A light rain falls at the Pike Place Market, painting the produce with a glistening sheen. It's here -- at Seattle's oldest open food fair -- that J.C. Bogle reluctantly embraces the ideals of capitalism, one banana at a time.
Lanky, with a thick shock of dreadlocks and a scruffy soul patch, Bogle would rather be wielding a picket sign than a handful of plums.
Yet, even the most staunch socialist needs to make a living.
So Bogle hawks his wares like a showman, cracking jokes, posing for tourist photos -- anything to make a sale.
But it is between transactions that Bogle makes his true pitch, shilling to shoppers alternatives to corporate capitalism.
Sometimes they listen. Sometimes they simply walk away.
Always, the struggle continues.
"I don't know where the answers are," Bogle says. "I just sit around here and sell bananas. But I know what I don't like to see.
"The founding principle of this country is protest. Protest is why this society exists. And now the corporate and political hierarchy want to take that all away? No way."
It's born of anger, fuelled by frustration, and sparked by a refusal to accept the status quo.
From the lowliest anarchist foot soldier to the highest-profile non-governmental organization (NGO), the modern protest movement is a powerful force for change.
This June, activists of every cause and persuasion will be drawn to Alberta for the G-8 summit in Kananaskis.
For two days, anarchists and radicals will march alongside union workers, women's groups, clergy and environmentalists.
They will be united by a common goal -- to confront and condemn globalization and its chief boosters, the G-8 industrialized countries. Some will come in the hope of changing the system. Others will want only to tear it down.
"This is a radical revolt against the system," says Naomi Klein, the left-wing icon and author of the best-selling anti-globalization book No Logo.
"We have a crisis of faith here. A crisis of credibility of politicians.
There is (also) an incredible crisis of legitimacy. That's why we have these protests."
Stereotypes so far have largely defined -- and confined -- the modern protest movement.
To many Canadians, the mind's eye conjures images of anarchists armed with rocks and firebombs, staring down walls of faceless storm trooper police, all drenched in a pea-soup sea of tear gas.
The activists themselves are alternatively painted as heroes or hooligans, depending on who is holding the brush.
The modern protest movement is all of these things -- and everything in between.
Today's activism is cloaked in greyness, an ambiguous entity driven by a multitude of motivations:
None of these people possess the charisma or influence of a Mahatma Gandhi or a Martin Luther King Jr. But they are dedicated and passionate in the belief that too much money and affluence is concentrated in the hands of a powerful few.
On a recent spring night, Sawyer, a thin, bespectacled anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, sat in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Ottawa, chewing over his case against the G-8 summit.
"These people were not elected to do global governance," Sawyer fumes, punctuating his words with a wave of his chopsticks. "I don't think eight mostly white guys should be deciding the fate of the world."
To Sawyer and other young activists the world is suffering from a major deficit of democracy.
Not the democracy that permits professional politicians, lobbyists and corporations to set the agenda for the masses, but a grassroots model, where average citizens "are able to participate freely in what affects them, without others saying we know what's best for you.
"I don't have the complete answer what democracy should look like," Sawyer says, taking a quick bite of seasoned broccoli. "But I do know the standard line of voting every four or five years is bogus."
The modern anti-globalization movement began during the mid-1990s as an subterranean current, rising occasionally to spark unrest at world summits.
It erupted into the mainstream during the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Sally Soriano.
Soriano, a 40-something, sandy-haired former assistant professor of community education, turned on to activism in the 1970s after losing friends in the Vietnam war.
She wears her protest colours with pride, sporting a No War poster in the window of her Puget Sound bungalow and a bumper sticker on her rusting Volvo that says: World Trade Organization Hurts Workers, the Earth and Democracy.
Soriano helped organize a speaker series on anti-globalization at the University of Washington in the months preceding the WTO.
Those lectures generated the anger that helped draw thousands of activists to the streets. The ensuing Battle in Seattle is now widely accepted as the big bang of the modern protest movement.
During that battle, thousands of activists succeeded in temporarily shutting down the WTO meetings, something Soriano still believes is one of the greatest victories of the new protest movement.
There have been many other battles in the years since the WTO -- at summits in Prague, Quebec City,
Ottawa, Genoa and Washington, D.C.
Again and again common people have flooded the streets to denounce globalization and its proponents worldwide.
And yet, Soriano admits with a heavy sigh, very little has changed in the way the world is run.
Government and corporate leaders keep meeting. The security crackdown on protest continues. And the gap between rich and poor keeps growing.
"We live in a plutocracy," Soriano says quietly, as a dull, grey rain beats a rhythm on her living room window. "The conglomerates call all the shots. And globalization? It's working for the rich one per cent. They're getting richer . . . while the rest of the population gets poorer."
We live in a world where the accumulated wealth of the 25 richest citizens -- approximately $382 billion US according to Forbes magazine -- exceeds the entire gross domestic product of Sub-Saharan Africa ($319.6 billion US, according to the World Bank).
It's a world where, World Bank statistics from 2000 reveal:
At a recent Calgary conference on globalization, Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, brought listeners to tears as he recounted the horrors many Africans face in their daily fight for survival.
His voice hoarse with emotion, Lewis, the former New Democratic Party leader in Ontario, declared his solidarity with the young activists who are the foot soldiers of the modern protest movement.
"I'm with them every step of the way," he said, his eyes moist with emotion. "There is no ambition more noble than to create a more just and caring society."
A closer look at the statistics reveals at least some social and health indicators are improving in the age of globalization. According to the World Bank, the number of people living on less than $1 per day has actually dropped over the past decade by about one million. During this same period, child deaths also fell by about one million.
Like the protest movement, the impact of globalization cannot easily be framed in tones of black and white.
In the early 1990s, a fresh set of phrases entered the common vernacular, each one imbued with a sense of infinite promise.
Politicians and scholars spoke of a New World Order, where everyone would finally become a citizen of the Global Village, linked by an information superhighway.
Rapid advances in technologies, believers said, would soon bridge the divide between nations. And through "globalization," investment from rich countries would spark growth and development in poorer nations, eventually lifting all members of the global village to unrivalled levels of prosperity.
This vision has since been rejected by most in the protest movement -- but the debate still rages among academics.
Jack Carr, an economist at the University of Toronto, firmly believes freer trade and stronger cultural and political links between nations will lead to stronger democracy and trickle-down prosperity in the Third World.
Of course, Carr admits, "when you adopt free trade . . . there are winners and losers. On the whole, Canada wins, no doubt. But not everybody wins."
Other academics, such as University of Washington biochemist Jean Buskin, say globalization creates too few winners and far too many losers.
Buskin marched with the protesters during the Battle in Seattle in 1999. She sees globalization as a tool used by rich nations to impose a western monoculture of consumerism on the world.
"I'm quite in favour of globalized human rights and globalized lots of things," Buskin says. "Just not globalized, unlimited corporate power."
The Sept. 11 terror attacks on America, combined with the shooting death of a protester at last year's G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, is forcing protesters, police, and politicians to re-examine the repercussions of summit violence.
Many protest groups openly condemn violence against people. But they also say they respect "a diversity of tactics" -- a loaded phrase that implies the condoning of the use of vandalism and property damage, to make statements against corporate and political targets.
Critics say protesters will never be taken seriously until the movement's leaders openly reject all forms of violence.
However, Katie Wepple, a university student and protest organizer in Seattle, says the violence debate is a red herring used by those in positions of power to split the movement into "good" and "bad" protesters.
She says this allows the political and corporate elite to divert attention away from the true social, cultural and economic "violence" being waged daily against the world's poorest citizens.
"There's a divide and conquer attitude," she says over coffee recently in Seattle's university district. "It's the police that are violent, by pepper spraying innocent people. It's clear police are there to protect . . . the corporations, not to protect people's rights to express their views."
Moises Naim, editor-in-chief of the respected U.S. political magazine Foreign Affairs, says protesters who try to shut down world summit meetings are misguided.
He says they should be pushing for world leaders to meet more often -- and to actually start fulfilling promises of past summits.
"Protesters should be protesting (the fact) that most of the time, these summits are just photo ops, not meetings where decisions are made," Naim says. "The problem is . . . the world is not getting enough action from these meetings."
The Kananaskis summit is supposed to be a retreat-style meeting where leaders can intimately discuss issues of global importance. For their critics, the remote location and unprecedented security simply reinforces the image of rich and powerful politicians cut off from their own people and the world.
Yet, this scaled-down summit will likely be the most expensive in G-8 history, with some critics estimating it will cost between $300 and $500 million.
Robert Fowler, Prime Minister Jean Chretien's point man for the G-8, says summits will continue to be costly as long as the threat of terrorist attack or violent protest exists.
"Yes, the summit is going to cost a lot of money," Fowler says. "But I challenge . . . (critics) to say the world can really be run by teleconference."
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