MISCmedia for 12/3/99
Apres WTO, Le Deluge

THIS WILL PROBABLY be the last I have to say about the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle this week. Unless I come up with some splendid new insights about it all later on. Which I probably will.

Among Tuesday's oddities was a small procession within the officially-permitted AFL-CIO parade denouncing human-rights abuses in Vietnam, a nation trying to join the WTO. The marchers carried flags of the old South Vietnam. Decades ago, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, died during a long, futile attempt to preserve the corrupt South Vietnamese regime against the Communists who'd taken over North Vietnam and wanted to "liberate" the rest of the country.

The U.S. excuse at the time was we were saving South Vietnam for "democracy." Since there wasn't much un-fixed democracy there (one "presidential election" involved the incumbent leader requiring all candidates to be approved by a commission he appointed, which determined nobody but him was qualified to run), all we seemed to really have fought for was the country's membership in the capitalist trading bloc.

A quarter-century later, the still-Communist rulers of the united Vietnam are as eager as any other developing-country regime to welcome Nike assembly plants and log exports. The exile protesters waving the old South Vietnamese flag are a bit mistaken in their affinities; aside from some health-care and education subsidies, unified Vietnam's becoming just the sort of friendly-to-foreign-business but hostile-to-internal-dissent country South Vietnam had been. As shown currently elsewhere in east Asia, democracy and capitalism needn't coincide.

Mainstream media coverage of the protests, in the daily papers and on the TV stations, was about what you'd expect: long on perceived threats to "public safety;" long on sob stories about how awful this is for upscale retailers; insistent upon defending officials' actions as restrained and responsible (even questioning whether police had been too lenient!); short on insight or on street-level views; lousy at distinguishing the thugs from the real protesters; even worse at distinguishing between the different (sometimes contradictory) factions among the real protesters.

Unexpectedly, the best mainstream-media coverage was in Seattle Weekly.

Dan Halligan writes:

"Insurance policies do cover vandalism, which is what happened. But you can be damn well sure Nordstrom and other downtown big businesses were irked enough with what was going on that they got the police to force people into the residential neighboorhoods of Capitol Hill rather than keep them downtown where they could have had a contained peaceful protest without putting as many citizens at risk."

What it all might mean: On one level, the WTO protests and related circuses could be interpreted as a spectacle of order vs. chaos. On one side, the economic ministers of most of the world's nations gathered as part of their ongoing arbitrations to grease the wheels of commerce. On the other side, assorted interest factions who may have little in common except a beef against the rule of Global Business.

The WTO and its supporters foresee a single planet, where everyone's united behind the all-overriding goals of development, prosperity, and profits. Where central economic planning, that former Socialist buzzword, is employed to make the world safe for business.

The many nonviolent protest factions foresee a more decentralized new century; one in which all sorts of people in all sorts of places are empowered by the new info and transport technologies to do all sorts of things; to persue their own national, regional, or tribal agendas.

Some of these societies may choose to pursue priorities other than Business Above All. Some might turn high trade levels or high GNPs aside in favor of social safety nets, or perserving family farms, or preserving local cultural expressions, or (in some Islamic societies) preserving religious purity, or (in some other countries) preserving national power structures against regional insurgencies.

The WTO wants a future of certainties, of consensus, of uniformity. The assorted anti-WTO groups want a future of disagreements, of passions, of opportunity.

You can guess which 21st Century I'd rather live in.

OTHER WTO SOURCES:

• Independent Media Center
• SeattleWTO.org
• Eat the State!
• Photos by Wally Glenn
• Free Seattle Radio
• Communications From Elsewhere
• Photos by John Kieltyka
• Photos from Hi-Score Arcade
• Buy riot souvenirs on eBay!
• Law Enforcement Brutality in Seattle, edited by Tess Bruney
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Seattle Weekly
• Z Magazine
• One World
• USA Today on 'Teamsters and turtle protectors on same side'
• Tom Paine.com
• Mobilization Against Corporate Globalization
• World Trade Watch Radio
• World Trade Observer
• AlterNet
• Trade Watch
• People for Fair Trade
• WTO Watch
• Bridges Trade News Digest
• Mid-Atlantic Infoshop
• Salon

TOMORROW: A weekend extra, with other views on the marches.

MONDAY: We hope to go lighter and discuss a proposed Pacific Northwest theme park.

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Parts one and two of our WTO coverage.
• The "new secessionists" somehow think business still has too little power vs. government.
• Can the World Trade Organization protesters get beyond the limited ambitions of the Lifestyle Left?
• The new Coldwater Creek store sells the fantasy of living on the land but not off it; while the new Ballard Fred Meyer hypermarket tries to look like the steel plant it replaced.
• Parts one, two, and three of a look back at Ed Bellamy's Looking Backward, which promised that by now we'd have complete socio-economic equality but not computers.
• Imagining a newspaper for the Net age.
• Some of today's more perverse, ephemeral "art forms."
• I still kvetch about arrogant San Francisco; but is Seattle now no better?
• Wacky emails received here lately, plus other fun short stuff.
• Can you tell me how to get to Coronation Street?
• Guys who fight aren't necessarily copying Fight Club.
• The history of trying to get away from it all.
• Does postmodern fiction trash old hierarchies or just build new ones; can't we just get past PoMo yet; and can we imagine a more proactive future?
• Ron Harris's journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.

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• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
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