Global Policy Forum

By Geov Parrish

The World Trade Organization's talks are scheduled to be held in free trade-friendly Seattle this fall. So is "the Protest of the Century," as WTO opponents gather to give the ruling class a kick in the groin.

On a cool but soon to be warm, sunny, and perfectly serviceable midsummer Saturday morning, when you'd think otherwise rational people would have something midsummerlike to do, some 120 organizers filed into the Labor Temple in Belltown. They came to hear the true believers fire them up over global trade issues. They also came to prepare for days, months from now, when it will be cold and dark and wet.

And loud.

"It's historic . . . the confrontations in Seattle will define how the bridge to the 21st century will be built and who will be crossing it--transnational corporations or civil society." That's Michael Dolan speaking, field organizer for the Washington, DC-based Naderite group Public Citizen. If Dolan has his way, the opening talks of the Seattle Round of World Trade Organization consultations, set for November 29 to December 3 this year, will be a benchmark, a huge protest of corporate dominance of the global economy that will give politicians pause and CEOs cold sweats.

The WTO represents over 100 countries in an unprecedented effort to globalize commerce. Advocates see it as a means of boosting the world's economy by bringing down trade barriers. But opponents believe the WTO is systematically gutting worker, consumer, and environmental protections, and deliberately usurping the rights of each country to make its own laws--especially when those laws might conflict with trade.

Dolan is working on behalf of the Citizens' Trade Campaign (CTC)--a broad-based national coalition including Public Citizen; labor groups like the United Auto Workers; consumer groups; environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and Clean Water Action; farm groups like National Farmers Union and National Family and Farm Coalition; church organizations; and many more. Over 700 international groups have signed on to the CTC's demand to oppose the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), a controversial free trade proposal that will probably be on the WTO's Seattle agenda. Instead of donating money to the cause of organizing against the trade meetings, the CTC has donated Dolan, who has spent much of the spring and summer meeting with community activists and lining up logistical support.

This month, the CTC opened a storefront operation downtown that will work until December to help coordinate protests. And that's only one of the anti-WTO organizing efforts under way. The AFL-CIO has dispatched two full-time field organizers to coordinate a massive march and rally set for November 30, days after labor union heads from around the world will convene in Seattle for their own conference. The teamsters, longshoremen, and other industrial unions are each conducting their own mobilizations; the steelworkers' union has reserved 1,000 hotel rooms in Tacoma and Bellevue. There will be teach-ins and alternative conferences and press conferences and rallies and marches and blockades galore. Farm groups like the Northern Plains Resource Council, Western Sustainable Agriculture, the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, and the Campaign to Reclaim Rural America will be bringing outrage. There is talk of a procession of tractors. Scores of nongovernmental organizations will come to try to make their voices heard. The Zapatista-originated Peoples' Global Action is bringing caravans across North America to descend on Seattle. The Sierra Club is mobilizing its membership.

Even peace groups like the War Resisters League are involved--free trade, by specifically exempting military spending from its agreements, acts to encourage the arms trade and military buildups by Third World governments. Art and Revolution is bringing its giant puppets and public spectacle from the streets of San Francisco. And the Evergreen State College, well, they might as well close the campus--they'll all be in Seattle, as will students from around the country, led by the Boston-based Center for Campus Organizing.

Steven Staples, British Columbia field organizer for the Council of Canadians, estimates that "hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands" will be coming down from Canada, where activists are concerned about the WTO's threat to their country's education and health care systems. After Vancouver's experience with heavy-handed riot police at the 1996 APEC meetings (pepper spray, preemptive arrests), Staples says, "people got a very clear idea of whose interests were being served." All in all, Seattle will see traffic snarled and resources stretched to their limits by a week of international protests mingling with trade ministers, heads of state, and both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Republican King County Council member Brian Derdowski, who is working with the protesters, calls the scenario "a security nightmare," and "the greatest security risk this region has ever known."

Seattle organizers of the WTO meetings--operating under the well-financed umbrella of the Seattle Host Organization (SHO)--are fond of calling the Seattle meetings the largest trade gathering ever held on US soil. Opposition to it will almost certainly be the largest anti-free trade protests ever held on US soil.

Dolan is one of the early speakers to the Saturday morning gathering at the Labor Temple, and he speaks with the fervor of an evangelist. The crowd, with doughnuts, coffee, handouts, and reprints in hand, responds with enthusiasm. Dolan talks of a political opening, with the defeat last year of Clinton's desired fast-track authority for negotiating free trade agreements and the subsequent derailing of MAI negotiations. He calls them "kicks in the groin of the ruling class." Dolan recounts with glee a recent front-page Wall Street Journal article on the protests--"The bosses are scared!"--and reminds the assembled that there's only 16 weeks to go, a short time for a logistical juggernaut that--unlike the meetings themselves--must be organized on a shoestring. Motel rooms and meeting spaces for the period are already gone; available flights into Seattle have all but disappeared. One of the greatest challenges for groups from around the country that want to come to Seattle will simply be getting here and having a place to stay. It's not a good time of year for camping.

A flyer for the Saturday meeting calls the upcoming protests of the WTO meetings the "Protest of the Century." It may not equal, say, Seattle's 1919 General Strike, but organizers are thinking in terms of that kind of scale; they bandy about hopes of bringing 100,000 people into the streets. The stakes are extremely high; for any one of the contemplated eight or nine subagreements on the possible agenda of the trade ministers, a lasting regime of corporate dominance could ensure human misery, environmental catastrophe, and short-term profit affecting billions of people on a scale barely imaginable even a decade ago. The surprise is not that protesters by the thousands will be drawn from all over the world. The surprise is that more people aren't up in arms.

What's that giant flushing sound?

The WTO was created in 1994 as the successor organization to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The idea is to execute a series of treaties among member nations that would reduce and eventually eliminate tariffs and other restrictions on trade in various sectors of the world economy. The negotiations for those different sectors have been named after the locations where the first meetings of the particular "Round" take place. The next several years will be known as the "Seattle Round."

One hundred and thirty-five countries--including all the major ones except China--are members; some 30 others have observer status. The United States dominates the proceedings, and the evolution of the WTO is one of the major reasons transnational corporations love Clinton. The WTO is exceptionally good news for transnationals. As with the North American Free Trade Agreement, on which it's modeled, removing barriers to free trade generally means weakening, preventing, or striking down environmental, wage, worker safety, public health, and consumer laws. It's a whirlpool effect--what Dolan calls a "downward harmonization," or a race to the bottom as countries find all but the lowest standards eliminated as unfair trade competition. Or think of it as public interest laws simply being flushed down the toilet.

In Seattle, ministers will consider both new and old business. Left over from the previous Uruguay Round are agriculture, services, and government procurement; new to the Seattle Round will be many Northwest-appropriate topics, including the Forest Products Agreement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (banking and finance), biotechnology, intellectual property rights, and electronic commerce. The "talks" will be largely for photo ops and political posturing; much of the real negotiating is taking place behind the scenes, in various meetings on different subagreements leading up to the event.

The global movement to challenge free trade is part of a larger movement challenging neoliberalism--the usurpation of public policy by the marketplace and the needs of transnational corporations. These corporations have steadily increased their grip over the policies of nation-states since the fall of the Berlin Wall and, previously, the era of Reagan-Thatcher. At stake is democracy itself, as corporations, through instruments like the