YESTERDAY, we discussed the protesters attempting, starting today, to disrupt the World Trade Organization’s international conference here in Seattle.

The protesters’ main beef: The WTO helps turn soverign governments into mere stooges, handservants to almighty Business.

However, despite the overwhelming influence business has over governments (influence-peddling and campaign cash at home; pro-corporate entites like WTO internationally), some folks still hold onto the opposite idea–the idea that mean ol’ Big Government’s still not de-fanged enough, that poor pathetic Business must be rescued from Government’s horrific machinations.

That’s the line you get from some Microsoft defenders; including Byte scribe Jerry Pournelle (who makes pains to insist that, unlike certain other “independent” observers who’ve spoken out for MS, he’s not being paid off by MS’s fake-grassroots PR lobby).

And it’s the line still being offered, after all these years, by “secessionist” advocates trying to carve out new counties or even states in rural and suburbanizing regions scattered across the country.

Around here, various outfits calling themselves names like “Freedom County” have attempted to form new legal jurisdictions in which land developers, forest clearcutters, gun vendors, and other valiant entrepreneurs would get to do all they want, with no pesky environmental laws or anti-sprawl zoning bureaucrats getting in the way. (So far, they’ve gotten nowhere; and the Washington State government says it won’t accept any new-county requests in the future, no matter how adamant.)

There’s a similar, if higher-stakes, effort being waged in northern California, by guys who want their own state.

This has nothing to do with the proposal in Mother Jones to split up the Fool’s-Golden State so it could get more U.S. Senators.

Rather, the advocates of “Jefferson State” (which would grab pieces of southern Oregon as well as California’s northernmost tip) want a regime that would be even friendlier to developers, miners, loggers, and factory-farmers than the already mightily business-friendly power structures down in Sacramento, CA.

Actually, the “Jefferson State” people don’t express grievances against the Calif. state government as vehemently as they do against the federal government, coming in and telling rugged-individualist businessmen they can’t do this or that because it’d threaten some endangered species or ruin a few more watersheds.

Exactly how they’d get federal environmental protections gutted for one new, small state that wouldn’t have the direct backing of the Calif. Republican establishment is a mystery the Jefferson guys don’t fully explain. But then again, tactical logic isn’t these guys’ strong point. Like the WTO opponents, the secessionists are mainly in it to make a statement and to communicate a vision, albeit an outmoded vision.

Seceding for the right to pollute and overdevelop seems, on the surface, to be less morally reprehensible than, say, seceding for the right to maintain slavery, but still not the best idea around there.

IN OTHER NEWS: Days one and two of the WTO protests went by Sunday and Monday with a few unfortunate sideshows of Lifestyle Left self-aggrandizement. (Spray-painting anti-meat slogans on a McDonald’s or dressing up in Chiapas-style bandana face masks has just about nothing to do with the topic of international tariff negotiations.) But the vast majority of the actions were well-intentioned and well-organized, and did a good job of bringing disparate factions (enviros, labor, churches, intl.-democracy advocates) together around the simple message that Business Isn’t Everything.

TOMORROW: Physical mementos of bank mergers.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Old telephone directories make ideal address books. Simply cross out the names and address of people you don’t know….”
• “Leave your phone off the hook for long periods when you know your friends are trying to reach you. That way, they’ll think you have an Internet dial-up account….”
• So it has come to this: Usenet flame wars leading to court orders (found by Macintouch)….

THE PROBLEM WITH RADICALS, I’ve often said, is they’re just too conservative.

It’s especially true in the U.S., where there’s no real radical political movement–just a lifestyle subculture that pretends to be one.

Where a real Left would seek solidarity with working-class folk, America’s Lifestyle Left loves few things better than sneering at the sap masses.

Instead of proposing new socioeconomic arrangements to replace the apparently-dead Eurosocialist dream of enlightened central planning, the Lifestyle Left prefers to merely complain about the moral inferiority of meat eaters, suburb dwellers, TV viewers, church goers, and just about everyone else other than themselves.

And instead of organizing a movement to bring any new proposals into practice, they’d rather just protest.

Protesting alone, at its feeblest, can be little more than a display of Attitude (a way-overused commodity these days). It lets you feel good about yourself and bad about whatever enemy you’re protesting, and can bond you with your fellow protesters in a shared-group experience. But it won’t change a damn thing.

This week, as you may know, Seattle’s supposed to become Protest Central. The World Trade Organization’s holding a bigass international conference starting tomorrow. In what might be the biggest public “radical” showing since the Gulf War protests in ’91, as many as 50,000 demonstraters (a number far outnumbering the invited WTO guests) are expected to show up to tie up streets, disrupt daily life, and otherwise make their message heard.

Their message: The WTO is A Really Bad Thing.

It’s a tool of global corporations, out to make the world even safer for business by gutting tarrifs, environmental protections, child-labor prohibitions, and anything else that gets in the way of guys with money making even more money. It subverts democracy by making individual nations’ laws subject to rebuke or even dismemberment by unelected offshore bureaucrats.

What the protesters don’t say as loudly is that the governments within the WTO’s member nations (some more democratic, some less) have voluntarily agreed to listen to and, in most cases, abide by the WTO bureaucracy’s rulings; all in the name of Almighty Commerce. Any country that wanted to could just say no to WTO, resign from the group, and go back to negotiating individual commercial pacts on its own with every other nation.

WTO is an instrument of central planning–just like the old socialist and fascist central-planning schemes the WTO’s “conservative” advocates claim to have always hated, and which some leftists once advocated. (Many of the WTO protesters are self-styled anarchists–folks who don’t like any big central authority system, not even a socialistic system claiming to operate on “the people’s” behalf.)

As you’ve probably surmised, I don’t hold out the greatest of hopes for the WTO-protest spectacle. But by announcing their intentions so loudly, so far in advance of the conference, they’ve done at least one thing the Lifestyle Left seldom accomplishes.

They’ve gotten the local mainstream print media to mention their grievances, in detail.

Even protest coverage built on giving WTO defenders the final say publicizes the questions.

The Wired guys, the cyber-libertarians, the Global Business Network butt-kissers, and the techno-conservatives have spent the past half-decade gleefully proclaiming that history’s over and they won; that there’s no way any society can ever be organized that doesn’t worshipfully cede all real power to Sacred Business. The techno-corporatists predict lots of “revolutions” within business, but don’t want anyone to even imagine a future not led by big corporations running everything.

If we’re lucky, the WTO protests might lead a few people outside the Lifestyle Left to start imagining a post-corporate world, and then to start working toward one.

(More anti-WTO stuff is at the Independent Media Center and SeattleWTO.org.)

TOMORROW: Visions of government as business’s enemy vs. government as business’s handservant.

IN OTHER NEWS: Babies are apparently still being lured by money on fishing rods…

ELSEWHERE:

• “Old telephone directories make ideal address books. Simply cross out the names and address of people you don’t know….”
• “Leave your phone off the hook for long periods when you know your friends are trying to reach you. That way, they’ll think you have an Internet dial-up account….”
• So it has come to this: Usenet flame wars leading to court orders (found by Macintouch)….