A-Infos (en) US, September 23-25: Resist the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh

G20 Resistance Organizing Updates: Update #1 of the www.organizepittsburgh.org/G20 Call To 
Action: September 23-25: Resist the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh Join Thousands at a Three Day 
Convergence of Action, Resistance and Hope ---- Pittsburghers didn’t ask the G20 to come 
here, but it is our intention that the worldview the summit represents will die here. ---- 
This September 24-25 Pittsburgh will host the next summit of the G20, a group of finance 
ministers and central bank governors from the world’s largest economies who meet twice 
yearly to discuss and coordinate the international financial system. Around 1,500 
delegates, including heads of state, will be here along with more than 2,000 members of 
the media, and thousands of police and security agents tasked with squelching dissent.

This summit, and the predecessor meetings this past April in London, occurs on the heels 
of the worldwide financial meltdown that has been severely impacting hundreds of millions 
around the world. Since its inception, the G20 has been a tool used to promote a world 
vision based on the ability of capital to move as it pleases, at the expense of labor, 
human rights and the environment.

Now that the system these leaders have forced on the world is in crisis they continue to 
operate as if they have the answer. We know that they do not. To save countries, they 
propose we turn to institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an entity 
that has historically imposed murderous structural adjustment programs on the world’s poor.

G20 summits, alongside other meetings of institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and 
the World Trade Organization, have rightfully been targeted by hundreds of thousands of 
people around the world because they represent a global vision based on war-making, social 
and economic injustice, and corporate greed. Pittsburgh will take its place alongside 
people around the world who have protested and resisted such gatherings in their hometowns.

Pittsburgh was chosen as the host city because of its history, and because the President 
is looking to buttress his working class credentials. It is true that our city has much to 
offer the world in terms of progress, we just happen to disagree with the politicians on 
what these words mean or what others should take from our experience. Pittsburgh has 
experienced 50 years of population loss and industrial decline as well as more than 150 
years of industrial class conflict. We have gained an instinctual knowledge that you get 
what you are willing to fight for. We celebrate that worker and community 
self-organization has often succeeded where government, bosses and the supposedly 
enlightened have failed.

What has carried us through the tough times has been our relationships, the tight knit 
nature of our mostly non-corporate dominated neighborhoods, a do-it-yourself ethic, the 
unpretentious manner in which people treat each other, and a sense of local pride that 
isn’t based on salary or one’s place in some hierarchy. Pittsburgh never died, and the 
currently-in-vogue talk of "rebirth" measures success, growth, and progress in terms of 
the number of corporations based here, the multi-national profits, or the success of our 
politicians at going from Mayors to County Executives to Governors.

For our measuring stick, we look to whether or not all have the resources needed to lead 
and pursue rewarding lives, and if we are meeting community needs without the involvement 
of the state. We look to the health of our environment and the treatment of other living 
things, the equality of educational opportunities, the degree to which we lessen our 
participation in the exploitation of others, and how successful we are in moving towards a 
new kind of society in which your success and ability to survive is not at the expense of 
others.

And in these respects, our city is making progress. We find inspiration and common cause 
in the efforts of the multitude of other projects and initiatives that are transforming 
Pittsburgh into a more just and sustainable place to live, efforts that are in a 
conflictual relationship with state power, and will be joining resistance to the G20. And 
truly, if the G20 were about anything besides state power and money it would be these 
efforts that other countries would be coming here to discuss and look at, because there is 
much that we have to offer in creating a better world.

Pittsburgh is not without its problems, and there is much that needs to be addressed. 
During the summit and its lead-up little will be said about the troubling grip the UPMC 
medical industrial complex and others hold over the region, the chronic illnesses caused 
by the extremely high levels of particulate matter in our air, the troubling ethical 
questions posed by the warfare robotics that are being pioneered here, the police violence 
and acts of unaccountable brutality against the public, a stacked deck against labor 
organizing, a depressingly inadequate public transit system, and a political process 
marked by a lack of ethical accountability and transparency.

We should be clear then, we love our city, and in so far as we see the G20 as a threat to 
our collective health and well-being we intend to be an obstacle to its ability to 
function. This is an unavoidable decision given what the summit is, and what it 
represents. The presence of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh will be a major - if short-lived 
- disruption to the city and the people who work and live here, with or without protests. 
Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has acknowledged as much, stating the summit will result in "chaos" 
due to security cordons, increased traffic, etc.

The government has already staked out its position: the needs of 20 politicians justify 
whatever disruption and cost to our city, and the responsibility felt by thousands to 
participate in resistance to the G20 and to articulate an alternate vision for society is 
more than unimportant, it’s a threat.

Based on past summits the media will play the state game by focusing on whether protesters 
will be able to disrupt the ability of the summit to meet, using ominous and 
sensationalist stories with unsubstantiated claims of evil outsiders come to wreck havoc 
on the good people, because these stories, even if refuted and later disproved, serve to 
justify attacks on the public’s liberties and dignity. This must not, and will not, deter 
resistance. The stakes are too high.

The real value of this summit, to its participants and those resisting it, is not in the 
substance of the "leaders’" discussions. Our power is not in whether or not we have the 
ability to prevent a bunch of finance ministers and heads of state from talking. The real 
importance is in the way an undisrupted ceremony reinforces the dominant worldview. If 
that view is flawed, it must be rejected, and the spotlight such a gathering creates must 
be one in which people will manifest liberating social conflict.

We therefore believe that the necessary attempts of thousands to interfere with the summit 
are not an ends in and of themselves, they are a critical part of the means we can use to 
achieve the victory we are collectively organizing for in September: to heighten existing 
social resistance, and to present an alternative narrative of why our world is the way it 
is. We must make it clear that the world need not be this way, and talk about our vision 
for a movement towards a new society based not on profit and coercion but rooted in 
meeting collective needs for both material comfort and the freedom to pursue fulfilling 
lives of opportunity and dignity.

In this effort we invite and encourage your participation!

In Struggle,
Pittsburgh Organizing Group
www.organizepittsburgh.org

If your group would like to endorse this call, let us know at pog@mutualaid.org

Endorsed by:

Students for Justice in Palestine (Pittsburgh)
Harrisburg Area Anarchist Collective (Harrisburg, PA)
Workers Solidarity Alliance (North America)
Friendly Fire Collective (SF)
Ricanstruction Netwerk (NYC)
Unconventional Action (Frederick, MD)
Dirty Hands Collective (Durango, CO)
Silent City Distro (Ithaca, NY)
Unconventional Action In The Bay (Oakland/San Fran, CA)
Armchair Revolutionaries (West Chester, PA)
Wooden Shoe Books (Philadelphia, PA)
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A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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