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Seattle and beyond: making the connection in the 21st century

It was immensely significant for black America that the last major public demonstration in the U.S. in the 20th century was a protest over global economics and trade. More than forty thousand people came to Seattle to oppose the policies of the World Trade Organization, which since 1995 has functioned like an international cabal in league with powerful corporate and financial interests. Labor activists went to Seattle to force the WTO to enact trade sanctions against nations that use child labor, prohibit labor unions and that pay slave wages to their workers. Environmental activists came to Seattle to pressure the WTO to ensure environmental safeguards would be part of any global trade agreements.

What motivated both labor and environmentalists is the political recognition that issues like human rights, employment and healthcare cannot be addressed individually as separate issues. Nor can they be effectively discussed only in the context of a single nation-state. Capital is now truly global, and any analysis of specific socioeconomic problems that may exist in our country must be viewed from an international perspective.

The oratory sweepstakes

You may think a person would bring up the subject of political rhetoric in our day only to dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln and Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.

What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be forever revered for setting new standards in political language.

My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is rapidly developing a style that may yet become comparable to his father's. He is a master of the perfectly opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan's famous line in the 1980 campaign -- "There you go again!" -- was carefully scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer.

Examples:

  • "Whatever's fair."
  • "Whatever's right."
  • "I’m all right on that."
  • "Whatever is fair between the parties."

And, a recent gem of opacity:

Eternal vigilance is the price of ...

Eternal vigilance is the price of ... um, well, guess we can't say that anymore. We might get sued.

Mostly when we think of threats to free speech, it's government actions or laws we have in mind -- the usual bizarre stuff like veggie libel laws or attempts to keep government actions or meetings secret from the public.

Sometimes you get a political case, like Gov. George W. Bush's effort to stop a Bush-parody site on the Internet. The parody, run by a 29-year-old computer programmer in Boston named Zack Exley, annoyed Bush so much that he called Exley "a garbageman" and said, "There ought to be limits to freedom." (That's not a parody -- he actually said that.)

Bush's lawyers warned Exley that he faced a lawsuit. Then they filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission demanding that Exley be forced to register his parody site with the FEC and have it regulated as a political committee.

This fits in with the four instances in which faculty members at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in our fair state were reprimanded at the behest of Bush associates for saying less-than-glowing things about our governor.

No rights whites must respect

In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court turned down a petition for freedom from an enslaved African American. The author of the court's ruling, Chief Justice Roger B. Tawney, declared that blacks could never be granted equal protection under the law or civil rights, because they were inherently inferior to whites, and forever would be.

Tawney observed that "the unhappy black race" had always "been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. Negroes were beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The infamous Dred Scott decision reaffirmed the fundamental legal condition of African Americans, not as citizens or human beings, but as property. Black people were to be treated by law enforcement officers and the courts primarily based on the color of their skin. Yet despite the nearly 150 years since the Dred Scott decision, African Americans still encounter nearly identical racist attitudes from the police and the courts.

Media hype for another 'American century'

In the nation's biggest news weekly, the final headline of 1999 posed a question that preoccupies many journalists these days: "A Second American Century?"

Providing some answers on the last page of Time's Dec. 27 issue, pundit Charles Krauthammer was upbeat. "The world at the turn of the 21st century is not multipolar but unipolar," he wrote. "America bestrides the world like a colossus." We are supposed to see this as a very good situation.

"The main reason for the absence of a serious challenge to American hegemony is that it is so benign," Krauthammer went on. "It does not extract tribute. It does not seek military occupation. It is not interested in acquiring territory." With such declarations, Time magazine echoes its founder, Henry Luce, who coined the "American Century" maxim six decades ago.

Like his colleagues in the punditocracy, Krauthammer recognizes that foreign rivals are restless. ("The world is stirring.") Yet the outlook is favorable: "None have the power to challenge America now. The unipolar moment will surely last for at least a generation."

Forget about the Swiss-- what about U.S. banks?

There's scarcely an issue in international affairs this year more likely to induce a feeling of moral superiority in Americans than that of the dormant Jewish accounts in Swiss banks. The general impression here -- I would venture to say it's one held by a very high percentage of the public -- is that Swiss bankers ruthlessly filched the deposits of Jews, even as the latter were being transported to concentration camps and murdered by the Nazis. Then, after the war, these same bankers supposedly concealed the deposits from relatives of the dead.

Earlier this month, the Volcker commission -- named for the former chairman of the Federal Reserve -- published its findings on what exactly was in those dormant accounts of the victims of Nazi persecution. It's an imposing document -- some 300-plus double-column, folio-sized pages -- and its actual conclusions stand in truly amazing contrast to the reports -- if such a word can properly be used to describe the shoddy coverage -- that have appeared in many of our national newspapers.

At the turn of a century, better options remain

The arrival of 2000 reminds us that life is short. Deadening routines often squander our time, while evasions take unnecessary tolls in human suffering. But much better possibilities remain.

Every day, a nationwide media barrage encourages us to be cynical and passive. Endless dramas of politics and grand commerce -- amorality plays -- are performed with great zeal. We're supposed to cheer. But many of us find the glorified spectacles to be dispiriting rather than uplifting.

The words of America's leading politicians reverberate through a national echo chamber. They tout global supremacy and higher market share as ultimate virtues. Dissenting voices are mostly circumspect. Pundits debate how -- but not whether -- the U.S. government should use such measures as diplomatic arm-twisting, financial blackmail and military might to impose its will on the world.

Butterfly’s landing

On Saturday, Dec. 18, Julia Hill, aka Butterfly, descended from her aerie in a redwood near Stafford, Calif., touching ground for the first time in two years. In the deal that brought Madame Butterfly back to terra firma, Hill agrees to pay Pacific Lumber $50,000, culled from donations, T-shirt sales and book royalties. In exchange, Pacific Lumber pledges not to log the Stafford Giant (which Butterfly calls "Luna"), the 1,300-year old redwood that was her arboreal hermitage for two years. The company also says it won' t clearcut within 200 feet of the redwood, although it reserves the right to conduct salvage logging inside the so-called buffer zone.

The civil disobedience actions on Pacific Lumber lands near Stafford didn't start with Julia Hill, but with Earth First!ers and local residents who feared that logging on those unstable slopes put their community at risk of killer landslides. On New Year's Day 1997, part of the logged-over hillside above Stafford gave way. Mud and rocks and stumps collapsed on part of the town, damaging or destroying more than 30 homes. The landslide originated on Pacific Lumber lands.

China and the progressives: short history of the 20th century

In June 1900, troops of the Western powers broke the Boxer siege of the embassies in Peking, looted the Empress Dowager's summer palace, and thus, destroyed for a time the valiant nationalist effort to halt colonial exploitation of China. And now, here we are at the other end of the century, listening to leading lights of progressive American politics, from Nader's fair-trade campaign, from the AFL-CIO and assorted NGOs, plus, leading lights of right-wing American politics, all calling for China to be denied admission to the WTO. What happened in between? Oh, it's an old story now. China had a revolution, a series of revolutions, in fact. Other poor countries did, too. They tried to redistribute land and wealth, build an industrial base, foster internal demand, get a fair price for the commodities they needed to sell abroad. The Western powers didn't care for that any more than they liked the Boxers. They mustered armies to crush these revolutions, hired mercenaries, saboteurs and spies. They never relented, never forgave.

Some revolutions struggled on for several decades, in varying states of siege, boycotts, embargoes, economic sabotage. One survives.

Media wallowing in grief after WTO summit

        When the World Trade Organization summit collapsed in Seattle, major American news outlets seemed to go into shock. The failure to launch a new round of global trade talks stunned many journalists who were accustomed to covering the WTO with great reverence. In the wake of the crucial meeting, the mainstream media plunged into stages of grief:

  • SHOCK

            Misled by its own reporting and punditry, the media establishment was unprepared for the strength and effectiveness of worldwide anti-WTO efforts that came to fruition at the summit.

            According to conventional media wisdom, the United States can prevail over Third World countries by brandishing various carrots and sticks at trade negotiations. That mindset did not prepare the press corps for what happened in Seattle, where delegates from poor nations refused to knuckle under.

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