Myerson- Who Were Those Kids

["Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman@xxxxxxxx>]

A bit of analysis from the social democrat gallery. -  Nathan


Who Were Those Kids?
And other questions about the meaning of
Seattle answered here!

by Harold Meyerson

Okay, who were those kids?

Though the media have done their usual
sensationalist spreads profiling the
several hundred anarchists who trashed
downtown Seattle, that still leaves
unresolved the identity of the other
20,000 nonlabor demonstrators. Yes, a
number came from other nations and
around the U.S., but the vast majority
were homies. Groups of young people I
spoke with on Shut-Down Tuesday came
from, in no particular order, a local
synagogue youth group, a local
Chinese-medicine college, the University
of Washington, other local colleges. My
high-school-senior daughter e-mailed a
high-school-senior friend who lives in
Seattle and was told that her friend's
entire class took their senior ditch day
that Tuesday to join in the demo. So, the
shortest answer to this question is: kids.
Normal kids. Not the kids who will end up
at the Wharton School of Finance, but few
kids do.

What the kids on the streets of Seattle
told me was that the WTO frightened and
upset them, which raises the question of what
all the WTO has come to symbolize. There may be
some clues in both the trashing of Seattle's
Niketown megastore and the wildfire growth of the
campus anti-sweatshop movement. The kids' deep
and visceral (as well as informed) loathing
seems directed, first, at the corporate
appropriation of youth culture, then at the huge inequalities
that our economy is generating at home as well
as abroad, and ultimately, at the corporatization
and commodification of the environment and
absolutely everything else (which the WTO is seen,
rightly, as promoting).

Good thing the Democrats aren't holding their
convention next summer in one of those God-awful
arenas with some abysmal corporate logo on top.

Did the enviros and the kids really hit it off
with the unions? Will this
alliance hold?

Ironically, they probably hit it off best with
the Steelworkers. (The mills that once turned the
industrial Midwest a dingy rust-brown have
been either shuttered or cleaned up.) At the behest of
Steelworkers president George Becker, nearly
1,000 of his union's activists came to Seattle and
stayed all week - conducting teach-ins for
themselves with environmentalists, academics and
unionists from distant shores; marching for
Third World debt forgiveness in a driving rain; and
leading a procession of whooping kids down to
the harbor where they dumped Styrofoam ingots
into the harbor (and fished them out again in
a display of proper Green etiquette).

What has been largely unreported is that many
nonunion demonstrators took part in the unions'
mega-rally and march, where the Naderites, the
church ladies, and the cadres from the Sierra Club
and the National Organization of Women cheered
and shouted as lustily as the longshoremen. A
camaraderie was forged in Seattle, and what my
friend Todd Gitlin has called the Greenie-Sweeney
alliance will only grow stronger in the next
battle: the fight over China's admission to the WTO.

We were told that was a done deal - that
Congress would surely vote to
approve China's admission, just as it votes
every year to extend its Most
Favored Nation status.

It may well have been a done deal, but Seattle
undid it. Before Seattle, House Democratic leader
Dick Gephardt was putting out signals that it
couldn't be beat, because he didn't want a fight on an
issue that would divide the Democrats in an
election year. Now, the unions and environmental and
human-rights groups have a shot to defeat it,
and to that end, they'll wage total war. Anything
less would be backing off when they have the
momentum. Their justifiable fear is that if China is
admitted to the WTO, all prospects that the
WTO will ever suggest, let alone mandate, any labor
safeguards, worker rights or environmental
standards to its member nations will be eternally
kiboshed.

Some free-trade advocates say the WTO
shouldn't get into labor rights and
standards, anyway; that these matters should
be handled by the International
Labor Organization (ILO).

That's because the ILO has less authority to
enforce global labor standards than your cousin
Bernie.

What about all those complaints from the
governments of developing nations
that imposing these standards will remove
their main competitive advantage:
cheap labor?

Globalization has reduced even the noblest of
these governments to the level of small-town
mayors forced to come up with ridiculous
subsidies to bring the widget factory to town. The union
activists of these nations - many of whom
spoke eloquently at the labor rally in Seattle - don't
buy this for a minute. This kind of free
trade, they document, drags down wages in Mexico to the
levels in Thailand, and those to the levels in
Bangladesh, and those to the levels in China.

Back to Gephardt's concern that this issue
will divide the Democratic Party.
Or, as one of the more senior and most savvy
members of the House asked me
this weekend, "Is this 1968 all over again for
the Democrats?"

Like 1968, this splits the party, but along
different lines. Vietnam divided the Democrats' core
constituencies against themselves: The
remaining urban machines and most of labor favored
LBJ's policy; the suburban liberals and the
campuses opposed it. This issue, by contrast, unites
the Democrats' core constituencies: labor and
the environmentalists together turn out a good 90
percent of all Democratic precinct walkers,
phone bankers, and the mailings that don't come
directly from the candidates' own campaigns.
On the other side are business and the centrist
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which
provide megabucks and ideological mush,
respectively, for Democratic campaigns, but no
bodies whatsoever. (Nationally, the DLC might
have just enough members to do a precinct walk
of K Street - Washington's lobbyist gulch -
between 16th and 19th streets.)

In short, China will present a miserable
dilemma for Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore
and Bill Bradley, who fecklessly endorsed
China's WTO membership bid before Seattle. The
unions supporting Gore and the enviros
supporting Bradley will be pushing them in one
direction, their finance capos in the other.
(Example: L.A.'s richest Democrat, National
Convention Committee chairman Eli Broad, is a
huge shareholder in AIG Insurance, which
forecasts fortunes from the Chinese insurance
market.) For Gore, the problem may be particularly
acute. The China vote is likely to come early
next year, at the very moment he needs unions
assistance in California, New York and the
industrial Midwest.

Can the unions be so dialectical that they can
mobilize their members for
Gore at the same time they're mobilizing them
against a deal Gore supports?

Hegel wasn't that dialectical.

How else can the Greenie-Sweeneys impact the
election?

Alas, there isn't a fair-trader in the whole
bunch of presidential candidates, except Pat Buchanan.
But one thing the core Democratic
constituencies can do is try to get the Democratic presidential
- and, for that matter, senatorial and House -
candidates to commit themselves to the position
that Bill Clinton took on Super Tuesday last
week, when he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
that he not only supported global labor
standards, but believed that nations that flouted them
should have sanctions applied to them, just as
nations that violate property rights do now.

Okay, Clinton's own Cabinet secretaries didn't
pay him any heed. Trade Representative Charlene
Barshefsky immediately assured her fellow
trade ministers that that was just the president talking,
that she would never insist on such a thing,
and what she said went.

In a sense, Seattle presented Clinton with his
greatest challenge in triangulation yet: His (and the
Democrats') core supporters were in the
street, his (and the Democrats') money guys were holed up
in their hotel rooms, with diametrically
opposed positions. In a faint echo of 1968, when Clinton
demonstrated against the war while in Britain,
but still worked to preserve, as he wrote at that
time, his "viability inside the system," the
president strove mightily to bring street and suite
together. His final gambit was to embrace the
street's position almost entirely, letting his
underlings tell the suites that he didn't
really mean it.

But why shouldn't the Democrats take the
president's rhetoric seriously? Gore and Bradley may
well be lost causes on the China deal, but why
not try to save them from their own worst instincts
on free trade generally? Greenie-Sweeneys
should push them, and the party platform, to embrace
the Clinton Post-Intelligencer position.
Injecting some binding standards, some environmental
protection, some worker rights into the
laissez-faire global economy would conform Democratic
global policy with long-standing Democratic
domestic policy. If the polling is to be believed at
all, it would also be a widely popular
position - one that could be favorably contrasted with the
Republicans' anything-for-a-buck approach to
the New World Order. Two key Democratic-leaning
constituencies that don't vote a whole lot -
blue-collar workers and kids - might even turn out
in greater numbers this November. (Did I
mention that's who the sit-downers were in Seattle?
Kids.)