RAT Hello Seattle

[CasaLobos@aol.com]

Anybody up there have first hand info on the WTO protests?  I'm finding some 
difference in reports when I check the online international press against the 
U.S. news.  The number of protestors reported in the Zurich paper is about 
double what I saw in the L.A. Times.  One of the online Vancouver papers 
reports that it was the police who got out of hand first, provoking 
previously peaceful demonstators.  The news I'm getting down here on TV 
implies that it was "bad elements" among the demonstrators who began the 
violence.  What does it look like from up close?

Anybody on this list in London?  Are the protests continuing there?

pauLMackley
loSAngeles
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excert from the Vancouver Province (www.vancouverprovince.com):

"Protester Camela Cowan of Vancouver was disgusted by police tactics. "I 
think it's a disgrace," said Cowan, a member of the Sierra Youth Coalition. 
"The police just sprayed us and threw in grenades of tears gas, and it was 
uncalled for." 

Kim Hendess and Caroline Twiss of Vancouver both got their share of tear gas 
in their eyes. "People being beaten, that was the most shocking thing," said 
Hendess. "They sprayed one woman and when she tried to wipe it away with her 
scarf, they took her scarf away and sprayed her again -- that's torture." 

Twiss, 25, said the police actions "should make people wake up, and if they 
think they're living in a democracy, they had better think again." "

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also from the Vancouver Province:

"....it is in the designs of U.S. lumber companies on the forests of the 
Third World that we can see the operation of the WTO at its most potentially 
malign. 

They have been agitating, with the support of the major economic powers, for 
the adoption in Seattle of a global accord known as the Multilateral 
Agreement on Investment, or MAI. The MAI would give corporations rights in 
international law which would allow them to overturn the preferences of 
elected governments. 

Under the MAI, nations would no longer be able to discriminate against 
forestry companies with poor environmental records. Nor would they be able to 
demand compliance with their own regulatory standards. 

Any company denied the right to buy up land, or businesses, because of such 
regulations could sue on the basis that the environmental safeguards reduced 
the profit from future investments. 

Actions on that basis have already been triggered under the North American 
Free Trade Agreement, and the MAI opens the door to the use of such coercive 
corporate power on a global level."