Conclusions --- What Does It All Mean? Home

Page updated 10-Dec-1999

The heiroglyphics on the walls..they tell it all Everyday waking up in the same room With six younger siblings who look up to you Not knowing where this day will take you Where are you going to run to, you don't know Treating every day like it's your last one Having nothing in common with the outside world The only way to reach them is to spray it on the walls Because no one listens to your calls From the part of town where no one wants to go Surrounded by a border that isn't even there Living in a place where there's no regards for the low Read the story it's tagged on the walls -Voodoo Glow Skulls Chemical warfare chemical warfare Chemical warfare chemical warfare warfare warfare -Dead Kennedys Come on, come on Give me a petrol bomb -Oxymoron (Just kidding. Don't get yer knickers in a knot.)

Now that the delegates have packed home, the world is safe from free trade for a little while, shoppers have returned downtown, protest signs and bandanas have been put away, and the mayor is up for scrutiny, there's time to reflect on what it all means. This section is incomplete, and it will probably be incomplete for a while as I think of things to add to it, but it's a start.

The biggest ramification is the clash between delegates, and how far the different countries disagree with and distrust each other. That will scuttle any trade deals for quite a while. But beyond that, people all over the world need to listen to each other more to understand where the others are coming from.

The US proposal to link labor rights with trade was soundly rejected because the developing countries claim it's a disguised way of maintaining US hedgemony. That sounds ludicrous to me as an American, but the fact remains that there is a difference between what the leftists and environmentalists in the rich countries think is "good" for the poor countries, and what the poor countries themselves actually think. Of course, this gets into the question of whether the poor countries' governments are actually thinking of their people or only of themselves...

I hate to say it, but I think President Clinton was unusually right this time, even though the rest of the world didn't buy it.

It was certainly an example of free speech in action, even if many of the anti-dissident countries that said we should have cracked down didn't get it. (One paper today said China blacked out all news coverage of the events.)

One activist on a TV call-in show said that the problem with the current free-trade proposals is that they address only the movement of goods and money: they don't do anything about the restrictions on movement of people and labor. The workers cannot vote with their feet, because they can't get visas to anywhere. This would also be an incentive for governments to get their act together, if they have to compete for residents....

Seattle's image. Yawn. Before WTO, the papers were full of stories about how we'd show the world we're a world-class city. Now they're talking about how our image is "tarnished". So what? It's only a small minority of boosters who care about our "image". People who really want to live here and who fit into the local culture, who want something off the beaten path, will continue to find their way here like they always do. People saw what happened when we were "discovered" a few years ago and have been trying to undo it ever since. Maybe the whole week was a plot by Lesser Seattle. Many people feel the costs associated with having an Olympics or a sports team outweigh any kind of economic asset they provide.

The most outrageous thing said during the whole week was was when some delegate said the entire protest was orchestrated by the US government. What drugs were they on? We know that (1) the Prez is strongly pro-WTO, and (2) the protesters aren't the type to let the government tell them what to do. The thought of them willingly or unwillingly sitting in meetings while the FBI/CIA encouraged/threatened them into protesting is ludicrous. No, it's insane.

The best moment was when Madeline Albright couldn't get out of her hotel. Sorry, Madeline, but to see a tough conservative woman like you, who flies to Israel and Egypt all the time, stopped by a measly mob of leftists in the US, who wouldn't know how to do terrorism if their life depended on it, certainly made our day.

The news does a more or less mediocre job on reporting what did happen. They flunk, however, at reporting what didn't. And even less do they try to explain why it didn't happen. This makes things look a lot worse than they are. This happens in every news story. Those of us who don't live or work downtown were not directly affected from the week at all, apart for some interruptions in bus service. The same thing happens every day: newspapers tell about the five people who were robbed one day, but fail to say anything about the two million people who weren't robbed all year. In WTO's case, nobody got injured except at the hands of some overzealous police. Protesters were not attacking each other or the public. Nobody was shooting each other, there were no gangs intimidating everybody, etc. The difference was brought to my attention when I turned on the radio one morning mid-week and there was a story about some gunman killing a guy in Jerusalem for whatever reason. And that's normal there. That's not normal here. It's not a war zone, it's not Northern Ireland, no matter how much the media loved that phrase this week.

Not meaning to demean some of the ex-soldiers who had fought in Vietnam, for whom Tuesday and Wednesday brought them such severe flashbacks that they thought they were there again. Kudos to those who helped them through it.

I do think the police were probably right in clearing out downtown by a massive blast Tuesday evening. It was quite tense at that point, and just letting it go on all night with everybody waiting for something to happen would not have been a smart thing to do. Better an equal-opportunity blast which forces everybody to regroup, rather than playing favorites, who to intimidate the most. And somebody did have to protect the office buildings at night, since nobody lives there, and it might have been a total Christmas sale. On Capitol Hill it's different, because there are plenty of residents everywhere to protect their buildings. If the cops had gone around in small groups arresting the looters, nobody would complain. If they arrested the window-smashers, it would have been least understandable. But there was no excuse for them going after the peaceful protesters. However, this point has been belabored enough this week that I think they got the message.

The downtown merchants are now looking for somebody to sue. They want the city to use a rainy-day fund to replenish their lost revenues. Since when do companies have a "right" to guaranteed profits? On the other hand, since WTO was a city-sponsored event, it's perhaps no different from downzoning your land and lowering your property value, for which they have to give you compensation. On the other hand, the businesses wouldn't be giving the city 100% of the revenues they would have gained, so why should the city give them 100% of the revenues they lost? Perhaps a compromise would be a "reverse sales tax": 9% of what they would have earned on an ordinary December day. However, Nordstrom in particular should not get any money. They already got public money recently for expansion into an empty department store downtown, a parking garage and a fancy new mini-mall next door, money that was supposed to be for low-income housing.

There was one article this week that scared me more than the evillest thing WTO has ever proposed, or the worst free-speech violations that occurred. Copyright Strikes Back by Bryan Pfaffenberger, an academic at the University of Virginia, is subtitled, "Wealthy copyright holders and media companies are paying big money to get the legislation they want--and this time, the victim is free speech." OK, it's less significant than the fact that there are people working full-time in factories for $100 per year, but if you're concerned about this issue, you'd better read this. [Bias disclaimer: I work for the company that hosts this article.]

The week also another example of how media sound bytes can't get things right even if they try. They overgeneralize and put things too much into categories. But only if you have independent knowledge of an event do you recognize it. That's one reason for this report; to show things aren't quite so black-and-white as some of the media says. Examples will be in the "Bad Media Quotes" section when I get around to writing it. This has happened when my parents have gotten in the paper for some business or neighborhood thing. Somehow the interview doesn't come out sounding like what you were trying to say. And when you know this happens with stories you have independent knowledge of, you wonder how much it's happening with stories you don't have anything to compare the report with. The best media coverage was the in-depth ones, especially Northwest Cable News, who just turned a camera on continuously and let you see for yourself.

A final lesson. It proved people can make a difference. In Washington state, the lesson wasn't quite new, because a few other examples of this had been happening the past several months. WTO came less than a month after voters passed Initiative 695, which rolled back the inflated annual car-tax rate (used to fund semi- related and unrelated programs) and mandated that henceforth, all state, county and city tax increases have to be submitted to voters, period. The point being, all the government officials, corporate leaders and TV ads were against this measure --- and it passed anyway by a large majority. (Ironically, most of the local WTO protesters were also anti-695.)

In Seattle, WTO also comes after a corporate leader (Paul Allen of Microsoft) fanagled his way into a bunch of city funds to help pay for his new baseball stadium --- even though he has enough money to build his own stadium! Even though the stadium was designed more to maximize Mariners' profits than for the enjoyment of baseball fans. (Who needs a retractable roof? Especially one that doesn't work.) Although people were unable to prevent it, it was the talk of the town before WTO. Some people said I-695 was the public's way to get back at the city for the stadium: it was the stadium vote that wasn't held.

Before that, Nordstrom, whose windows were one of the WTO's victims, made a sweetheart deal I mentioned above. (The fancy new mini-mall next door, by the way, does have breathtaking architecture inside. You should see it if you have the chance.) Another case of welfare for the rich that people were unable to prevent. All this fed into the anti-corporate sentiments.

Now, did the revolution really begin? No. But, as time will tell, one or two little revolutions might possibly have started. [More on this later...]