to comment on the protests from their individual perspectives.
Unlike Showdown in Seattle--on the anti-WTO protests of November 1999--produced by the same groups, Breaking the Bank is both carefully edited to a more reasonable length and very well balanced, integrating a whole range of images of opposition in the streets with a virtual video teach-in on the IMF and World Bank by people like Journalist Pratap Chatterjee, policy director for Food First Anuradha Mittal, President of the Rainforest Action Network Randy Hayes, and former World Bank consultant (1982) Stan Andrews, among many others. Demonstrators consulted--most apparently students--range from a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and one from the Young Communist League to a black bloc protester, and from apparently unaffiliated youths to local DC activists and DC homeless.
Breaking the Bank points out that World Bank and IMF were set up shortly after WWII, originally to help in reconstructing Europe, later oriented towards development in Third World countries in order to integrate them into (and subordinate them to) the international industrial economy. To the latter end, the IMF often makes loans to national governments in the name of alleviating poverty, but actually designed to benefit both multinational corporations and local elites, while leaving the poor out in the cold at best, or more often disrupting their communities and destroying their environment. Then, once governments fail to make their debt payments (often due to their incompetence, inability to compete in international markets, economic downturns, or even deliberate fraud), the IMF refinances with short-term loans conditioned on the national imposition of "structural adjustment programs" (SAPs). SAPs usually include requirements to devalue currencies, reduce social spending, privatization of utililites, and end social subsidies and price controls, while encouraging environmental despoilation (through increased mining & deforestation, export-oriented agriculture, undermining traditional subsistence economies, the damming of rivers, etc.). Ultimately and inevitably, the most spectacular "successes" of the IMF and World Bank (from their points of view) in encouraging massive industrial development and integration into the world capitalist economy have also often involved the increasing immiseration of whole populations.
To the great credit of the videographers and producers, Breaking the Bank doesn't attempt to artificially portray a unified, coherent anti-globalization movement where none exists. With a diversity of voices included there is also a range of opinion revealing the cross-purposes of many participants, which shows up most clearly in the conflicting perspectives of those professing ideologies of non-violence and those more interested in directly confronting and resisting capitalism and the state.
One student, Brad Janzen (identified only as from the University of Oklahoma) provocatively blurts out, "We're not about property destruction. We're not about hurting people with violence and stuff, were just about nonviolent resistance to the corporate aggression that they're trying to push on us." This is followed with shots of a symbolic blockade of an intersection by people linking hands, tying multiple pieces of yarn across the street, while chanting and singing. After which an unidentified man shouts, "She just talked to the police and communicated that this is a nonviolent protest. They said they're not going to do anything to us any time soon...."
It is extremely important that the manifold illusions of many protesters (and especially protest organizers) and their frequent preference for collusion with cops over consistent confrontation has been so well documented. However, at the same time that Breaking the Bank reveals the poverty of analysis shared by so many protesters, it sometimes fails to make clear their ultimate impotence in the face of successful police maneuvering. For example, the video inexplicably leaves unchallenged one protester's statement that, "The reports we've been getting is that we've been really successful, that we've secured a perimeter around the IMF/WB meeting....." What is left out is the fact that the vast majority of delegates had already made it to the meeting before the relatively meaningless perimeter was finally "secured." On the other hand, the video does a good job of documenting the contemptuous police raid of the protesters' "convergence space" meeting place (on the the basis of obviously bogus complaints), and the (unconstitutional, but effective) pre-emptive arrests of over 600 people at an anti-prison march days before the planned IMF/WB blockade.
Ultimately, the video also does an excellent job portraying the undeniable energy, creativity and wit of protesters, despite all their illusions. Along with documentation of the usual, unprovoked police beatings of unresisting activists, there are plenty of shots of unrestrained dancing, music and singing, giant puppets in the streets, and a few especially clever chants, like one directed at people turned away from the blockade: "Hey, How're you doing? Sorry you can't get through. Leave our name and your number and we'll get back to you."
In Alive! in the Streets: DNC 2000, documenting protests at the Democratic National Convention later last summer, the Cascadia Media Collective was faced with a very different series of events and chose a different mode of presentation. From the opening song by Bonnie Raitt and the opening speech by John Trudell (on power vs. authority), Alive! in the Streets uses more quick cuts and video effects to cover a wider range of events without much central focus. Without the coherence given Breaking the Bank by the fact that protesters were united in choosing a highly specialized target and goal (even in the absence of shared theory and tactics), Alive! in the Streets settles for a necessarily more superficial treatment of the week's protests. In many ways, the Democratic National Convention isn't as easy for protesters to pin down as the IMF and World Bank. When protesters range from supporters of Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader to anti-electoralists like the anarchists, there is simply no common ground for an approach anywhere near that of the DC goal of shutting down the entire meeting. Instead the weeks' actions more resembled a smorgasbord of single issue protests and cultural events, from the march for the U'Wa people of Colombia (especially significant, given that Al Gore owns a huge amount of stock in Occidental Petroleum, whose insistent oil exploration and intention to drill threatens the entire U'Wa way of life) to the march in support for death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, and from the Critical Mass bike ride to the Rage Against the Machine concert.
Along with the increased number of special effects, there are also fewer on-the-street comments from participants here. Partly this is a result of the shorter length of Alive! in the Streets at 30 minutes (less than half the length of Breaking the Bank). But it must also reflect the choices of the videographers and producers involved. While Alive! in the Streets is both lively and interesting, providing a good, quick overview of the week of DNC protests, Breaking the Bank is overall much more compelling, and much more involving for the viewer. Both videos ought to be shown throughout North America (and the rest of the world)--at the least as correctives to the completely one-sided portrayals and misreporting of the mainstream, corporate media. But I highly recommend that APR readers consider going out of your way to see Breaking the Bank at any opportunity. It may be the most important radical video of the year.