The July 24 protest against President Bush in Dearborn is part of a growing movement against the president. In recent months, he has been met by protestors at the majority of his fundraising appearances and protests are already being organized for the Republican National Convention in 2004.
On this visit, his tenth to Michigan, Bush was greeted by protestors outside a $2,000 dollar per plate fundraiser in Dearborn where he raised $2 million for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. A crowd of fifty people protested Bush in Dearborn, with many protestors representing the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice.
The Dearborn appearance was the President's second speech yesterday in Michigan. He spoke earlier in the day in Livonia at Beaver Aerospace and Defense, Inc. where he discussed his economic policies, claiming that his recent tax cut has spurred economic growth and that further prosperity should be coming soon. However, many people in Michigan do not agree with the President's assessment of the economy. A recent survey by Lansing-based EPIC/MRA said that 60 percent of those polled in Michigan gave Bush a negative rating on the economy. Moreover, Michigan has a 7.2% unemployment rate (higher than the national average of 6.4%) and Michigan has lost 127,500 jobs, many in the manufacturing sector, since August of 2002.
The protest against the President's policies that took place in Michigan was the most recent in what has become a common occurrence at appearances by the President, with the largest of recent protests consisting of thousands of people in Los Angeles. Earlier in the day at an appearance in Philadelphia, over one hundred people attended a protest outside the President's appearance the Philadelphia Regional Financial Center, a check manufacturing plant where the first of the "rebate checks" that will be sent out as part of Bush' new tax legislation were being printed.
The Philadelphia protest was also typical of recent Bush protests in another way -- protestors were kept far away from the President. In Dearborn, protestors were kept 150 yards away from the entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel by the Secret Service and the Dearborn police, something that has become common at Bush appearances around the country. Under the guise of the current "war on terrorism," the Secret Service has been keeping Bush's opponents out of his view. Yesterday in Philadelphia, protestors from the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) obtained an emergency court order from a U.S. District Judge demanding equal access to the site after Bush supporters were seen near the entrance to the building, while the Secret Service tried to push protestors back even further from the building. Predictably, the Secret Service excused their actions as being a security necessity and James Borsai, special agent in charge of the Secret Service in Philadelphia, was quoted as saying "In this climate, it's all security."
The protests can be viewed as leading up to both the 2004 election, when many progressives and Democrats will attempt to capture the White House, as well as the 2004 Republican National Convention. Organizers have already made the call for protestors to converge at the convention, which will be held in New York City in September of 2004. The RNC Not Welcome Collective began organizing for the 2004 convention back in May. Recently, the anti-war group United for Peace and Justice issued a call for a worldwide day of protest in solidarity with actions against the convention on August 29, 2004.
This is certainly not the first time that a presidential convention will be met by protests. While the quintessential example is the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, many people in the United States do not realize that the 2000 conventions of both the Republicans and the Democrats were met by large protests. At the RNC in Philadelphia, 420 protestors were arrested while doing direct action in order to prevent the start of the convention. Reports of police misconduct and abuse of power were rampant, and there are still a few people awaiting trials.
Police misconduct can be expected in New York City, as the NYPD has a horrible record in dealing with protests. In 2002 during protests against the World Economic Forum, the NYPD forced protestors into restrictive pens, repeatedly corralled demonstrators between lines of police and threatening to make mass arrests, made targeted arrests of well-known activists, and used lies as justification for attacking the crowds. More recently on February 15, 2003, the NYPD made over 300 arrests at an anti-war rally organized by United for Peace and Justice as well as other groups. The city refused to issue a march permit, citing "security reasons" and made numerous arrests when protestors organized unpermitted marches to the rally site and when the pens that had been erected to contain the protestors overflowed and spilled into the surrounding streets. The New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union released a forty-four page report titled, Arresting Protest, that examined police misconduct. Among the misconduct found by the ACLU was the use of excessive force, including the use of horses to charge peaceful crowds of people, the use of pepper spray on peaceful groups, political interrogations, denial of access to lawyers once arrested, and the denial of food and medical care.
The recent protests against the President and those planned in the future are evidence that the anti-war movement is expanding their focus, realizing that in order to stop war they must address issues of social justice. Whether or not momentum can be retained until the 2004 election remains to be seen, but so far, it looks like it will not be problem.
