>I think Doug is on to something about low unemployment contributing
>to "Seattle"--"Ah, for the late 90s," as someone said. Remember in
>this connection the big labor victories at UPS and Verizon. About
>Seattle, though, weren't there some important local factors that
>contributed too? I'm thinking of the labor strife at Kaiser
>Aluminum and the fight over logging the old-growth forests, two
>issues with the same villain--thus "Teamsters and Turtles."
In the late 1980s, or maybe the early 1990s, the Economist argued that environmental consciousness rises late in long booms and recedes in recessions. They pointed to the 1960s and the 1980s as examples. The sample size is small, but this might have something to do with the salience of turtles in 1999, too.
Doug