There is an open letter from librarians, written by Mark Rosenzweig, protesting the police violence at the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, Italy, on the web and ready for your signature. I signed it, not because I am opposed to globalization per se, but I am opposed to the way it is happening and definitely opposed to the police response in Genoa, which has been incredibly brutal. The signable letter is at http://libr.org/PLG/Genoa.html, on the PLG site. It is also copied inside if you follow the internal LISNews link. You may also be interested in the Library Juice feature issue on what has happened in Genoa and it\’s coverage in the media. Apologies to those who object to anything non-library related, but as professionals we exist in the larger world.
There is an open letter from librarians, written by Mark Rosenzweig, protesting the police violence at the anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, Italy, on the web and ready for your signature. I signed it, not because I am opposed to globalization per se, but I am opposed to the way it is happening and definitely opposed to the police response in Genoa, which has been incredibly brutal. The signable letter is at http://libr.org/PLG/Genoa.html, on the PLG site. It is also copied inside if you follow the internal LISNews link. You may also be interested in the Library Juice feature issue on what has happened in Genoa and it\’s coverage in the media. Apologies to those who object to anything non-library related, but as professionals we exist in the larger world.Open letter from librarians against the murder of people excercising the right to protest against corporate
globalization at the Genoa Conference, July, 2001
The undersigned librarians, library employees, library professors &
teachers of library & information sciences, library students & interns,
information professionals, paraprofessionals and service providers,
wish to express their horror at the escalating anti-civilian military
mobilizations and the planned and entirely disproportionate violence
exercised against fundamentally peaceful, certainly unarmed, protests
of the meetings of the G7+, the WTO, the IMF/World Bank and all other
gatherings of the proponents and agencies of a transnational corporate
world order.
We reject (and hold responsible the entire chain of command behind it)
the orchestrated, planned violence of the armed-to-the-teeth defenders
of the global elite against the all-too-visible political
manifestations of popular, international rejection of the agendas of
the institutions perceived as imposing policies and practices which,
rather than alleviating the problems they claim to be confronting
(hunger -famine – on an unimaginable scale; dislocations of entire
populations; marginalizations of whole sectors (class strata, nations,
peoples, ethnic groups), poverty of a degree and scale which has been
–and continues to be (for most people) unthinkable; rampant epidemics
of fatal disease; massive environmental despoliation in the
overwhelming majority of the world, and increasing attacks even on the
social & economic gains of most people in the so-called developed world
with its welfare state protections and public sectors being scrapped
and shredded, including in the self-proclaimed economic
\’super-powers\’) are merely interested in creating a stabilized global
regime in which the attempted globalized monopolization of effective
wealth and power in the hands of actors not responsible to any
democratic control is imposed, while containing the disruptions created
by the inevitable resistance of the masses of people affected by
policies over which they have no control.
We protest, vehemently, the murder of an anti-corporate protestor in
Genoa, shot and ruthlessly run-over by a military vehicle, and also the
growing number of those protestors being beaten, gassed, shot at,
trampled, jailed and subjected to both personal brutality and high-tech
crowd control techniques for the purposes of discouraging their
protests — and all such protests — and preventing them from having
any impact on those world \”leaders\” who are presently meeting in a
fortified compound in the free city of Genoa.
We call on the global economic elite meeting in Genoa — and ready to
meet in further fortified locations over the next months as they have
since the WTO debacle in Seattle — to abandon the entire
anti-democratic framework of their deliberations, to drop the
anti-popular programs and policies which they are pursuing and to enter
into free, open dialogue, transparent and unimpeded, with
representatives of civil society and of organized mass-democratic
forces and movements.
Let this murder in Genoa not be in vain! The escalation of this
confrontation with popular interests and representatives of the needs
of the ordinary people of the world should come to a halt here and
now.
The cynicism of Bush who tells the world that the protests only hurt
the cause of \”the poor\” (as if \”the poor\” were some category of humans
apart from his own species) must be rejected with the contempt it
deserves.
We call on our fellow professionals and workers, educators, cultural
activists, all those engaged in the social and cultural service sector,
to reject privatization, the destruction of the public sector where
it exists and its discouragement where it has yet to be significantly
developed, the substitution of anti-democratic supra-national
decision-making of secret bodies representing elite interests for
existing democratic structures, however weak.
Progressive librarians and information workers say NO to corporate
globalization; NO to murderous violence against legitimate militant,
mass anti-globalization protest; NO to the erosion of democratic
institutions; NO to the crushing of the claims of national sovereignty
and the equal rights of minorities; NO to the creation of a new
economic order based on the burdening of the poor nations with
increasing debt!
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