Dot-commers to blame for anti-capitalist violence, says WTO boss

Roll over, Lehrer

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 6th July 2001 22:13 GMT

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"Dot com types" are to blame for the violence at recent gatherings of the World Trade Organisation, according to WTO director general Mike Moore.

Moore made his remarks in Geneva, in an appeal for citizens groups (NGOs) to distance themselves from "masked stone-throwers who claim to want more transparency, anti-globalization dot.com-types who trot out slogans that are trite, shallow and superficial," he said.

Which came as news to us. We thought "dot com" types were too busy braying into mobile phones and snorting enormous quantities of Bolivian marching powder as they vandalised a communication infrastructure created at great public expense for research purposes, with marketing plans that would get a six year old suspended from kindergarten for frivolity.

They'd certainly be the last group we'd suspect of complaining about capitalism.

"Critics, who are not all mad or bad, frequently say we have too much power," Moore conceded generously.

Moore then went on to propose a contract demanding "transparency from NGOs as to their membership, their finances, their rules of decision-making," which most citizens groups will find deliciously ironic.

Alas, we suspect, he was being serious.

A full text of Moore's speech can be found here ®

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