ravi wrote:
> setting aside your gratuitous insults, can you explain how seattle was a
> victory?
-Seattle had a significant impact on boosting the morale of millions of -people both here in the States and around the world.
Chuck skips the more obvious success. The trade talks collapsed.
The pressure in the streets, especially with unions joining enviros and others, forced him to raise labor issues as part of the trade round, which created gridlock in the debate and killed the start of the talks.
They got restarted a couple of years later, but it undercut the momentum and permanently added concerns around the role of pharmaceutical companies and other social justice issues that are continuing to bedevil the pure corporate agenda that had existed pre-Seattle.
Again, what made that march effective was a new message: Teamsters and Turtles together, the announcement of an emerging alliance of enviros and labor and global justice advocates in alliance.
Further marches on the same theme could never get similar effect, for they just would appear, in Naomi Klein's acid phrasings, as much like a Grateful Dead camp following trade ministers around, rather than a radically new message.
The advantage of the global justice movement is that they continued to organize in a range of different ways, and part of the result of their efforts is the cancellation of debt for poor countries just announced.
-- Nathan