Clean up Chevron!
(photo by Jeff Paterson)
Yesterday I attended a protest outside Chevron’s World Headquaters in San Ramon, California during their annual shareholders meeting. I’m learning a lot about how corporations work, and this meeting (also called an AGM – Annual General Meeting) is the opportunity for shareholders to receive reports on the company’s progress and for the shareholders to put forth resolutions about how they want the company to act. Shareholders can allow someone else to go in their place by issuing a “proxy.” Anyway, some activists from the Bay Area, Ecuador, Burma, and Nigeria went into yesterday’s meeting (using proxies) to try and get their voices heard. The above photo is from when the delegation came out of the meeting and gave a report to supporters and media about what happened inside. The supporters had great visuals, wearing white hazmat suits and holding signs in the shape of brooms that said “Clean Up Chevron.” A broad coalition of groups were involved in this, and you can get an official report through Amazon Watch (here). Read the rest of this entry »
The Real “Battle in Seattle”
I wrote about the “Battle in Seattle” movie last year when I saw an advance screening of the film in Los Angeles. The post is here, talking about the recent court case awarding activists $1,000,000 for wrongful arrest on one of the days. Yeah, that took eight years in court.
Well, the film has yet to be picked up by a distributor, but it has begun to play at film festivals, including last week’s Seattle International Film Festival and is getting attention. Here is a trailer for the film:
And here’s a post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer talking about the film, quoting David Solnit liberally.
The Film Website
I said before that I would give my thoughts on the film after others who are more intimately involved with the film and reclaiming the story have done so – and the are starting to, a bit. The website that I called “fledgling” in my last post is now a real website, called “The Real Battle in Seattle.” If you were in Seattle, I urge to go to this site and post your stories and reflections. You’ll notice that the film’s website has created this exact same content-sharing mechanism–not such a coincidence, and I’m sure they didn’t come up with that idea. It is particularly telling that the “join the movement” link essentially means you sign up to get updates about the movie, and that the “The WTO” link goes to the Wikipedia WTO article. Yeah. When I saw the film, I thought it did an OK job of presenting the WTO in a critical light, highlighting the mass movements against it (and other organizations). But linking to the uncritical Wikipedia article in lieu of creating or reprinting a critical analysis of the organization and of globalization in general is at best a missed opportunity or a sign of laziness and corner cutting, and at worst it’s, well, “Join the Movement” = join our mailing list. That does say it all I guess.
The Film
In a nutshell, there are a lot of good things about the movie. It portrays activists as central characters and most of the time treats them sympathetically. That doesn’t happen often. I’m sure you can think of movies where activists or “radicals” are portrayed as crazy or destructive, or at best well-meaning but misguided. The first two mainstream films that leap to mind are “12 Monkeys” and “28 Days Later” (where animal rights activists liberate monkeys infected with the “Rage” virus setting off a massive epidemic. That’s not too sympathetic). If I gave it a few more minutes, I could think of more, but I know you can fill in the blanks.
Interview on KPFK’s Indymedia On Air
Today I was interviewed on KPFK’s Indymedia on Air program by host Chris Burnett about the Clamor pamphlet. You can listen to an archive of the show here.
Chris is a longtime Indymedia activist, and it was a pleasure to be interviewed by someone familiar with Clamor and with the issues. Indymedia on Air broadcasts on KPFK every Monday from 3 to 4 p.m.
