Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Monday, January 6, 2014

The Dark Side of Globalization

Why Seattle's 1999 Protesters Were Right The WTO demonstrators were the "Occupy" movement of the late-20th century—mocked, maligned, and mostly right.

By Noah Smith

The Atlantic - Jan 6 2014

In 1999, my friend moved to Seattle, where he was hit with rubber bullets, tear-gassed in the face, and nearly arrested by police. He had joined the famous protests of the WTO Ministerial Conference, widely known as the Seattle Protests. The Occupy Wall Street of their time, they focused on globalization rather than the excesses of finance. And, quite like the Occupy Wall Street of their time, they were often mocked by critics as silly, aimless, and overly hand-wringy about the future.
The organizers were a hodgepodge of groups—unions worried about competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups worried about unsafe imports, labor rights groups worried about bad working conditions in other countries, and leftists of various stripes simply venting their anger at capitalism.

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