> Trade Organization meeting this November. It says Seattle's city council
> has voted "to make the city a global-investment-treaty-free zone." Seattle
> is home to Boeing and Microsoft, two companies with massive global sales
> that thrive on the tightened intellectual property restrictions and
> pried-open trade regimes embodied in WTO/MAI-style treaties. Can any
> northwesterners on the list enlighten me on how the locals reconcile this?
I can't speak for the SeaTac zone, but down here in Orgzone, the thing is that you have massive economic polarization, combined with low unemployment. So high-tech is booming, the raw materials/timber sector is on life support, while agribiz is somewhere in between. Back in the Eighties, conservatives could argue that the Japanese were buying up the planet; in the early Nineties, Nippon-bashing was replaced by homophobia (the infamous OCA, which tried to criminalize homosexuality via a state ballot measure). But now, with Asia in the tank, Oregon farmers getting clobbered by declining Pacific sales, and those juicy software surplus-rents, I think folks have the incentive as well as the wherewithal to protest against the Fat Cats. Note that the anti-free trade thing is closely tied to the anti-NAFTA struggle; so low unemployment makes it easier for the locals to see Latino/Asian immigrants as plucky pioneers like themselves. The politics of austerity are turning into the politics of prosperity, which is good news for working people, and for the Left in general.
-- Dennis