Marching down Fourth Avenue, this crowd was met at Virginia Street by union marshals who locked arms and directed their marchers back toward Seattle Center, away from a downtown already crammed with demonstrators. Others formed wedges and burst through the marshals' arms dramatically. This passionate solidarity showed just how broad a coalition has been built around something as arcane and complicated as trade policy. The American economic system is supposedly functioning at its highest and best capacity. Unemployment is as low as it's ever been.
Inflation barely registers.
Our political and economic leaders would have us believe that removing all barriers to the movement of capital and transnational corporations will spread this bounty worldwide. Yet dissenters keep pointing out that real wages are stagnant, the number of uninsured keeps rising, families are working two, three, or four jobs to make ends meet, and insecurity among ordinary working people runs quite high. Of course environmentalists, human rights activists, religious groups, and anarchists all have their own concerns with the way the global economy is developing. On Tuesday, they showed what a new American movement for a more just economy could look like. It was dazzling indeed.