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aim them right at the heads of peaceful, seated demonstrators. It was the most horrible thing I have ever witnessed. (I was a protest monitor, and later sent testimony for the City of Seattle hearings.) Here is what happened: 10,000 people, of the 50,000 in the Seattle protesting the WTO, organized the biggest and most incredibly effective civil disobedience action ever conducted. They all sat down in the street intersections, to prevent the WTO from meeting. And they just sat there. No disorder. No incidents. Totally peaceful. It was a jaywalking ticket, at best. Then came the Darth Vaders and other cops, who shot pepper spray hoses at them, drenched the area with CS gas, and beat people up--and arrested them and hauled them off to unprepared detention (many sat in buses for hours and hours, with no water, no toilets, no medical care, no food)--and this went on ALL DAY LONG, from about 10 in the morning to late in the afternoon, before there was any disorder downtown. There, agents provocateur began burning trash cans and breaking windows, late in the day, for the evening news. The police ignored them. They didn't arrest the vandals. They arrested anybody with an anti-WTO button on. Then they started invading nearby neighbhorhoods and gassing everybody. They even beat up a city councilman.
On the news that night, first thing they showed was a foot going through a window--as if to justify the police violence, as if the police were establishing order, with their brutal actions. Totally topsy-turvy news coverage. Shocking, back in 1999. The WTO protests were slandered mercilessly--without the slightest regard for the truth--all across the land, even in some leftist publications. And the true story has never been told by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, and probably never will be.
But I think that we can judge the IMPORTANCE of the WTO protests, to the Corporate powers-that-be, by the excessive brutality and calculation with which it was turned into a "melee," and by the "Iron Curtain" in the news media placed over the truth. Oh, my goodness, did they ever want to smash us, and prevent other Americans from getting any ideas about protesting global corporate piracy ("free trade")! My, my my!
I actually think that the Bush theft of the 2000 election, and, two years later, the institution of electronic voting, with machines run on "trade secret," proprietary programming, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, were two major Corporate Ruler reactions to those awesome protests in Seattle. And perhaps the whole Bush regime is. I think they realized that they had a big problem on their hands, with progressive Americans being in the majority, and, to prevent us from asserting our sovereignty as a people, against Corporate Rule, they had to, a) militarize us and loot us, and b) control election results. No more "benign" Clintonite rule. We needed a good smash in the face of naked fascist rule. Very distracting--war, torture, Bush ripping up the Constitution. Hard to stay focused on the global corporate predators enslaving third world nations, pillaging and laying waste to the earth, and outsourcing all our jobs, with mass death and loss of our democracy happening.
Just my little theory. But I think there's something to it. And then, if they grace us with another Clinton, she will have Bush's "unitary executive" precedents, of suspension of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without charge, no fly lists, massive domestic spying, and all these other fascist goodies, to deal with any more Seattles.
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