This year’s Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue took place at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers November 6–8. It was, the TABD website said, to provide a framework for “enhanced cooperation between the trans-Atlantic business community and the governments of the EU and US.” But that’s just what watchdog groups are afraid of. According to a protest flyer, it was a meeting between a major manufacturer of depleted uranium weapons; a would-be raider of workers’ pensions; a supporter of the apartheid government in South Africa; a prescription-drug price fixer; various dumpers of hazardous waste; beneficiaries of forced labor and human rights abuses abroad; war profiteers; and the inevitable phalanx of ambassadors from Big Oil. Upon learning that the secretive TABD was coming to Chicago, activists organized a protest march and rally. Mayor Daley responded by organizing the police.

Despite her misgivings and fear, CMW board member Margaret Nagel found
herself among the protestors at the anti-TABD march and lived to tell her tale.

Citizens have a right to ask questions, don’t they? Fortified by thoughts of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all those heroes of humanity who have stood up for truth, peace, and justice, I cleared my throat on that cold afternoon of November 7, and spoke up a second time.

“Excuse me, but can you tell me the way to the protest?”
Responding at last, the police officer at the edge of a sea of other police officers tightened his grip on his riot stick, shifted his gaze to closeup and scanned me from head to chilly toe.

“The protest,” I repeated. “I’m planning to take part, but I’m not sure how to get there.”

I’d been sized up, apparently, as not an immediate danger.

“Just go right,” the policeman said. His tone was scrupulously devoid of inflection. He’d answer questions if pressed, but there would be no person-to-person connection if he could help it. “You’ll come to it in three blocks.”

“Thank you,” I said, with all the person-to-personness I could muster. I unrolled my protest sign and went on my way.

I hadn’t meant to go that way.

Well, yes, I did take the long bus ride to the Washington peace rally in April, about which I wrote in the Summer 2002 issue of CMW Report. I did march along the Magnificent Mile for peace with 2,000 other engaged citizens in October. The next day, I rallied at Federal Plaza with the peace crowds yet again. In between, I had spent many hours collecting thousands of signatures against Bush’s war on Iraq. But this TABD thing…

I quailed at the thought of possibly being clubbed, teargassed, swept off to prison under the USA Patriot Act. In the great trade protests in Seattle and Genoa, police reportedly had rushed past small groups of actual vandals to attack the peaceful multitudes instead. It all smacked of planned provocation, choreographed intimidation. And here was Mayor Daley outfitting and training a virtual army of police personnel on hair-trigger alert, clad in riot gear like space warriors. The sense of menace emanating from newspaper photographs was indescribable.

But then I thought I’ll go, but I’ll stay off to the side of everything. So one step led to another, until I went straight to my right, according to the policeman’s instructions, and ended up in Boeing Plaza—smack in the middle of everything.

There were no sidelines to speak of. If you had a sign and wanted to wave it, the Mayor’s bleak-eyed, armored forces sent you into the street. Otherwise you stayed incommunicado behind a Great Wall of those same forces. Once in, the police didn’t let you out again. You were in for the duration.

“You know, if anybody starts anything, we’re dead,” said a protester beside me. She paused to get a better grip on her sign. It said, “Get Out of Agriculture, You Morons.” She shook her head. “We’re packed in like sardines. The police will come after us all, everybody will panic, and there’ll be no way out. We’ll be crushed.”

Knowing she was right, I eyed the other signs that surrounded us like a forest. They protested what seemed like a great spread of issues. The Bush-Cheney regime. Working conditions at places like Wal-Mart and Taco Bell. Our dysfunctional fossil-fuel economy. The strident call for unending war. The attacks on social security, job security and health care. The move to privatize even the essence of life: water itself. The incursions of the biotech industry against the integrity of the world’s food supplies.

As the Chicago Tribune noted on November 8, these seemingly disparate issues shared an underlying theme: a growing awareness that corporations are out of control and need to be reined in.

But as everybody knows by this time, the crowd of perhaps 2,500 people at its greatest had committed itself to non-violence, and kept that commitment. And to give Mayor Daley and the police their due, there were no staged incidents. Instead, the mighty mass of us—hemmed in on each side by those walls of police, on foot or mounted—flowed steadily through the streets from Boeing Plaza to the Tribune Plaza.

From my center position, it was impossible to see the beginning or the end of the flow. A drum beat solemnly, like a powerful heartbeat. Plenty of people waved from the sidewalks, or from windows along the way. A police horse, unstrung, threatened to bolt sideways into our midst. Buses from the Cook County jail stood parked at cross streets. Lights flashed from patrol cars.

There was a bizarre, edgy beauty to the scene, a sense that things could suddenly go very wrong. But in the end, Chicago did not have its Seattle, its Genoa. Whatever mayhem against the public might have been taking place unchecked inside the Sheraton, there was no violence in the streets. In fact, it’s said that within the Sheraton, nobody could tell that a protest was happening at all.

I’m glad that I finally listened to my conscience and went, and I’m glad that the rest of us went. I wish every one of us who was there could be multiplied 10, 20, 100 times over. It’s going to take numbers like those to make a change. If we fail, I fear the day will soon come when life outside the Sheratons of this world won’t count for much. A fear like that is enough to get anybody marching—even those of us who’d rather stay home.

Postscript: Prior to November 7, the Tribune appeared ready to adhere to the Establishment point of view. However, its coverage of the protest was not only prominent, extensive, notably accurate and fair, but took pains to break through the stereotype. “I think the amount of press we received was absolutely fabulous,” says Angela Garcia of Illinois Peace Action, one of several organizers of the protest.