Interview with a 'Yellow Overall' from New York
MJ: I'm wondering if you can give us a little background on Ya Basta and the yellow overalls, as it has played out here in North America.

TFGC: The New York City Ya Basta! Collective formed just a few weeks after the pictures and stories from the protests in Prague [IMF meetings, Sept 2000] were transmitted across the Atlantic. Like many people inspired by these communications, we were interested in understanding the dynamics of this relatively new and somewhat poetic tactic of civil disobedience, and attempted, as far as possible, to gather intelligence on the efforts of the "tute bianche". We had the fortunate privilege of having an Italian activist as a member of our local collective, one who was more than familiar with the developments of the white overalls and the Ya Basta Association, specifically as things evolved in cities like Milan and Genoa. We received greatly informed reports as developments would happen.

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Translation of a recent intervention by Toni Negri on 'Globalization, Multitudes, Exodus' delivered at La Sapienza university in Rome.
"I feel uncomfortable when people talk about the birth of the globalised world simply as a kind of effect, a given, an expansion of the empire that was left [after the disappearance of the USSR].

Globalisation, which really begins to lift off in 1989, doesn't happen simply by the outward spreading of one empire when another empire disappears. It is born of far deeper roots. Globalisation is the point of confluence of working class and proletarian struggles which could no longer be regulated within the confines of the nation State. The dynamic which consisted of struggles - creation of inflation - balancing of state budgets - pressure on welfare - breaking of the material elements of the bourgeois constitution, led gradually to two things: first, a theory of the limits of democracy (and strangely here we find that same Huntington who wrote about the "clash" of civilisations in a document of the Trilateral Commission back in the 1970s), and then a powerful push towards going beyond the nation State. "

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Arundhati Roy asks 'Should We leave it to the experts?'
India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outwards from the middle - adding a few centuries on to either end of our extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing head of a hammer-headed shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions. On the one hand, we hear that European countries are considering changing their immigration laws in order to import Indian software engineers. On the other, that a Naga sadhu at the Kumbh Mela towed the district collector's car with his penis while the officer sat in it solemnly with his wife and children.

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Brief history of the World Economic Forum in advance of their forthcoming meeting in New York from January 31 to February 4th
The WEF is, in a way, a big cocktail party for the global corporate elite. As an organization, it has no power to actually set policy, but it creates a space in which international "leaders" can hash out their vision for the rest of us. In their own words, "they are fully engaged in the process of defining and advancing the global agenda." More specifically, it's our globe, but it's their agenda.

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