Before November 1999, few Americans knew what “WTO” meant, much less understood its workings. The World Trade Organization evolved from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and was officially created in 1995. Membership has now reached 135 nations …
A year ago, two unexpected incidents, one involving an international crisis and the other a domestic one, each associated with protests, sent shock waves through China and provoked surprising responses by the Beijing regime. Taken together, these incidents and the …
The Third Way/Die Neue Mitte Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder This manifesto, issued by the prime ministers of Britain and Germany, seemed to us to warrant critical attention, which we asked Joanne Barkan, one of our editors, to provide. Eds. …
The inner city as a character, not as mere background, became in the 1990s one of the staples of American film. For more than a decade, independent and studio directors dramatized the most convulsive, violent, and self-destructive inner-city lives. They …
The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind by Jeffrey Scheuer Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999, 280 pp., $23.95 Above all, keep it short. The message must be brisk, colorful, and to the point. Just say it and get …
The perfect battle can’t be picked. However flawed politically, the confrontation inspired by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle this past December had enough going for it to be worthy of progressives’ support. The growing hegemony of business, the …
In his appreciation of Milwaukee’s civility, David Glenn calls the state defense of civic order “a fundamental and necessary condition of a decent society.” But I don’t think our current state is defending civic order; it’s defending the concentration of …
The afterlife of the Vietnam War has lasted longer now than the war itself. Time makes new wounds. A host of legends clamor to make the disaster mean something. First things first. Symbolic Vietnam ought not to obscure the existence …
The 1999 WTO protests brought together a unique coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, and direct actionists, governed by a spirit of respect and mutual support rarely seen before—or replicated since.
Before we talk about Seattle, a few words about Milwaukee. In February 1839—less than a decade after they’d dispossessed the Menominees and other local Native Americans—the settlers of southeastern Wisconsin had a problem to solve. Hundreds of farmers had staked …
The American public has grown accustomed to the notion that very bad things happened in Vietnam—though for the entire ten year period, only one bad thing, My Lai, was accorded the label “atrocity.” The war in Korea, which the U.S. …
American women entered the twentieth century without the right to vote and ended it with the right “to have it all” as long as they “do it all.” Progress? It depends on whom you ask. The nation’s citizens are deeply …
There is an image from the late sixties, so famous now as to be cliché, of a young woman slipping a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s gun. There’s another photograph, from Paris in 1968, of a young man …
Back in the 1960s, I criticized the Vietnam War, in part, by contrasting it with the Korean War. This was a way of distinguishing myself, and the part of the antiwar movement to which I belonged, from those leftists who …
It is possible (just possible; I don’t mean to slip into the prophetic mode) that we are at the beginning of a new period of political activism. Globalization seems to be producing not only rapid-fire growth, erratic movements of capital, …
