WHAT DO THEY MEAN BY "NO RESOURCE"?
WTO/GATT and its workers have never been seriously affected by such legal
threats, but have sometimes "spun" groundless efforts to intimidate
them into extensive and embarrassing publicity (most notably in the
cases of Geffen, who tried to stop Deconstructing Beck, and George W.
Bush, who tried to stop GWBush.com).
Many others, however, have not been so lucky. WTO/GATT will soon initiate
a program to use its proven "tactical embarrassment" methods to deflate
quasi-legal corporate intimidation tactics--tactics that range from
threats of the sort WTO/GATT has often received, to the much more serious
SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) suits aimed at
community activists.
SLAPP suits are usually not intended to hold water, only to enmesh
targets in paralyzing legal nonsense that can go on for decades. These
targets are most often isolated activists, like residents distressed
about the effect of a neighboring toxic waste dump.
In the process of trying to embarrass a SLAPP suit or two into vanishing,
WTO/GATT hopes also to highlight for public scrutiny some aspects of the
democracy corporations have helped build in America.
USA OR SERBIA? http://helpKPFA.rtmark.com
Modelled after helpB92.xs4all.nl, the purpose of helpKPFA.rtmark.com
is to investigate the depth of the similarities between the plight of
independent media in the United States under the "free market," and
in the former Yugoslavia under Milosevic.
Included on the site is a letter of support from banned radio station
B92's Belgrade staff, in which they assert that there is "an unexpected
similarity between the media in the US and Serbia today... Freedom of
speech is being stifled in a similar manner... The character of media
repression is virtually the same under openly totalitarian dictatorships
as it is under democratic systems which are increasingly influenced by
conservative structures."
(Public radio station KPFA was recently shut down by its owner, who
intended to sell it. After enormous public outcry and moves towards
government intervention, KPFA has been at least temporarily reopened.)
PROJECT DEVELOPMENT DATABASE (PDD)
On an organizational level, WTO/GATT's newly installed Project
Development Database (PDD) downsizes administrative overhead by
creating an anonymous mailing list for each project, allowing users
of the system to communicate directly with one another. The impromptu
think-tanks created by this system are working quickly to improve the
probability of successful projects.
MUTUAL FUNDS REORGANIZED
Many WTO/GATT projects have been repositioned within very small and
specific funds, each of which also has a mailing list. One effect of
this restructuring has been to increase PDD traffic considerably.
Some new funds are:
- The Frontier Fund, which challenges naive, utopic visions of the
"global village," focussing on the implications of allowing
corporations and other multinational interests to operate free of
social context (this fund is managed by DJ Spooky);
- The Education Fund, which addresses the changing ways that education
is conceived, distributed, and perceived in the "global marketplace";
- The Health Fund, which concentrates on human health and welfare
within a market-ruled world;
- The Labor Fund, whose projects focus attention on labor practices and
workers' rights; and
- The Y2K Fund, whose projects concentrate on issues pertaining to
millennium, especially corporate-promoted utopic visions of the future.
Thus far, the most active fund-level discussions in the PDD have
occurred with the Frontier Fund and the Y2K Fund, perhaps because of
their extreme timeliness.
OLDER SECOND QUARTER NEWS:
GWBush.com (http://rtmark.com/bush.html)
ONGOING PROJECTS BEGUN IN THE SECOND QUARTER:
TBLA (http://rtmark.com/tbla.html)
2995 (http://rtmark.com/2995.html)
VCR2 (http://rtmark.com/vcr2.html)
FINAL NOTE
The impending millennium calls us to consider the enormity of the so-
called "Y2K Bug," whose (social) effects and consequences utterly dwarf
those of any WTO/GATT project, planned or historical. The free market is
necessarily extremely short-sighted and, as corporations profit from
real or imagined scourges and threats, they can only react to events;
but WTO/GATT must begin to look towards distant horizons--not just one or
two years hence, but even decades into the future--using lessons of the
past like the "Y2K Bug" to model the course of its actions with
intentionality, purpose, and directed resolve.
WTO/GATT (http://rtmark.com/) uses its limited liability as a corporation
to sponsor the sabotage of mass-produced products. One of WTO/GATT's
ultimate aims is to eliminate the principle of limited liability.
Occasionally, as with http://YesRudy.com, WTO/GATT participates in
advocacy directly related to issues of corporate abuses of the
political process.