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thousands of completely peaceful demonstrators, and FAILING TO ARREST these few so-called "anarchists" who were damaging property in plain view. In some cases, PROTESTERS stood in front of the goddamned corporate store windows trying to STOP the vandalism. It was so insane. The only danger, the only harm to people or property, the only violence, the only disorder, and the only real civil disruption, in a week of peaceful protest by 50,000 people, was perpetrated by the police and those unattached, black-masked vandals whom the police allowed to run rampant. And the corporate news monopolie went right along, in lockstep, with the false narrative that the Seattle protesters were violent.
'Alice in Wonderland" comes to mind--the Red Queen ordering all the white roses to be painted red. Everything upside down and backwards. That was the beginning of our upside and backwards world--BushWorld. I remember seeing TV news on the first night of the police riot, and the first thing they showed--after that day of the most awesome, peaceful, civil disobedience protest I have ever witnessed--was a foot kicking in a window. It was all clearly DESIGNED to justify the police violence and repression AFTER THE FACT.
We've all paid a lot of attention to the war profiteering corporate news monopolies during the Bush Junta--and their important function not so much of selling the war as providing a narrative to make it appear that the war WAS selling (despite their own polls!)--and Seattle, I think, was an early warning of how important the corporate news monopolies are to Corporate exploitation, profiteering and brutality. Also, what they did to the Seattle protest points, by contrast, to how important real journalism is, not just to the functioning of democracy but also to the SANITY of a country. This experience gave me yet more admiration for black Americans--and for others around the world such as the indigenous of Latin America--who live in this upside down, backwards, insane world of SLANDER all the time. The one breakthrough that I recall for black Americans came in the 1960s with the civil rights movement, which received FAIR coverage in the news media. The news organizations of that era actually provided footage of the ugly bigots in the south, of the beatings and hosings of peaceful marchers, and focused the nation's attention on the gross and systematic unfairness to black citizens. It told the REAL story, or at least sufficient parts of it that we all understood what was really happening. The poor of Latin America--for instance, the 200,000 Mayan villagers who were raped, gutted, skinned alive, burned alive and slaughtered without mercy, in one of the worst acts of genocide under Reagan in the 1980s--have never had fair news coverage. Even in the better news era, reports of what was really happening in Latin America were sporadic and distorted. (And I don't think the story of Guatemala has ever been told by our corporate media.) In any case, being a protester in Seattle in 1999 felt much like being a black American prior to the '60s, or a poor Latin American at any time. No reality--or a very distorted perspective--in the national news narrative, and thus in the national consciousness. It can make you crazy when the truth is not told. Suffering seems to be part of the human condition. We can't avoid it. But LIES are even worse than suffering, because they make it so difficult to RECOVER from the suffering, as well as to develop remedies for injustice.
Lies are meant to demoralize you--to make you feel disempowered and disenfranchised. You are made to feel that, if you can't get your story told, you don't exist--or, if your point of view is never acknowledged, never aired, then it must be a weird or minority point of view that no one shares. The corporate news monopolies' function of DEMORALIZING the progressive majority in this country was quite evident in Seattle, and has become even more evident since then.
I think a lot of things that currently plague us are traceable back to Seattle. One of them is the Corporate Rulers' determination to gain direct control over voting counting in the USA, which they have done. In Seattle, 50,000 ordinary Americans--steel workers and postal workers, church groups, teachers, small business people, community leaders, human rights and environmental groups, parents, students--were pointing out the impacts of "unfair trade"--the already evident outsourcing of jobs, the proliferation of sweatshop labor worldwide, the Corporate assault on labor and environmental laws, and the looting of third world countries (--coming here next). The Seattle protests were a major revolt of the AMERICAN people against global corporate predators. Clearly we were right, and clearly, from the point of view of the Corporate Rulers, they had to, a) slander us completely--create an illusion of disorder and ruffianism, and b) GET CONTROL OF us. The latter was accomplished by 2002, with the passage of the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" (electronic voting, run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls), by the Anthrax Congress.
And guess what? Now we have SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people wanting the Iraq War ended, and Bush about to ESCALATE it ANYWAY. What does he care? He is not beholden to the American people for his power. He is beholden to Diebold and ES&S, run by buds of his. And the escalation is mainly to extend the hogfest of corporate war profiteering in Iraq.
The American people live at the vortex of evil Corporate power in the world. We have the potential to curtail these outlaws, these monstrous monopolies that are running roughshod over governments and peoples everywhere, and that are destroying the very planet we live on. Theoretically, we can dismantle them--pull their corporate charters, seize their assets, bust them up, or, at the least, reign them in, regulate them. In Seattle, we showed the first signs of doing so. We showed the consciousness and the organizational capacity to curtail Corporate Rule, and they came down on us like a ton of bricks.
So, we may not be able to track the pay stubs of the so-called "anarchists" who trashed Seattle, but I think we can be certain that they were not innocent youngsters out for a bus-burning, store trashing lark, and that whatever "organization" or theory that was being fed to the corporate news monopolies about them was in fact highly contrived psyops--a front.
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