60 Minutes 2

D.L. boddhisatva at mindspring.com
Wed Dec 15 13:14:39 PST 1999


To whom...,

So much of the (vast over-) reaction to the WTO protests has shocked me. There has been so much clumsy, panicked infliction of the capitalist police/propaganda state over a few smashed windows.

I mean, following the wholly, blatantly pejorative bit on Eugene's naughty hippies in black, they put on a piece about Khmer Rouge death camps. I could hear Noam Chomsky giggling all the way across the country.

By the way, objectivity has flown out the window here in the Seattle press (wherefrom a lot of the "info" and footage comes to the national media). This bimbo from the Downtown Association has been pushing up damage estimates to such an extent it's absurd. Early on, the Seattle Times published her estimate based on a price of five to twenty thousand dollars per store window alongside a professional glazier's price quote of one to five thousand dollars per window without seeming to see a contradiction. They're still taking her number as gospel. Even at 5 to 20 grand a window it doesn't add up.

By the way, the effect of this terrible violence on downtown (now "estimated" at over 2 million dollars damage) is just plain invisible. A person from any city but the Emerald City wouldn't even recognize it as damage. More damage is done during a good St. Patrick's Day in New York. Has anyone ever heard of a riot with so few civilian-on-civilian assaults? Other than from police beatings, I don't think anybody got so much as a tooth knocked out. I think the protesters in Seattle were absolutely remarkable for hitting almost exclusively who they were aiming at.

peace



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