WTO Ministerial Conference Protests

I spent that Tuesday in Seattle with 50,000 of my closest friends, some wearing turtle costumes, some carrying union banners, and everybody chanting "They say free trade; we say fair trade" and "Hey hey, ho ho, WTO has got to go." To almost everyone's surprise, we managed to shut down the World Trade Organization's Seattle conference and sent the WTO's leadership hightailing it back to Geneva without what they came for: an agreement for a new round of closed-door negotiations on global trade rules. An expert at a progressive think tank in Washington described it as "a kick in the groin of the ruling class."

I believe the cops started the real violence, however. Early in the day, when the delegates couldn't get to the convention center through the ring of activists, the police sprayed gas and shot rubber bullets at people engaging in civil disobedience by linking themselves together with pipes and locks. That was the first violence, although the media focused more on young white guys in black ski masks who broke store windows later in the day. While I disapprove in principle of property destruction, I've often wondered whether we would have got as much press as we did without the Starbucks trashing.

I had been in Seattle on and off for nine months, helping organize this mobilization on behalf of the advocacy group Public Citizen, with a coalition of unions, environmental groups, faith-based and human-rights networks, family farmers and consumers. We knew this confrontation between civil society and corporate rule was going to be exciting when we went to the Ruckus Society's direct-action camp in September and learned how to scale overpasses, hang banners and get busted. We knew it was going to be big when we joined the AFL-CIO in planning sessions to mobilize workers from all over the U.S., and when local politicians participated in our critique of so-called free trade.

For the organizers, the experience was an epiphany: none of us could remember a time w...

Trade negotiations? Oh, please--wake us when it's over. Tariffs. Subsidies. Antidumping measures. Multilateral investment agreements. The eyes glaze over. Even free trade's First Cheerleader, Bill Clinton, confesses that most people think the World Trade Organization is "some rich guys' club where people get in, talk in funny language and make a bunch of rules that help the people that already have and stick it to the people that have not."

Yup.

So why is it that tens of thousands of demonstrators from around the globe will make chilly, rainy Seattle a hot town next week--the scene of marches, teach-ins, street theater and uncivil disobedience? This vintage '60s protest fest is prompted, incongruously, by the first American gathering of the WTO, a sober, 135-nation group that sets the rules for international commerce. Thousands of trade ministers, politicians and their staffs will hunker down by Puget Sound to launch a new multiyear round of wrangling over how to promote exports--and, as much as possible, avoid one another's imports.

The Geneva-based WTO is both traffic cop and top court of the global economy. And as shown by China's bid for admission last week, the organization seems about to extend its gospel of no-pain, no-gain capitalism across the planet. The WTO's 36,000 pages of regulations reach into far-flung crannies of human existence. Can Malaysian fishermen export their shrimp to the U.S. even if their nets lack escape hatches for endangered turtles? Yes. Can Massachusetts refuse to buy products from companies that do business in Myanmar? No. Do American corporations get an illegal export subsidy by setting up legal offshore tax shelters? Yes. Can the French block our hormone-fed beef? No. Rule breakers are punished--in France's case by a hike in the tariffs on Roquefort cheese, among other goodies.

In the abstract, free trade is feel-good fellowship. Trash the tariffs and, globally, consumers profit from lower prices. Political enemies t...