There was no "New Round" for the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Precisely a year after the MAI talks collapsed at the OECD, the WTO threw in the towel and admitted that their attempt to launch a new round of expanded negotiations had failed.
Like the MAI, the WTO could not survive public scrutiny. The broad international coalition consisting of labor unions, environmental groups, faith based community, consumer organizations and activists once again proved to be more powerful than any corporate push to expand the scope of the WTO or other free-trade agreements.
Ever since Seattle was announced the host city for the Ministerial, people have been mobilizing for this moment. A international sign-on letter demanding a "Turn-a-Round" of the WTO now has 1500 groups from 89 countries signed on to it (for an updated version go to www.onelist.com or www.tradewatch.org), there has been several days of action against the New Round and also on specific issues like opposing the Global Free Logging Agreement. All over the world the negotiators and politicians have been confronted with a strong demand for a "NO NEW ROUND - TURNAROUND", and the WTO - once just an obscure acronym - has become a household name for people around the world.
At the Ministerial in Seattle, the dominant countries in the WTO (U.S., EU, Japan and Canada), once again tried to make the decisions, without including developing countries. In typical, undemocratic WTO-manner - through closed sessions with only selected countries invited - they tried to force through their "consensus". This blatant arrogance as well as the unprecedented opposition from civil society, were key reasons for the collapse of the negotiations.
Our fight against the WTO continues. We have now entered the "Turn-a-Round" Phase of our campaign. The negotiators and bureaucrats will return to Geneva where they will try to find a way to continue and expand the scope of the WTO. Our job is to both continue to build the momentum against these failed agreements, as well as outlining what a forward-looking trade- and investment policy must look like. We look forward to continuing the fight with you!
Below are some clips from the last couple of weeks that outline both the role of civil society on the outside, as well as what happened on the inside of the negotiations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WTO SUMMIT: PROTEST IN SEATTLE; INTERNET FUELED GLOBAL INTEREST IN DISRUPTIONS; COMPUTERS: E-MAIL IN JANUARY LAUNCHED CYBERSPACE PLANNING FOR THE ACTIONS, INCLUDING AID IN FINDING SEATTLE LODGINGS.
GREG MILLER, TIMES STAFF WRITER
The tumult in Seattle began 11 months ago with a salvo of e-mail.
"Everybody clear your calendars," read a message sent Jan. 26 to thousands of supporters by Public Citizens' Global Trade Watch, a lead organizer of this week's protests. "We're going to Seattle at the end of November."
That e-mail, and others from allied organizations, began ricocheting around the globe the moment Seattle was selected to host the World Trade Organization talks.
Soon there were dozens of "listservs," or e-mail discussion groups, devoted to devising ways to disrupt the event. By this fall, there was a central Web site, at http://www.seattle99.org, seeking volunteers, distributing fliers, providing directions and even assisting protesters in finding lodging.
These were the digital origins of what has become one of the most incendiary U.S. political uprisings in a generation, with hundreds of police and National Guardsmen using tear gas and concussion grenades to face down armies of protesters.
And Wednesday, as the WTO talks finally got underway and 300 demonstrators were arrested, organizers of the massive protest said its magnitude would not have been possible without the internet.
"The internet has become the latest, greatest arrow in our quiver of social activism," said Mike Dolan, field director for Global Trade Watch. In many ways, he said, "the internet benefits us more than the corporate and government elites we're fighting."
That, he said, is true not only because of the Net's geographic reach, but because of its ability to link disparate political groups that might not have identical agendas but, at least in the case of the WTO, can identify a common enemy.
Environmentalists, labor activists, women's rights organizations and vegetarians are just a few of the groups represented among the tens of thousands of protesters that have flocked to Seattle, including many from other continents.
But almost all of them have used the Seattle99 site as a clearinghouse of information. The site, operated by People for Fair Trade and backed by numerous organizations, offered to post materials from almost any group interested in taking part in the protests.
The site has gone well beyond the usual position papers and solicitations for volunteers. It has served as a distribution center for such traditional materials as fliers that activists can print and post on telephone poles and bulletin boards. One features a cartoon of a WTO official preparing to carve up the world with a knife just as an army of pitchfork-wielding protesters storm in, saying, "Thought We'd Drop In!"
One of the site's cleverest functions is its use of software to match protesters who need shelter with Seattle residents willing to offer their spare bedrooms or couches for a few nights. Travelers were even prompted to list any allergies to pets that they might have, or whether they preferred a nonsmoking residence. According to Bill Aal, technical director of the site, more than 1,200 demonstrators found temporary lodging that way.
Many protesters relied exclusively on such online data in making their Seattle plans. Sarah Koch, who was in one of the environmental marches Tuesday, said she was unaware of the planned protests until a few weeks ago, when she stumbled onto an anti-WTO Web site.
After signing up for one of the site's e-mail lists, she became fascinated by the scope of the event taking shape online. Each day she was getting e-mail requests for help, ranging from a plea for assistance in stitching together sea turtle costumes to requests for duct tape and first aid supplies.
"All these people asking for specific help for specific things made me want to come," said Koch, 28, who traveled from Idaho. "It made me feel that I would actually have something to do."
Of course, the demonstrations were also the culmination of a great deal of offline planning. Top-level organizing "is still done in person," said Lori Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch. Since January, she said, there have been monthly international conference calls among dozens of groups mapping out the Seattle protests.
But the internet has been an invaluable tool for disseminating information to a vast audience at almost no cost, she said. To illustrate the Net's impact, she described an instance six years ago when her organization obtained a leaked copy of the agreement that created the WTO.
"I took it to Kinko's, made copies and Federal Expressed it to 30 people I work with," she said. When her group got its hands on another sensitive document last year, she said, "I scanned it into our computer and then e-mailed it not just to those same 30 people but posted it on our Web site for the world to read."
Well-Wired Activists
Activist groups used the internet to inform, organize and draw protesters to Seattle for the WTO meeting. Here's a look at some of the more popular sites:
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Information on the WTO at http://www.globalizethis.org,a site from an activist group known as the Ruckus Society. PHOTO: Web page at http://www.agitprop.prg, linked to a coalition of activists known as Direct Action Network.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Washington Post December 2, 1999, Thursday, Final Edition
BYLINE: Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post Staff Writer
In this week's Battle for Seattle, the field marshal for the global anti-establishment has been an intense, rumpled lawyer who grew up in an admiral's house in Chevy Chase and spent the past nine months building a grass-roots campaign to disrupt the meeting of the World Trade Organization.
Mike Dolan feels his efforts largely have been rewarded so far, from the 30,000 union demonstrators who paraded peacefully through the streets of Seattle on Tuesday to the militant protesters who succeeded in delaying the opening of the trade talks.
The throng of protesters in Seattle was uniquely diverse--trade unionists, farmers, church groups, proselytes of a hundred causes, consumer activists, environmentalists, animal rights and human rights activists, supporters of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico and the Free Tibet movement in China--united by a common concern about the impact of globalization.
At the same time, Dolan's worst fears were realized when his anti-globalization message was trampled in the public consciousness by photos of young demonstrators ransacking a Starbucks, trashing police cars and overturning Dumpsters.
"We won the day, we made a little history here," Dolan said today. "What's disappointing is that our message got lost in all this stuff."
Dolan himself got felled by tear gas Tuesday afternoon as he finished participating in the union march and was attempting to negotiate a stand-down between police and protesters at Fourth and Pike downtown. That area has become ground zero for the planned opening-day gridlock, within hailing distance of Niketown, Starbucks, Nordstrom and other totems of the thriving economy in the Northwest.
Dolan blames police for not acting quickly and early enough to stop the small band of hooligans who rampaged through the downtown at midday--and then for overreacting later in the day by launching tear-gas assaults against the nonviolent protesters.
"The ugliness at the end of the day could have been avoided," he said.
But on balance, Dolan was feeling "gratified" by the week's events. "It means this movement can't and won't be ignored," he said.
Officially, Dolan is deputy director of Ralph Nader's Citizens Trade Campaign, an umbrella organization for a coalition of groups that includes the United Methodist Church, Friends of the Earth, and the Teamsters and Steelworkers unions. Keeping such a broad coalition together has required him to deftly fudge his way around the members' significant differences over policy and tactics. His strategy has been to unite them around the simple--and critics would say simple-minded--message that the WTO is an undemocratic institution that has gained too much power over people's lives.
"I wouldn't exactly say they've been successful," Michael Baroody, senior vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said Tuesday after being turned back from the planned WTO opening ceremonies. "But they have done an effective job in motivating these earnest young people by filling their heads with misinformation."
At the same time, Dolan has also worked quietly with a handful of groups intent on using civil disobedience to attract the attention of the world's news media and disrupt the WTO's proceedings. While publicly keeping his distance from the more militant groups, he talked frequently with their leaders, offering them use of his downtown office, helping them to arrange financing and housing, even attending one group's disobedience training camp in the mountains outside of Seattle.
It was at Dolan's suggestion that Han Shan, leader of the Berkeley, Calif.-based Ruckus Society, was invited to a news conference with the mayor and police chief last week to assure Seattle residents of their nonviolent intent. "Because of Mike, I've got Han's cell-phone number now and he has mine," Laurie Brown, an aide to the mayor, said in the midst of Tuesday's confrontations on the streets.
Dolan said he was not in contact with the black-masked protesters who attacked several downtown businesses.
For Michael Francis Dolan, 44, the road to Seattle began in Chevy Chase, where he grew up in the home of his stern grandfather, Adm. Oswald Colclough, who was once judge advocate general of the Navy. Dolan's own father, a Navy fighter pilot, had died in an accident when Dolan was only 5. His mother taught English at Holton-Arms School in Bethesda.
Although obviously bright, Dolan was a rebel and nonconformist who was constantly getting into trouble at St. Albans, where Vice President Gore was only several grades ahead. After getting thrown out of school for a second time, in the 11th grade, he was shipped off to a boarding school in New England, where he was promptly booted out again.
In the ensuing decade, between several more bouts of dropping out and switching schools, he graduated from George Washington University and its law school, where his grandfather had served as dean after retiring from the Navy.
As the itinerant politico, Dolan is a familiar type on Capitol Hill, where he makes his official residence across from the Marine Barracks in Southeast. Originally trained by the United Farm Workers, he was field director for the California Democratic Party and Rock the Vote, which registered millions of young voters for the 1992 presidential campaign.
On assignment from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Dolan did "the field" for congressional candidates David Wu in Portland, Ore., and Dan Williams in Idaho, but he broke ranks to work on the winning campaign of Los Angeles's Republican mayor, Richard Riordan.
Something of a cross between Lenin and Woody Allen, Dolan signed up with Nader's anti-free-trade effort in 1995. It's been a gig that's lasted longer than any other job he's had. It was from his war room on Capitol Hill, much of it financed with union money, that the successful campaign was waged against giving President Clinton authority to negotiate new trade treaties on a "fast track" basis.
A year later his coalition did it again, shutting down a new round of negotiations over cross-border investments, known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investments.
Although colleagues inevitably describe him as indefatigable, charismatic and driven, he remained relatively unknown outside liberal enclaves: On Monday, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky said she had never heard of Dolan.
Mike Dolan feels he "made a little history" in Seattle by orchestrating protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Democracy was certainly in the streets of Seattle last week, and a whiff — perhaps carried by teargas — even made it into the convention center where trade ministers from the World Trade Organization (WTO) member states met.
Many factors contributed to the collapse of the WTO talks — an effort to expand the scope of the trade agency's authority — but there is no question that popular protests played a central role.
Tuesday saw at least 40,000 people take to the streets to protest the corporate tilt of the WTO. A stunning coalition of teamsters, consumers, sea turtle protection activists, religious people, women's groups, environmentalists, students and anti-corporate youth and many, many others joined to "Just Say No to the WTO."
Approximately 10,000 people — primarily students and youth — joined together in an extraordinarily well organized and highly disciplined direct action to block every access way to the convention center, stopping most of the official and negotiating activities scheduled for the WTO meeting's first working day.
Notwithstanding city efforts to clamp down on all public dissent in the downtown area, protests continued throughout the week, with thousands demonstrating at separate environmental, farmer, steel worker and women's marches and rallies. Always on display were focused attacks on the WTO and strident criticism of the corporations that have drafted and lobbied for its anti-people rules.
On Friday, perhaps ten thousand joined in a labor-led march — organized on about 24 hours notice — to again protest the WTO and the city's infringements on civil liberties through the creation of a "no protest" zone.
Meanwhile, students and others in an overwhelmingly young crowd continued civil disobedience and direct actions throughout the week.
Inside the convention center, where negotiations began on Wednesday after riot-gear-equipped police and national guard forces cordoned off the downtown from most protesters, turmoil was building as well.
When separate working groups negotiating over a wide array of sectors failed to produce compromise agreements, the United States sought to forge a deal through the WTO's heavy-handed old-style tactics.
Charlene Barshefsky, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the rest of the U.S. negotiating team picked a handful of countries to commence negotiations in a closed "Green Room." The idea was for the arbitrarily selected bunch to work out a comprehensive deal, and then present it to the entire WTO membership as a fait accompli for adoption. But even the Green Room gambit failed, and the talks ended in complete disarray.
The complexity of trade negotiations — with compromises made in one sector dependent on unrelated compromises in another — means no single factor can explain the talks' failure. But it is possible to identify many of the key negotiating reasons for the collapse:
On each of these issues, the street protests helped heighten contradictions and conflicts. The simple fact of preventing negotiations on Tuesday helped impede agreement in the agricultural sector. As a delegate from Zimbabwe explained, the street demonstrations emboldened the Third World negotiators to object to the exclusionary processes inside the WTO. And the demands from the U.S. labor movement — backed by mobilized rank-and-file members — stiffened the U.S. negotiators so that they at least refused to cave in on their minimalist labor rights demands.
For now, street heat has stifled the corporate elite. Just as they blocked delegates from entering the convention center, so they blocked the corporations' attempt to extend the WTO's reach even further into nation's economies and societies.
But as spectacular as was the Seattle victory, achieving the second half of one of the week's primary slogans — "No New Round, Turnaround" — will be even more daunting. Launching a new WTO negotiating round is nowhere near as important to corporate interests as maintaining existing WTO rules and the prevailing model of corporate globalization.
Still, a little bit of democratic empowerment can be a dangerous thing. If the broad coalition that came together in Seattle can stay together — a big "if" — it may eventually be able to force new rules for the global economy, so that trade is finally subordinated to the humane values of health, safety, ecological sustainability and respect for human rights, rather than the reverse.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999, http://www.corporatepredators.org)
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Saturday, 4 December, 1999
By Robert Pigott in Seattle
It has been a disastrous week for the World Trade Organisation. This was supposed to be the day when a new era of free trade throughout the world was triumphantly born.
Instead people will remember a week of violent protest, tear gas, and rubber pellets. Even inside the heavily guarded convention centre the demonstrations raised the stakes in the debate.
After such a public relations disaster on the streets, failure in the talks as well, seemed unthinkable. Indeed on the last day the discussions seemed close to success.
The European Union made concessions on one of the chief sticking points, it's huge agricultural subsidies. An agricultural package was agreed, but the EU did not believe it was getting enough in return.
The spokesman on trade for the socialist group of MEPs, Beryl McNally, said it was the EU that pulled the plug on the talks. "The United States was too greedy" she said, "it was all take and no give". "I can't believe that America's chief negotiator could have been so foolish to think we would accept it".
Outlawing child labour was one of many areas of dispute But Ms Barshefsky blamed what she called the novelty and complexity of the issues being negotiated for the failure to agree.
They included such things as how far industrialised countries could insist on improvements in labour conditions in developing countries, how far measures to protect the environment could be pushed without letting them become barriers to trade, and whether there should be free trade in bio-technology and genetically modified food.
However Ms Barshefsky did accept claims that the way in which trade agreements are discussed, by a small number of countries in a private room needed to be reviewed. "I wondered whether keeping people in a room, filled with intractable issues, was going to work", she said.
"There were only 25 countries in the room, meaning that there were 110 outside. I didn't like the look of it, I definitely didn't like the feel of it and I didn't like the way it was going."
Switzerland in spring
Some of the harshest criticism of the way the talks were organised and conducted has come from developing countries. They have felt excluded while industrialised countries have stitched up deals among themselves.
The Foreign Minister of Guyana, Clement Rohee, said that system would have to stop if there were to be success in expanding free trade in future. He said, "We from developing countries were invited to this meeting, and asked to participate, but then treated like delinquents. "We didn't come here to sit outside and drink coffee while the decisions were taken by the richer countries."
It's been a turbulent week in Seattle. There was the worst public disorder for 30 years and the first curfew since the Second World War. It's left the people of the city angry, and the image of the World Trade Organisation tarnished.
But the WTO has stressed that taking what Charlene Barshefsky called a "time out" in the debate, by freezing the discussions, much of the work of this week would be preserved. Attempts to agree an agenda for a new round of talks will start again in Geneva in the Spring.
Discussions on trade in services and in agricultural products are already scheduled, after that part of the agenda was agreed in the last round of talks. But considering the complex interrelationship of bargaining in Seattle, it's doubtful whether much progress can be made on those issues in isolation.
The Seattle talks, with all their noise and chaos, have also highlighted the negative side of free trade. There is concern that too many areas of national life are falling under the control of trade rules, and the participants in future talks will be counting the cost of abolishing trade barriers all the more carefully.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
=========================
NEW CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION!
On the internet at www.tradewatch.org/publications/gtwpubs.htm
FOR MULTIPLE COPIES CONTACT PUBLIC CITIZEN 202-588-1000 OR GO TO
www.citizen.org/newweb/publicat.htm