As the more transparently sleazy, odious, and second-rate features of President Junior’s “No Child Left Behind” program became known, the sarcastic nicknames began to fly — among them my own favorites, “No Child Left Unrecruited” and “No Child Shall Escape”. Indeed, no child shall escape the State’s program of psychiatric drugging, captive-audience mass-marketing, military recruitment and political indoctrination. Education? Who said it?

By this time, as well, military recruiters’ encroachment into high-school campuses had markedly increased, along with more aggressive tactics ranging up to and including harassment, threats, and telephone harassment of students’ families at home. Student resistance escalated in kind, including the blockading of military recruiting office in downtown DC; in at least a couple of cases, young men in the process of enlistment got the message and backed out on the spot.

Medium-res jpg image, 903k

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Time for another parody of an iconic American image, this time the famous photograph of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima island during WWII. Once again, it’s not like it’s been done before, but like all the great Renaissance painters doing their own versions of the Annunciation and Crucifixion, I decided it was time for me to do my own version of Iwo Jima.

This piece advertised the planned “Peoples’ Strike” focused on the residents of Washington, DC who, the organizers of the “strike” assumed, had reached the point where things had gotten bad enough to spark a mass general strike to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings. Sadly, somehow, despite the loss of the city’s only public hospital, the closure of homeless shelters and the sale of schools and the property under them to condo developers, many residents of DC chose not to join the “strike” as apparently things still hadn’t gotten bad enough — either that or, as I suspect, they were awaiting permission from the local Democratic Party to organize and rise up on their own behalf.

Medium-res jpg image, 710k

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Part of the ’02 IMF/World Bank festivities was a planned widespread, networked civil disobedience around the city of Washington, DC, which organizers hoped would include major highways and subway lines in and out of the city. In order to dramatize the organizers’ intent, this poster depicted the entire city of DC squeezed and choked at the various intersections of highways and rapid-transit lines — or, resembling some kind of weird alien bodily organ, depending on how much Star Trek you’ve watched.

Medium-res jpg image, 839k

Continue reading "Fall 2002 IMF/WB “Map”" »

By this time, the approach of summer meant one thing: time to get going on the posters for the Fall World Bank/IMF Mobilization! A more militant local outfit, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, was taking a large part in this year’s mobe as many in the movement were becoming dissatisfied with the more “moderate” position of the large NGOs such as Global Exchange, and DC’s own Mobilization For Global Justice (originally formed to organize the A16 WB/IMF actions in 2000).

As was customary, my posters for the IMF/WB Mobe sought to be simple, easily-read portrayals of the issues our movement was addressing; in addition, this year I also added a series of images depicting our movement’s vision for a peaceful and just society, to shut up all those conservative wags out there predictably whining “we all know what you’re against, but what are you for?”

Complete set, Adobe pdf file, 3m

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