This is neither here no there, but I recently saw Janeane Garofalo, who is constantly called a hypocrite by the purists, on David Letterman's TV show doing stand-up where she said she had read that pop star Ricky Martin felt the U.S. should stop testing weapons in Puerto Rico. She sarcastically questioned how effective it was for pop stars to get involved in policy-making, for instance the Beastie Boys and Michael Stipe as poster boys for the "Free Tibet" campaign. She added, "When [they] say jump, the Chinese ask, how high my friends?"
>A honeymoon between AFL-CIO and
>youthful activists may portend the dropping of anti-imperialism from
>the youth agenda altogether (except for a handful of socialist
>youths). It sure looks like young American leftists have come to be
>more critical of nationalisms of other nations than American
>nationalism.
Well the AFL-CIO recently came out in support of better immigration policies for the U.S. And I bet most of the activists at A16 consider Buchanan a fascist. And at least some of them, along with Lori Wallach, consider the WTO, the IMF and Word Bank as imperialist tools of first world governments, which in turn they consider fronts for the governments' countries' corporate intersts.
It seems to me that the confusion arises when it looks like the WTO and first world governments are "using" the Third World to inflict the neoliberal agenda on the first world. So, what you get is (the appearance of?) first and third world elites benefiting a lot, third world workers benefitting a little, the environment and first world workers losing? Like, as you might put it, some of the East Timorese were able to return home, but now their home is a U.N. colony of sorts, instead of an Indonesian colony.
Peter