Hello Friends,

The following is a wonderful and inspiring letter from a friend highlighting his experience at the recent Seattle WTO protest.

Many friends from Santa Cruz are still being held in jail in Seattle. The police are holding them, all non-violent activists/citizens, without any details about when they will be released, without charging them with any crime. As many of you may have felt already, this rally of 50,000 folks with incredibly diverse interests united to protest corporate anti-democratic global trade gives me a lot of hope.

With love to you all,
Kathy

What is the sound of history happening? It is the sound of 300 non-violent protesters blockading an entrance to the Seattle convention center, staring up at the gas-masked faces of advancing riot police and chanting "the whole world is watching!" It is the insistent techno beat pouring out of a sound van that has turned a blockaded street into an impromptu rave. It is the ringing of gongs carried by a group of korean fisherman in traditional dress, dancing in front of an armored police vehicle. It is the spontaneous cheer that rises up from tear gas-weary protesters, hemmed in on two sides by riot cops, when they realize that 5000 many teamsters and longshoremen have just shown up to join them at the barricades.

The sound of history is the military precision of a black-clad anarchist marching band, anonymous behind their gas masks. It is the thwock thwock of police helicopters. It is the screaming fury of a German delegate realizing that someone has just removed his credentials from his shirt pocket and that he will never get to attend the WTO Seattle ministerial. It is 10 Radical Cheerleaders in red and white, bouncing on top of a concrete and iron pipe platform placed in the middle of an intersection and u-locked to the necks of 20 EarthFirst!ers. It is the hacking coughs of two bainbridge island high school students who skipped school to attend a Sierra Club rally and ended up holding their ground amid clouds of tear gas and pepper spray. It is the chants of "No Violence!" that begin spontaneously when someone throws a bottle or broke a window.

The sound of history is the incredulity of a Spanish delegate, who asked a reporter, "How is it possible that the world's so called superpower is unable to control a few protesters? It's really impossible to explain."

How did it happen? We just marched right up to all the entrances of the Seattle convention center and sat down, and then the people kept coming. By noon, 50,000 people had taken over downtown Seattle and were having a party.

There were gore-texed radical environmentalists, aging anti-nuke activists, tibetan monks, and locked-out steelworkers, standing next to French farmers, ski-masked "black-block" anarchists, and old ladies from Audubon. There were teachers who had heard about the protest on the radio and come down after work, Salvadoran campesinos, and a contingent of Falun Gong adherents meditating as the tear gas rolled over them.. There were high school students who had walked out of class, gangsta kids who came to taunt the police, a whole contingent of non-violent, bell-wringing Santas, and topless "Vegan Dykes." All ages, all colors, people from all over the world and across the political spectrum. All come to protest an organization that until a week ago 90 percent of the country had never heard of.

If this all seems a bit breathless, I hope you will forgive me. It was incredible. It really, truly seemed like it might be the beginning of a new political movement.

The array of issues people came to protest was dizzying. But most people seemed genuinely united by the idea the WTO is quietly effecting a global corporate free-for-all where massive companies force countries to vie for the weakest environmental laws and labor standards, and where corporate lawyers have the right to overturn decisions of democratically-elected local governments that are deemed "restrictive to trade."

The WTO is a system where the rules have been written almost entirely by an incredibly wealthy elite, and are designed to shield their opportunities for profit at the long-term expense of almost everyone else. This is a system that would have outlawed most of the economic isolation strategy that eventually toppled aparthied. This is a system that says that Massachussets is no longer allowed to reserve government contracts for companies that choose not to do business with Burma's tyrannical regime, and where California voters cannot choose to require that products that contain high levels of known carcinogens be labeled as such.

This is a system where the democratically elected EU parliament cannot vote to ban the sale of meat raised with potentially dangerous growth hormones despite the public's overwhelming sentiment that they don't WANT hormone-tainted beef. This is a system where the U.S. can't clean up our gas because it would restrict Venezuela's right to sell dirty gas in the U.S. This is a system where a U.S.-based multinational can patent a plant that has been cultivated for thousands of years by indigenous people in a developing country, and then reap exorbitant profits for its shareholders selling drugs made from that plant back to that country.

Leave it to the WTO (White Trash Oligarchy?) to create a system so objectionable that it could bring together groups that haven't been able to agree on much of anything for 40 years. The WTO's rules are so obviously antithetical to the global public interest that 50,000 people took to the streets, linked arms, and laid their bodies down to call the world's attention to what was happening. In the United States! When is the last time that happened?

Tuesday was a day of indelible images.

When we marched up to the convention center, the first blockade we came across was 200 "sea turtles", standing imperturbably in the middle of a maze of police tape. I guess the cops were reluctant to arrest a peaceful crowd of protesters who looked for all the world like teenage mutant ninja turtles.

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The first police violence of the day came when they realized that we had sealed off the entire convention center, and they decided to open up a route to let delegates in and out. They ammassed on both sides of one intersection. They rolled in a police tank and formed a phalanx. They put on their gas masks and took out their riot guns. We herded more and more people into the intersection, and all sat down, held hands and chanted, with police in front of us and behind us. Then, with no warning, the police took out a fire-extinguisher full of pepper spray foam and unloaded it in the faces of the protesters. Then they shot tear gas, and then the cops behind us started onloading volley after volley of rubber bullets on the protesters seated in front of them. Many people held their ground for an incredibly long time. The rest got up and calmly walked away. I grabbed someone's shoulder when I couldn't see any more was led down the street.

When the smoke cleared, the blockades reformed on either side of the path the police had blazed. But all the delegates in the Sheraton hotel were still blocked in by protesters, and the police decided to push the protesters back far enough to open one of the entrances. We sat down in front of the riot police, and more and more people came forward and sat down beside us. The police rolled the tank up.

Someone in the front row was holding an American flag, and another person began singing the Star Spangled Banner. Soon, the whole crowd took it up, and many people saluted. The rain dripped down the face masks of the police as we sang of "the land of the free, and the home of the brave."

"Whose streets?" someone shouted. "Our streets!" came the reply from 500 people. "Whose democracy?" "Our democracy." Then the police started shooting tear gas again.

Later, we negotiated with the police to try to keep them from tear-gassing the intersection where 20 people were locked down, knowing that they would be unable to escape and could be seriously injured or killed. At the end of the day, the group informed the police that they were going to unlock and lead a procession of protesters away from the convention center. The police waited until about half of them had unlocked and began firing tear gas and percussion grenades.

In the afternoon, Police tear-gassed another intersection nearby, and instead of running away, hundreds of people began running toward it. The police fell back, and protesters lit a bonfire. Huge booms echoed back and forth between the buildings as the police launched percussion grenades and angry protesters jumped up and down on dumpsters they had dragged into the street. The police formed their line and protesters massed less than a foot away, screaming in rage at having been assaulted while they sat and sang. Looking around, I saw more cameras in one place than I have ever seen in my life. Many of us begged people to sit down and hold the intersection, to meet violence with non-violence. Tears rolled down people's faces as the gas dissipated, and volunteer medics moved through the crowd, treating people who had been pepper sprayed.

The tension remained, as a few people jumped up and down on the dumpsters, screaming at us to stand up to the police, and other protesters shouted back to avoid violance. Next to me, a woman quietly came forward and kneeled in front of the police, and began to sway back and forth, praying. The police never moved, until 5:30, when they received the order to clear downtown. We heard percussion grenades at the intersections around us, and then with no warning the police fired tear gas and started advancing in lock step. They kept shooting and advancing, and they stampeded 10,000 people out of downtown. They pushed many of the demonstrators all the way into capitol hill, where angry residents came out of their houses and battled police for much of that night and the next.

Now I'm back in Fresno, and my head is spinning. When I went up to Seattle, I thought a lot of things would happen, but I never thought for a minute that we would actually be able to shut down the WTO.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a picture of the first afternoon session of the ministerial meeting (which WTO Director Mike Moore vowed went on as scheduled). In the picture, a sea of seats are visible, each one labeled with the name of a different country. There are about four people seated in the whole room. In the midst of the confusion, Medea Benjamin, director of Global Exhange snuck on stage and began moderating a discussion about the anti-democratic nature of the WTO. This apparently went on for 10 or 15 minutes before someone realized what was going on and police yanked her off stage.

In 24 hours, the national debate over trade policy changed permanently. This protest was on the front page of nearly every paper in the U.S., and many others around the world, For the first time I can remember, world leaders were forced to answer to the populist left. President Clinton declared that enforceable international labor standards should be part of the WTO, a 180 degree reversal in the administration's policy. At the same time, the U.S. delegation vowed to block all progress on negotiating an agenda for the next round of talks until the environmentally disastrous global free-logging agreement is adopted by the WTO.

It will be a while before the smoke clears and we can see how much has really changed. We are taking on the most powerful economic interests in the world, They have hijacked global trade regulation to create a powerful tool for limiting the ability of democratic governments to curb corporate malfeasance, and they won't give that up without a fight.

But I think what we saw in Seattle was a powerful possibility. The possibility that the seemingly inexorable process of economic globalization will actually be strong enough to ignite a new internationalism, to unite wildly divergent peoples across the world in a struggle for reasonable working conditions, a healthy environment, corporate accountability, and democracy.

The Wednesday LA times described the scene as the protests were broken up the evening before. "By nightfall, city officials had declared a curfew, and Gov. Gary Locke called for unarmed National Guardsmen to occupy the streets this morning. The drastic steps added a sober,almost warlike ambience to what the U.S. officials had hoped would be a triumphant occasion that would move the global economy into the 21st century."

On Tuesday, the U.S. trade delegation and its corporate sponsors were unable to moved the economy into the 21st century, because WE, the people, did it for them. We fired the opening salvo in the next century's global fight for justice, and the shot was heard round the world. Members of the WTO, welcome to new millenium.

Justin