The Discordant Opposition Journal Issue 10 - File 12
Seattle Was A Riot
Hi there, Im Kleptic. I didn't write this, but I thought it that I should get as many people as possible to read about what happened in Seattle. Cause hell... "Seattle Was A Riot" - Anti-Flag.
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 10:09:30 -0800
From: Paul Hawken <xxxxxx@xxxx.xxx>
When I was able to open my eyes, I saw lying next to me a young man, 19, maybe 20 at the oldest. He was in shock, twitching and shivering uncontrollably from being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed at close range. His burned eyes were tightly closed, and he was panting irregularly. Then he passed out. He went from excruciating pain to unconsciousness on a sidewalk wet from the water that a medic had poured over him to flush his eyes.
More than 700 organizations and between 40,000 and 60,000 people took part in the protests against the WTO's Third Ministerial on November 30th. These groups and citizens sense a cascading loss of human and labor rights in the world. Seattle was not the beginning but simply the most striking expression of citizens struggling against a worldwide corporate-financed oligarchy - in effect, a plutocracy.
Oligarchy and plutocracy are often are used to describe "other" countries where a small group of wealthy people rule, but not the "first world" - the United States, Japan, Germany, or Canada. The World Trade Organization, however, is trying to cement into place that corporate plutocracy. Already, the world's top 200 companies have twice the assets of 80 percent of the world's people. Global corporations represent a new empire whether they admit it or not.
With massive amounts of capital at their disposal, any of which can be used to influence politicians and the public as and when deemed necessary, all democratic institutions are diminished and at risk. Corporate free market policies subvert culture, democracy, and community, a true tyranny. The American Revolution occurred because of crown-chartered corporate abuse, a "remote tyranny" in Thomas Jefferson's words. To see Seattle as a singular event, as did most of the media, is to look at the battles of Concord and Lexington as meaningless skirmishes.
But the mainstream media, consistently problematic in their coverage of any type of protest, had an even more difficult time understanding and covering both the issues and activists in Seattle. No charismatic leader led. No religious figure engaged in direct action. No movie stars starred. There was no alpha group. The Ruckus Society, Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, and hundreds more were there, coordinated primarily by cell phones, emails, and the Direct Action Network. They were up against the Seattle Police Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI - to say nothing of the media coverage and the WTO itself.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of an elegy to globalization entitled The Lexus and the Olive Tree, angrily wrote that the demonstrators were "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix."
Not so. They were organized, educated, and determined. They were human rights activists, labor activists, indigenous people, people of faith, steel workers, and farmers. They were forest activists, environmentalists, social justice workers, students, and teachers. And they wanted the World Trade Organization to listen. They were speaking on behalf of a world that has not been made better by globalization. Income disparity is growing rapidly. The difference between the top and bottom quintiles has doubled in the past 30 years. Eighty-six percent of the world's goods go to the top 20 percent, the bottom fifth get 1 percent. The apologists for globalization cannot support their contention that open borders, reduced tariffs, and forced trade benefit the poorest 3 billion people in the world.
Globalization does, however, create the concentrations of capital seen in northern financial and industrial centers - indeed, the wealth in Seattle itself. Since the people promoting globalized free trade policies live in those cities, it is natural that they should be biased. Despite Friedman's invective about "the circus in Seattle," the demonstrators and activists who showed up there were not against trade. They do demand proof that shows when and how trade - as the WTO constructs it - benefits workers and the environment in developing nations, as well as workers at home. Since that proof has yet to be offered, the protesters came to Seattle to hold the WTO accountable.
On the morning of November 30th, I walked toward the Convention Center, the site of the planned Ministerial, with Randy Hayes, the founder of Rainforest Action Network. As soon as we turned the corner on First Street and Pike Avenue, we could hear drums, chants, sirens, roars. At Fifth, police stopped us. We could go no farther without credentials. Ahead of us were thousands of protesters. Beyond them was a large cordon of gas-masked and riot-shielded police, an armored personnel carrier, and fire trucks. On one corner was Niketown. On the other, the Sheraton Hotel, through which there was a passage to the Convention Center. The cordon of police in front of us tried to prevent more protesters from joining those who blocked the entrances to the Convention Center. Randy was a credentialed WTO delegate, which means he could join the proceedings as an observer. He showed his pass to the officer, who thought it looked like me. The officer joked with us, kidded Randy about having my credential and then winked and let us both through. The police were still relaxed at that point. Ahead of us crowds were milling and moving. Anarchists were there, maybe 40 in all, dressed in black pants, black bandanas, black balaclavas, and jackboots, one of two groups identifiable by costume.
The other was a group of 300 children who had dressed brightly as turtles in the Sierra Club march the day before. The costumes were part of a serious complaint against the WTO. When the United States attempted to block imports of shrimp caught in the same nets that capture and drown 150,000 sea turtles each year, the WTO called the block "arbitrary and unjustified". Thus far in every environmental dispute that has come before the WTO, its three-judge panels, which deliberate in secret, have ruled for business, against the environment. The panel members are selected from lawyers and officials who are not educated in biology, the environment, social issues, or anthropology.
