175 Peaceful Protesters at WTO get $1 million from Seattle.

Consider this story in the light of my previous post.

Why did Americans expand the vote from just property owners to universal manhood suffrage after the Constitution was adopted in 1787? One major reason was that the non-property owners had only one political outlet, and that was rioting. American history includes the Whiskey rebellion and Shay's rebellion, both of which were responses to what appeared to be tyrannical government. Armed uprisings by militias in Maryland led quickly both sharp reductions in property rights to vote and to adding an expansive "Declaration of Rights" to the Maryland Constitution. to get the mule to move, first you must get its attention. When nothing else works, a riot is the necessary 2 by 4.

Then Gandhi and Martin Luther King demonstrated the political power of non-violent demonstrations. This was still a way for an oppressed group to bring their requirements to the notice of a government that was otherwise ignoring their needs. The non-violent demonstration is today clearly a much superior form of pressure on governments and corporations which are ignoring the needs of people who are not represented among the decision-makers.

The power of the demonstration depends on the availability of widespread public news. Before newspapers were widely read, it required deaths and fires to get attention. Gandhi had the advantage of newspapers and radios, and was greatly assisted when the British overreacted. The same was true for Martin Luther King. Pictures of the Sheriff of Selma, Alabama siccing dogs on peaceful protesters who included women and children gave the Civil Rights Movement the attention they greatly needed. So did the KKK killings of the Freedom Riders in Mississippi.

Now we get the news that the Seattle Police badly overreacted to the peaceful Protesters at the WTO meeting. I'm happy to see that they are getting the insurance money, but the really important part is that they are getting (positive) widespread news coverage of their message.

Before we get a decent political-economic theory that explains (and limits) Globalization we will have to get a good description of the many problems the current methods are causing. After that we will get the overarching political-economic theory that I discussed in Are corporations conspiring to take over the world.

Maybe we'll get lucky and find some brilliant individual who builds a theory that cannot be so easily reduced to mathematical equations as Keynsianism has been. Not that the math is a bad thing. It's just that the apparent precision of math conceals the many non-quantifiable variables which are often more important than the quantifiable ones are.