Charlie Deitch reports in from Arsenal Park in Lawrenceville, where an unpermitted march is set to kick off in roughly 90 minutes. 

Here's the scene:

Deitch says that the crowd at Arsenal currently numbers about 100 "with a couple new people coming in every minute or so." The first contingent of police -- about a dozen bicycle-mounted police officers -- has just arrived. 

In the meantime, Bill O'Driscoll has this report from a protest Downtown involving Burmese monks:

Around noon, 15 Burmese monks and a like number of supporters gathered outside the August Wilson Center to protest government repression in their home country of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).

The monks, who live in exile at the Buddhist temple monastery in Chapel Hill, N.C., were hosted locally by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, which shelters persecuted writers. The Wilson Center is perhaps the closest large public area to the convention center that's still accessible without having to cross security checkpoints during the G-20 summit.

Monks speaking out for freedom in Myanmar are persecuted and often jailed. Many of the protestors today held images of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident who's spend much of her adult life under house arrest, despite international condemnation of the persecution.

One of the images was a portrait by Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama "hope" poster.

"The people in Burma, the students, from all walks of life, are suffering," one of the monks, Agga Dhamme, said through a translator. "They [are] emotionally depressed because the military government was in power for more than 26 years."

The monks, all wearing orange and brown robes, had marched from City of Asylum's houses on the North Side. The protest consisted largely of the monks meditating while seated on this blocked portion of Liberty Avenue. It attracted some media and enlivened other protestors, including opponents of oppression in Ethiopia and a guy carrying a sign reading "stop the Global Bank Thieves of America" and repeatedly yelling "Protest is freedom!"

Most of them left after the monks did, at about 12:30.

Sure, the Secret Service guys LOOK all bad-ass. And obviously Pittsburgh is crawling with Homeland Security agencies, shadowy figures who know more about us than we know about ourselves. 

But apparently, even THEY are no match for Pittsburgh's streets, reports our Bill O'Driscoll. 

O'Driscoll is credentialed to attend the G-20 proceedings at the Covention Center, and he thought he'd stop by after attending a press conference at the August Wilson Center. But to get inside the convention center, press must first go through a security checkpoint at the Mellon Arena. As O'Driscoll describes it:

At the Arena, the Bigelow Boulevard side is blocked off -- even though that's where the media gate is. So cops direct you all the way around -- counterclockwise, from 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock. Then you empty your pockets and climb aboard one of the eight charter buses awaiting media.

Forty-five of its 50 seats were empty, but the bus left on time. The driver seemed only marginally familiar with Downtown. But he was more clued in than the Secret Service guy riding shotgun. 

"You know this town better than I do," said the Secret Service guy as we attempted to locate a route to the Convention Center.

"This is Grant Street," the driver said a minute later. "Maybe that was William Penn Place there, I don't know."

O'Driscoll got their evenutually -- by way of Fifth, Liberty, and Fort Duquesne Boulevard. But the best part of the story may be this only-in-Pittburgh/only-during-the-G20 vision:

As O'Driscoll was walking up to the Arena, he says, he was passed by a pedicab -- peddled by a white Pittsburgher carrying an Asian passenger. Judging from the large amount of luggage in the cab, the passenger may have been overseas media. And on the hill rising up to the arena, O'Driscoll says, "the load apparently became too heavy: The passenger got out and had to push while the driver peddled ahead."

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, I'm pretty sure.

This afternoon's unpermitted march is still hours away, but early indications suggest that police may not need all those pairs of disposable handcuffs after all. 

Our Chris Young is at Friendship Park in Bloomfield, the starting point for a student "feeder march," which will later hook up with the main event. People were supposed to start gathering in Friendship Park at 11:00 a.m. But as of 11:30, there were only a half-dozen demonstrators on hand. 

It's early yet, and no one likes to be the first person to a party. But one volunteer organizer (who declined to be identified by name) seemed a bit downcast. 

"This is not working out too well," she said just before leaving. 

So here we are. The general consensus is that if there's going to be chaos in the streets during G-20, it's going to happen today, thanks to an unpermitted march kicking off from Arsenal Park this afternoon.

Lots of people are expecting the worst, but I gotta tell you: Right now, I feel like there's a real chance that Pittsburgh becomes the Anti-Seattle. For every person I looked at and thought "this guy might be one of those anarchists I've been hearing so much about," I've seen at least a dozen police.

We'll know soon enough how this is going to shake out. When it does, there will be recriminations and accusations pointed in one direction or the other. And THAT will become the story of the G-20 for most of us.

The drama on the streets will be the only thing we take away from this whole event, because what's going on in the convention center itself is utterly detached from us -- totally over our heads. Last night, for example, I had a beer with a woman who works at the convention center, and who didn't even know what the G-20 is. Probably more of us are like that than we want to admit. 

So before that happens -- while we still have a few minutes to talk about something of substance -- I wanted to get in a few words about Joseph Stiglitz, a world-renowned economist who came to the Hill District yesterday. 

Stiglitz is the author of Globalization and its Discontents, and as the Wall Street Journal notes, "the academic face of the anti-globalization crowd." Suffice it to say that when Stiglitz was introduced to the crowd packed into the pews of Monumental Baptist Church, there was the kind of cheering -- including some ululation -- that economists rarely get. 

Stiglitz actually had several good things to say about the G-20. If nothing else, he said, it was more inclusive than the G-8, a much more select group of elite economic powers. He also lauded the fact that delegates would at least consider an issue dear to Stiglitz's own heart: establishing a more holistic approach to measuring key economic indicators.

(Sounds wonky, I know. But there is something deeply askew with the numbers we use to judge our economic health, like Gross Domestic Product. Such measurements regard every dollar spent as an economic boon  -- even if the dollar was spent for something socially damaging. I've heard it said that an ideal citizen, from an economic standpoint, is a person going through a lengthy divorce and suffering from cancer -- because addressing both those lamentable conditions requires spending a lot of money. Anyway, as Stiglitz points out -- how good can our economic measurements be if they showed the U.S. economy surging right up until the moment it collapsed?)

But there's still plenty of work to be done, Stiglitz said. There are in fact 192 countries in the world, meaning that the G-20 doesn't represent the vast majority of nations. For example, the only G-20 country in sub-Saharan Africa -- one of the most populous areas in the world -- is the country of South Africa. And they are hardly representative of other countries in that region. 

Again, sounds abstract. But consider an issue like global climate change. If predictions of rising sea levels pan out, small countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives will be swamped, losing countless acres of land and God knows how many people. As Stiglitz put it, "Even if we [waged] war on these countries, we couldn't do more damage" than global warming might do. The people with the most at stake in environmental decisions, then, are the farthest away from the table with the big-shot countries who create most of the problems. 

And in that sense, we are all Bangladesh. We're all being victimized by a group utterly detached from our concerns.

For example, Stiglitz warns that in many ways, our financial system is even more precarious than it was this time a year ago. Granted, the danger of bank collapse seems remote. But the bailout has reward "too-big-to-fail" Wall Street firms ... at a cost to the smaller banks that issue loans and mortgages that actually fuel the economy the rest of us live in. 

"We didn't focus on lending," Stiglitz said. "We focused on ... gambling. We've given money in the wrong direction." And as a result, we have only encouraged those same banks to take risks down the road. 

Meanwhile, even if the recession is officially "over," don't expect your own life to improve much. (Unless you work at Goldman Sachs, of course.) Stiglitz points out that for years, our own lifestyles were propped up by dubious financial practices as well. American wages have been stagnant or declining in recent years, Stiglitz noted, but American consumers were glutted with easy create, and got the message: "Don't let it bother you that your income is going down -- consume as if your income is going up."

"Most Americans have to realize that their standings of living are going down" in the years to come, Stiglitz added. 

This is just a cursory take on Stiglitz's talk -- and the guy talks a lot. I hope to post some video footage in the near future. And like I say, Stiglitz wasn't completely pessimistic. It's still possible that government could truly overhaul the financial system, he allowed: The French and Germans, he noted, are pushing a reform agenda very hard. But in the end, he concluded, "The best we can hope from a meeting like this is that it sets the agenda for the next meeting." 

Is that worth all the bullshit Pittsburghers are currently being subjected to? I don't know. But we get so consumed with traffic disruptions and unruly protesters, I think, that we often forget the actual substance of what's going on here. 

[Editor's note: Last night, I filed a brief dispatch about an impromptu marching-band demonstration, which took place as the Green Jobs rally in Point State Park was breaking up. Here's a fuller account by our Bill O'Driscoll. Reading it over, I'm reminded of all the media fearmongering that has surrounded the G-20. Based on the dire warnings we've heard about anarchists running wild through the streets, you wouldn't think 150 youthful activists could walk the nighttime streets of Pittsburgh -- with minimal police escort -- and not try to tear down a skyscraper.] 

As marchers reached the new PNC building, not far from Point State Park, they numbered 150 and were already in full cry -- with at least three snare drums, a french horn, a trombone and other brass, plus a clarinet. Many were part of an anarchist marching band called Breakaway, said Alex Lotorto, a Muhlenberg College grad who'd just moved to Pittsburgh and is involved with organizing G-20 protests.

The marchers had only a small police escort as they headed up Fifth Avenue: one cop near the front of the procession, whose job was to keep marchers on the sidewalk, and two police vehicles trailing behind. The police inside the vehicles never left their cars. 

The protesters carried signs urging a "Better World Beyond G-20," and most of their chants were in the "This is what democracy looks like" vein.

As they approached Fifth and Grant, an intersection dominated by BNY Mellon, they cahnted "Bankers, bankers, watch your back: / We don't protest, we attack." But over the course of the hour, they never attacked anything, and most of the route was deserted. 

It's not clear how much advance preparation went into the march. One participant, Mike Yoffee, said the march gathered spontaneously after the concert in Point State Park ended. But that didn't explain the typeset song sheets some marchers were carrying. 

Lacey MacAuley, who was taking photos of the march, said it had formed earlier in the day as a "text mob" -- a response, she said, to the commercialized music at the rally. ("Music should be of the people, by the people, for the people," she said.)

"We saw a need for learning the protest songs of our history," added Lotorto.

As the march approach the new Penguins arena, demonstrators spilled into the street. And while TV news crews had followed the march earlier, it was here that the demonstration receieved its first noticeable live audience: a handful of patrons from Aces and Deuces Loung and other nearby bars. Some barflies applauded the protest: One called out, "I'm still with the cause. My heart's wit'chall."

The police presence dropped away, and the protest began to break up about an hour after it began. It dwindled to 50, and some participants spoke of heading to Oakland. 

As we approached the more residential part of Uptown,somebody said, "Quiet down: We're going through a neighborhood."

And the marchers fell quiet.

This evening's Green Jobs rally at Point State Park was ... well ... less than entirely successful. Lots of empty chairs out there. Al Gore spoke via video, as did the indefatigable state Senator Jim Ferlo and Governor Ed Rendell. Plenty of police on hand, and some ACLU observers too. But nobody tried to infringe on Rendell's freedom of speech, more's the pity.

CP's Bill O'Driscoll says that as the Green Jobs event was wrapping up, some 150 people began an impromptu parade through the city, and along 5th Avenue and into Uptown. The demonstration featured an anarchist marching band and included chants like: "Bankers, bankers, watch your back. / We don't protest, we attack." But they didn't, and in fact the march dissipated more or less harmlessly.

Other than that, the best part of the Green Jobs thing was a bit of performance art taking place at the park's entrance. The demonstration was ostensibly a sales pitch for the "SurvivaBall": a sort of self-ambulatory escape pod -- or a "gated community for one" -- for CEOs who don't want to deal with the impact of global warming. There were living models wearing these things, and handing out brochures ...

See that goofy thing in the lower right-hand corner, that looks sort of like a stuffed deer tick with eyes? There were people wearing these things. As the brochures put it, "If you have a SurvivaBall, even if everyone else is dying, at least you can weather all storms." Before this week is out, I have a feeling I'm going to want to crawl in one myself.

Greetings from Downtown Pittsburgh, where the streets have been given over almost entirely to concrete dividers and black Cadillacs with diplomatic plates. 

The latest news ...

Marty Levine reports there are more complaints about city officials engaging in harassments tactics. This time, it's the Three Rivers Climate Convergence, the folks staffing a "climate camp" in Schenley Park. Camp organizers tell Levine that "The city took all our stuff" sometime Monday night. So either parks crews grabbed the environmental displays, or they fell through a hole in the ozone layer, or some damn thing. 

We've contacted the Department of Public Works, but have yet to receive a response.

The Convergence folks were a party to the ACLU's lawsuit against the city, alleging harassment by police. You may also recall that the Convergence were among the groups that wanted camp overnight in city parks. Their main reason for doing so was that it would better demonstrate green-living practices. But now perhaps we see another advantage: Camping overnight would allow the Convergence to keep an eye on their stuff.

In any case, the Convergence is probably done with Schenley -- the park will be shut down for a G-20 banquet taking place at Phipps Conservatory tomorrow night. 

Then, later tonight, police made a show of force outside the Greenfield headquarters of the G-20 Resistance Project. A spokesman for the group, Noah Williams, said activists were meeting at around 7 p.m. to discuss plans for protests to take place tomorrow and Friday. A dozen police vehicles rolled up outside the offices, located just off the corner of Murray and Hazelwood avenues. 

The police donned riot gear, but made no other move. "They hung around for a while, loaded up again and left" after a half hour, says Williams, who chalks up their departure to the presence of 12 legal observers on the scene. 

"I think it's a psychological operation -- a display of force, a sort of threat and intimidation."

But it didn't stop the meeting: Dozens of activists were still on hand two hours later. 

City Paper has made an inquiry to police for an explanation about this wacky stunt as well.

UPDATE: When we asked police spokesperson Diane Richard why the police saw fit to drop in on the Resistance Project folks, she said she'd look into it. But she cautioned that there might not be much more information available, because "If there was no incident there will be no report."

On the eve of the G-20, Downtown is buttoning up and battening down. Chinook helicopters overhead ... fences going up all over the damn place ... squads of state police walking around.

It's like East Berlin, except with a couple gyro shops thrown in. 

Oh, and have you heard about our Cultural District? It's really brought so much LIFE Downtown!

There are so many photos of boarded-up and blocked-off storefronts I can show you, though. What's more interesting is to see how some local businesses are trying to convince visitors that they don't exist by concealing or removing their name plates. 

We'll reveal the identity of these corporate citizens just as soon as the smoke clears.

Some Starbucks around town have also sought to conceal their identity. All this effort, even though anyone who can access Google Maps can find the location of just about any place they wish.

I do wonder, though, whether the folks at UPMC wished it was a little easier to take THEIR sign atop the Steel Building down. Probably not -- the impact of a street protest rarely reaches past the first floor. 

Just an update on the Seeds of Peace ... who I hope (for their sake) we won't be talking about too much any more.

Peter Dolan, a spokesperson for the group, says that things have settled down in the past 12 hours. The group is currently ensconced in the parking lot of Trinity Lutheran church on the North Side. 

"Today is really the first day that I've been able to do any cooking," said Dolan, whose group came to Pittsburgh to help feed other demonstrators. 

For now, it seems, police are willing to let the group use the church's lot. Police visited the group at around 10:30 last night, due to a complaint from a neighbor, but Dolan says "They were very polite." Even so, "I don't feel like it's the end of it," says Dolan. "It seems like they're just waiting until they find some other way of harassing us." 

Dolan said that one Seeds member who was arrested last week was released yesterday evening -- though her story may be more complicated than it first appeared. Early on, protesters alleged that police accused the woman of giving a false -- merely because she gave a shortened version of her first name. But Dolan says there may be more to it. 

"None of us actually knew her full name," because she'd joined with the group shortly before it came to Pittsburgh. After her arrest, the Seeds called a number they had for her sister ... and the sister gave a different last name than the one she was in jail for. Which means that she may have given a false last name after all. 

Dolan isn't sure: "She's keeping a low profile," he said. 

In any case, Dolan says he's enjoying Pittsburgh -- "during the times I haven't been detained. We've experienced a lot of different neighborhoods." And while he says several police officers seem to enjoy giving the group a hard time -- "I had an officer tell me I was a threat to the city because I'm so dirty, I probably have swine flu" -- everyone else has been "so nice to us. People at the Rock Room [in Polish Hill, where the group was lodged previously] were just stoked to have us in town." 

But I wouldn't blame Dolan if he was happy to leave. During our conversation, an ambulance siren went off not far away. "I hope that's not for anyone I know," Dolan said. 

And we're off!

The first high-impact protest of the G-20 has taken place on the West End Bridge. Activists have hung a banner from below the bridge deck, photographed by our very own Charlie Deitch. 

Not sure if you can read that, but it says: "Danger: Climate Destruction Ahead. Reduce C02 emissions now"

As I write this, police officers are beginning to repel from the bridge deck. (If you look closely, you can see them positioned above the banner, perched on the railing.) The protesters who deployed the banner are still hanging from below.

The demonstration attracted at least two military helicopters, and Deitch spotted roughly two dozen police officers -- most of whom appeared to be on loan from Erie, Pa. -- on the deck. There are also at least three law-enforcement boats in the water below. 

ADDED: The Tribune-Review is reporting that Greenpeace, who is claiming responsibility for the demonstration, also sought to hang a banner from the Fort Pitt bridge, but police caught activists before they could pull it off. 

"Police planned to bring some of the participants to Point State Park," the Trib says. I'm guessing it's not so they can get good seats for tonight's "Green Jobs" rally. 

Meanwhile, in a statement, Greenpeace says the banner 

"comes on the heels of a major address by President Barack Obama on climate change at the UN,  where he warned of the tremendous danger the world faces from global warming but failed to commit his country to the science-based action necessary to stop it."

Greenpeace wants the U.S. and other large countries to invest more heavily in green jobs ... and to help pay for forest protection and other environmental initiatives in poorer nations.