Exclusive
WW photos from the WTO protests
The
Battle in Seattle by Harold Meyerson
WTO and global trade links
For a lot of people, last week's World Trade Organization
meeting in Seattle was a disaster.
The trade talks ended without any major agreements. European
negotiators derailed a U.S. effort to seal a deal on agricultural
exports. Representatives from developing nations refused
to look at issues of wages and working conditions.
In Seattle, downtown merchants claim they lost millions
in pre-Christmas sales.
And on Tuesday, Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, who
was once courted to be Portland's top cop, resigned after
failing to adequately prepare for the protests.
But for the thousands of activists--including scores of Portlanders--who
took to the streets, last week was a series of victories.
In this issue we bring you some of their stories.
The
Seattle Shift
BY
CAROLYN GUTMAN-DEY
Being in Seattle last week was like being at the epicenter
of an earthquake in the world of ideas. Like enormous plates
vying for dominance, the long-standing struggle between
opposing forces began to reach a point of no compromise.
When it hit, and as the aftershocks continued all week,
everyone felt the shift.
On Monday night, I sat in the overflow crowd in the basement
of a downtown church and listened to spiritual leaders from
eight religious traditions lead invocations and ask for
a forgiveness of Third World countries' debt.
Rumble.
Afterwards, we joined with thousands outside the church
and marched to the Kingdome, where we held hands and easily
encircled it.
Groan.
The next morning, courageous activists from around the
world took their places at strategic intersections and blocked
access to the convention center.
Crack.
Later Tuesday, labor leaders from around the world denounced
capitalism in front of 30,000 hard hats and tree huggers.
Rattle.
If you read the protesters' signs carefully, it wasn't
just about stopping the WTO meetings. It was about changing
our priorities from unbridled economic "growth" to a commitment
to preserve the well-being of people and the natural environment.
For me, the earth shook most strongly not when concussion
grenades went off just blocks from the Capitol Hill apartment
I was staying in, nor when tear gas stung my eyes and lungs
as I ventured out at 12:30 am to investigate.
Rather, the most invigorating time of my four days in Seattle
was witnessing an underreported debate held Tuesday night
at Town Hall, at the edge of the just-announced "no protest"
zone.
On one side sat Ralph Nader, a national leader in battling
GATT, NAFTA and now the WTO; Vandana Shiva, a powerful intellectual
and internationally known activist from India; and John
Cavanagh, author and board member of the International Forum
on Globalization, which co-sponsored the event. On the other
side sat Scott Miller, head of international trade for Proctor
& Gamble; David Aaron, U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce
for International Trade; and Jagdish Bhagwati, former economic-policy
advisor to the GATT director-general.
As Nader and Shiva brilliantly exposed the myths that uphold
our current system, and as Aaron in turn called their ideas
"dangerous," the audience sat riveted, except when they
jumped to their feet and cheered (a video clip of the debate
can be seen at www.progressproject.org). A crucial moment
for me was when Nader challenged Aaron to a five-hour debate
on the WTO, and Aaron accepted! I may be naive, but I feel
that something really good could come out of a debate like
that.
I went to Seattle to protest in the streets, support the
civil-disobedience folks and feel the earth move. I felt
my spirit move with it.
Carolyn Gutman-Dey, a substitute teacher
in Portland, studied the effects of globalization on education
at Portland State University. She was in Seattle from Monday,
Nov. 29, to Thursday, Dec. 2.
I
Was Jane WTO #520
BY
NANCY HAQUE
I just spent five days in the King County Jail, and I've
never felt stronger.
That isn't to say it was fun. I went to Seattle prepared
to be arrested. I had been trained in non-violent civil
disobedience, I had been coached on the rights of people
in custody. But none of us was ready for the brutality that
awaited us.
On Wednesday, Dec. 1, we were punished by cops who were
embarrassed by what had happened the day before. Not knowing
whether I'd be next, I watched the blood flow from the head
of a fellow protester who was singled out by the police.
Following my arrest, I glanced at an elderly woman with
me at Sandpoint Naval Base, where we were being held temporarily.
I noticed the fist-sized spot of blood on her coat and realized
that it was where her cuffed hands had been.
Later, an 18-year-old woman who was in my cell told me
she had been stripped naked and thrown into a solitary holding
cell. Others were sprayed with pepper spray and threatened
with more the next day.
Through it all, I also saw amazing displays of compassion
and solidarity. For example, to slow the jail system down,
none of us would give our names. So each of us was given
a wristband with the name Jane WTO, followed by a bar code
and a number. Mine was 520.
The women in my cell block were able to care for each other,
to hold each other while we cried, to laugh, sing and chant
together. At one point, for reasons that were never explained,
jail officials tried to separate me from the others in another
wing of the jail. I didn't want to go, and when I didn't
immediately comply, I was threatened with solitary confinement.
My cell mates responded by locking their arms around me,
singing, "Sí, se puede" ("Yes, we can"). The jail
officials let me stay.
The whole system seemed set up to break our spirit. The
guards yelled at us when we sang too loud or laughed too
loud or danced or even just touched each other.
As I look back at last week, I don't have any regrets.
In fact, I'm proud.
I'm glad that we were chanting "This is what democracy
looks like" as they took us into custody for our non-violent
protests. The fine line between our normal lives and the
police state made itself quite evident in the streets and
jails of Seattle.
What I'm left with is knowing in my heart that resistance
is beautiful. Yes, we won by shutting down the WTO, but
we also won in many more ways. The baptism by tear gas for
my generation of activists has made us warriors--and, judging
from my experience--loving warriors.
--Nancy Haque is an organizer with Portland
Jobs with Justice. She arrived in Seattle on Nov. 19. She
left, after being released from jail, on Dec. 5. She's been
charged with failure to disperse and blocking pedestrian
traffic.
Teach
Your Children Well
BY
DOLORES HURTADO
While the actions of a few U.S. protesters drew most of
the media attention last week, there was an incredible education
component in Seattle as well, a testament to the international
flavor of a growing movement.
For three full days at the packed 2,500-seat Symphony Hall
I heard French farmers, U.S. labor leaders, Dutch economists,
Chinese human-rights activists, African environmental leaders
and Malaysian writers all discuss the effects of the incredible
powers our governments granted the WTO.
As a longtime activist, I have never seen such an impressive
range of different groups working and marching together.
Portland has a coalition that is a microcosm of this phenomenon,
but seeing it operate globally brought home to me our potential
for becoming a mass populist movement that can make people,
not profit, the foundation of a sustainable world.
Shutting down the first day of the WTO meetings and then
seeing the whole session end in collapse was very gratifying.
I suspect that some Third World WTO delegates, complaining
about their exclusion from back-room deals, were emboldened
by the indignation in the streets about closed meetings.
But even more important is the fact that the major media
are now featuring our concerns about this concentration
of power in trans-national corporations, and the frightening
handover by our government of the right to make decisions
about our environment, working conditions and food protection.
We have started to make an impact on public opinion, and
this may be the most important spillover of the "Seattle
Round."
Dolores Hurtado lives in Lake Oswego and
is a member of the Portland chapter of the Alliance for
Democracy. She arrived in Seattle on Friday, Nov. 26, to
attend the various teach-ins and debates being held before
the WTO convened. She met up with other members of the local
Alliance chapter Tuesday for the big march.
Smashing
Success?
BY CULLY
GALLAGHER
Tuesday, Nov. 30. 10:45 am.
When I heard the first Nordstrom window smash, my guts
twisted.
I was wandering through downtown Seattle in an exuberant
daze. I had worked all morning alongside 40 other Portland
activists to help block WTO delegates from their meetings.
Although exhausted, wet and shivering, I felt fantastic.
All around me were fellow activists. I saw a swirling throng
of giant puppets, banners, dancers, chanters, human chains.
I had heard reports of at least one police tear-gas attack
on peaceful protesters, but otherwise everything was a success--we
had shut down the WTO morning session!
The sound of shattering glass cut through the celebrations
and provoked immediate responses. To my left, I heard a
fellow protester yell, "Shit! They'll ruin everything!"
To my right I heard, "Fuck yeah! I hope they get Starbucks."
My own body struggled with both reactions, jolted with fear
and tingling with undeniable glee.
On the one hand, I think some protesters overreacted to
the anarchists' destruction of property. Their action was
not mindless vandalism; it was activism consistent with
their philosophies. Their targets were mostly confined to
symbols of corporate exploitation (like Gap and Niketown),
wasteful materialism (jewelry stores) and government oppression
(police cars).
Still, although property destruction is not the same as
violence against humans, it is violence nonetheless; I could
feel it in my gut. Violence is a clumsy tool.
By noon, attention was shifting from focused activism toward
a vague circus of aggression. At the WTO meeting sites,
protest organizers could no longer fill all the gaps in
the human barricades, and more WTO delegates were getting
through. Meanwhile, many of the protesters had migrated
to cop-crowd standoff areas. Some stood on the front lines
and shook defiant fists at the police.
Though the police may have started the violence mid-morning
with unprovoked tear-gas attacks, the anarchists' aggressive
cop-baiting--both during their late-morning smashing spree
and at the early-afternoon standoffs--set the stage for
the afternoon's escalating violence. The anarchists became
the publicly acceptable excuse for police violence. The
resulting riots, in turn, legitimized the mass arrests of
peaceful protesters starting the next morning.
Returning to Portland on Wednesday morning, I felt Tuesday's
protests in were a qualified success. The positive impact
of activists might have been greater if the police and the
anarchists had kept a lid on their violence.
Cully Gallagher is a community-development
activist who lives in Northeast Portland. He traveled with
a group of friends to Seattle, where he joined fellow Portlanders
in an affinity group called the Tumbleweeds.
"Whose
Streets?"
BY GREGORY
KAFOURY
There is a time when the operation of the Machine becomes
so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take
part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got
to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels,
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to
make it stop.
--Mario Savio, Berkeley, 1964
People understood what was at stake last week. The WTO
was a coup.
Corporations now had the armies and the police forces of
the world to defend them. But on its triumphal march, the
WTO would have to pass through Seattle. And we would meet
it there.
The teach-ins, street theater, debates and marches set
the scene, but the goal in Seattle was to humiliate the
WTO, to bring it to its knees before the world. The delegates
and the dignitaries and all the princes of the New World
Order had to be literally stopped in their tracks, blockaded
in their hotels by human barricades.
Arm in arm through the night and the day, backed by tens
of thousands who stood with them, the people in the streets
held the line. When pushed back by rubber bullets and tear
gas, the people would find their breath, then surge forward
again, now reclaiming the streets, the intersections, recreating
the barricades. They drew inspiration from the courage of
those around them. A hoarse voice called out, then others,
until the chant shook the city:
"Whose streets? Our streets."
"Whose world? Our world."
The civil-rights demonstrations of the '60s were joyous
affairs. Human rights were the natural progression of history,
so we were certain we would win. The anti-war demonstrations
of the '70s grew increasingly angry as we realized that
our government was not simply misguided, but malevolent.
Seattle was different. While the power of the WTO was potentially
unlimited, it was not yet consolidated. We had a chance
in Seattle to derail the WTO, a chance that might never
come again. Victory lay in exposing the workings of the
WTO and forcing it to be debated on its merits. Victory
meant the creation of a new movement to reclaim the human
future from corporate power.
Because we understood what was at stake, we prevailed.
Gregory Kafoury is a Portland lawyer and
was co-director of the successful efforts to shut
down the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. He was in Seattle Nov.
27 and 28 to serve as magistrate for the Global People's
Tribunal on Corporate Crimes Against Humanity.
That
Wasn't My Nightmare
BY BETSY
TOLL
The first thing I did when we got back to Portland on Tuesday
night was call my 83-year-old mother. Her voice sounded
weak and frightened. "Are you hurt?" she asked. "Are you
in a curfew? This is so awful."
At first I thought my mother, whose health was failing,
was delusional. My family had just returned from an exhilarating
day in Seattle. Why was my mother, who marched with me in
protests against the Vietnam War, so worried?
"Everything's fine, Mom. We're at home." I could hear her
TV in the background. "Isn't the march on the news? The
kids had a great time; it was like a festival, a huge, colorful,
powerful parade, tens of thousands of people. No one got
hurt, Mom, there was no trouble. What curfew?"
I flipped on my own TV and my mother's fear and confusion
were explained. Surreal images of Darth Vader-cloaked cadres,
clouds of tear gas, smashed windows and angry people filled
the screen. Where was this battle scene? Whose nightmare
was this anyway? It certainly wasn't my Seattle experience.
Before daylight that morning, Bill and I had bundled our
12-year-old daughter, Alec, and 8-year-old son, Marshall,
into the car, along with pillows and blankets, sandwiches
and snacks, and headed north. We joined tens of thousands
of people just like us to protest an institution whose policies
and presence we find intolerable.
We marched with dock workers, schoolteachers, homeless
people, veterans, indigenous people, students, tree sitters
and office workers. We listened to trade unionists, human-rights
activists, educators and clergy from around the world decrying
a system that directly threatens sovereignty, workers, ecosystems,
food safety, the poor and the well-being of people everywhere.
Reading and watching the week's events in the news, I feel
robbed--"disappeared"--by sensational tabloid-type coverage.
Video footage and photo spreads focus ad nauseam on the
angry vandals and agents provocateurs who break windows
and spray-paint walls. The non-violent marches, civil disobedience,
rallies, press conferences and teach-ins are lost in a footnote
or not there at all.
I marched with my mother 30 years ago in a cause we believed
in. I took my kids to Seattle last week so they could experience
first-hand the power of doing the same. I want them to know
that standing together, risking danger, speaking truth and
committing to a vision larger than your own life is a fundamental
right and responsibility of American citizens.
They might not get that in public school, but they got
a taste of it marching through downtown Seattle.
I'm glad we went, and we'll be there next time.
Betsy Toll, of Northeast Portland, is
a member of Living Earth, a local group that advocates for
changes in cultural and ecological values.
The
Battle In Seattle
BY HAROLD
MEYERSON
The last time the World Trade Organization had a major
meeting, it was in Singapore, and now we know why.
Singapore, of course, is the city-state that accords near-perfect
freedom to banks and corporations while jailing political
activists and caning people who chew gum in public. When
WTO ministers gathered in Singapore in 1997, their business
was unimpeded by any outside agitators.
That Seattle wasn't going to be another Singapore was never
in question. Last Tuesday, though, Seattle wasn't even Seattle.
It was more like Petrograd-for-a-Day. The TV news was filled
with replays of the day's violence, but that was just a
small part of the Seattle revolution, and something that
hundreds of demonstrators personally tried to stop. Rather,
like Petrograd circa 1917, Seattle 1999 had something for
nearly every species of reformer and revolutionary. Here
was economist Bob Kuttner, with a scholarly presentation
to an upscale and decorous gathering on the perils of laissez-faire
capitalism. Over there, Ralph Nader was giving a more spirited
rendition of the same basic tune. On the waterfront, the
entire port clanged shut, as the longshoremen welcomed the
trade ministers to Seattle by closing off trade altogether.
Down one boulevard paraded 100 uniformed airline pilots
indignant about growing employer power; down another, 100
environmentalists decked out in turtle suits to dramatize
the WTO's overturning of national endangered-species laws.
Not to mention the thousands of students who trudged downtown
from the University of Washington, the leaders of the American
union movement who suddenly sounded like Gene Debs, and
the nearly 20,000 workers who paraded around the outskirts
of downtown while 20,000 other activists, most of them college-age,
peaceably sat down in the middle of downtown and kept the
WTO from convening.
Most astonishing, there was the intermingling of all these
disparate movements, generations, nations and lifestyles.
There were the kids blocking the WTO delegates, who parted
like the Red Sea to make way for a group of steelworkers,
identifiable by their blue-poncho rain gear as members of
the most ubiquitous of the protesting unions this week.
There was Amparo Reyes, a single mother who puts in a 74-hour
week (for a lordly $69) at her local maquiladora, shouting
"Long live the Zapatistas!" at the official AFL-CIO rally.
And amid Teamsters chanting "Hoffa! Hoffa!" and baby-faced
animal rightsters chanting "No violence! No violence!" there
was the sign that proclaimed, "Teamsters and Turtles--Together
at Last!"
Team the Teamsters with the turtles, and what you get could
well be an ideological turning point--or at least, an end
to the unchallenged dominance that right-wing economics
has enjoyed for the past two decades.
For 20 years now, the greatest achievements of the world's
industrial democracies--the broadly shared prosperity created
by unions and social insurance, the attempts to restore
and preserve clean air and water, the whole idea of leisure
time--have been eroded by the resurrection of laissez-faire
economics on the global level, even while living standards
in much of the developing world have been held in check
by the coming of laissez-faire. For 20 years, movements
that knew how to change national, state and local laws were
paralyzed by this shift to the global.
At first, this new global terrain was a realm of practices,
not laws; there was no legislature to lobby or win over;
there was just business without government--Singapore writ
large. National governments remained, but they were whipsawed
by multinational businesses just as state governments had
been whipsawed by the first national businesses--the railroads--100
years ago.
At which point, the global corporate and financial powers--preponderantly
American--made a serious mistake. Mere practices weren't
enough for them; they wanted some global codes. France was
still blocking the exports of American food out of some
sentimental attachment to its farmers; nations of the former
communist bloc were pirating American films without paying
the studios; and investment houses wanted developing nations
to make their banks and businesses keep a clean set of books
so they'd know what exactly they were buying. So five years
ago, the governments of the West obliged their major businesses
by bundling all their separate trade deals into one neat
package and creating the WTO to make sure that transnational
investment would encounter no significant obstacles.
In short, without fully grasping exactly what they'd done,
they created at least the appearance of a legislature. Its
mandate was limited to helping global capital, and its members
weren't chosen by election, but it had an office, held meetings
and set rules. At long last, global capital had a street
address.
And last week, in one convulsive outburst that had been
building for 20 years, the movements shut it down.
Convulsive, in this instance, means neither violent nor
unplanned. Before the Ted Kaczynski wannabes took over some
downtown intersections late Tuesday afternoon, the civil
disobedience of the kids was both morally irreproachable
and tactically brilliant.
Indeed, the free-spirit wing of the American Left was a
lot better organized than the two other groups on the street--labor
and the cops. The unions had to reroute their 20,000 marchers
so they wouldn't plow into the downtown sit-down. That called
for a midmarch U-turn, which half the unions executed while
the other half wandered blindly into sit-down central. Roughly
100 briskly trotting and generally apprehensive union parade
marshals fanned out in search of their missing columns.
As for the police, they were badly outnumbered until well
after nightfall. Despite a full year of planning, police
officials couldn't come up with a remotely accurate assessment
of their needs.
The kids, by contrast, knew every street, every hotel,
every plausible technique for linking arms to one another
and the nearby lamppost. They managed to block off the Paramount
Theater, where the opening session was supposed to take
place. When I got there, the standoff was almost done; just
a few delegate cars remained obstructed by the sit-downers,
whose numbers had dwindled to around 30. Ten feet in front
of them was a line of nine cops, in riot helmets and holding
their nightsticks.
Rayna Rusenko, a Portland worker-rights activist, said
she and her fellow protesters had heard organizers say that
bodies were needed at the Paramount, and off they'd gone.
Other than one set of parents with two young children, and
two middle-aged men, they all seemed to be in their early
20s or late teens.
There was no cop-taunting on their part, just a steady
refrain that they were committed to nonviolence, which under
the circumstances was in equal measure a plea to keep the
cops cool and a bit of a moral dare. The scene remained
tense until a middle-aged African-American man, in a jacket
that clearly identified him as an ironworker (one of labor's
lost legion, apparently), came by and, in a deliberately
light tone, started talking to the cops about how the sit-downers
wanted decent wages and benefits for all workers, cops included.
At which point, the squad commander emerged from behind
his officers, looked at the man and said, "We'd sure like
to get ironworkers' wages." Everyone laughed; the tension
was gone.
The ghost of the '60s hung over the afternoon: There was
a loud recording of Hendrix playing "The Star-Spangled Banner";
Tom Hayden walked up and down the street; the crowd chanted
"The whole world's watching" when the police fired off tear
gas. Gassing and pepper spray were the cops' preferred modes
of attack on Tuesday, and the clouds wafted over the just
and unjust alike. Young protesters complained to me of the
police brutality. But at the risk of sounding like the most
hackneyed of grizzled elders, I am compelled to say: I was
in Chicago in 1968, and I know a police riot, having been
on the receiving end of one, when I see one. In the opening
hours of the protests, at least, Seattle's finest were comparative
pussycats. They made scarcely any arrests, and when an altercation
threatened to get out of hand--when the black-clad self-proclaimed
anarchists trashed display windows and stores--they resolutely
refused to do anything that could have resulted in a serious
injury to anyone.
In all the news coverage on Seattle TV last Tuesday night,
there was just one shot of a gun being pulled, not by a
cop or a demonstrator, but by a WTO delegate frustrated
by his inability to get to the hall.
One of the dignitaries who couldn't get into the WTO's
opening ceremonies was the featured speaker, Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright. It was the second of two disasters
to befall Albright in Seattle, the first being a private
meeting the day before with AFL-CIO president John Sweeney
and other union leaders. Sources report that Sweeney and
company let Albright know the full extent of their rage
at the Clinton administration's deal to let China into the
WTO.
For labor, that move instantly negated all the kind words
that Clinton and his lieutenants were mouthing about raising
the profile of labor and environmental concerns within the
WTO. The international organization acts by consensus, certainly
by consensus of its major members, and the prospect that
China--which independent authorities estimate has at least
850,000 workers in forced-labor camps run by the army, where
child labor is rampant and unions are viewed as treasonous--would
permit the WTO to pass any binding labor code was nonexistent.
In its 60-year relationship with the Democratic Party,
labor has grown inured to the thousand casual affronts the
party inflicts upon it, but the China deal, coming when
it did, was a bit much. At least partly in consequence,
the rhetoric at labor's Tuesday rally was a throwback to
a time when labor was an outsider to the political system.
Standing before 15,000 unionists and 5,000 activists from
environmental, human-rights, church and consumer groups,
with stilt-walkers decked out as corporate demons, sporting
death's-heads and Edward Scissorhands fingers, AFSCME president
Gerry McEntee addressed the crowd. The union head most deeply
enmeshed in Beltway inside politics, McEntee seemed to lift
his talk from Karl Marx's manifesto. "The system turns everything
into a commodity!" he bellowed. "A rain forest in Brazil,
a library in Philadelphia, a hospital in Alberta! We have
to name that system: It is corporate capitalism!"
There's a lot more at work here than pique, of course.
When it comes to the WTO, McEntee and Sweeney are outsiders,
just like the union leaders of 100 years ago, who could
get no one in the national government to hear them out.
As the rally made clear, their frustration is matched by
European trade unionists. The governments in power in France,
Italy, Germany and Britain are theirs, after all; they are
socialist or social democratic or labor. Both separately
and together, though, these governments are even more relentless
advocates of free trade, devoid of binding labor standards,
than Clinton's.
Some of the historically left European governments proclaim
themselves the champions of the developing nations, who
resolutely oppose transnational labor or environmental codes.
The problem, as international trade union leader Bill Jordan
notes, is that they have "no class analysis of the Third
World," where the elites represented in government profit
from trade deals no matter how grotesque are the sweatshops
they create. While support for labor standards is nowhere
to be heard from the trade delegates of the developing nations,
it was sounded repeatedly by the South African, Caribbean,
Malaysian, Mexican and Chinese union activists (some of
whom had spent years in prison for their efforts) who addressed
Tuesday's AFL rally. "What's good for Ford workers in Detroit
is good for Ford workers in Mexico and South Africa," said
Glen Mpufane, a South African mine worker who called for
a global minimum wage.
Mass opinion has always been dubious about free trade.
One recent University of Maryland poll shows 78 percent
public support for the idea of making labor and environmental
concerns a factor in all trade deals.
Elite opinion, however, has long viewed the case for free
trade as axiomatic. Free trade made nations richer, which
made them more democratic, except when it didn't (one of
those pesky anomalies the theory hasn't fully explained
away). But labor has already forced one key segment of the
elite--the administration and its consulting ideologists
at the Democratic Leadership Council--to alter its rhetorical
position on trade. This week, everyone from Treasury Secretary
Lawrence Summers to trade rep Charlene Barshevsky has suddenly
been talking up the virtues of a humane global-trade order.
"We must pay more attention to labor issues," Summers wrote
in last Monday's Financial Times, casually jettisoning
the beliefs of a lifetime.
It is rhetoric, of course. The working group the administration
seeks will be powerless, and the entry of China will effectively
negate all subsequent attempts at protecting worker rights.
But rhetoric, however insincere, can have an effect. In
this case, it reflects not only the political needs of Al
Gore, who can't afford to have the administration estrange
labor any more until the primary season has passed, but
also a shift in the intellectual climate.
The momentum for laissez-faire policies in domestic affairs
has peaked. The war on the state waged by Reagan, Thatcher
and Gingrich has been called off. Only at the level of world
trade does the cult of laissez-faire continue to hold sway,
but the case is getting harder and harder to make. If increased
wage equity and environmental safeguards are once again
valid concerns in national affairs, it grows harder and
harder to argue that they're mere sideshows to the transnational
economy and society.
While elite opinion begins to waver, popular opinion has
now gained a focus. At last week's marches for debt forgiveness
and labor, people came out of their shops and businesses
to cheer the marchers on. While the trashing and gassing
was proceeding apace last Tuesday afternoon, just three
blocks away office workers laughed as a chorus sang mock
Christmas carols with anti-WTO lyrics. There was anger at
the inconveniences the marches caused, anger at the anarchists
for sure. But on the whole, the protesters in Seattle were
nobody's outside agitators. These were the kids from Wash
U and Reed, the ladies from First Unitarian, the guys at
Freightliner and Boeing. It was Seattle and Portland and
Madison and Wooster marching this week.
To the WTO, Singapore has never looked better.
--Harold Meyerson is the executive editor
of LA Weekly, which has a longer version of this
story on its Web site at www.laweekly.com.
This article comes to WW via AlterNet, a project
of the
Independent Media Institute.
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Media Institute (AlterNet link)
Institute
for Public Accuracy (Corporate Watch page)
Global
Exchange (Global Economy page)
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Willamette Week | originally
published December 8,
1999
|
