Globalization Videos

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As the 10th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle approach, we have rooted around in our archives to bring you the 5 original episodes of "Showdown in Seattle," produced at the Seattle Indymedia Center that week. "What Democracy Looks Like" Dec 3, 1999 William Kunsler, great American defense attorney describes Michelangelo's Statue of David as unique because it captures the moment of decision, not the moment of victory. The first four episodes of "Showdown in Seattle" were produced while the battle was raging, when each activist and group had to face THEIR moment of decision, the moment when they decided to go up against all odds to really stop the WTO. This, the final episode of "Showdown," proclaims their victory as the WTO talks collapsed in defeat. (Although not shown in this episode, to really rub it in, the city government of Seattle refused to let the WTO conference extend their stay in town by even a day, even though the WTO begged for an extension. Activists in the streets shut down the WTO on the first day, and the City shut them down again on the last day. Double shut-down! Some people feel that it took 911 and the subsequent development of the US security state to check the people's movement that stopped the WTO. Irregardless of 911, the united front that emerged to stop the WTO in Seattle still is needed, now, more than ever. There have been subsequent losses of liberties, economic collapse, and an ever greater understanding of the importance of taking into consideration the environment. As a species, we are still racing for the bottom when we need to fight for the other world that is possible. (There is not one peep about global warming in ANY of these 5 episodes. That's one example of an issue that has arisen full force since 1999, but that proves the point of the protests.) These videos serve as a fine example of what can come out of a people's media. The IMC went viral, spreading to countries around the world, playing an important part in keeping the movement alive and well. The PepperSpray Collective, producers of "Indymedia Presents," began as part of the Seattle IMC. We are proud to continue this fine tradition. Like Michelangelo's David we have decided we CAN fight the giant, and we can win. Please visit our website for more info: www.peppersprayproductions.org

www.cjly.net/deconstructingdinner/111909.htm In January 2009, the Agroinnovations Podcast featured Deconstructing Dinner. Agroinnovations touches many of the subjects covered on Deconstructing Dinner but further offers unique perspectives and subjects worth exploring. The Agroinnovations Podcast is based in Albequerque, New Mexico and is hosted weekly by Frank Aragona. They have produced 70 episodes to date. Today's episode features segments from Agroinnovations featuring well-known figures like Paul Stamets - a mycologist (aka mushroom specialist) from Olympia, Washington, the U.K's Rob Hopkins who has popularized the Transition Town Movement and Montana journalist and author Richard Manning, who possesses a keen interest in the history and future of the American prairie and agriculture. Voices Paul Stamets, mycologist, Fungi Perfecti (Olympia, WA) - Stamets is on the editorial board of The International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, and is an advisor to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School. He runs Fungi Perfecti - a family-owned company specializing in using gourmet and medicinal mushrooms to improve the health of the planet and its people. Paul is the author of Mycelium Running. Rob Hopkins, co-founder, Transition Town Totnes (Totnes, UK) - Rob is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He has many years experience in education, teaching permaculture and natural building, and set up the first 2 year full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland as well as co-ordinating the first eco-village development in Ireland to be granted planning permission. He is author of 'Woodlands for West Cork!', 'Energy Descent Pathways' and most recently 'The Transition Handbook: from oil dependence to local resilience'. Richard Manning, author/journalist, Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization (Missoula, MO) - Richard is an award-winning environmental author and journalist, with particular interest in the history and future of the American prairie, agriculture and poverty. He is the author of eight books, and his articles have been published in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Audubon and The Bloomsbury Review. His 2007 release is titled Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization.

It was the moment when a great coalition of the future, the people of the world, united together, first became visible. American labor had seen its factories closed down, jobs exported to more exploitative regions of the world. The third world had felt its own pains, and WTO delegates from those countries knew they were committing their homelands to perpetual poverty if they willingly locked on the shackles of the WTO agreements. Farmers of India were committing mass suicide. Environmentalists had recognized the signs of ecological collapse. Nowhere was safe from the reach of global capital and a bleak future of corporate monoculture, all in the name of ?free trade.? The crack-down intensified, the jails filled up, but demonstrations continued. In the swirling clouds of teargas, the American public got a glimpse of the crossroads of the future: one way was the road of repression and a corporate-dominated race to hell. The other road raised the possibility of world unity and a fight to lift us all, symbolized by the coalition of ?Teamsters and Turtles.? At the least, people the world over, wondering what the fuss was all about, got a quick political education, fulfilling one of the goals of the protests. This is episode 4 of the 5-part series ?Showdown in Seattle, 5 days that shook theWTO,? produced by the Seattle Indymedia Center during the week of meetings and protests in late 1999. Looking back we know that the ?Millennium Round? of the WTO collapsed that week, but when this episode was produced, the collapse had not yet happened. Like the Berlin Wall, which fell without warning, the demonstrators rage against the machine, not knowing how close to total success they were getting. Students of political process could study these videos and learn profound lessons about going up against the corporate state.

Part 1 of "SHOWDOWN IN SEATTLE, 5 Days That Shook the WTO" (Nov 29, 1999) Ten years ago the WTO came to Seattle, the only American city with a statue of Lenin, and got run out of town. It was a moment legends are made of, but it was real life. Sixty thousand protesters, all in one way or another saying "shut it down," para-trouped in behind corporate lines, regrouping into alliances and affinity groups. They formed the legions of a political army, with all the division of labor any other army would have. It was "People, United," and they would NOT be defeated. They DID shut it down, physically and politically, internally, and perhaps eternally. The people stood up, not in some Obama music video, but in real life. Diversity of tactics and timing allowed the action to go on all week, and our side--people's army that it was--didn't abandon our casualties. In the end, the WTO, in disarray, asked the City of Seattle if they could please extend their stay by a day or so. The City said "No, leave as scheduled," and firmly ran them out of town. One good thing that came out of those times was the birth of the Seattle Indymedia Center (IMC). Before 1999 there was much less thought about going to the Internet to follow an event like a political uprising. The IMC cobbled together servers galore and a phat pipeline to the web. Even if Corporate America had wanted to cover the story of the opponents to the WTO, they couldn't have done so well. CBS or NBC might have one camera on the ground, and that most likely in with the dignitaries, but every gang and gaggle of activists likely included somebody who recorded it or reported it. Citizen journalism was alive, and even Corporate News turned to the IMC website for accurate reporting. An ad-hoc collaboration of some pre-existing video groups under the auspices of the IMC, gathered this footage and produced a daily video in a series called "Showdown in Seattle, 5 Days that Shook the WTO." Indymedia Presents #370, is Part 1 of that original series, produced Nov 29, 1999, a day of banner drops, debt drop, and raindrops, with a big show that night in the Seattle Center. Episode #371 of Indymedia Presents will be the second part in the 5-part series, and so on. We hope these original episodes can be useful in providing some deeper understanding of the issues, many of which have become mainstream, hidden in a sound-bite mention of the 10th anniversary of those days of action. In these 5 shows we can see a victory for the people and for people?s media. It was messy, but the WTO is still in shambles, while the IMC, with its collaborative model, went viral.

"Showdown in Seattle, 5 Days That Shook the WTO" part 2, Nov 30, 99 It was the opening day of the official proceedings. Activists were way better organized, and got up earlier than authorities had expected. Using multiple tactics, including the blockading of the streets leading to the meetings, activists managed to do what they had promised to do, which is keep the meetings from happening. Longshoremen shut down every port on the west coast, Seattle cab drivers went on strike, activists held their blockades and barricades, and 50,000 union members marched into the city center, hard hats, steel toed boots and all. Beyond physically stopping the meetings, the coalition which formed to stop the "Millennium Round" of the WTO scored a BIG political victory by putting the WTO and the problems with it in the minds of people and by really boosting and linking movements around the world. Watching this footage, which was captured and edited in the thick of the "Battle of Seattle" is fascinating, because 10 years later we know how the story turned out, and that the effort was way more successful than even the activists understood at the moment. The stories of how US Secretary of State Madaline Albright was stuck in her hotel room and couldn't get to the sites of the WTO meetings were not known to demonstrators on the ground. The stories of how the protests outside embolded Third World delegates inside the Ministerial meetings only came out later. The video coverage of that day, contained in part two of the 5 segments is remarkable for how similar it is to ANY large demonstration, and shows, in a way, how "mountaintop" moments are made. Indymedia Presents #371 features part 2 of the 5 parts series made 10 years ago in occupied Seattle. Part 3 will be in our next episode, #372, and so on.

Part 1 of "SHOWDOWN IN SEATTLE, 5 Days That Shook the WTO" (Nov 29, 1999) Ten years ago the WTO came to Seattle, the only American city with a statue of Lenin, and got run out of town. It was a moment legends are made of, but it was real life. Sixty thousand protesters, all in one way or another saying "shut it down," para-trouped in behind corporate lines, regrouping into alliances and affinity groups. They formed the legions of a political army, with all the division of labor any other army would have. It was "People, United," and they would NOT be defeated. They DID shut it down, physically and politically, internally, and perhaps eternally. The people stood up, not in some Obama music video, but in real life. Diversity of tactics and timing allowed the action to go on all week, and our side--people's army that it was--didn't abandon our casualties. In the end, the WTO, in disarray, asked the City of Seattle if they could please extend their stay by a day or so. The City said "No, leave as scheduled," and firmly ran them out of town. One good thing that came out of those times was the birth of the Seattle Indymedia Center (IMC). Before 1999 there was much less thought about going to the Internet to follow an event like a political uprising. The IMC cobbled together servers galore and a phat pipeline to the web. Even if Corporate America had wanted to cover the story of the opponents to the WTO, they couldn't have done so well. CBS or NBC might have one camera on the ground, and that most likely in with the dignitaries, but every gang and gaggle of activists likely included somebody who recorded it or reported it. Citizen journalism was alive, and even Corporate News turned to the IMC website for accurate reporting. An ad-hoc collaboration of some pre-existing video groups under the auspices of the IMC, gathered this footage and produced a daily video in a series called "Showdown in Seattle, 5 Days that Shook the WTO." Indymedia Presents #370, is Part 1 of that original series, produced Nov 29, 1999, a day of banner drops, debt drop, and raindrops, with a big show that night in the Seattle Center. Episode #371 of Indymedia Presents will be the second part in the 5-part series, and so on. We hope these original episodes can be useful in providing some deeper understanding of the issues, many of which have become mainstream, hidden in a sound-bite mention of the 10th anniversary of those days of action. In these 5 shows we can see a victory for the people and for people?s media. It was messy, but the WTO is still in shambles, while the IMC, with its collaborative model, went viral.

"Showdown in Seattle, 5 Days That Shook the WTO" part 2, Nov 30, 99 It was the opening day of the official proceedings. Activists were way better organized, and got up earlier than authorities had expected. Using multiple tactics, including the blockading of the streets leading to the meetings, activists managed to do what they had promised to do, which is keep the meetings from happening. Longshoremen shut down every port on the west coast, Seattle cab drivers went on strike, activists held their blockades and barricades, and 50,000 union members marched into the city center, hard hats, steel toed boots and all. Beyond physically stopping the meetings, the coalition which formed to stop the "Millennium Round" of the WTO scored a BIG political victory by putting the WTO and the problems with it in the minds of people and by really boosting and linking movements around the world. Watching this footage, which was captured and edited in the thick of the "Battle of Seattle" is fascinating, because 10 years later we know how the story turned out, and that the effort was way more successful than even the activists understood at the moment. The stories of how US Secretary of State Madaline Albright was stuck in her hotel room and couldn't get to the sites of the WTO meetings were not known to demonstrators on the ground. The stories of how the protests outside embolded Third World delegates inside the Ministerial meetings only came out later. The video coverage of that day, contained in part two of the 5 segments is remarkable for how similar it is to ANY large demonstration, and shows, in a way, how "mountaintop" moments are made. Indymedia Presents #371 features part 2 of the 5 parts series made 10 years ago in occupied Seattle. Part 3 will be in our next episode, #372, and so on.

World Trade and Globalization We'll talk about globalization and its effect on the American economy with Daniel Griswold from the Cato Institute. Griswold believes that globalization is misunderstood and is wrongly blamed for many of the economic woes our country is experiencing. We'll talk about the politics, myths and reality of trade and globalization. Guest Daniel Griswold - Director, Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Author of Mad Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization Amazon | Mad Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization by Daniel Griswold. Event | Daniel Griswold speaks Nov. 18th at noon at the Hilton. More info. Click here to add and read comments