RE: Michael Saltz (a former list subscriber)

[Julio Fernández Baraibar <julfb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A warm hug for our former list member. All of we were in jail with him in
Washington DC.

Julio FB
----- Original Message -----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 1:42 PM
Subject: Michael Saltz (a former list subscriber)


> New York Times, April 17, 2000
>
> From Cell, Coalition Looked Like a Movement
>
> By TIM WEINER
>
> WASHINGTON, April 16 -- As he sees it, Mike Saltz spent Saturday night in
> jail for exercising his natural-born rights of free speech and peaceable
> assembly.
>
> A man who appears both sweet-tempered and thoughtful, Mr. Saltz, 22, a
> student at the University of Oregon in Eugene, was swept up in a mass
> arrest of roughly 600 people near the International Monetary Fund on
> Saturday.
>
> He was trying to find some friends at a rally, he said, when he was
> arrested, cuffed wrist to ankle and charged with parading without a
permit,
> an infraction legally less serious than a misdemeanor.
>
> "I was really shocked," he said. "When it comes to disagreeing with the
> dominant view, your rights are really out the window. They can do whatever
> they want -- they're the police."
>
> It was his first arrest. He spent Saturday night and Sunday morning in a
> holding cell in the bowels of the District of Columbia Superior Court
> before he paid a $50 fine and was freed. He had had no water to drink, he
> said, and only a doughnut to eat. But he had plenty of time to ponder his
> part in this weekend's street protests in Washington, in the diffuse
> movement for "economic justice" -- if it is a movement -- and the police
> reaction to it.
>
> Mr. Saltz was raised in Yorba Linda, Calif., not far from Richard Nixon's
> family home. His family is a pure product of the American Dream, he said.
> But he began to get ideas about politics in grade school that were a
little
> outside the mainstream in Southern California.
>
> "I started getting interested in activism in the third grade," he said.
> Sprawling developments cutting into mountain lions' habitat first fired
his
> imagination. He became interested in the Sierra Club and the radical
> ecology group Earth First. He started a political magazine as a high
school
> freshman. His work drew anonymous death threats, he said.
>
> "In 1994, before I went to college, there was the Zapatista uprising" in
> southern Mexico. The small but politically savvy rural guerrilla movement,
> linked to the outside world by e-mail, demanded land rights for Mexican
> peasants and protested the North American Free Trade Agreement. That set
> Mr. Saltz studying, as he put it, "how globalization creates a movement
> like the Zapatistas, a globalized activism."
>
> When he went off to the University of Oregon, his thinking connected with
> what he calls "this strange coalition" that drew thousands of protesters
> like him to Seattle in November and to Washington this weekend. It is a
> collection of advocates for ecology and self-declared anarchists,
> traditional leftists and mainstream labor unions and dozens more groups
> deeply skeptical of the forces of globalization.
>
> Sitting on a park bench today in downtown Washington, two blocks from the
> White House and four from the World Bank, he reflected on his experience
in
> Seattle, where he was not arrested, and on the crowd in Washington, and
> said, "I'm beginning to call this a movement.
>
> "It could break apart as easily as it came together," he said, "but it
> feels like it's coming together. In Seattle it was just forming. Now there
> seems to be a coherent, cohesive idea -- economic justice. The World Trade
> Organization was something to latch onto. It represents what we reject: an
> economy that is becoming less and less democratic.
>
> "Governments are repressing movements for economic democracy like the
> Zapatistas. In this country, the government is cutting social spending.
> We're doing away with welfare, doing away with job security. There's more
> and more temporary work, jobs that don't provide a living wage. The
> economy's creating more billionaires, but there's a huge, growing gap
> between the rich and poor."
>
> "I don't know if the movement is at the point of proposing a model," he
> said. "Maybe it's fair trade. Maybe it's getting people to think about
what
> they buy, whether whatever they're buying is made in sweatshops or under
> exploitative conditions. Maybe it's getting people to see they have the
> power to change things."
>
> For himself, in the future, it may be a career as a labor organizer, or
> working abroad in poor villages, maybe in Mexico, he said.
>
> For today, it was enough to get out of jail and back into the streets and
> their continuing political carnival tinged with confrontation.
>
> "I'm still trying to figure out for myself what the answer is," he said.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
>