There were students, labor union members, greens, farmers, religious leaders, and human rights activists. They came to Seattle by the thousands to shut down the World Trade Organization, one of the most powerful insitutions pushing globalization. The most dramatic confrontations took place on November 30 (N30), when thousands of protesters blocked WTO delegates from reaching the meeting. Author Paul Hawken was among them
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 teargassed 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 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, e-mails, 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, The New York Times columnist and author of an encomium
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.
This is what democracy looks like
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
Avenue and Pike Street, 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.
Opening ceremonies for the World Trade Organization's Third Ministerial
were to have been held that Tuesday morning at the Paramount Theater
near the Convention Center. Police had ringed the theater with Metro
buses touching bumper to bumper. The protesters surrounded the outside
of that steel circle. Only a few hundred of the 5,000 delegates made it
inside, as police were unable to provide safe corridors for members and
ambassadors. The theater was virtually empty when US trade
representative and meeting co-chair Charlene Barshevsky was to have
delivered the opening keynote. Instead, she was captive in her hotel
room a block from the meeting site. WTO executive director Michael
Moore was said to have been apoplectic.
Inside the Paramount, Mayor Paul Schell stood despondently near the
stage. Since no scheduled speakers were present, Kevin Danaher, Medea
Benjamin, and Juliet Beck from Global Exchange went to the lectern and
offered to begin a dialogue in the meantime. The WTO had not been able
to come to a pre-meeting consensus on the draft agenda. The NGO
community, however, had drafted a consensus agreement about
globalization – and the three thought this would be a good time to
present it, even if the hall had only a desultory number of delegates.
Although the three were credentialed WTO delegates, the sound system
was quickly turned off and the police arm-locked and handcuffed them.
Medea's wrist was sprained. All were dragged off stage and arrested.
The arrests mirrored how the WTO has operated since its birth in 1995.
Listening to people is not its strong point. WTO rules run roughshod
over local laws and regulations. It relentlessly pursues the
elimination of any restriction on the free flow of trade including
local, national, or international laws that distinguish between
products based on how they are made, by whom, or what happens during
production.
The WTO is thus eliminating the ability of countries and regions to set
standards, to express values, or to determine what they do or don't
support. Child labor, prison labor, forced labor, substandard wages and
working conditions cannot be used as a basis to discriminate against
goods. Nor can a country's human rights record, environmental
destruction, habitat loss, toxic waste production, or the presence of
transgenic materials or synthetic hormones be used as the basis to
screen or stop goods from entering a country. Under WTO rules, the
Sullivan Principles and the boycott of South Africa would not have
existed. If the world could vote on the WTO, would it pass? Not one
country of the 135 member-states of the WTO has held a plebiscite to
see if its people support the WTO mandate. The people trying to meet in
the Green Rooms at the Seattle Convention Center were not elected. Even
Michael Moore was not elected.
While Global Exchange was temporarily silenced, the main organizer of
the downtown protests, the Direct Action Network (DAN), was executing a
plan that was working brilliantly outside the Convention Center. The
plan was simple: insert groups of trained nonviolent activists into key
points downtown, making it impossible for delegates to move. DAN had
hoped that 1,500 people would show up. Close to 10,000 did. The 2,000
people who began the march to the Convention Center at 7 a.m. from
Victor Steinbrueck Park and Seattle Central Community College were
composed of affinity groups and clusters whose responsibility was to
block key intersections and entrances. Participants had trained for
many weeks in some cases, for many hours in others. Each affinity group
had its own mission and was self-organized. The streets around the
Convention Center were divided into 13 sections and individual groups
and clusters were responsible for holding these sections. There were
also “flying groups” that moved at will from section to section,
backing up groups under attack as needed. The groups were further
divided into those willing to be arrested and those who were not.
All decisions prior to the demonstrations were reached by consensus.
Minority views were heeded and included. The one thing all agreed to
was that there would be no violence – physical or verbal – no weapons,
no drugs or alcohol.
Throughout most of the day, using a variety of techniques, groups held
intersections and key areas downtown. As protesters were beaten,
gassed, clubbed, and pushed back, a new group would replace them. There
were no charismatic leaders barking orders. There was no command chain.
There was no one in charge. Police said that they were not prepared for
the level of violence, but, as one protester later commented, what they
were unprepared for was a network of nonviolent protesters totally
committed to one task – shutting down the WTO.
The victory that wasn't
Meanwhile, Moore and Barshevsky's frustration was growing by the
minute. Their anger and disappointment was shared by Madeleine
Albright, the Clinton advance team, and, back in Washington, by chief
of staff John Podesta. This was to have been a celebration, a victory,
one of the crowning achievements to showcase the Clinton
administration, the moment when it would consolidate its centrist free
trade policies, allowing the Democrats to show multinational
corporations that they could deliver the goods.
This was to have been Barshevsky's moment, an event that would give her
the inside track to become Secretary of Commerce in the Gore
Administration. This was to have been Michael Moore's moment, reviving
what had been a mediocre political ascendancy in New Zealand. To say
nothing of Monsanto's moment. If the as-yet unapproved draft agenda
were ever ratified, the Europeans could no longer block or demand
labeling on genetically modified crops without being slapped with
punitive lawsuits and tariffs. The draft also contained provisions that
would allow all water in the world to be privatized. It would allow
corporations patent protection on all forms of life, even genetic
material in cultural use for thousands of years. Farmers who have spent
thousands of years growing crops in a valley in India could, within a
decade, be required to pay for their water. They could also find that
they would have to purchase seeds containing genetic traits their
ancestors developed, from companies that have engineered the seeds not
to reproduce unless the farmer annually buys expensive chemicals to
restore seed viability. If this happens, the CEOs of Novartis and
Enron, two of the companies creating the seeds and privatizing the
water, will have more money. What will Indian farmers have?
But the perfect moment for Barshevsky, Moore and Monsanto didn't
arrive. The meeting couldn't start. Demonstrators were everywhere.
Private security guards locked down the hotels. The downtown stores
were shut. Hundreds of delegates were on the street trying to get into
the Convention Center. No one could help them. For WTO delegates
accustomed to an ordered corporate or governmental world, it was a
calamity.
Up pike toward seventh and to Randy's and my right on Sixth, protesters
faced armored cars, horses, and police in full riot gear. In between,
demonstrators ringed the Sheraton to prevent an alternative entry to
the Convention Center. At one point, police guarding the steps to the
lobby pummeled and broke through a crowd of protesters to let eight
delegates in. On Sixth Street, Sergeant Richard Goldstein asked
demonstrators seated on the street in front of the police line “to
cooperate” and move back 40 feet. No one understood why, but that
hardly mattered. No one was going to move. He announced that “chemical
irritants” would be used if they did not leave.
The police were anonymous. No facial expressions, no face. You could
not see their eyes. They were masked Hollywood caricatures burdened
with 60 to 70 pounds of weaponry. These were not the men and women of
the 6th precinct. They were the Gang Squads and the SWAT teams of the
Tactical Operations Divisions, closer in training to soldiers from the
School of the Americas than local cops on the beat. Behind them and
around were special forces from the FBI, the Secret Service, even the
CIA.
The police were almost motionless. They were equipped with US military
standard M40A1 double-canister gas masks, uncalibrated, semi-automatic,
high velocity Autocockers loaded with solid plastic shot, Monadnock
disposable plastic cuffs, Nomex slash-resistant gloves, Commando boots,
Centurion tactical leg guards, combat harnesses, DK5-H pivot-and-lock
riot face shields, black Monadnock P24 polycarbonate riot batons with
Trum Bull stop side handles, No. 2 continuous discharge CS
(orcho-chlorobenzylidene-malononitrile) chemical grenades, M651 CN
(chloroacetophenone) pyrotechnic grenades, T16 Flameless OC Expulsion
Grenades, DTCA rubber bullet grenades (Stingers), M-203 (40mm) grenade
launchers, First Defense MK-46 Oleoresin Capsicum (OC) aerosol tanks
with hose and wands, .60 caliber rubber ball impact munitions,
lightweight tactical Kevlar composite ballistic helmets, combat butt
packs, .30 cal. 30-round magazine pouches, and Kevlar body armor. None
of the police had visible badges or forms of identification.
The demonstrators seated in front of the black-clad ranks were equipped
with hooded jackets for protection against rain and chemicals. They
carried toothpaste and baking powder for protection of their skin, and
wet cotton cloths impregnated with vinegar to cover their mouths and
noses after a tear gas release. In their backpacks were bottled water
and food for the day ahead.
Ten Koreans came around the corner carrying a 10-foot banner protesting
genetically modified foods. They were impeccable in white robes,
sashes, and headbands. One was a priest. They played flutes and drums
and marched straight toward the police and behind the seated
demonstrators. Everyone cheered at the sight and chanted, “The whole
world is watching.” The sun broke through the gauzy clouds. It was a
beautiful day. Over cell phones, we could hear the cheers coming from
the labor rally at the football stadium. The air was still and quiet.
At 10 a.m. the police fired the first seven canisters of tear gas into
the crowd. The whitish clouds wafted slowly down the street. The seated
protesters were overwhelmed, yet most did not budge. Police poured over
them. Then came the truncheons, and the rubber bullets.
I was with a couple of hundred people who had ringed the hotel, arms
locked. We watched as long as we could until the tear gas slowly
enveloped us. We were several hundred feet from Sgt. Goldstein's
40-foot “cooperation” zone. Police pushed and truncheoned their way
through and behind us. We covered our faces with rags and cloth,
snatching glimpses of the people being clubbed in the street before
shutting our eyes.
The gas was a fog through which people moved in slow, strange dances of
shock and pain and resistance. Tear gas is a misnomer. Think about
feeling asphyxiated and blinded. Breathing becomes labored. Vision is
blurred. The mind is disoriented. The nose and throat burn. It's not a
gas, it's a drug. Gas-masked police hit, pushed, and speared us with
the butt ends of their batons. We all sat down, hunched over, and
locked arms more tightly. By then, the tear gas was so strong our eyes
couldn't open. One by one, our heads were jerked back from the rear,
and pepper was sprayed directly into each eye. It was very
professional. Like hair spray from a stylist. Sssst. Sssst.
Pepper spray is derived from food-grade cayenne peppers. The spray used
in Seattle is the strongest available, with a 1.5 to 2.0 million
Scoville heat unit rating. One to three Scoville units are when your
tongue can first detect hotness. (The habanero, usually considered the
hottest pepper in the world, is rated around 300,000 Scoville units.)
This description was written by a police officer who sells pepper spray
on his website. It is about his first experience being sprayed during a
training exercise:
“It felt as if two red-hot pieces of steel were grinding into my eyes,
as if someone was blowing a red-hot cutting torch into my face. I fell
to the ground just like all the others and started to rub my eyes even
though I knew better not too. The heat from the pepper spray was
overwhelming. I could not resist trying to rub it off of my face. The
pepper spray caused my eyes to shut very quickly. The only way I could
open them was by prying them open with my fingers. Everything that we
had been taught about pepper spray had turned out to be true. And
everything that our instructor had told us that we would do, even
though we knew not to do it, we still did. Pepper spray turned out to
be more than I had bargained for.”
As I tried to find my way down Sixth Avenue after the tear gas and
pepper spray, I couldn't see. The person who found and guided me was
Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, and probably the only CEO
in the world who wanted to be on the streets of Seattle helping people
that day.
When your eyes fail, your ears take over. I could hear acutely. What I
heard was anger, dismay, shock. For many people, including the police,
this was their first direct action. Demonstrators who had taken
nonviolent training were astonished at the police brutality. The
demonstrators were students, their professors, clergy, lawyers, and
medical personnel. They held signs against Burma and violence. They
dressed as butterflies.
The Seattle Police had made a decision not to arrest people on the
first day of the protests (a decision that was reversed for the rest of
the week). Throughout the day, the affinity groups created through
Direct Action stayed together. Tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper
spray were used so frequently that by late afternoon, supplies ran low.
What seemed like an afternoon lull or standoff was because police had
used up all their stores. Officers combed surrounding counties for tear
gas, sprays, concussion grenades, and munitions. As police restocked,
the word came down from the White House to secure downtown Seattle or
the WTO meeting would be called off. By late afternoon, the mayor and
police chief announced a 7 p.m. curfew and “no protest” zones, and
declared the city under civil emergency. The police were fatigued and
frustrated. Over the next seven hours and into the night, the police
turned downtown Seattle into Beirut.
That morning, it was the police commanders who were out of control,
ordering the gassing and pepper spraying and shooting of people
protesting nonviolently. By evening, it was the individual police who
were out of control. Anger erupted, protesters were kneed and kicked in
the groin, and police used their thumbs to grind the eyes of
pepper-spray victims. A few demonstrators danced on burning dumpsters
that were ignited by pyrotechnic teargas grenades (the same ones used
in Waco).
Protesters were defiant. Tear gas canisters were thrown back as fast as
they were launched. Drum corps marched using empty 5-gallon water
bottles for instruments. Despite their steadily dwindling number, maybe
1,500 by evening, a hardy number of protesters held their ground,
seated in front of heavily armed police, hands raised in peace signs,
submitting to tear gas, pepper spray, and riot batons. As they
retreated to the medics, new groups replaced them.
Every channel covered the police riots live. On TV, the police looked
absurd, frantic, and mean. Passing Metro buses filled with passengers
were gassed. Police were pepper spraying residents and bystanders. The
mayor went on TV that night to say, that as a protester from the ‘60s,
he never could have imagined what he was going to do next: call in the
National Guard.
Lawlessness
This is what I remember about the violence. There was almost none until
police attacked demonstrators that Tuesday in Seattle. Michael Meacher,
environment minister of the United Kingdom, said afterward, “What we
hadn't reckoned with was the Seattle Police Department, who
single-handedly managed to turn a peaceful protest into a riot.” There
was no police restraint, despite what Mayor Paul Schell kept proudly
assuring television viewers all day. Instead, there were rubber
bullets, which Schell kept denying all day. In the end, more copy and
video was given to broken windows than broken teeth.
During that day, the anarchist black blocs were in full view. Numbering
about one hundred, they could have been arrested at any time but the
police were so weighed down by their own equipment, they literally
couldn't run. Both the police and the Direct Action Network had
mutually apprised each other for months prior to the WTO about the
anarchists' intentions. The Eugene Police had volunteered information
and specific techniques to handle the black blocs but had been rebuffed
by the Seattle Police. It was widely known they would be there and that
they had property damage in mind. To the credit of the mayor, the
police chief, and the Seattle press, distinctions were consistently
made between the protesters and the anarchists (later joined by local
vandals as the night wore on). But the anarchists were not
primitivists, nor were they all from Eugene. They were well organized,
and they had a plan.
The black blocs came with tools (crowbars, hammers, acid-filled eggs)
and hit lists. They knew they were going after Fidelity Investments but
not Charles Schwab. Starbucks but not Tully's. The GAP but not REI.
Fidelity Investments because they are large investors in Occidental
Petroleum, the oil company most responsible for the violence against
the U'wa tribe in Columbia. Starbuck's because of their non-support of
fair-traded coffee. The GAP because of the Fisher family's purchase of
Northern California forests. They targeted multinational corporations
that they see as benefiting from repression, exploitation of workers,
and low wages. According to one anarchist group, the ACME collective:
“Most of us have been studying the effects of the global economy,
genetic engineering, resource extraction, transportation, labor
practices, elimination of indigenous autonomy, animal rights, and human
rights, and we've been doing activism on these issues for many years.
We are neither ill-informed nor inexperienced.” They don't believe we
live in a democracy, do believe that property damage (windows and
tagging primarily) is a legitimate form of protest, and that it is not
violent unless it harms or causes pain to a person. For the black
blocs, breaking windows is intended to break the spells cast by
corporate hegemony, an attempt to shatter the smooth exterior facade
that covers corporate crime and violence. That's what they did. And
what the media did is what I just did in the last two paragraphs: focus
inordinately on the tiniest sliver of the 40–60,000 marchers and
demonstrators.
It's not inapt to compare the pointed lawlessness of the anarchists
with the carefully considered ability of the WTO to flout laws of
sovereign nations. When “The Final Act Embodying the Results of the
Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations” was enacted April
15th, 1994, in Marrakech, it was recorded as a 550-page agreement that
was then sent to Congress for passage. Ralph Nader offered to donate
$10,000 to any charity of a congressman's choice if any of them signed
an affidavit saying they had read it and could answer several questions
about it. Only one congressman – Senator Hank Brown, a Colorado
Republican – took him up on it. After reading the document, Brown
changed his opinion and voted against the Agreement.
There were no public hearings, dialogues, or education. What passed is
an Agreement that gives the WTO the ability to overrule or undermine
international conventions, acts, treaties, and agreements. The WTO
directly violates “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” adopted
by member nations of the United Nations, not to mention Agenda 21. (The
proposed draft agenda presented in Seattle went further in that it
would require Multilateral Agreements on the Environment such as the
Montreal Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the
Kyoto Protocol to be in alignment and subordinate to WTO trade
polices.) The final Marrakech Agreement contained provisions that most
of the delegates, even the heads-of-country delegations, were not aware
of, statutes that were drafted by sub-groups of bureaucrats and
lawyers, some of whom represented transnational corporations.
The police mandate to clear downtown was achieved by 9 p.m. Tuesday
night. But police, some of whom were fresh recruits from outlying
towns, didn't want to stop there. They chased demonstrators into
neighborhoods where the distinctions between protesters and citizens
vanished. The police began attacking bystanders, residents, and
commuters. They had lost control. When President Clinton sped from
Boeing airfield to the Westin Hotel at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, his
limousines entered a police-ringed city of broken glass, helicopters,
and boarded windows. He was too late. The mandate for the WTO had
vanished sometime that afternoon.
Media myths and legends
The next morning and over the next days, a surprised press corps went
to work and spun webs. They vented thinly veiled anger in their
columns, and pointed guilt-mongering fingers at brash, misguided white
kids. They created myths, told fables. What a majority of media
projected onto the marchers and activists, in an often-contradictory
manner, was that the protesters are afraid of a world without walls;
that they want the WTO to have even more rules; that anarchists led by
John Zerzan from Eugene ran rampant; that they blame the WTO for the
world's problems; that they are opposed to global integration; that
they are against trade; that they are ignorant and insensitive to the
world's poor; that they want to tell other people how to live. The list
is long and tendentious. Outstanding coverage came from Amy Goodman's
Democracy Now on Pacifica radio and The Nation.
Patricia King, one of two Newsweek reporters in Seattle, called me from
her hotel room at the Four Seasons and wanted to know if this was the
‘60s redux.
No, I told her. The ‘60s were primarily an American event; the protests against the WTO are international.
Who are the leaders? she wanted to know.
There are no leaders in the traditional sense. But there are thought leaders, I said.
Who are they? she asked.
I began to name some: Martin Khor and Vandana Shiva of the Third World
Network in Asia, Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South, Maude
Barlow of the Council of Canadians, Tony Clarke of Polaris Institute,
Jerry Mander of the International Forum on Globalization, Susan George
of the Transnational Institute, David Korten of the People-Centered
Development Forum, John Cavanagh of the Institute for Policy Studies,
Lori Wallach of Public Citizen, Mark Ritchie of the Institute For
Agriculture and Trade Policy, Anuradha Mittal of the Institute for Food
& Development Policy, Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International
Society for Ecology and Culture, Owens Wiwa of the Movement for the
Survival of the Ogoni People, Chakravarthi Raghavan of the Third World
Network in Geneva, Debra Harry of the Indigenous Peoples Coalition
Against Biopiracy, José Bové of the Confederation Paysanne Europèenne,
Tetteh Hormoku of the Third World Network in Africa, Randy Hayes of
Rainforest Action Network…
Stop, stop, she said. I can't use these names in my article. Why not?
Because Americans have never heard of them. Instead, Newsweek editors
put the picture of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynksi, in the article
because he had, at one time, purchased some of John Zerzan's writings.
Some of the mainstream media also assigned blame to the protesters for
the meeting's outcome. But ultimately, it was not on the streets that
the WTO broke down. It was inside. It was a heated and rancorous
Ministerial, and the meeting ended in a stalemate, with African,
Caribbean, and some Asian countries refusing to support a draft agenda
that had been negotiated behind closed doors without their
participation. With that much contention inside and out, one can
rightly ask whether the correct question is being posed. The question,
as propounded by corporations, is how to make trade rules more uniform.
The proper question, it seems to me, is how do we make trade rules more
differentiated so that different cultures, cities, peoples, places, and
countries benefit the most. Arnold Toynbee wrote that “Civilizations in
decline are consistently characterized by a tendency toward
standardization and uniformity. Conversely, during the growth stage of
civilization, the tendency is toward differentiation and diversity.”
Those who marched and protested opposed the tyrannies of globalization,
uniformity, and corporatization, but they did not necessarily oppose
internationalization of trade. Economist Herman Daly has long made the
distinction between the two. Internationalization means trade between
nations. Globalization refers to a system where there are uniform rules
for the entire world, a world in which capital and goods move at will
without the rule of individual nations. Nations, for all their faults,
set trade standards. Those who are willing to meet those standards can
do business with them. Do nations abuse this? Always and constantly,
the US being the worst offender. But nations do provide, where
democracies prevail, a means for people to set their own policy, to
influence decisions, and determine their future. Globalization
supplants the nation, the state, the region, and the village. While
eliminating nationalism is indeed a good idea, the elimination of
sovereignty is not.
Globalization's winners & losers
One recent example of the power of the WTO is Chiquita Brands
International, a $2 billion dollar corporation that recently made a
large donation to the Democratic Party. Coincidentally, the United
States filed a complaint with the WTO against the European Union
because European import policies favored bananas coming from small
Caribbean growers instead of the banana conglomerates. The Europeans
freely admitted their bias and policy: they restricted imports from
large multinational companies in Central America (plantations whose
lands were secured by US military force during the past century) and
favored small family farmers from former colonies who used fewer
chemicals. It seemed like a decent thing to do, and everyone thought
the bananas tasted better. For the banana giants, this was untenable.
The United States prevailed in this WTO-arbitrated case. So who won and
who lost? Did the Central American employees at Chiquita Brands win?
Ask the hundreds of workers in Honduras who were made infertile by the
use of dibromochloropropane on the banana plantations. Ask the mothers
whose children have birth defects from pesticide poisoning. Did the
shareholders of Chiquita win? At the end of 1999, Chiquita Brands was
losing money because it was selling bananas at below cost to muscle its
way into the European market. Its stock was at a 13-year low, the
shareholders were angry, the company was up for sale, but the prices of
bananas in Europe are really cheap. Who lost? Caribbean farmers who
could formerly make a living and send their kids to school can no
longer do so because of low prices and demand.
Globalization leads to the concentration of wealth inside such large
multinational corporations as Time-Warner, Microsoft, GE, Exxon, and
Wal-Mart. These giants can obliterate social capital and local equity,
and create cultural homogeneity in their wake. Countries as different
as Mongolia, Bhutan, and Uganda will have no choice but to allow
Blockbuster, Burger King, and Pizza Hut to operate within their
borders. Under WTO, even decisions made by local communities to refuse
McDonald's entry (as did Martha's Vineyard) could be overruled. The
as-yet unapproved draft agenda calls for WTO member governments to open
up their procurement process to multinational corporations. No longer
could local governments buy preferentially from local vendors. The WTO
could force governments to privatize healthcare and allow foreign
companies to bid on delivering national health programs. The draft
agenda could privatize and commodify education, and could ban cultural
restrictions on entertainment, advertising, or commercialism as trade
barriers. Globalization kills self-reliance, since smaller local
businesses can rarely compete with highly capitalized firms who seek
market share instead of profits. Thus, developing regions may become
more subservient to distant companies, with more of their income
exported rather than re-spent locally.
On the weekend prior to the WTO meeting, the International Forum on
Globalization (IFG) held a two-day teach-in at Benaroya Hall in
downtown Seattle on just such questions of how countries can maintain
autonomy in the face of globalization. Chaired by IFG president Jerry
Mander, more than 2,500 people from around the world attended. A
similar number were turned away. It was the hottest ticket in town (but
somehow that ticket did not get into the hands of pundits and
columnists). It was an extravagant display of research, intelligence,
and concern, expressed by scholars, diplomats, writers, academics,
fishermen, scientists, farmers, geneticists, businesspeople, and
lawyers. Prior to the teach-in, non-governmental organizations,
institutes, public interest law firms, farmers' organizations, unions,
and councils had been issuing papers, communiqués, press releases,
books, and pamphlets for years. They were almost entirely ignored by
the WTO.
A clash of chronologies
But something else was happening in Seattle underneath the debates and
protests. In Stewart Brand's new book, The Clock of the Long Now – Time
and Responsibility, he discusses what makes a civilization resilient
and adaptive. Scientists have studied the same question about
ecosystems. How does a system, be it cultural or natural, manage
change, absorb shocks, and survive, especially when change is rapid and
accelerating? The answer has much to do with time, both our use of it
and our respect for it. Biological diversity in ecosystems buffers
against sudden shifts because different organisms and elements
fluctuate at different time scales. Flowers, fungi, spiders, trees,
laterite, and foxes all have different rates of change and response.
Some respond quickly, others slowly, so that the system, when subjected
to stress, can move, sway, and give, and then return and restore.
The WTO was a clash of chronologies or time frames, at least three,
probably more. The dominant time frame was commercial. Businesses are
quick, welcome innovation in general, and have a bias for change. They
need to grow more quickly than ever before. They are punished, pummeled
and bankrupted if they do not. With worldwide capital mobility,
companies and investments are rewarded or penalized instantly by a
network of technocrats and money managers who move $2 trillion a day
seeking the highest return on capital. The Internet, greed, global
communications, and high-speed transportation are all making businesses
move faster than before.
The second time frame is culture. It moves more slowly. Cultural
revolutions are resisted by deeper, historical beliefs. The first
institution to blossom under perestroika was the Russian Orthodox
Church. I walked into a church near Boris Pasternak's dacha in 1989 and
heard priests and babushkas reciting the litany with perfect recall as
if 72 years of repression had never happened. Culture provides the slow
template of change within which family, community, and religion
prosper. Culture provides identity and in a fast-changing world of
displacement and rootlessness, becomes ever more important. In between
culture and business is governance, faster than culture, slower than
commerce.
At the heart, the third and slowest chronology is Earth, nature, the
web of life. As ephemeral as it may seem, it is the slowest clock
ticking, always there, responding to long, ancient evolutionary cycles
that are beyond civilization.
These three chronologies often conflict. As Stewart Brand points out,
business unchecked becomes crime. Look at Russia. Look at Microsoft.
Look at history. What makes life worthy and allows civilizations to
endure are all the things that have “bad” payback under commercial
rules: infrastructure, universities, temples, poetry, choirs,
literature, language, museums, terraced fields, long marriages, line
dancing, and art. Most everything we hold valuable is slow to develop,
slow to learn, and slow to change. Commerce requires the governance of
politics, art, culture, and nature, to slow it down, to make it
heedful, to make it pay attention to people and place. It has never
done this on its own. The extirpation of languages, cultures, forests,
and fisheries is occurring worldwide in the name of speeding up
business. Business itself is stressed out of its mind by rapid change.
The rate of change is unnerving to all, even to those who are
supposedly benefiting. To those who are not, it is devastating.
What marched in the streets of Seattle? Slower time strode into the
WTO. Ancient identity emerged. The cloaks of the forgotten paraded on
the backs of our children.
What appeared in Seattle were the details, dramas, stories, peoples,
and puppet creatures that had been ignored by the bankers, diplomats,
and the rich. Corporate leaders believe they have discovered a treasure
of immeasurable value, a trove so great that surely we will all
benefit. It is the treasure of unimpeded commerce flowing everywhere as
fast as is possible. But in Seattle, quick time met slow time. The
turtles, farmers, workers, and priests weren't invited and don't need
to be because they are the shadow world that cannot be overlooked, that
will tail and haunt the WTO, and all its successors, for as long as it
exists. They will be there even if they meet in totalitarian countries
where free speech is criminalized. They will be there in dreams of
delegates high in the Four Seasons Hotel. They will haunt the public
relations flacks who solemnly insist that putting the genes of
scorpions into our food is a good thing. What gathered around the
Convention Center and hotels was everything the WTO left behind.
In the Inuit tradition, there is a story of a fisherman who trolls an
inlet. When a heavy pull on the fisherman's line drags his kayak to
sea, he thinks he has caught the “big one,” a fish so large he can eat
for weeks, a fish so fat that he will prosper ever after, a fish so
amazing that the whole village will wonder at his prowess. As he
imagines his fame and coming ease, what he reels up is Skeleton Woman,
a woman flung from a cliff and buried long ago, a fish-eaten carcass
resting at the bottom of the sea that is now entangled in his line.
Skeleton Woman is so snarled in his fishing line that she is dragged
behind the fisherman wherever he goes. She is pulled across the water,
over the beach, and into his house where he collapses in terror. In the
retelling of this story by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the fisherman has
brought up a woman who represents life and death, a specter who reminds
us that with every beginning there is an ending, for all that is taken,
something must be given in return, that the earth is cyclical and
requires respect. The fisherman, feeling pity for her, slowly
disentangles her, straightens her bony carcass, and finally falls
asleep. During the night, Skeleton Woman scratches and crawls her way
across the floor, drinks the tears of the dreaming fisherman, and grows
anew her flesh and heart and body. This myth applies to business as
much as it does to a fisherman. The apologists for the WTO want
more-engineered food, sleeker planes, computers everywhere, golf
courses that are preternaturally green. They see no limits; they know
of no downside. But Life always comes with Death, with a tab, a
reckoning. They are each other's consorts, inseparable and fast. These
expansive dreams of the world's future wealth were met with perfect
symmetry by Bill Gates III, the co-chair of the Seattle Host Committee,
the world's richest man. But Skeleton Woman also showed up in Seattle,
the uninvited guest, and the illusion of wealth, the imaginings of
unfettered growth and expansion, became small and barren in the eyes of
the world. Dancing, drumming, ululating, marching in black with a
symbolic coffin for the world, she wove through the sulfurous rainy
streets of the night. She couldn't be killed or destroyed, no matter
how much gas or pepper spray or how many rubber bullets were used. She
kept coming back and sitting in front of the police and raised her
hands in the peace sign, and was kicked and trod upon, and it didn't
make any difference. Skeleton Woman told corporate delegates and rich
nations that they could not have the world. It is not for sale. The
illusions of world domination have to die, as do all illusions.
Skeleton Woman was there to say that if business is going to trade with
the world, it has to recognize and honor the world, her life, and her
people. Skeleton Woman was telling the WTO that it has to grow up and
be brave enough to listen, strong enough to yield, courageous enough to
give. Skeleton Woman has been brought up from the depths. She has
regained her eyes, voice, and spirit. She is about in the world and her
dreams are different. She believes that the right to self-sufficiency
is a human right; she imagines a world where the means to kill people
is not a business but a crime, where families do not starve, where
fathers can work, where children are never sold, where women cannot be
impoverished because they choose to be mothers and not whores. She
cannot see in any dream a time where a man holds a patent to a living
seed, or animals are factories, or people are enslaved by money, or
water belongs to a stockholder. Hers are deep dreams from slow time.
She is patient. She will not be quiet or flung to sea anytime soon.
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