1/8/2002
Camilo Viveiros was one of the hundreds arrested and treated brutally over during the Republican Convention, but he had the misfortune of being charged with assaulting the top Philly cop: Police Commissioner Timoney. Those who know Camilo believe that it is unlikely that he committed any such assault. He goes to trial in February. Read the article.
Sage words on the spiritual meaning of trade.
As of today, April 21, 2001, representatives of the nations of the Americas are meeting in Quebec to negotiate a new world order for the Americas. There are also some other invited guests: representatives of the largest multinational corporations, selected representatives of NGOs, banks and "approved media."
There are some uninvited guests: approximately 10,000 protestors representing the interests of the people of this hemisphere whose interests are most certainly not represented.
As an exclusionary method, the Quebec government has erected a 10' high chain link fence enclosing the city center and imported more than 6,000 police armed with the usual weapons of tear gas, pepper spray and rifles with plastic bullets capable of fracturing ribs (and eyeballs, no doubt). Odd that the government would be afraid of 10,000 non-violent protestors, isn't it?
Here are two articles taken from in the IndyMedia Site (http://www.quebec.indymedia.org), which is highly recommended.
The Quebec Wall by Michel Chossudovsky.
Economics Instructor Speaks About FTAA by Michael McKeever
1/27/01
The news from Switzerland is not good. In case you weren't aware, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is meeting there at the moment and protestors have converged from all over the world to protest the economic policies that are impoverishing most of the population of the world and leading us towards an environmental disaster. Read the article.
The WTO's Draft Ministerial Declaration from Seattle, December 3, 1999
12/29/99
The above link will take you off-site to the final version of the draft declaration prepared in the "Green Room" at the WTO Ministerial in Seattle. The "Green Room" operates within the WTO as an exclusionary forum for negotiation among the most dominant WTO members, often coming up with draft language that delegates from developing nations are pressured into accepting although they have had no input. While much of this document is written in legalese and bureaucratese, its purpose is to continue the globalization process that was thwarted in Seattle. This document is posted on the Flora MAI-NOT website, so you will need to use the "back" button on your browser to return to the Jackson Progressive.
12/15/99
The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned congress not to block the agreement to admit China into the World Trade Organization or face a backlash from business in the November 2000 congressional election. Since the corporate constituency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the bankroller of the Republican Party (and much of the Democratic Party) it is clear that enormous pressure will be exerted on Congress to approve China's entry.Who will be the winners if China is admitted?
- The transnational corporations and their stockholders, which will be allowed to own large pieces of Chinese firms and import agricultural products to China;
- The Chinese ruling elites, who will get a large piece of the privatized companies now owned by the Chinese government;
- Financial institutions, who stand to profit handsomely by providing the same kind of financial services that have made them so rich and powerful here in the U.S., but without the safeguards we have become used to.
Who will lose?
- The Chinese workers, millions of whom will become unemployed as the privatized industries are downsized and made to work "more efficiently";
- American workers, whose employers must compete with the influx of even more cheap goods made by Chinese workers at subsistence wages;
- Small businesses, whose customers' incomes will be hard pressed by the competition of wage slave labor;
Another witness writes of the events in Seattle - Starhawk (ca. 12/14/99)
Attorney Paul Lehto of Everett, Washington, attended the events in Seattle and wrote these letters to a mailing list. At our request, he subsequently wrote a follow-up to the letters, filling in details. We are grateful to Paul for keeping us informed when the media has imposed a virtual blackout. (Mr. Lehto plans to use this material in a forthcoming book and has asked us to remove it from our web site, which we have done. Thanks, Paul, for letting us keep it posted for so long. --Ed.)
12/8/99
Somebody predicted it, it was already happening during the WTO ministerial last week, and now it's the rule. The C-L (page 3A) ran an Associated Press article on the resignation of the Seattle police chief, Norm Stamper, "harshly criticized by civic leaders, police officers and others for his handling of the demonstrations last week that cost downtown merchants nearly $20 million in lost sales and property damage. The protests got so out of hand that the National Guard was called in and a curfew was imposed." (emphasis added) Police union president Mike Edwards was quoted as saying that police officers "lacked crowd-control equipment such as smoke grenades and tear gas last week, and found themselves on the streets for days with little food or rest." Critics of police brutality got a short paragraph at the end of the article of little substance.If you have been following the eyewitness accounts of the Seattle demonstrations through the Internet, you may have already thrown up by now at the barrage of misinformation and downright lies contained in the above statements. There is little or no evidence that the Darth Vader-dressed police lacked a plentiful supply of CS tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons and paddy wagons to wage their own riot against the non-violent protesters. CS gas, by the way, is a particularly nasty form of tear gas. The military usually uses CN gas when training their own, which causes eye and nasal irritation. CS, on the other hand, is far more potent and causes nausea and other symptoms. Why were the cops using CS gas instead of CN? I don't recall this being brought up anywhere in the media.
Yesterday's article on the chief's resignation in the Seattle Post-Intelligence, the local establishment newspaper, followed the same line: the protesters were responsible for all the damage, loss of sales, etc. It is as though the police force and the mayor were innocent bystanders.
And above it all, while protesters were being beaten, shot and gassed outside, our president makes a speech to the delegates expressing sympathy for the protester's cause. I suppose he felt their pain.
Perhaps surrealism is the only authentic artistic response to the end of the Twentieth Century. The World often seems very like a Salvador Dali painting. --TJL
12/4/99
Nestled near the bottom of the front page of section "C" of the Clarion-Ledger is the quiet announcement "WTO suspends meeting without deal." There will be no "Millennium Round" of trade talks, as the delegates could not agree upon an agenda for a new round. As usual, there was little substance in the Associated Press article. The blackout continues.
It would be unrealistic to conclude that the massive protests in Seattle were the sole cause of the meeting's failure; the delegates addressed far more contentious issues than before, issues which President Clinton would have undoubtedly preferred to ignore but couldn't, because of domestic pressure. Yet the demonstrations and the vicious, illegal behaviour of Seattle's finest succeeded in informing the American people in dramatic terms of the danger implicit in a secret, undemocratic syndicate of plutocrats and their shills determining the economic future of the world.
Gone forever is the carefully fostered illusion that the WTO is merely a technical assemblage of financial experts, benign in intent. It has been exposed for what it really is: an attempt by the multinational corporations, successful thusfar, to transfer sovereignty from nation-states to a world government under their control, without interference or consent from the people affected. The protesters in Seattle could not destroy the WTO, at least for now. But they made a big stink.
And what a stink! Everybody smells it!
Over the next few weeks the Jackson Progressive will undertake to explain just how the WTO has affected the lives of Mississippians, for better or worse, and how it can be expected to affect us if it continues on its present course. Stay connected.
An Open Letter to the Mayor of Seattle by Dan Merkle 12/3/99
"many of us were in the streets and saw first hand how these immature, rambo-style punks reacted to nonviolent citizens. the so-called violent protesters that your henchmen attacked may have broken a few windows of the multi-nationals, but in no way did any of them, let alone the many other law-abiding citizens, deserve this outrageous behavior. "
"This Worldwide crisis of the late twentieth century is more devastating than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has far-reaching geo-political implications; economic dislocation has also been accompanied by the outbreak of regional conflicts, the fracturing of national societies and in some cases the destruction of entire countries. This crisis is by no means limited to the developing countries. In Europe and North America the Welfare State is being dismantled, schools and hospitals are being closed down creating conditions for the outright privatisation of social services. By far this is the most serious economic crisis in modern history. " Read the entire article: Seattle and Beyond: Disarming the New World Order
The Emperor's New Clothes. A web site devoted to piercing the fog of lies surrounding the WTO, as well as other major events.
From World Trade Observer.
12/2/99
After peeling off the advertisements wrapped around the outside of this morning's Clarion-Ledger, one couldn't miss the large color picture of cops and demonstrators in Seattle and the headline: "National Guard patrols Seattle -- 400 arrested as talks go on"
The large picture was instructive. A Darth Vader-like figure described as a police officer complete with gas mask, jackboots, a large automatic weapon, and enough Velcro to hold together the world, kicking an unarmed t-shirted protester in the groin.
Unfortunately, that picture was the most instructive item. The article itself, which even included reports of an "uncomfirmed" attack on Chile's trade minister, was an attempt to smear as many of the protesters as possible. There was nothing--nothing whatever--concerning the issues that brought the protesters to Seattle in the first place. One is forced to regretfully conclude that the mainstream media, including the Gannett chain which owns the C-L, is bitterly determined to keep Americans, and therefore Mississippians, ignorant of what is at stake.
They do it by concentrating on the "violence," rather than the issues. It turns out that virtually all of the violence is on the part of the police and the establishment, not the demonstrators. On Tuesday, the "violence" that justified the imposition of martial law was the rampage of a small group of persons dressed in black wearing ski masks who broke windows and looted several stores but who were neither arrested nor resisted by the Seattle police.
It's shades of the 1960s, when law enforcement infiltrated protest groups to provide the "violence" that justified police crackdowns.
Look to the web, dear reader, not your newspapers or the TV stations. The blackout in the mainstream media is near universal.
12/01/99 -- Union members harassed over "No WTO" political materials ban at Seattle airport and ports
12/01/99 -- The WTO, ICANN, and the End of the Republic
12/01/99 -- How NPR Covered the Battle of Seattle this morning
11/27/99--On Tuesday, the top finance ministers of 135 countries will meet in Seattle to determine the contents of the next round of trade negotiations, nicknamed the "Millennial" round. Protesters from all over the World will meet them in one of the largest mass demonstrations since the 60s. It is possible that, with the mass media focused upon the demonstrations and the Internet conveying information to the public which the media will invariably fail to report in keeping with the interests of their corporate owners, the general public will begin to understand what most of the World has already known for some time: the so-called "free trade" promoted by the WTO is actually controlled and managed by powerful corporations and financial institutions for the benefit of their owners and to the detriment of nearly everyone else, including citizens of the "developed" countries.
Most Americans do not understand or even recognize the potential economic and political disaster that the WTO represents. Without knowledge of the people, our president and Congress have handicapped our government's ability to protect our health, our environment and our economic well-being. Laws duly enacted in accordance with the U. S. Constitution, the law of the land, may be found by a secret committee appointed by the executive department of the WTO to be an illegal barrier to trade and a violation of the WTO agreements. The U.S. can be subjected to sanctions and fines unless it rescinds the law. In the cases which have come before it, the committee has invariably ruled against laws protecting the environment, public health and local content.
It is difficult to imagine the changes to our lives that are in the offing. The freedom for capital and money to move across borders with the speed of light has already brought about a financial collapse in Asia, from which it has not yet recovered, and because of which, our U.S. balance of trade has become more and more negative as we are flooded with imports that those desperate countries are selling at increasingly lower prices in an effort to satisfy the austerity programs required by the International Monetary Fund as a precondition for emergency loans. And, of course, the influx of cheap foreign goods competes with and drives out domestic goods and thereby costs us hundreds of thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs-- jobs which previously supported middle-class families.
We believe that the WTO ought to be dismantled. In its current form, the WTO is little more than a conveyance of our national sovereignty to the transnational corporations, whose amoral and destructive behavior over the past 150 years would be greatly encouraged and magnified by the resulting absence of legal restraint. As John Nichols of the Capital Times wrote: "Consistently and without exception, the WTO has refused to adopt minimum enforceable standards for workers' rights, human rights, and environmental protection." In all its acts, it has shown itself to be deeply anti-democratic and subservient to the interests of large corporations. It has put trade and profit above the environment, public health, children, and the legitimate aspirations of peoples to live a decent life, and it has done it pursuant to an economic philosophy that reduces everything, no matter how sacred, to its monetary equivalent.
It would be far better to live under a monarchy than to trust our persons, our children, our communities, and our entire society to the tender graces, if any, of a corporate dictatorship. At least the king is charged with responsibility for the welfare of all his subjects.
A page of links to organizations concerned with economics, trade, and the WTO. There's enough material here to enable one to become very knowledgeable of trade issues, as well as to make one shudder at the possible consequences of continuing in our present direction.
7/24/99
"This is the New World Order's assault on democracy,'' U. S. Representative George Miller said. "Local legislation can be nullified because a secret trade tribunal says so. . . . It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or liberal." From the San Francisco Chronicle.
7/14/99
Work, Social Capital, and the Rebirth of the Civil Society: A Blueprint for a New Third Sector Politics by Jeremy Rifkin discusses some recent findings by economists Paul R. Krugman of MIT and Robert L. Lawrence of Harvard University regarding the elimination of labor by automation and its future impact upon public policy in the industrial countries. The conclusions of these two eminent mainstream economists will make it very difficult to insist, as economists have insisted in the past, that the unhindered free market can always provide employment for everyone who needs a job. Thoughtful, even technical, replies are welcomed and will be published. editor@jacksonprogressive.com
Exporting Pollution to Developing Countries: The Lawrence Summers memo. Our new Secretary of the Treasury wrote this infamous memo in 1991 when he was chief economist for the World Bank. Read it and contemplate the fact that the man who wrote it is in charge of the economic policy of the United States.