Let Them Eat Bits
Sachs, David
WHO NEEDS GLOBAL CAPITALISM? REVOLUTION IS JUST A CLICK AWAY BY DAVID SACHS Rain casts a gray pall over the red and yellow leaves hanging down outside my window. There is a fog over the small...
...But Common Dreams is too mainstream for hard-core protesters...
...many of the movement's figureheads share a similar tolerance for violence...
...By linking the Mexican Indian rights with the fight against NAFTA— then just going into effect—Marcos gained sympathy with labor unions and environmentalists north of the Rio Grande...
...South Africa chimed in with "Socialized Psychopath George W Bush: America's Number One Evildoer...
...Common Dreams is a non-profit, funded by individuals and organizations including the World Wildlife Fund, AFL-CIO, Amnesty International, Senator Paul Wellstone, NOW, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, several Naderite groups and concerned individuals everywhere...
...Democratic rights must be guaranteed: • The right to demonstrate...
...It's been translated into 10 languages, with new editions forthcoming...
...I will post more as I hear it...
...Free trade...
...Berlin, Germany...
...We will encourage, as much as possible, all groups who speak to the media to talk about their own actions and refrain from negatively commenting on other protesters' actions," the Ottawa nl6 World Bank site counsels...
...Then in 1998 came the next logical step: a portal just for protest...
...Zapatismo...
...Others have to be signed up for at meetings (that is, in real space...
...Nortel Networks has been running ads that ask, "What do you want the Internet to be...
...On a recent day, the site bannered: "20,000 Criticize EU in Ghent, Belgium...
...This isn't as romantic a cause as, say, fighting segregation or nuclear weapons...
...The people have a right to live in peace...
...organizers assume as a matter of course that police are on the list...
...I'm sure you are well aware that our environment is in a state of crisis," the event summary begins...
...I've just about eliminated mainstream media from my diet," Geneva says...
...More importantly you have NO PROOF that your ardent desire to smash the big bad bogeyman of global capitalism is anything more than a monstrous alibi for your own personal psychosis...
...The new-style, come-one-come-all, big-top shows get their own acronymic, multicultural—and maybe not accidentally, distinctly militaristic—headlines: WTO - N9 (Translatiom: World Trade Organization, November 9th, 2001) On this day there will be an anti corporate anti war/profiteer direct action and parade in NYC...
...Obviously...
...One of my favorite sites is www.flag-blackened.net...
...Sites such as this show the full power of the Internet as a propaganda medium cum travel service cum organizing tool...
...The company was spending whatever it took to agressively press their case—the longest in English history by the time it dragged to an end...
...Riot potential: are you kidding...
...Take www.nol-ogo.org...
...You wish to create a society in which the exploration of space would be an impossibility, or at least relegated to the far distant future...
...A-info's often twice-daily e-mails give news from the frontlines around the world: protest ideas for the Commonwealth meetings in Australia, news on squatters in Helsinki, plans for anti-poverty marches in Toronto...
...Riot potential: nice, polite Canadians, but don't befooled—near certain...
...as Protest...
...It is a world of witches and clowns, monsters and prophets...
...tanding out in the cyberswamp of essays, e-mails and news reports, Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos is the s undefeated heavyweight radical communications champ...
...All media is biased," an activist told me, "If I have to put my blinders on, I would do it with media that doesn't serve capitalist interests...
...She's a California-based pagan activist named Starhawk, a self-described radical envi-ro-anarchist who worships the Earth and has a following among feminists, environmentalists, anarchists and—of course—voodoo adherents...
...It kicks...
...There are maps of the city, including details of expected police cordons and barricades, and of the sites of the main protest activities...
...Click on Europe or Asia Pacific to bring up a schedule of upcoming protests...
...Here's an e-mail missive from the Bay Area Radical Cheerleaders: Hey y'all: Here are the words for the cheers we made up or modified on Friday...
...Mission: "To be the people's scribe...
...In the first month, the McSpot-light site received a million hits...
...The name is a reference to Naomi Kleins book No Logo, a kind of anticorporate bible that pulls all the movement's disparate threads together...
...Right now, a spokescouncil meeting is going on to figure out what to do...
...Web surfing is fun, but most of the real heavy lifting for world liberation happens on listservs...
...my inbox runneth over...
...Fifty Years Is Enough" features ready-made rants against the new world order: When the International Monetary Fund and World Bank arrive in southern countries, corporate profits go up, but so do poverty and suffering...
...It was cool stuff, genuine innovation—global dot.com politics...
...Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Arianna Huffington, Bill Greider, Michael Moore, Ralph Nader and (surprise...
...So where did the love come from between socialists, human rights activists, Buchananites, church groups, United Students Against Sweatshops, the Green Party, Queers Against Corporate Globalization, Anarchist People of Color, the AFL-CIO and every other species of turtle-saver, tree-hugger and monkey-wrencher...
...Unions, environmentalists, church and student groups all joined in...
...What Powerful States Call Terrorism May Be An Inevitable Response To Injustice...
...It is patently obvious...
...His enigmatic political communiques outline his beefs with the Mexican government, and he has also invented a new tool, the anti-globalization allegory, with his tales of Durito the Beetle...
...Of course, activists realize that their listservs aren't secure...
...In other parts of Mexico, in Latin America, in the United States and Canada, in the Europe which belongs to the Treaty of Masstrich, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceania, the pockets of resistance multiply...
...At the Genoa G8 protest in July, the movement suffered its first death, an Italian protester shot in the head while smashing a police car with a fire extinguisher...
...The same year saw the formation of San Francisco-based Corp Watch, dedicated to holding corporate feet to the fire on issues of human rights, labor rights and environmental justice...
...I check back to a calendar for Canadian events...
...God I love the smell of tear gas...
...and "Isn't libertarian socialism an oxymoron...
...Now a counterblast: The problem with your hardline anarchist position is that you have absolutely NO PROOF that your method works...
...Capitalism provides variety, not choice...
...This is a call for a mass mobilization against these killers...
...The term 'nonviolence' itself doesn't work well from a magical point of view...
...Each one of them has its own history, its differences, its equalities, its demands, its struggles, its accomplishments...
...In the book Republic.com, Cass Sunstein argues that the Net's ability to filter—in effect, restrict—what we read and who we talk to endangers the deliberative aspect of democracy, which relies on considering opinions we would not have otherwise sought...
...How did so many tens of thousands come to travel to the big Shows in Seattle, Quebec City, Prague and Genoa...
...Like the book, the Web site is accessible and inviting, with cute graphical icons representing corporate bad guys...
...But anyone having fantasies of left-right radical convergence should listen to Mike, a poli-sci student from New York whom I talked to briefly during the riotous Quebec demonstrations...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 83...
...In fact, that's embedded in its genes...
...We will rise up and seize the means of communication...
...As the site announces: Every day from Kansas to India, activists are meeting, organizing, and protesting to demand a better world for all...
...Life on the Web sustains the movement in the off-season with gleefully partisan news sites and discussion forums...
...I thought that was convenient...
...parent companies—Nike, Disney, The Gap...
...And so do we...
...She shared her thoughts on violence in a widely posted recent essay: We're moving onto unmapped territory, creating a politics that has not yet been defined...
...The protest show is already being planned...
...The problem is, the public sector has a mandate to make decisions of the good of the people, whereas the private sector has a mandate to make decisions which are for the good of their shareholders...
...The potential for connecting technology and protest first became apparent in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels burst onto the world stage from the jungles of the impoverished southern Mexican province of Chiapas...
...But it's no doubt heart felt...
...Another Global Street Party is planned to mark the November 9 WTO meetings in Qatar...
...These are old-school, small-ticket events, for the dedicated activist...
...Shut them down...
...Although activists look down on corporate-media consumers as naive, their solution is not to open up to a more diverse range of ideas—it's to insulate themselves, within the walls of a pre-fabri-cated ideology, and then to wage muderous debate within those carefully defined limits...
...Where did they all meet, the laundromat...
...You have NO PROOF that your violent tactics will produce the freedom you passionately proclaim...
...And that in fact is exactly what the Internet is making possible...
...Every beginning Witch learns that you can't cast a spell for what you don't want—that the deep aspects of our minds are unclear on the concept of 'no.' If you tell your dog, "Rover, I can't take you for a walk," Rover hears "Walk...
...Riot potential: high...
...Its as simple as that really...
...Riot potential (my rating, not the site's): high...
...Clearly not to be trusted...
...The first Global Street Party, coinciding with a WTO meeting in Geneva, took place in May 1998 in cities worldwide, including (just to stick with the Bs), Berkeley, California...
...Saturday there's ECOconference 2001— National Student Environmental Conference, at George Washington University in D.C...
...I'm sitting at the dining room table, drinking ten-year-old Scotch...
...But there's also a frequent undertone of rage, even menace...
...Say, legal advice...
...A correspondent in Chicago contributed: "The Overthrow of the American Republic, Part Four...
...There is a fog over the small lake, and the beautiful, fiery colored hillside opposite is grayed, too...
...The actual contents, culled from wire services, newspapers and magazines around the world, are a kind of "progressive" Top 40: "Nobel Laureate Encourages Global Justice Movement: Keep It Up...
...European Union policy goes against the aspirations of the people...
...Anyone can post here...
...And they may be planning to show up in your town...
...We will rise up and seize the means of communication...
...So there it is, the demon behind all the diverse arguments, especially for the younger protesters: a deep-seated hatred of corporate culture...
...Geek expertise and skills are shared via e-mail...
...As Keith McHenry, co-founder of the WHERE-based group Food Not Bombs, later put it: "Every- where I went in Europe I could attend a protest against McDonalds...
...The WTO...
...As one organizer said, "We're not like some tight group with t-shirts...
...Trying to dicate what people "should" and "shouldn't" do...
...Plus, of course, some suitably turgid verbiage: What have neo-liberalism, globalization and privatizations brought the general population...
...There was an RTS in Washington in late October...
...In the countryside of Quebec, I can always find a riot somewhere...
...its writers are actual professionals—they write for money...
...Zapatismo, Baby...
...There's a right-wing version of this: NAFTA et al sacrifice national sovereignty to creeping world government...
...and runs for the door...
...Mostly using e-mail, sympathizers began to organize around the world, demonstrating at Mexican embassies and consulates, pressing the Zapatistas' demands...
...Inside, a fire is blazing...
...So, when major decisions involving people, health care or social policies, or the environment are being made, I don't think they should be in the hands of the private sector...
...Our efforts are currently centered around preparing for the next meeting of the G8, to be held in Kananaskis, Alberta...
...78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 the US section of the International Communist Current...
...Their leader, Subcommandante Marcos, writing in a bizarre mix of Shakespeare, Kafka and Mao, became a 'global resistance' hero, an emblem for would-be revolutionaries everywhere...
...We can't rely on the media establishment to cover our movements...
...A-infos, a popular multi-lingual anarchist listserv, is a managed forum—anyone can sign up to receive it, but input is controlled by the a-infos cabal...
...Brussels is a long way off...
...And so was born Protest.Net, an activist collective supported by donations solicited online, 87,000 events served (and counting...
...The site includes travel resources— bus and train schedules, carpool lists from various points of departure, and links to out-of-town student and other groups organizing buses into the city...
...If It's Thursday, This Must Be the G8 Clicking on the anti-EU notice on protest.net, I come to the Brussels-based site D14.be ("D" for December...
...I take a pull on my Scotch and type www.common-dreams.org—the number-one global source for news with 80 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 a 'progressive' slant...
...No matter that without it, they— and their beloved Web—almost certainly would not be here...
...This was also the official 'Year of the Sweatshop', when Kathie Lee Gifford cried on TV...
...Bingo—right in Ottawa: The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and G20 will be meeting on November 16-18...
...Back home it could call out protests overnight against the U.S...
...Server space is cheap: organizations such as TAO.ca and riseup.net provide it free for other groups, who may be physically located on the other side of the world (or have no physical location at all...
...We are accused of being misinformed bleading heart hooligans with nothing better to do than march up and down blocking traffic...
...Trivial—indeed, reactionary—as it may seem in a world still full of hate and hunger, the ubiquity of modern marketing has spawned a fully articulated (well, sort of) counter-revolution...
...You should assume the FBI or CIA know what's going on...
...It's our right to resist their oppression using whatever means are necessary, and when they come to demonstrations with tear gas, live bullets and riot gear that sure as hell don't mean turning the other cheek...
...And to do so, it might be time to leave Martin and Malcolm arguing around the dinner table with each other and Emma, Karl, Leon and all the rest, and step out into the clean night air...
...The Internet is a low-cost paradise for views under-represented in mainstream media—left, right and modes of thought that don't fit any spectrum...
...Before ensuring the safety of space colonies, we should ensure the safety of everyone's rights to have food, water, shelter and health care no matter who he/she is and no matter how rich he/she is...
...But on the tear-gassed streets and the post-action message boards, Chapter 11—or the WTO or the planned Multilateral Agreement on Investment—represents nothing less than the transference of popular democratic power to multinational companies and secretive international tribunals...
...For those willing to travel for a good protest, there's cross-referencing by issue: Labor/Union, Globalization & Imperialism, Race and Class, Sexuality, Gender and GBLT (The T is for Transsexual—see if you can figure out the rest...
...Since the now-famous 1999 "Battle of Seattle"—Bill Gates' home turf!—the movement has ratcheted up its numbers, its impact and its profile on the Internet, making each new "action" more elaborate and potentially dangerous than the last...
...Anti-globalization activists make it a particular point of spurning anything with the faintest whiff of a profit motive or commercial interest...
...Was there free beer...
...TV stations and most newspapers are beyond the pale...
...Yeah...
...That's all for now...
...McDonald's, the restaurant chain, was suing the pair for libel for distributing anti-Ronald literature...
...This will be able to intervene anywhere, either because the market economy is not master of the situation or because the economic interests of the big multinationals consider that their interests are in danger...
...By so doing, you seek to deny the option to millions of people who DO wish to explore space...
...we are fighting for freedom...
...Of course there are schedules—marches, concerts, teach-ins, protest training— and info on free legal collectives (you'll want to get arrested), independent media (nothing that might upset your fixed ideas), and food and medical facilities (whose volunteer staffers conveniently can sign up right on-line).There will be tips on what to bring—don't forget a vinegar-soaked bandanna, to protect from tear gas—and bank account numbers for making donations to the legal defense fund...
...And then there's Berkeley's famed Ruckus Society, specializing in spreading "the skills of non-violent civil disobedience...
...Decades of promises that just a little more "short-term"pain will bring long-term gain have exposed the IMF and World Bank as false prophets whose mission is to protect those who already control too much wealth and power...
...The Internet realm of the activist is full of amazing characters and voices...
...That's a total breakdown of democratic society...
...World Bank...
...Ruckus training manuals, available at www.ruckus.org, include titles like Action Planning and HangingYourself From A Billboard...
...Indymedia and its satellite sites throw together a mix of serious non-mainstream journalism, conspiracy theorist rants, activist updates, manifestos, and opinions of all types...
...But what's globalization for...
...I'm looking for a riot...
...But if you .. .1 totally disagree with the notion think that attacking heavily that cops and protesters are 2 sides of the same coin...
...Genetically modified crops...
...I got in touch with her through a fellow-activist friend...
...And it makes for a generation extremely receptive to anti-corporate, anticapitalist ideas from unions, environmentalists, socialists or anarchists alike...
...Now that would be news...
...This is a new notice...
...Noam Chomsky—they're all here...
...Oh, and nightlife directory...
...I went to broadcast journalism school and learned 'If it bleeds, it leads.' That's crap...
...Arguments spiral deeper into radicalism, as the more hard-line bully the moderate...
...The site sports Team Anarchy 2001's official colors— black background, red headlines—and a map of the world, divided into chunks...
...I don't consider what's in a newspaper news...
...The movement saw what it could do...
...Dating back to the Net's earliest days as a Pentagon-funded tool for dispersed scientific researchers, listservs are e-mail lists, some with hundreds or thousands of members, some with a dozen...
...The Daily Rant: All the News That Fits Our Servers The activist groups themselves can be just as free-form...
...RealLivePeople.net What shows up at places like Prague and Seattle are not, of course, IP addresses or network servers but real people, from the antiquated realm known as 'real-space.' For instance, Geneva, a Montreal-based student organizer and veteran of Seattle, Washington and Quebec, as well as smaller local protests over bio-safety...
...But the European Union encourages privatisations and deregulation...
...From Ronald McDonald To Kathie Lee Gifford In cyberspace, global activists have a home-field advantage—way ahead of the corporations and governments they attack, and the law enforcement agencies trying to track them...
...In a movement that is proudly non-hierarchical, disorganized, and discordant, the Internet is the toothpick holding together the protest Club sandwich...
...The banner shows a yellowed silhouette of a boy (possibly Calvin, of Calvin & Hobbes) urinating on an EU flag...
...There are plans to write a joint statement...
...It allows a kid in Mississippi to believe he is working hand in hand with, labor organizers in Manila, rebels in Chiapas, squatters in Helsinki, ravers in London, anarchists in Melbourne, socialists in New York, environmentalists among the redwoods north of San Francisco...
...There are links to anar-chist groups worldwide—the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement, Heatwave (from Texas) and the All City Anarchists, from Australia...
...And of course, the anarchist movement has flourished in the no-rules, no-hierarchy environment of the Net...
...It's also the magic of the Net—something for everyone...
...Alerted through the RTS Web site, thousands of partyer-activists at the appointed hour take over a busy intersection...
...Meanwhile, back inside the looking glass, there is more to be seen on the cyberscape...
...War On The Poor And Working Class...
...As the Webmaster of one protest group told me, "The Internet might be serving capitalism, but it's serving the interests of the subversives too...
...No preventive arrests, nor preventive house searches • No fire-arms in the hands of the Police • No disguised police amongst the demonstrators, no police provocation...
...Re sweeping generalizations by steveh on Sunday September 02 @0 5:43 AM reply to lemming: I repeat my utmost respect for your outspoken honesty...
...But no free trade proponents.That would just be too weird...
...The discussion boards are notable for their heated debates between activists of different stripes, for example anarchists v. environmentalists and socialists...
...On the other side of history, history has begun...
...In fact, activists of all stripes—left, right and crazy—have been madly e-mailing, running listservs, tending antique servers and building Web sites for years...
...When the corporate media takes note of our activities it is only to spit upon our struggle...
...Barricades and stereo equipment are set up, street entertainers join the crowd, and a giddy party is underway, often lasting hours or even half a day before police can remove the barricades and clear the area...
...A secretive, un-elected threat to national sovereignty...
...WTO MINISTERIAL The schedule of this day IS adjusted to INCORPORATE STREET ACTION INTO OUR AGENDA...
...In front of their computers, with their hands on keyboards and mouse pads, real people are attached to the ideas and plans that flicker on the screen...
...Certainly, that trend is observable in the activist Web sites...
...Is it important to me to know if a bridge fell in Arkansas...
...If you re really serious, right there online you can book live training at a Ruckus 'Action Camp.' It's a cliche already to note that the anti-globalization movement has become every bit as global as the structures it fights...
...Since corporate media (a favorite term) is not to be trusted, activists rely on their own news sources, most of them online and conveniently linked from both specific protest sites and larger portals like Protest.Net...
...Landmark number two: on February 16,1996, two London activists launch the McSpotlight website...
...The Ottawa meeting was just announced today...
...They are fighting to preserve the capitalist system...
...In England, environmentalists, squatters and rave kids have created a type of protest/party known as Reclaim The Streets...
...Serious global citizens turn to the Seattle-based Independent Media Center, best known by its URL, indymedia.org...
...But that's all so 1999...
...That's not an isolated comment...
...Just a couple of hours down the road...
...Public condemnation in one way or another, as has happened in the past, creates more division than anything else...
...Watch for Pat Buchanan on the message boards at www.nologo.com...
...Goodbye family farmers, if not the entire human race...
...The people have a right to access public services...
...What that belies is another of Net-based anti-globalism's little secrets: it's fun...
...LunaCity (stranger) 08/19/01 11:39 AM There you go again...
...Message boards are a good place to find out just how crushingly boring anti-globalists can be...
...The Oakland-based Midnight Special Legal Collective runs a site with complete, do-it-yourself materials on organizing legal protection for activists during protests, and on taking complaints against police to civilian review boards...
...One less obvious utility of the Internet is simply its ability to mark your presence in the larger world, affirming one's existence by staking a claim in cyberspace...
...And it will have new authors...
...Global loan shark...
...So now you know...
...It is a new world...
...Evan Henshaw-Plath (nom de Net "Rabble-Rouser") had developed an Internet-based calendar tool in college, and got some venture capital funding to develop it...
...in the afternoon, TO COINCIDE WITH THE FIRST DAY OF THE 4TH...
...G8 ALBERTA (June 2002) Please join us in our efforts to challenge the directions and policies of the G8...
...Cold autumn in the mountains of central Quebec...
...Flagblack-ened is unrivalled, both for entry-level and hardcore enemies of authority in all its myriad forms...
...Zapatistas communiques spread like digital fire across the Net...
...This problem of violence has led to the new idea of "diversity of tactics": you may be armed riot cops might not have been the wisest possible idea, best keep the thought to yourself...
...they can be joined just by finding the right website...
...Let me tell you about a witch...
...Peace is swell!/RISE UP, UNITE, REBEL!' That kind of humor is the flip side to violence in the movement's "diversity of tactics" equation...
...The system doesn't work no more!/ What did you say?71 said the system pushes down the poor!/What did you say?71 said STOMP...
...During this summer's marches in Washington, "guerrilla" journalist Dan Berger filed a report that his roommate had just called to say that their march—about 300 strong— had been surrounded by riot cops: People are in high spirits—playing soccer, playing with puppets, hanging out...
...If we say 'nonviolence' we are still thinking in terms of violence...
...And it's all biased by corporate media...
...and Brisbane, Australia...
...But the fresh-faced, pierced, maximally trendy global anti-globalization movement has taken Net activism to what Silicon Valley-ites call "the next level...
...A refreshing change from the No Logo brigade whose ambivalence and double speak about violence is destroying their case...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79 Suddenly they had sympathetic pro bono lawyers, researchers to dispute every McDonalds claim, a fundrais-ing conduit and their own dedicated army of demonstrators...
...Their agenda is no secret: tear down the world economic apparati...
...It contains an anarchist FAQ, a sort of Black Bloc For Dummies, with questions like "What would an anarchist society look like...
...Dvorak's New World Symphony is playing from my laptop's CD player as I stare at the screen, doing like so many young people these days...
...Why should people follow your neo-reli-gious faith without proof...
...Let's Hear From The Peanut Gallery Cyberspace is full of strange sights and people, especially when one gets away from the AOL and Yahoo's tourist traps.The Net's mask—on the Internet, no one knows you're a Scotch-sipping Canadian conservative—lends itself to extroversion...
...they're owned by large corporations, the prime agents of global mayhem...
...Net's "About Us" section puts it...
...Up pops a very helpful weekly calendar, with times, summaries and links to other pages...
...But the Union is creating an autonomous army...
...Anti-EU - D14 (Brussels) Our voice must be heard at the gates of the Big Castle, where the European summit will take place...
...Activists around the world are fighting for a better world...
...Becoming a cop is an act of betrayal to your community and they all have to bear some kind of collective responsibility for the role that the police play in society...
...Here's how it works: As soon as a protest-worthy official meeting is announced, an activist group in the host city launches a dedicated site, which functions as the umbrella organization for any and all interested protest groups...
...Someone told me you can gamble and find pornography out there...
...To an increasing number of angry young people, the answer is: an unrivalled new weapon for a global war against the State, the greedy capitalist elite, the transnational sweatshop overlords, the Frankenfood manufacturers, the despoilers of the environment, the tramplers of indigenous rights, the billion dollar pimps of the world...
...The Grand Alliance was born...
...respect, steveh Hmmm...
...So is June...
...Google,Yahoo, AltaVista—use whatever search engine you like: type in P-R-O-T-E-S-T, and up pops Protest.Net, your gateway to 21st century global activism...
...Heaven Forbid...
...I hit North America, get a map, then click on the Northeast...
...Some are public...
...Housing options—typically local colleges, churches and private homes—are all coordinated on the site...
...It's easy to talk big on the Internet of course, but a significant minority of protesters do actively engage in violence—for some, that's undoubtedly the main point...
...I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for anarchist rhetoric...
...The debate around 'violence' and 'nonviolence' may itself be constricting our thinking...
...Got that...
...Friday there's a lecture on "Capitalism's Headlong Flight Into Barbarism," on West 4th Street in New York City, sponsored by David Sachs is a Canadian writer and novelist...
...He told me about a recent visit to Ecuador: There were just malls and fucking McDonalds here and McDonalds there and it's just disgusting...
...LIBERATE!/Let's stop the hate!/Organize...
...Thanks for a fun practice and too much champagne...
...At anti-global protests in Quebec city this summer Gabriel, a 23-year-old student put it this way: "I see a concentration of power shifting from the public to the private sector...
...Just an Internet connection away...
...One of his famed essays outlines seven pieces of the global jigsaw puzzle, with the 7th being "pockets of resistance": Resistance does not only exist in the mountains of Southeast Mexico...
...At least he's not number two...
...Welcome to the brave new world...
...They're oversimplified soundbites of complex histories, and a lot of stuff which is irrelevant to me...
...New-media Bolsheviks in their twenties and thirties are the engine of this new ubermovement.They get out the troops to bolster the Teamsters and other unions, and forge the links between the various protest streams...
...With the Internet's influence, and a sprinkling of that Zapatismo fairy dust, the Rebel Alliance really is more or less everywhere...
...Some have described it as the fear of looking at the moon and seeing the Pepsi logo emblazoned on it...
...And built, of course, by the very same greedy, trampling, destroying, transnational elite...
...82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 NAFTA's Chapter 11 is a hot topic...
...Then, let's climb to reach the skies...
...Its intent is to prevent governments from imposing laws that discriminate against foreign corporations...
...It's a "race to the bottom"—sweatshops, ravaged landscapes, all in a bid to attract greedy investors...
...On the topic NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO1 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 81 'Creative Images Of Police Brutality In Genoa,' I come across this exchange: Re: sweeping generalizations by Lemming on Thursday August 30 @04:34AM a pacifist, but you need to respect the revolutionaries' right to smash a bank window or turn over the espresso machine in Starbucks...
...For real fun, check the message boards, where anarchists argue, not just over the use of violence in protests, but other burning issues—"Space Travel in an Anarchistic Society" for instance: Theobalt (Unregistered) 08/19/01 11:03 AM Before exploring space, we should explore our own planet first...
...There is NO PROOF in human history that your brand of libertarian anarchism produces a successful and sustained libertarian society...
...We've taken away their culture and just imposed ours basically...
...Since you have no proof in these areas you have NO RIGHT to superimpose your personal psychosis and destructive desires on protest movements concerning the environment and global justice...
...Just what you needed, some activist friends suggested, for keeping abreast of the global protest world...
...The activists used a tiny office and a few computers to spread their story worldwide...
...To young activists, surfing the Web and building sites comes as easily as making placards or chanting slogans...
...Using cheap e-mail and a homemade Web site, Corp Watch began monitoring previously obscure labor conflicts in places like the Philippines and Indonesia...
...She is also, with her first novel, the recipient of the 1984 Lambda award for Best Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction...
...Through The Looking Glass We all know you can buy a car on the Internet, manage your company's inventory, and e-mail streaming video of the kids to relatives...
...Motto: "Resistance is fertile...
...Birmingham, England...
...Chapter 11 in NAFTA has shown occasions that corporations can actually sue governments...
...McDonald's won a token settlement...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
