Tran writes: "This is an interesting analysis of the WTO...."

"Disneyland, Doha and the WTO in Hong Kong:
The Spectacle of Corporate Fear
Absurdity and the New Universalism"

Hidayat Greenfield, Z Mag

It's fitting that the Sixth WTO Ministerial should arrive in Hong Kong only a couple of months after the opening of Disneyland. In both cases reality is abandoned at the door, while fiction and fantasy take over. The magical Doha 'Development' Round promises an end to global poverty and a new prosperity for all — based on an agenda that boosts transnational corporate power and demolishes the remnants of political and social barriers to corporate profit.

Like a rollercoaster ride through a fictional world, we set off to alleviate global poverty and arrive at greater impoverishment as the destination. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and dazzling special effects, but we end up where we began. We end up with US$545 billion in global agricultural exports co-existing with eight million people dying of hunger and hunger-related diseases every year, while tens of millions of small farmers and agricultural workers who produce the food that feeds the world are themselves living in hunger. In the fantasy world of the Doha Round 'market access' is the magical solution: small farmers and workers must compete harder, producing more for less, while pinning their hopes on access to overseas markets so they can sell more of the stuff that's impoverishing them.

Continues here.

16,000 Gather at Post, Maintain Peaceful Vigil

School of Americas Watch

Adriana Portillo Bartow has been back to her native Guatemala 15 times since members of her family disappeared more than 20 years ago, never to be heard from again.

"My father and the other adults were tortured and killed," Bartow said. "The bodies were dumped so we would never find them. I hoped my daughters and sister were spared."

Bartow, who now lives in Chicago, was among the record 16,000 protesters who gathered Saturday near the main gate of Fort Benning to protest the U.S. Army's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. She said the officers responsible for her family's disappearance were trained at the former School of the Americas.

Columbus police Chief Ricky Boren said the crowd exceeded last year's assembly of 12,400 protesters.

Two Myths That Keep the World Poor

Vandana Shiva, Ode

From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world
suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end
poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the
world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a
UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book
The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made
it into a cover story.

But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He
simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as
the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he
writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much
of the world was left far behind.”

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have
been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth
accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken
from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich
textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the
genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the
Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or
North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and
markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

The following letter was sent to an International Conference on Elisée Reclus, the 19th century anarchist geographer and political theorist. The conference, which was held in Milan on October 12–13, was one of several planned for this year to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Reclus’ birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. I was invited to do a presentation but couldn’t leave New Orleans to attend. Fortunately, our electricity, which had been out for almost six weeks, resumed shortly before the conference and I was able to write the letter hastily and find a place to email it. It arrived in Milan the day before the conference and was read during the proceedings, and it will be translated and published in the Italian anarchist magazine Libertaria.

A Letter from New Orleans

(Reclusian Reflections on an Unnatural Disaster)

John Clarke

Dear Friends,

I regret that I can’t be with you for the international Reclus conference in Milano this week. I was looking forward very much to seeing all of my good friends there and participating in the extraordinary event that you’ve organized. I decided that to help make up for my absence from my session tomorrow that I’d send you some reflections on what I’ve been doing recently and what has been occurring here in New Orleans.