http://www.suck.com/fish/99/12/21/
------------------------------- Battle Figure http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/07/
Coolness and ironic detachment are great, but they work a lot better if one actually knows what one is talking about. It is clear that as far as "freedom" of trade (more accurately, "freedom" from labor and environmental restrictions for investors), inequality of terms of trade (hint: Chinese factory workers' wages as a fraction of American ones, adjusted for productivity), historically successful strategies for third-world economic development (hint: South Korea), and US economic history (hint: tariffs), you are in desperate need of a clue. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.prospect.org/ columns/sawicky/sa991203.html
Enrique Diaz-Alvarez <enrique at ee.cornell.edu>
I followed that link hoping to get some big wonkish policy analysis but found just another rant. Are you aware that the WTO was designed to reduce those "tariffs" you claim make up the whole of US economic history? Is anybody actually aware of what the WTO does?
Yr pal, BarTel
I'm afraid you failed to mention one of the main lessons of the Battle of Seattle. With his "resignation," Police Chief Norm Stamper provides a much-needed scapegoat for Mayor Schell's bumbled handling of the protests. Doug Henwood, among others, is correct when he points out that had New York Mayor Giuliani been in charge, things would not have spun out of control. Il Duce would have denied all parade permits and would have flooded downtown with regiments of New York's finest who, as you know, would have jumped at the chance to beat puddles of blood out of festive protesters and probably would have left a few popsicle-sticked with their own signs, à la Abner Louima. Mayor Schell, to his eternal regret, was more concerned with free speech than with law and order, not to mention the right to make a bundle during the holiday shopping rush. No doubt the nation's mayors have understood the moral of the story; even so, I bet the next convention takes place in somewhere like Jakarta or Singapore.
Peter Kilander — an avenging lesbian trapped in a man's body <peterk at enteract.com>
Yours has been the only letter expressing anything approaching sympathy for the mayor and the chief of police. I'm inclined to your view, but most of our readers seem a bit more image driven, and will condemn cops in helmets even when the cops are trying to stop people from breaking windows.
Yr pal, BarTel
Comparing the Nazis' atrocities launched on Kristallnacht to anarchists smashing Nike windows?
Do you have any scruples at all?
Luckily, the market for easy, thoughtless, detached "irony" from flush twentysomethings with vacuum chambers where their knowledge of history should be is just about over.
Elizabeth McLellan <orlando2k at earthlink.net>
Sadly, the market for cliché-slinging bores affecting pointless umbrage appears to be infinite.
Yr pal, BarTel
Battle Figure
Jeez, that was a pretty compelling essay you brought forth. You navigated at a distance the shifting terrain of competing perspectives, bringing forth a landscape rendered more authentic by your elimination of each side's illusions and contradictions. Even your summation capped the affair in a believable way — that in the final analysis Americans' only want to ensure our own hegemony and keep up the pace of ever increasing riches and goods through the lamentably unavoidable labor exploitation equation. And all this by those united in a flurry of coffee drink indulgences! Pegged!
But I think with all that fancy writing you surely must know that there is more to the story of opposition to the World Trade Organization than merely ensuring the American slice of the pie stays hefty, especially since a great many American corporations are still getting fat off the backs of foreign labor with no change in sight. And you must know that for those on the side of real labor concerns, the depth of commitment goes way beyond crocodile tears and posturing over the woes of foreign labor practices.
Your essay seamlessly skirted between the extremes, hewing each side down, but in the end it was hard to tell whether you wore the free garb of a social critic, or were merely doing a fancy dance for the pseudoenlightened, a marionette staged with blasé savoir-faire. Your removed glance at the overarching scenario gave what might pass as some perspective, but was any real insight proffered? After all, we know we're fat Americans in collusion with the Olean stream, so readers of Suck ought to be way past wordy reminders of how their selfish conspicuous consumption is rife with denial. They ought to be ready for some real dissection — in glib, readable terms of course — about the underlying issues for and against the WTO. But keep working at it. I am sure you must know a little more than you were willing to dig into just yet. And if you're not the puppet of someone else, I am sure you should be willing to bring forth something more substantial.
Sincerely, Lindsay H. Cook <aeons at cstone.net>
"Free garb?" "Fancy dance?" These sound like terms from the annual Philadelphia mummers parade! Are you a mummer? I'm guessing that makes you a 59-year-old man who drives a Habersett meat delivery truck and who, though heterosexual, still enjoys dressing up in feathers and playing a ukulele.
Those crazy mummers! If they'd had mummers in Seattle, I'd have been right there with them, in my boa, chanting, "Fuck the corpos!"
Yr pal, BarTel
Worst drivel I've read for a long time, or maybe I missed your point and it was just a "let's pretend we're stupid" kind of paper. Being stupid is one thing, not checking your sources is another. "To the best of our knowledge," my ass. Jose Bové can hardly be called a terrorist (twice). He's only a farmer union leader as hungry for media coverage as any politician. His union (la confederation paysanne) doesn't advocate protectionism. In fact, their first successful protest this year was against unilateral American trade sanctions. Did you know McDonald's launched a major advertising campaign in France casting American farmers as stupid fatsoes to promote the European origin of their products? I don't think they were that satisfied with sales to depart from their usual Disney/family line. So, do go back to "remote-controlled luxury," but next time try harder to "avoid getting into too many specifics."
Michel Bazieu <michel.bazieu at CNEN.DE.EdF.Fr>
Funny that Bové is protesting the WTO, since unilateral trade sanctions is one of the main things the GATT and WTO were invented to fix.
But you're right: If McDonald's has to advertise, it must not be very successful.
Yr pal, BarTel
Dear Sucksters,
Some days this rag is brilliant, some days it sucks (and I mean that in a nice way), but there's usually a point to it. What happened today? There's more substance in a sidewalk rant from a brick wielding madman. (And if you consider d'Arcy's Starbucks comments, maybe I'm on to something there.)
After the rococo cynicism and oh-so-clever sidetracks have been pared away, what remains of today's outburst is roughly this: The anarchists are bogus, protesting is bogus, Teamsters and Greens having anything in common is bogus, several insignificant writers are bogus, the French are bogus, and furthermore, it's pointless to try to influence economic policy and anyone who tries to do it is bogus.
Who cares who's bogus? We're all bogus. The fact that wealthy corporations are exploiting the people and environment abroad would be no less a fact coming out of the mouth of Kathy Lee Gifford in Nike sneakers at Disneyland than it would be coming out of the mouth of a hungry and jobless Pakistani.
Anyone who's written for a college newspaper knows how easy it is to rail against hypocrisy the way d'Arcy does. No target is ideologically pure. But when you've run out of bricks and windows, it helps to have an answer for the old lady who comes out and asks, "Now what do you have to say for yourself, young man?"
The only affirmative point in today's screed is roughly this lazy retort: Slavery, extortion, and environmental exploitation are the only means to prosperity because that's how we did it here in the already developed world, and anyone who says otherwise is bogus.
Sucksters, if I want that kind of entertainment, I can read Steve Dunleavey's column in the NY Post. I expect better from you.
This Thursday evening, there'll be a few bogus souls, myself included, marching down Fifth Avenue to protest labor abuses by manufacturers (and no doubt we'll all be wearing garments made by exploited labor, so sue us). May I assume Tim Cavanaugh has a less pointless activity planned; shopping, perhaps?
Kurt Opprecht <arjaynine at yahoo.com>
Let me guess: It's brilliant when you agree with it; it sucks when you don't. It's funny the way that works.
My objection isn't to people who are ideologically impure, but to people who are ideologically wrong, people who would rather return the poorest people on Earth to lives of subsistence farming than put up with the aesthetic offense of sweatshops. Poverty is not something created by a conspiracy of capitalists. It's the natural state of humanity, and the only known cure for it is economic activity.
Don't know whether I'll be shopping this Thursday, but as a matter of fact, if you really want to help poor people you'd do better to skip your little march and buy something instead.
Yr pal, BarTel