By the
pond Seattle was an end, and a beginning
By ARTHUR JONES
What did the battle in Seattle
mean?
The End. And The Beginning.
To recap: World Trade Organization members gathered in Seattle the
first week of December 1999 to further globalize world trade, to knock down any
remaining elements of national sovereignty. Also gathered were members of
hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, labor, environmental and other
groups.
In Seattle, issues were paraded in the streets rather than debated
in the Green Room (named for a room in Geneva, Switzerland, where
you-scratch-my-back-Ill-scratch-yours trade meetings among the First
World rich and powerful are held).
In return, Seattle unleashed its modest variant of the enraged
powers-that-be response. Not quite up to the standards of the Peterloo Massacre
(when sabre-slashing soldiers were loosed in 1819 on English protesters seeking
lower food prices) or in 1914 when John D. Rockefellers deputized thugs
shot through the tents housing Colorado families and strikers. The Seattle
police force isnt as practiced as a British prime ministers or
American robber barons.
Meanwhile, inside the World Trade Organizations hallowed
halls, the United States and the European Union had already decided that if the
rest of the world was hungry, its because they cant handle
globalization, so let them eat cake. As far as the powerful were
concerned, it was simply a matter of whose cake the world would eat. The
Americans wanted it to be American cake, and the Europeans, European cake.
However, Seattle was about democracy, not just trade. And to
understand that requires an historical reprise.
Item 1: In July 1789, the simple English village peasantry was
astonished by a rare sight: the local nobility, the aristocrats, suddenly
attending church on a Sunday. What could it mean?
In an era of slow communications, it meant that English
aristocrats had heard about the French Revolution and the storming of the
Bastille before the rural villagers had. The powerful were fearful for their
lives. Would the French Revolution jump the English Channel? No wonder they
were at church.
Item 2: At almost the same time, around most English villages,
there was a common. Its a word still used to describe open,
public land. The villagers used it for common grazing. But the landowning
aristocracy and local squires, feeling the pressure of agricultural imports and
the need to engage in high farming (the 18th-century term for
agribusiness), decided more acreage and larger farms were imperative in order
to compete. The squires and their like enclosed the commons. They simply took
the land. The farming peasantry who could no longer make a living found
themselves working in the dark, Satanic mills of the Industrial
Revolution and living in slums. (Its happening today from Mexico to
Malaysia.)
Item 3: Bowling along a highway behind an 18-wheeler hauling those
huge international shipping containers, youll occasionally see a baby
blue one with a white star on it and the name Maersk. In Denmark, its a
name to conjure with. The Maersk familys shipping firm was once the small
nations largest corporation. The story goes that early in the 19th
century, when it was time for the company to pay taxes, Maersk would meet with
a cabinet member and strike a deal on how much Maersk was willing to pay versus
how much the government wanted.
Item 4: When two or more are gathered in Mammons name in the
first class lounge of any airport, or at their clubs off Park Avenue, or in
Paris or on Londons Pall Mall, when men keep their limousines running
late into the night outside international meetings of business insiders or
World Bankers at hotels where the room rate exceeds $800 a night -- the fix is
in.
Item 5: When the satraps and advance folk of those interests --
meaning the appointed officials or the elected officials whose election was
funded by the late night financial and corporate wheeler-dealers -- when they
gather for something called a Green Room meeting, to divide up world trade to
suit the world powers, the fix also is in.
In Geneva, maybe. In Seattle, it wasnt.
Seattle was beginning of The End of that way of doing world trade,
that sort of business.
Now to The Beginning.
What followed the French Revolution was the dissemination of the
rights of man that in time came to include the rights of women. These were new
concepts for the soon-to-be attempted Western democracies, democracies not
granted, but won. (And its taken two centuries to just get democratically
this far.)
What followed the enclosure of the commons and the departure of
the peasantry to the factories was, in time, the trade union movement.
What followed the European and American world, where governments
and wealth, Maersks or Rothschilds, Morgans or Baruchs, went one-on-one with
their government counterparts, was a public taxation system open to view and
public vexatious dispute.
And what happened at Seattle -- call it the storming of the Green
Room -- was the first wedge of democracy. The protesters were asserting the
right of nations and movements, regardless of size, to take part in public,
open, contentious, vexatious negotiation on world trade.
The various factions in the Seattle street parliament included,
but were not limited to, environmentalists, the labor movement and protectors
of child laborers. They are kin to the small nations locked out of the Green
Room. In Seattle, the nations that made the deals included only the United
States and similar heavyweights, along with a handful of normally left-outs
like Brazil, Egypt and Singapore. The Seattle club was to decide The Fate of
the World. Or at least of World Trade.
The little guys wouldnt have any. They protested. By and
large peacefully.
They protested because globalization is calling up from the bowels
of the earth a global democracy, whether the movers and shakers want it or
not.
And when the national security state attempts to gas or smack down
the protesters into the old mold, the world takes to the Internet, the Web
site, the e-mail -- the new Jacobin cell. (Frances revolutionaries were
organized into cells; the name came from an old monastery where the first
meeting was held.)
But we must not fall into the trap of thinking that, because of
Seattle, much has changed. The financial corporate culture certainly wont
turn the other cheek. The Masters of the Universe are not at this moment
riffling through the pages of Pope John Paul IIs World Peace Day message,
responding to his invitation to economists and financial professionals,
as well as political leaders, to recognize the urgency of the need to ensure
that economic practices and related political policies have as their aim the
good of every person. More likely, they are dusting off their copies of
Machiavellis The Prince.
To repeat, Seattle was a street meeting because the normal venues
for democracies, parliaments and congresses have been bought by the limocrats.
History tells the tale. The only way world trade is going to
function fairly is for the little guys to get their acts together.
Environmentalists and poor nations have to link arms to overcome.
They need the clout that numbers and pressure bring.
The First World is looting the planet. Thailand goes into a
tailspin because of flawed U.S. policies? Thats OK. The First World
corporations dont wait until the dust settles; they go in and snap up the
bargains in banking and financial and industrial infrastructure at fire sale
prices.
Thailand and South Korea and Indonesia wake up to find they are in
new hands, American more often than not. These nations politicians know
all that. Its why India built a fence around itself for years, hoping
protectionism would keep India Indian.
Globalization bulldozes down everyones fences. Small nations
dont want to throw in their lot with America, Europe and Japan, and get
swallowed up. They dont want only to keep their name on the door while
First Worlders own the entire building.
But laissez-faire capitalisms supporters, the
neoconservatives, say, Nonsense! Join the one-world family, in which the
rich get richer and the poor get further screwed.
Its happening. And if the little movements and big labor and
poor nations large and small, dont hang together, by God theyll
hang separately. The One World will be complete, on First World terms.
Before the next World Trade Organization meeting, presumably in
Geneva, the poor nations and the environmentalists, labor and those who depend
on their childrens labor for tonights meal and tomorrows
rent, need to get together on their own and sort out how they can cooperate.
And on what.
And once more hold their meeting in the street.
So the world can see who attacks them next time.
Arthur Jones is NCRs editor-at-large.
National Catholic Reporter, March 10,
2000
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