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JUST ANOTHER FORM OF IMPERIALISM
Column Written 12/3/99
Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved
If they [NGOs-Non-Governmental Organizations] are
allowed to hijack the World Trade Organization talks,
it will be a dangerous precedent that every
governmentand every global company will regret long
after the protests in Seattle."
Business Week magazine
The spectre of tens of thousands of workers,
environmentalists, human rights activists and
anarchists, seizing the streets of Seattle, was a
stirring sight indeed. Their opposition to the
antidemocratic, corporation-heavy World Trade
Organization earned them the enmity of the corporate
media, and the vocal condemnation of corporate
politicians. The WTO, the successor organization to
the GATT-General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade,
functions as a virtual shadow government, in fact a
Super-government, that rides roughshod over the
national and state concerns seeking to protect the
wages of workers, insure environmental standards, and
protect collective bargaining gains. To the extent
that the WTO consists of a collection of governments,
it in fact protects corporate interests: the primary
interest of capital, over and above all other
interests. In this context, the demonstrations were a
welcome and powerful corrective, expressing the views
of the many, not protecting the interests of the few.
Much can be said about the much-maligned anarchists
that rocked the mid-city, by attacking the shimmering
edifices of capital.
The press leaped at the opportunity to call them
"thugs," or "hooligans," who were involved in
"violence." What is missing from the reportage, of
course, is that those young folks attacked property,
not other beings. Meanwhile, the state, through its
police, attacked persons, kicking them, gassing them,
beating them, and jailing them. What, one wonders, is
the greatest form of "violence?" But, in the world
projected by the corporationist media, state
violence isn't real violence. Only individuals who
are unaffiliated with the state can therefore be truly
violent. What madness!
John Cavanaugh, from the Institute for Public Studies,
speaking at a public meeting in Seattle around the
time of the demonstrations, likened the powerful
anti-capitalist, anti-WTO demonstrations to another
well-known act of violent civil disobedience that
marked the beginning of the American Revolution.
That act of Civil Disobedience is now known as the
Boston Tea Party, where Americans demonstrated against
the trade domination of the British, by blackening
their faces (to hide their identity), dressing like
Indians (to hide their ethnicity), and by destroying
over 30,000 pounds of British Tea, by throwing boxes,
bundles, and bales into the Boston Harbor. Their
lament? Taxation Without Representation. To the Brits
and their Tory sympathizers, this was the action of
"thugs," "hooligans" and "ruffians," no doubt. But
what did they contribute to the public spirit of
resistance to the British Empire? The length and
breadth of capitalist corporation's control over the
lands, resources, and labor of millions of people in
the US and abroad (especially in the so-called Third
World) makes the grievance of Americancolonists
against
the British look remarkably petty.
The WTO is the unelected, privately-dominated body
that undermines democracy by its very existence. They
make the rules under which the world's vast economy is
organized. And all must submit to this economic
power, despite local, national and/or regional laws to
the contrary. For the only "law" that they respect is
the primacy of profit. Capital makes the rules;
labor dances to their tune. Consider, how very quickly
(overnight in fact!) Seattle cops created what was
termed a so-called "Protest Free Zone" in the
very heart of a major American city, to "protect" the
interests of foreigners, diplomats and businessmen, of
some 50 square blocks! A "protest free zone," is by
necessity, a "First Amendment-Free Zone," with the
word "free" meaning as little as the term used
in discussing "free trade." In what part of the
United States does the U.S. Constitution not apply?
In whose interest was this cordon sanitaire
established? The citizens of Seattle, or the monied
gentry of global capital?
Seattle revealed the fault line underlying the lie of
the great economic "miracle" of the 1990s. It
revealed the justifiable fears and anxieties at the
heart of millions of American workers. It revealed
who politicians work for. It revealed the nature of
the police. It can, it should be, a beginning.
=====
FIGHT FASCISM!!!
FREE ALL U.S. POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!!!
ABOLISH THE RACIST/CLASSIST DEATH PENALTY!!!
FREE THE PEOPLE!!!
FREE MOTHER EARTH!!!
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