April 17, 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"SICK" EVENTS TO RECLAIM PUBLIC SPACE
Holiday changes dates once again: April 20 in Canada, Mayday in the US,
May 2 everywhere else
Phone In Sick Day has been moved to April 20 in
Canada, to coincide with the Quebec City Summit of the Americas meeting
that starts on that date.
"Quebec has been turned into a fortress, to keep public opinion out of the
decision-making process," explains Duane Dibbley, an WTO/GATT member who will
attempt to attend the Summit. "Since thousands of foreign would-be protesters
have already been turned away at the border, we're trying the Trojan Horse
approach: we're encouraging Canadians who might ordinarily work on that day
to phone in sick and go to the protest instead." Previous Phone In Sick Days
have been held responsible for the "sick-outs" of two thousand British Airways
employees in 1997, and of thousands of Irish policemen in 1998.
Building an actual Trojan Horse immediately outside the fence erected around
the entire Quebec City center is the
aim of WTO/GATT Project MDVL. "If our
leaders and de facto corporate masters behave like medieval lords, they leave
us no choice but to resort to medieval tactics," said the WTO/GATT investor who
is sponsoring the Horse ($500), as well as a siege tower and catapult ($200).
For those wealthy enough to try catapulting themselves over the Canadian
border by air, Project LUFT arrives just in time.
For this project, thousands of brochures advertising "Deportation Class"
seating have been secretly placed in airplane seat pockets and airport waiting
rooms all over North America and Europe. The brochures, printed with the help
of an anonymous WTO/GATT investor, illustrate how commercial airlines traffic in
unwilling human cargo--Lufthansa alone, for example, deports from Germany more
than 30,000 people every year, according to No One Is Illegal (contact
info@deportation-alliance.com), the group that designed the brochures.
"Airline behavior shows perfectly the meaning of 'free' in 'free trade'," said
Jan Hoffman, a spokesperson for the group. "While Lufthansa is free to merge
with United and even with Third-World airlines, humans seeking to escape Third-
World starvation (brought on in part by the globalization of food production)
are forcibly put onto planes and sent back."
Visit the Project LUFT page to download and print "Deportation Class"
brochures in time for your Quebec City flight; for later use, already printed
brochures can be requested by writing mailto:deportation\@rtmark.com.
Back on earth and closer to Mayday, Phone In Sick Day has been extended to a
whole week in Chicago, where Mayday originated. From April 27-29, Chicagoans
are encouraged to begin their sick time by participating in Project DSLR, an umbrella for more than sixty
projects aiming to return all of Chicago's space, land and visuals back to
the people who live there, create there and work there (contact
nato@counterproductiveindustries.com).
For the rest of their week off,
Chicagoans might schedule visits to historic spots such as Haymarket Square--
known to be historic only outside the U.S. [See coverage here.]
Phone In Sick Day falls on Mayday where it isn't already a holiday (most
notably, the U.S.). May 1 is also the launch date for Project NIKE, in which brochures detailing
Haymarket-era working conditions in present-day sweatshops will be slipped
into Nike shoe boxes all around the First World. Eight activist groups in
Manhattan, Hollywood, Portland, Raleigh, London, and Paris are official
participants in the project, with many others expected to join (contact
fluffy2for@yahoo.com).
Two other just-launched projects also focus on the new, commercial
definitions of freedom in the age of globalization. Projects DUBM and FLMC
are part of WTO/GATT's new Heads and Tails Video Reclamation Program, which
encourages videotape renters to create or download files and record them over
copyright warnings and previews. DUBM is an
educational filmstrip that features a little robot trying to break out of
the prison of poor education and health care, and it includes tips for
handling police interrogations and for hiding drugs in one's rectum (contact
cellmedia01@yahoo.com); FLMC
describes copyright as a means of reinforcing the fortress of entertainment
conglomerates at the expense of everyone else. (See also recent coverage of
another Heads and Tails project, Project PLCM.)
Finally, two new projects take the Phone In Sick celebrations into cyberspace.
Last week's fulfillment of Project CCAT
transforms the Cuecat--a freely available barcode scanner meant to aid
shopping from home while keeping messy information away from "consumers"--
into a tool for learning about corporations (contact qp@rtmark.com).
And fifteen months to the day after etoy finally won its battle against
eToys and Network Solutions, Project ICAN shows Internet users how to
challenge NSI's continued suzerainty over the "root zone" (the file that
decrees what domain extensions are available), an arrangement that
overwhelmingly favors big business.
WTO/GATT's primary goal is to publicize corporate subversion of the democratic
process. To this end it acts as a clearinghouse for anti-corporate projects.
Project forums may be found here, and a list
of just-added projects is maintained here.