TNR writer Easterbrook writes:"There was something extraordinary about the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) .... What was strange was that multitudes would turn out to chant against hitherto *obscure* economic negotiators in a time of record-breaking prosperity."(my highlight)
Obscure because corporate lackeys like the New Republic failed to report on it - leaving it for the "experts" in the business sections of newspapers. So, not surprisingly, The New Republic is baffled by what happened and instinctively resorts to its tired mantra that these are the best of times.
But the mantra won't suffice; the spineless magazine needs to quarantine and sanatize what happened. Argument number one is that people have the luxury to focus on "ever-more-minor issues" - what the WTO is about - because things are so rosy. Times are great and the WTO is relatively unimportant. Doesn't much explain why 400+ people would go to jail - and many more were willing to risk jail and bodily harm - in order to protest the WTO. The New Republic can also be counted on to argue that people don't vote or care about politics because the economy is in such good shape. So which is it? Easterbrook even says: "One might have expected such scenes during an economic depression." Does this imply that an economic depression will bring on some crazy shit?
"And it is precisely because free-market economics has created an American society in which fewer than ever before are illiterate or exhausted from debilitating physical labor that vast numbers of people are now in a position *to learn the details of WTO decisions, dislike those details, and express themselves.*" For which the New Republic deserves no credit.
TNR writer Charles Duhigg, on the other hand, argues people shouldn't have been surprised by the protests, which according to him involved around 10,000 people. He goes on to say that the northwest is a known hotbed of protest and suggests that the U.S. government chose Seattle on purpose, predicting that the ensuing protests would strengthen its bargaining power vis-a-vis other nations. Hence the protesters were supporting their government in its disputes with other nations! Why play down the numbers, then? How could he miss all of the anti-corporate sloganeering? Reuters reported that Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch said: "History has been made in Seattle as the allegedly irresistible forces of corporate economic globalization were stopped in their tracks.''
If true, the U.S. government's decision to purposely hold the meetings in a hotbed of radical protest - a "brilliant strategy" according to Duhigg - completely backfired. His colleague Easterbrook admits "that multitudes [turned] out to chant against hitherto obscure economic negotiators." Those would be both American and foreign.
The defeat of the MAI and the derailment of the WTO talks in Seattle proves that The New Republic is failing in it's mission to obscure the role and intentions of its corporate masters. I look forward to further dust storms of bogus arguments from the rag, watching it pathetically attempt to make political realities adhere to its ideological outlook.
Peter K.