The WTO, an international organization of 134 member countries, is a forum for negotiating international trade agreements and the monitoring and regulating body for enforcing these agreements. The organization met in Seattle in late November 1999 for its "millennium round" of talks. In response to this gathering, tens of thousands of people converged on the city to protest the WTO, while smaller protests and rallies were held across the nation.

The events that took place in Seattle during the last days of November were unprecedented. November 30 saw the movement reach full bloom with nearly 40,000 people--union members, students, community activists, farmers, religious leaders and environmentalists--coming together to assert that the global economy must be fundamentally changed to acknowledge and respect people and the environment, and not just the interests of transnational corporations.

Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who was present at the various protests and actions that eventually shut down the WTO's Seattle meeting, noted afterwards that "the real millennium round for the WTO is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of its people. The centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the WTO which are establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures, need to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralization and diversity. The rights of all species and the rights of all people must come before the rights of corporations to make limitless profits through limitless destruction."

Shiva also notes that "free trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech bondage [hence Wayne's reference to 'frankenfood'], and countries are being enslaved into debt, dependence and destruction of their domestic economies. The rules set by the secretive World Trade Organization violate principles of human rights and ecological survival. They violate rules of justice and sustainability. They are rules of warfare against the people and the planet. Changing these rules is the most important democratic and human rights struggle of our times. It is a matter of survival."

2-6. The following five photographs were taken at the action in Minneapolis on November 29 to protest the WTO. Accompanying the photos are "ten key reasons to oppose or even shut down the WTO" as published in the January 2000 edition of Z Magazine.

(i) The WTO prioritizes trade and commercial considerations over all other values. WTO rules generally require domestic laws, rules, and regulations designed to further worker, consumer, environmental, health, safety, human rights, animal protection, or other non-profit centered interests, to be undertaken in the "least trade restrictive" fashion possible. Almost never is trade subordinated to these noncommercial concerns.

(ii) The WTO undermines democracy by shrinking the choices available to democratically controlled governments--with violations potentially punished with harsh penalties.

(iii) The WTO actively promotes global trade even at the expense of efforts to promote local economic development and policies that move communities, countries, and regions in the direction of greater self-reliance.

(iv) The WTO forces [so-called] Third World countries to open their markets to rich transnationals and to abandon efforts to protect infant domestic industries. In agriculture, the opening to foreign imports will catalyze a massive social dislocation of many millions of rural people on a scale that only war approximates.

(v) The WTO blocks countries from acting in response to potential risk--impeding governments from moving to resolve harms to human health or the environment, much less imposing preventive precautions.

(vi) The WTO establishes international health, environmental, and other standards at a low level through a process called "harmonization." Countries or even states and cities can only exceed these low norms by winning special permission, rarely granted. The WTO thereby promotes a race to the bottom and imposes powerful contraints to keep people there.

(vii) WTO tribunals rule on the "legality" of nations' laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors. The very few, therefore, impact the life situations of the many--without even a pretense at participation, cooperation, and democracy.

(viii) The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollars for human rights, environmental, worker rights, and other non-commercial purposes. The WTO requires that governments make purchases based only on quality and cost considerations. Not only must corporations operate with an open eye regarding profits and a blind eye to everything else, so must governments and thus whole populations.

(ix) WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced--irrespective of whether they were made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxins or with no regard for species protection.

(x) WTO rules permit and, in some cases, require patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms. In other words, the WTO does whatever it can to promote the interests of huge multinationals-there are no principles at work, only power and greed.

7. Among those who traveled to Seattle for the WTO protests were Kyle Makarios, his partner Erin, and their daughter Emma. Upon his return, Kyle wrote an article for the Midwest Institute for Social Transformation's newsletter, MIST Rising, in which he noted that "while the T.V. coverage of the protests played it up as a battle, showcasing the 'violence' of protesters and clouds of teargas, they neglected to report on what was really going on and its true significance . . . What happened before the police offensive was one of the most powerful events I've ever taken part in. For the six or so hours that protesters held downtown Seattle there was a huge festival of resistance to corporate plunder. All over the 'liberated territory' there were marches, parades, street theater, musicians, dancing, rallies, and huge artistic puppets . . . We were successful in blockading every entrance to the WTO's conference center and stopping the meeting of this organization dedicated to corporate profit--that is, until the police were given the order to clear the streets. Then followed two days and nights of vicious attacks on non-violent protesters by police using rubber bullets, teargas, pepper spray, and plenty of boots and clubs. When those in power realized they had lost control of the situation to people acting democratically through direct action, they regained it in the only way they could--force."

Commenting on this brutal display of force, activist Starhawk said: "The police, in defending their brutal and stupid mishandling of the [protests in Seattle], have said they were 'not prepared for the violence.' In reality, they were unprepared for the non-violence and the numbers and commitment of the nonviolent activists . . . My suspicion is that our model of organization and decision making was so foreign to their picture of what constitutes leadership that they literally could not see what was going on in front of them . . . Our model of power was decentralized, and leadership was invested in the group as a whole. People were empowered to make their own decisions, and the centralized structures were for coordination, not control. As a result, we had great flexibility and resilience, and many people were inspired to acts of courage they could never have been ordered to do."

8. Mary Shepard - August 2000. In the wake of the events in Seattle, the justice and peace movement was awash with commentaries seeking to identify and clarify the signifance of what the world had just witnessed. Mary Shepard, co-founder of Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and longtime justice and peace activist, produced perhaps the most incisive analysis for the February 2000 WAMM newsletter.

"In the closing days of the millennium, " wrote Mary, "the World Trade Organization (WTO) fiasco may have been the turning point for which we have been waiting. Finally, the lid on the organizing and protesting activities of the grassroots peace and justice movement--which had been so successfully imposed by the corporate media--blew, and behold, linkages between issues and people had been made!

". . . The beauty of the Seattle protests was that there had been no need for conspiratorial planning. Corporate rulers were confident that the New York Times had it right: the movement could be safely ignored . . . it posed no threat. They were oblivious to the anger at the grass roots. Foolishly, they provided the focus, time and place for the movement to explode by holding the WTO meeting in Seattle, one of the bastions of world corporate power."

Mary also provides an insightful historical perspective for the events in Seattle: "Before such a watershed event could happen, it was necessary for the communist experiment, which began the final century of the millennium with great promise and then dissolved into a series of dictatorships, to run its course and collapse. Only then could the economic/political system the U.S. was imposing on the world be seen for what it is. For most of the last century, two power blocs were locked in a deadly embrace, using each other as excuses for monstrous crimes. Now the contradictions between what the capitalist world professes and what it does are plain to see.

"The WTO is nothing more than the logical extension of the capitalist system, which rewards the 'haves' and deprives the 'have-nots'--a system irrationally fueled by greed in a world of diminishing, nonrenewable resources. Rather than being the road to democracy, the system cannot tolerate democracy and crushes it wherever it raises its head. Rather than being a force for peace, the system all but guarantees the wars."

Mary notes that if the showdown in Seattle really is the beginning of something new, than there is much work to be done: "We must brace ourselves for a corporate backlash. Preparations and plans must be made for new ways of sharing the world's resources. We cannot expect help from either the media (which continue to bore us with irrelevancies . . .) or the politicians (who still don't dare to speak truthfully about the precarious state of the world) . . . Many peace and justice organizations have already been quietly strategizing about new political and economic arrangements. We need new ways to do cost accounting and a renewed respect for the aspirations of all people. We need a better stimulus to our economy than the encouragement of greed, and a better measurement of success than the accumulation of wealth. Indeed, we need a better definition of wealth to begin with . . . a new paradigm. It can't come soon enough."