Wednesday, January 5, 2000
Why I'm Grateful to Seattle!  

I thank everyone who exercised their First Amendment rights in Seattle by demonstrating against the World Trade Organization: you took care of my life and all people's and I love you for it!  

While press and media skewed and muffled its importance, the large meaning of what occurred is explained, exactly and thrillingly, by Ellen Reiss in the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, "The Force of Ethics–& Seattle." In it she shows the livingness today of what Eli Siegel, economist and founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, alone explained in 1970: that the profit system--the use of many people to enrich a few--has failed, never to recover  

Here is some of what Ellen Reiss wrote:  

• One of the reasons the Seattle massive protest was beautiful is that it gave the lie to the picture of Americans which the media have presented — of persons quite pleased with the profit system. Here were thousands of men and women, people in unions, farmers, clergy, students, parents...objecting to the use of humanity and earth for profit. The shouts of "Whose world? Our world!" were in keeping with these great sentences by Eli Siegel, first in print in 1946: "The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his."

• The alternative to profit as the basis of life and jobs is not Marx or Mao. The alternative is ethics: an economy based on a true answering of the question which Mr. Siegel articulated for humanity: "What does a person deserve by being alive?" 

• The Financial Times says freedom and justice need not and should not be one. It says even if little children are forced to labor, trade is "free" — as if these misused children, whose hands make the products, have nothing to do with trade: trade can be "free" while they, on whom this trade depends, are not!...Such notions have been around for centuries, but they will be seen as blazingly crazy, and barbaric.  

• The basis of trade anywhere, on a street or "globally," should be good will....The idea that people in one part of the world can get something they need from people in another part of the world — oranges, or steel, or medicine — is kind and lovely.  

The only thing mucking up "global trade" is the ill will of the profit motive: the hope that people be poor so they'll work for little, be desperate for your product so they'll pay a lot; and the hope that other people making things fail.

• In order to understand the meaning of Seattle it is necessary to study something else that Mr. Siegel explained. The attempt, he said, "to have capitalism the same as the nation itself...is fascism, which came to its height in terms of the world in the 1930s." This description is backed up by the Columbia Encyclopedia's entry on fascism, which states that "the capitalist and land-owning classes were protected by the fascist system and favored it."  

The WTO is able to supersede the laws of nations. It can overturn national laws protecting species, environment, people. The purpose of the WTO, like that of the IMF, is to have capitalism the same as the world itself. 

• Never in recent decades did people of other nations respect Americans more than in these days, as they...saw Americans take the tear gas and rubber bullets and stand for justice to children in Asia and Chicago, to working people in France and Cape Town and Tennessee.