Protesters in Seattle warned us what was coming, but we didn't listen

Ten years ago, protesters gathered in a port city; politicians arrived for intense backroom negotiations; the city's hotels were booked out by representatives of thousands of NGOs from all over the world. In 1999 Seattle, like Copenhagen this week, was a big international meeting attempting to exert some governance over globalisation. There's a fitting symmetry that these two meetings bookend this decade. For while the Seattle protests were deliberately misrepresented and widely misunderstood at the time, their agenda has proved unanswerable. Copenhagen is belatedly grappling with just one aspect of Seattle's unfinished business.

For those for whom Seattle is a hazy memory, let's recap. The World Trade Organisation had become the bete noire of a heterogeneous global coalition bizarrely labelled as the anti-globalisation movement. The WTO meeting to hammer out an international trade agreement became the touchstone for riots, and a draconian police response of teargas and truncheons. Seattle made it on to the front page of every newspaper. Some Starbucks windows were smashed; the protesters were ridiculed for their taste in lattes, Naomi Klein's No Logo and their trendy crusades against brands such as Nike. For a decade Seattle has been dismissed as illogical, self-indulgent posture politics that, not surprisingly, went nowhere.

But it's crucial if we are to have any sensible understanding of the first decade of the century to grasp how the Seattle agenda was traduced and its promise of a global civil society was dismantled. Go back to 1999 and what was all the fuss about? In part, Seattle was a protest about a highly volatile financial system built on unsustainable levels of debt. Asia had just been through a bruising financial collapse, millions of people in countries such as Indonesia had dropped back below the poverty line in what Paul Krugman describes as "one of the worst economic slumps in world history". Economists such as Martin Khor were central to the critique that the "liberal world order" promoted by globalisation benefited only a small proportion of the global population.

Another key target in Seattle was corporate power; it manipulated globalisation for its own profit, ruthlessly corrupting all political systems. National governments had neither the appetite nor capacity to call them to account. Finally, Seattle was a protest against the economic system of global capitalism, which was destructive of the environment and was burning through finite resources at ever faster speed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/13/copenhagen-seattle-climate-globalisation-protesters

"draconian police response" to WTO riots?

spare me. mayor paul "i am not a wuss" schell UNDERPREPARED for WTO. there had been riots other times the WTO met, but this was SEATTLE. it's "different here". we can't have riots in seattle. we're too 'civilized'. he was an idiot. so, he didn't adequately request mutual aid, did not prepare, AND the police sent out their officers in "soft uniforms" iow NOT riot gear. they were promptly overrun. as i responded "code 3" (highest emergency response) to the city, I heard officers practically crying for help.... over and over... FINALLY, the cops were able to restore order. were there overresponses? sure, but on the whole, police response was incredibly restrained. the injuries suffered by rioters were minor, especially compared to those seen at similar riots in europe. so, despite our "tear gas and truncheons", it was a measured response, to a RIOT

of course mayor schell then OVER-reacted and the city passed a "no protest zone" ordinance which was blatantly illegal, but what do you expect from those statist ninnies?

and watched them brutally and systematically attack peaceful, civil disobedience protestors. I saw no "rioting" by protestors--none, zilch--nowhere in the city where I walked (or ran, depending on circumstances). I saw a few of the black-masked youth vandalizing property, late in the day. They were not part of the protest, which had been planned for days in advance, in many meetings. I saw widespread injuries--from pepper spray, tear gas, billy clubs and rubber bullets, and those who were arrested were left for up to 18 hours without food, water or toilets. The police violence and abuse was egregious, and unprovoked. THEY were the provokers.

The problem was that the protest was very successful--and very peacefully so. The "free trade for the rich" crowd and their enforcers couldn't leave it at that--that ordinary citizens got together in such amazingly organized fashion and shut down their meeting. In a free country, that would have been the end of "free trade for the rich" and ruinous forms of globalisation. But, very unfortunately, our leaders don't give a crap what we, the people, think. And if we get in their way--as we did in Seattle--they riot against us.

i observed the police standing by and doing nothing until the (most likely eugene anarchist set) starting throwing shit, breaking shit, etc.

like i said, i have ZERO doubt that there were overreactions by some cops.

of course.

but "draconian"? please

the cops otoh, were remarkably restrained.

again, compare the INJURIES to protesters (and those caught in the fray) in seattle VS. many of the european cities where they had similar riots. there were multiple DEATHS and grave injuries.

i personally had two bottles bounce off of me. so, don't tell me it wasn't a riot

I'm not saying that there weren't SOME "riotous" actions, late in the day. A FEW people got angry, after six hours of severe police repression--starting with systematic, brutal assaults on 10,000 peaceful, seated demonstrators. However, there were virtually no retaliatory assaults on the police, and the 50,000 people who had assembled in Seattle for these protests were INCREDIBLY peaceful and DETERMINED to have an ENTIRELY peaceful set of protests--stressed over and over, for months in advance, and in numerous meetings during the week of the protests. I have never felt so safe as among these 50,000 protestors. Our corporate rulers could not tolerate this incredibly successful, peaceful protest--and INSTIGATED a riot. And even then, it was only a few stray people who "rioted"--threw bottles, as you experienced, or broke a few windows, or burned trash cans. These things would not have happened if the police themselves had not grossly violated the human and civil rights of these 10,000 non-violent, civilly disobedient protesters. And they didn't stop with their massive assault on non-resisting, seated protestors. They kept escalating--tear-gassing everywhere, so that there was nowhere for the many thousands of peaceful protestors to retreat to, declaring large swaths of downtown as "no free speech zones," banning people from sidewalks for merely wearing an anti-WTO button, and turning the city into a war zone.

The protestors were no threat to anybody. They were merely an inconvenience. The WTO meeting could not occur. Traffic was stopped. And, if there hadn't been a police riot, business downtown would never have been better. But the "threat" of a democratic people arising in massive, peaceful, civil disobedience against the global corporate predators who rule over us could not be tolerated. In other words, the protestors came up against the immovable object of state obduracy--just like the civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama, long ago. Those civilly disobedient protestors were demanding basic civil rights for African Americans--and they got hosed, and they got beaten and jailed, because the "state" itself was controlled by bigots. The Seattle protestors were demanding the right of a sovereign, democratic people to influence the rules of international trade that intimately affect our lives and the lives of others, and the viability of the planet itself. And we had a very profound effect on the WTO which played out over the next 2-3 years, mainly in the empowerment of "third world" countries. Just like the bigoted sheriffs, office holders and others in Alabama in the early 1960s, the city, state and federal authorities making decisions in Seattle were bought-and-paid-for corporatists, with profoundly anti-democratic and anti-sovereignty-of-the-people views. They saw us as "enemies"--we who were merely citizens expressing our will, peacefully and effectively.

The assault on peaceful protestors was DESIGNED TO cause a "riot." Our peacefulness and effectiveness was intolerable to the "powers that be." And, by chance or by design (planting of agents provocateur), a FEW people took the bait, late in the day, and inflicted what was rather limited vandalism on private or city property. Don't you understand that this was the INTENTION of the authorities? Left alone, the protestors might have gotten some favorable TV coverage (maybe), provoked some discussion of globalisation issues (maybe) and would have peacefully gone home. But our government NEEDED to portray this civil rebellion as disorderly and riotous. They were good and pissed off at this very well-organized, vocal objection to "free trade for the rich."

It is always, ALWAYS to the advantage of the powerful to portray the unpowerful, whom they are exploiting and oppressing, as "riotous." And there is nothing more threatening to the "powers that be" than protestors who will not be provoked. That was the case in Seattle. The protestors were determined not to be provoked, and the "state" therefore responded by brutally attacking them and CREATING first that disorder, then escalating disorder around the city.

Think what would have happened if the police had been nowhere present--except for normal, unarmored policing. The protests were against a temporary meeting venue. The protests would have continued for a day or two, and the protestors, having made their point, would have gone home--OR, better yet, would have been invited into the WTO meeting for an open, public session to air their grievances!

How about that, huh? Why weren't the protestors--a very orderly lot of quite intelligent, focused people with well thought-out objections to the WTO--invited in, to talk about labor rights and the environment, to the WTO members?

As a matter of fact, that is ALL the protestors were asking for--the sum of ALL of their objections: that the WTO was NOT democratic. It was making up rules for trade outside of any democratic process, excluding the people that those rules would greatly affect, and was furthermore dominated by US global corporate predators making secret deals and imposing them on other countries and on us--rules that would impoverish many people and destroy their local economies; rules that would violate our local environmental regulations; rules that favored only the very rich and powerful.

Democracy was the issue (as this Guardian writer doesn't really grasp), and democracy was the answer. It would have been great if Clinton had said, "Open the doors!" That would have been a very great act of leadership. Instead, the response was to create a "riot" and slander this amazingly peaceful, massive protest against an anti-democratic, unfair, unfree (monopolistic) trade meeting.

I knew people who were in Seattle for the WTO meetings, and they complained that a few dozen black hooded "protesters" who smashed windows (possibly provocateurs) received all the news coverage, while an international group of 15,000 ordinary people marched peacefully a few blocks away.

I've seen provocateurs at work. They exist.

You don't pay $4 for a shitty cup of Starbucks coffee and then kick in their window with a ski mask on..... At least not if you're actually protesting global corporatism.

Those people were definitely on the Langley payroll.

of around 8-9 young black men running through the peaceful people..hitting and punching and shoving as they ran past...and they beat the crap out of a number of people and the police commissioner REFUSED to allow the police to move in and stop the gang.
It's all on tape..we all watched the police watching and not even moving.
The only other trouble was a small gang of agent provocateurs also were ALLOWED (with the police not moving until the people were all leaving anyways)..to wreck their havoc with the news stations somehow johnny on the spot to film the "terrible rioters". What ..all eight or nine of them>?
By then all of my family and most of Seattle then watched the police beating the crap out of everyone..people who were already trying to get out of there and that had not been doing anything wrong.

the end of World War II, and I saw cops laughing and joking with chimpira (sort of apprentice yakuza) who were driving at and scattering a group of people demonstrating for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Occupation Forces' encouragement of the yakuza as a force to control leftists is well documented.

If you're going to say that the Seattle '99 protestors should have been listened to, you should begin with an accurate description of what they did.

First of all, the entire event is more accurately described as a police riot. I was there. I know what happened. I saw it for myself. And the truth later came out in testimony to a city commission investigating the event, but nobody paid any attention to that either. The Seattle protestors were ENTIRELY PEACEFUL, through a march of about 50,000 people, and other events, and an awesome and ENTIRELY PEACEFUL civil disobedience action by 10,000 people, who PEACEFULLY sat down in intersections near the WTO meeting and PEACEFULLY would not be moved, in order to shut down the WTO meeting and protest its lack of democracy and the horrible impacts of "free trade for the rich" and global corporate predation on workers and the environment.

Several hours into this PEACEFUL civil disobedience action, the police arrived at these intersections dressed in Darth Vader armor, with pepper spray and tear gas cannons and armored vehicles, and they began systematically shooting peaceful, seated demonstrators in the heads, faces and upper bodies, with firehose strength streams of pepper spray. This is one of the most horrible things I have ever witnessed. (I was a legal observer.) The demonstrators still didn't move from the intersection, didn't retaliate, they just stayed there and took that violence and abuse to make their point. Then the police began teargassing the entire downtown and going after PEACEFUL demonstrators with billy clubs and shooting rubber bullets, when people began to run to get out of the tear-gassed areas They also arrested and seriously abused hundreds of people (who were all unjustly held and later released), and began a full scale police riot in downtown Seattle, invading neighborhoods that had nothing to do with the protests, and even beating up a city councilman. At that point, some youths (a few black-masked young "anarchists") broke a few windows and burned a few trash cans, and I think they burned a bus. The real protestors tried to stop them. The police did nothing--they let these few young vandals go freely about vandalizing property.

That night on the TV news, what do they show? One of the young anarchists' foot breaking a window. This was after six hours of police riot!

The Seattle protests were entirely and egregiously slandered by the corpo-fascist media (and even by some leftist media). There. was. no. riot. by. the. protestors.

But to this day, even a well-meaning writer like this (Madeleine Bunting, in the Guardian) accepts the "Big Lie" propaganda version of those events. "The touchstone for riots," followed by "a draconian police response." It was the other way around. And the protestors did NOT riot.

Bunting then mentions some of the issues of the "anti-globalisation" movement, but again accepts a stereotype from the corpo-fascist news (one that was repeated in an infuriating "West Wing" episode). Bunting writes: " Let's be honest, it was an odd protest movement – the "anti-globalisation" agenda attracted a hugely disparate following that had as much to argue about with itself as with anyone else. All that united them was a stubborn belief that the model of globalisation being aggressively promoted by the west had many disastrous outcomes. They differed dramatically about what to do about it, and that was their weakness."

She really doesn't grasp the spirit of those 50,000 protestors in Seattle. What she calls "a hugely disparate following" was in truth a cross section of American leaders, quietly and marvelously working together to deal a blow to the WTO from which it would never recover. And her characterization, that this remarkable, large group of people "had as much to argue about with itself as with anyone else" is simply not true. Yes, there were environmental groups, and labor unions, and student groups, and religious groups, and many others, but we all understood the octopus-like reach of global corporate predation on our particular lives, perspectives and issues. Her characterization of us is straight out of the Clinton White House (via "West Wing"). A babble of causes. A gang of onery people all arguing with each other. In truth, there was almost preternatural unity, calmness, understanding and cooperation. And there were dozens and dozens of workshops, with brilliant speakers, laying out the problem and discussing solutions--one of the main ones being the need to improve democracy, in trade negotiations, in trade bodies, in nations. And we are seeing the fruits of that solution in the huge leftist democracy movement in Latin America.

Who got left out were the "first world" countries with demoralized, heavily propagandized people and crippled and near non-existent democracies--the US and the UK in particular, who then--as Bunting laments--led the "first world" on a wild and horrible ride into war and lost an entire decade of work on the impacts of bad globalisation, and made everything so much worse. Most of those 50,000 demonstrators in Seattle were Americans, but we probably did make one mistake, in underestimating how far gone our democracy already was. The task of reform, in the US, is extremely difficult. Unknown to us, in Seattle--and unknown to me until circa 2004--the corpo-fascists were fast-tracking 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines all over the US, with programming code owned and controlled by a handful of corporations with hair-raising far rightwing connections, and with virtually no audit-recount controls--a situation that is actually worse today than it was in 2004. Democracy itself has been hijacked here--along with our military and everything else. Though Americans provided a spark to the anti-globalisation movement, in Seattle--a portent of just how progressive we are, as a people--we were unable to carry out any reforms here.

But Latin America is quite far along on reforms, and we should try to learn from them. The biggest lesson, to my mind, is the absolute necessity of TRANSPARENT vote counting. They have very bad media, too, in Latin America. They've been able to overcome it with honest, transparent election systems. That's one VERY important US solution--to restore the most basic condition of democracy. I don't think it applies to the UK. They have a different system and will have to work out what's needed there, for fundamental reform.

and agree 100%

The corporations are so busy conning us they forget that people have memories.

cameras, and internet access.