________________________________________________________________________________ A few days ago I spoke to a Japanese exchange student from Seattle. She participated in the protest but left when she smelled tear gas and realized she could get beaten by the police. Coming to the protest was a part of her education in the U.S., as she understood - and Japanese are serious about that, it seems, but getting beaten up by the U.S. police was kind of too much of an extracurricular activity she was ready to take. She has a course in American Politics at the university and her teacher offered her and other students to go to the protest and get credited for that. 90% of her class, including her, took up on the offer. She was right there, a first hand, non-partisan observer, she did it solely for a purpose of learning about American political process. And what did she observe? She observed that police caused/started the violence. They freaked out, she told me. They just started shooting rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd for no reason at all. Then the 'anarchists' broke out and started smashing windows, setting fires and breaking stuff. And she left. She is very careful, polite and oblique when asked what does that make her think about the U.S. political process. Unexpectedly or not, Clinton in the end sided with the protesters, allowing the trade talks to sink ungracefully and drawing the angry wrath of Washington Post, Newsweek and other editorial pens. They all made the same assumption: Clinton is protecting the U.S. labor, all right, near-sightedly though, but he is definitely hurting the third-world workers by trying to tie the labor laws to trade talks. What's the matter with him? His place is to protect the rich faceless corporations, not think about the quality of life of some poor illiterate nobodies in some country that he probably can't even find on the map. Plus, the delegates from the third world countries were furious. That was their general take on the collapse of WTO talks. But they never seemed to ask themselves whether the delegates from the third world countries were the legitimate representatives of the people from those countries. I highly doubt so. The majority of third world countries are run by oligarchies that are deep in the pockets of multi-national corporations. They just look our for their share in the looting of their peoples and how to stash their off-shore accounts. Anarchists that, perhaps not intentionally, made such a reckless stand of American president at the WTO conference more politically understandable, destroyed quite a list of stores: Bon Marche, Carroll Fine Jeweler, Washington Mutual Bank, FAO Schwarz, Banana Republic, Warner Bros Store, Speedo, Nike Town, Planet Hollywood, Old Navy, Eileen Fisher, Nordstrom, Seafirst Bank and two (2) Starbucks caffes. Starbucks, once an epithome of the Northwestern cool, in recent years became viewed as everything that went wrong with the U.S., as something that took away and destroyed the tradition of the Northwestern laid back grande latte lifestyle, so a special hatred is reserved for it. In the Austin Powers sequel Starbucks was chosen as headquarters for Dr. Evil (I am sure that Starbucks paid for 'product placement'; I am not sure if they were cheerful about how they were placed...), and in The Fight Club, the Starbucks caffe is destroyed with a giant metal ball in one of the "project mayhem" operations - and the theater (at least when I was watching it) was screaming in positive excitement. The black clad troops on the streets of Seattle definitely reminded me of the 'project mayhem', though. Newspapers say they come from Eugene, Oregon. Media link them to John Zerzan, writer who made his home there, anarchist and a close friend of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Eugene must be a swell place. J.Palahchiuk, who wrote The Fight Club, also comes from around there, and Valdas Analeuskas, a Lithuanian dissident who just recently wrote a book about his disappointment with the U.S., lives in Eugene. Eugene is very high on my list of places to visit. One last observation: for quite a while capital and those who control it move freely across the globe, discussing things that annoy them, like tariffs and trade barriers in talks behind closed doors, while the rest of us are still subjected to customs, visas, immigration laws, and other anachronistic chains of the nation state. In 19th century Marx envisioned capitalists entrenched in their nation states and globally organized work-force dictating terms. He was painfully wrong - it happened exactly the opposite: the nation states were retained and politicians employed to make work-force nationally conscious, parcelized, making them more pliable to exploitation and more marketable as consumers, while capital and those who own it float freely over the national borders like some modern day nobility. The story of Seattle shows that this is changing now: bringing unions and environmentalists, French and US farmers, political organizations and Medecins Sans Frontieres together. The new technology is out and easily accessible by more and more people - the Internet - that makes that change possible. Now not only the capital is global, but those who produce it and depend on its distribution are becoming a part of the global equation, too. This makes the process of globalization more socially acceptable. ivo # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org