> The G20 doesn’t have time to develop big ideas during their meeting. There
> are too many disasters to be averted, not to mention petty squabbling over
> hedge-fund regulation and executive pay. But the next generation of leaders
> needs to get finance right, to balance the global economy and to keep
> development on track. That requires a new intellectual framework.
>
> Protesters who look like they just want a street party aren’t likely to be
> up to the challenge. Sadly, the more intellectually sophisticated Left seems
> to be hardly more capable of helping out. Any protester who can articulate a
> coherent alternative to the establishment’s tattered notions really could
> change the world.
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Big demos against capitalism can't be rushed jobs. We had over 10 months to prepare for Seattle and that barely got us out of park and into 1st gear; I won't go into the counterproductive nitpicking that occurred but in retrospect it does seem we got out of first gear by the time 9.11 ruptured the the organizing and narrative momentum.
Sadly, as Yoshie pointed out on a recent Lenin's tomb piece, US workers [the taxpayers blah blah] are worse than paralyzed. What is to be done?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/02/g20-protests-london-city
When mass protests exploded on the streets of Seattle in 1999 against the kind of globalisation embodied in the World Trade Organisation, their anti-capitalist message was widely portrayed as utopian. A decade on, as anti-capitalist demonstrators vented their fury yesterday on the social and ecological vandals of the City and prepared to do battle today outside the G20 meeting in the heart of what was once London's docks, it looks more like common sense.
[snip]
Ian