RESPONSE TO FAREED ZAKARIA

I am a polisci major myself and after becoming jaded by a lot of professors using the classroom as the platform for their ideology, this guy is really refreshing. What jumped out at me immediately from the original article by the corporate altar boy Zakaria, was the idea that we are being anti-democracy. He talks flippantly about it as though the idea of democracy is "shut-up, sit down, and do what you are told." Mr. Larry George has so wonderfully pointed out all the instances where not doing what you are told has improved the life of the people. You know, the same people that the government is supposed to serve, not lord itself over. How else are we to get any recognition to the issue when we will not be granted the appropriate forum in which to fight for it. Go through legislation for everything?! This guy is kidding right? At least there are people like Larry George who bother to find the truth. Bravo to Mr. George. He has this anarchist's respect.

I am a colleague of Larry George, a member of CSULB's history department. I've been teaching on corporate globalization in my U.S. Since 1945 course for the past two years. I wholly agree with George's assessment. The phrase "globalization without representation" is right on the money.

In the United States corporate power, beginning in the nineteenth century has continuously undermined democracy. We had an entrenched plutocracy in the last two decades of the nineteenth century which led Mark Twain and others to characterize the period as the Gilded Age. National outrage at huge aggregates of capital (trusts) and their control of the American political system brought on the reform and regulation of the Progressive era (1900-17). When corporate hegemony returned in the 1920s, and with it the great disparities of wealth, stock market overspeculation, and war on labor that are its stock in trade, we ended up with the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal put in place effective regulation of corporate self-aggrandizement, coupled with a strong labor bill of rights. Together with the reforms of the 1960s the first two twentieth century reform movements limited unchecked corporate power, began the process of integrating marginalized groups into the mainstream, and redistributed wealth and opportunity downward.

But in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, under the false Reaganite slogan that "government is the problem," the wholesale purchase of congressional and state legislators, and with them the U.S. Supreme Court, corporate interests were able to bring about massive deregulation and the present neoliberal consensus. Hence we are once again faced with the dominance of a plutocracy. The three great twentieth century reform movements have been largely invalidated as we sit in the middle of Gilded Age II. What characterizes this age is a system in which corporate ceo's make almost five hundred times what a worker makes in the United States. And many times more than that in comparison with the workers in brutal sweatshops that corporate hegemony has set up all over the global South. The movement of disfranchised populations (which consist of nearly everybody) represented in the Quebec demonstrations are to me a welcome uprising of democracy against the most comprehensive power grab that international business has yet attempted. Like my colleague, Professor George, I applaud the citizens in the movement against corporate globalization. It is a people's movement for the preservation of the earth and against the escalating degradation of all species that has accompanied the hegemony of neoliberal institutions.

I think it very important to make it clear that most demonstrators were not a violent rabble. I am outraged that the media has selectively chosen to portray them otherwise.

I have read first-hand reports on both the Quebec City and Seattle demonstrations. The overwhelming majority of these demonstrators were non-violent.

There were somewhere between one hundred and two hundred destructive, black clad, masked demonstrators in Quebec City. That same group had consisted of 35 to 50 in Seattle. They would do hit and run tactics and rapidly leave the scenes of their vandalism, usually before police arrived. In at least one instance reported, several of these "members" of the so called Black Bloc actually carried off a person to be arrested.

A woman who volunteered as a medic for the duration of the Quebec City demonstrations observed the repeated deliberate shooting of tear gas cannisters to the backs of crowds which effectively surged the demonstrators forward toward the police. Also mentioned was the emergency tracheatomy when a woman was shot in the throat by a rubber bullet.

After 37 years as a Democrat, I am a member of the Green Party. I am Progressive and a firm believer in democracy and the tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King when no way can be found to gain a forum. The lack of government access is clear evidence of the violation of democratic principles and practices.

"Most codes do not distingusih between acts against government and acts against the oppression of the government.

The latter are virtues; yet have furnished more victims to the executioner than the former. The unsuccessful struggles against tyranny have been the chief martyrs against treason laws in all countries." (1792, Thomas Jefferson)

"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." (Thomas Jefferson, 1816)

Of course they are going to apply the stigma associated with 'unwarranted violence" to protesters. There are millions of darkling minds out there that are willing to eat up the soundbytes provided by the media and feel full of self righteousness and savvy on current events. These people have been covertly trained not to worry about political issues affecting their daily life. The news is sensationalism, nothing more. It has become a sitcom as far as marketing goes. The biggest weapons available against protesters and anarchists alike involve appropriate use of the media. They can either place us so far out on the fringe of society that we are looked down upon and immediately categorized as violent radicals who are off their rockers, or mainstream us. The more radical elements of society have often, over time, been watered down and handed out to the mainstream. This makes it more of a fashion trend than anything else. And most importantly, the watering down process strips us to the point where the everyday Joe Darkling sees us as fundamentally similar enough to the powers we fight against that he is content to shove us to the back of his mind in the category of "Things that don't affect my everyday life." Educate to erradicate-Refuse, Resist, Revolt!

This article, and the comments, show that more and more people are ready for real, positive change. My husband and I tried to contribute last November by standing as candidates for a small but progressive party here in Canada, CAP, (Canadian Action Party) whose two main policies were 1) instituting banking reform, and 2) abrogating the phony "free" trade, and negotiating FAIR trade. However, though it gave us a platform to reach more people about the dire direction world politics/economics is heading in, we knew we couldn't win. And if we DID win, and tried to bring in these two changes, Canada would have been wiped off the map by the free-market world economy, because we realized that one country can't do it alone.

Then along came John Bunzl, of London, England, who found our writing on a progressive list, who knew we would be interested in his initiative: Simultaneous Policy. This is a way to work towards building a consensus for co-operation and away from the cut-throat, winner-take-all, everybody else loses form of competition. It's simple, but not easy, and not an over-night solution, but in the opinion of Noam Chomsky and many other activists, it deserves a good try. Please check it out at:

www.simpol.org and the more people in the grass-roots adopt it, the more moral force it will gather.

Diana Jewell

North Vancouver, BC

Canada

I know, I know--it seems out and out wacky, what with people around the world killing each other over stuff that happened 500+ years ago. And I do consider myself a nationalist, at least in the Black Nationalist sense of the world. But if there is truly no other way to curb the excesses of the global economy (and I'm not saying there isn't), is establishing some kind of global governing body a viable option? Or would it be too much trouble? Make no mistake, nationalism as a force is as strong as ever, despite what people who read too much Willaim Gibson would have you believe. And also, would a global government make things worse rather then better? Would it turn into another form of imperialism? What if a dictator gets control? And even if he (or she) didn't, would running a global democracy be too unwieldy? Imagine the bureaucracy involved. Like I said, it's just a wacky idea of mine, but one to consider in any case.

Although I did enjoy the article for its thorough savaging of the Newsweek article's incosistences and outright ignoring of the realities of the Left, this article further complicates the issue by ignoring certain sectors of the left.

The entire left wing is not comprised of pacifists or protesters who subscribe to the absrud non-violent/violent dichotomy. Moreover, many of the protesters are outright members of revolutionary left-wing and this comprises no small portion of the current movement--many of us reject terms like "anti-globalization" which seems to only include in it white, middle-class hierarchical groups (such as the Ruckus Society which has had its own share of sever problems) in favour of non-hierachical groups that dn't seek to outright condemn people of differing tactics.

I am getting sick to death of seeing people claim that there exists some sort of small group of "violent anarchists" that somehow exist separately from the protests and don't represent legitimate opinions. In fact, anarchists have shown more solidarity with non-hierachical protesters who choose other avenues of protest than have groups like the Ruckus Society.

If you wish to discuss the left, you have a responsibility to discuss the ENTIRE lft and not simply marginalize us with the same rhetorical tools you attack the right for using.