THIS IS WHAT PLUTOCRACY LOOKS LIKE

      At 10:00 a.m. on November 30th, police began firing canisters of tear gas in an attempt to clear the streets, attacking the WTO protesters with rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, riot batons, concussion grenades, pyrotechnic grenades, and pepper spray.

At first, the police used pepper spray to disperse them. Then came tear gas, which left people gagging. The youths remained seated in the street, covering their faces -- doggedly maintaining their positions, holding each others' hands. As the gas spread I caught a picture of police with their gas masks on and wearing 65 pounds of riot gear, moving into the cloud of gas, grabbing and kicking demonstrators. A policeman shot me in my left leg three times with his star-wars-like pellet gun. One shot left powder burns on my left hand.(10)

- Jim Harney, Bangor Daily News

     That afternoon, long after the first shots had already been fired, a “black bloc” of 30-40 anarchists—their faces hidden behind black bandannas and ski masks—attacked a series of symbolic corporate targets: Starbucks, Niketown, Fidelity Investments, and the Gap.(11)  Local businesses were left alone,(12) while corporate villains had their storefronts vandalized using crowbars and hammers. Homeless street kids joined in the looting, smashing plate glass windows.

   This was the beginning of the “violence,” as far as the media were concerned. Rubber bullets weren’t violent. Violence was defacing storefronts and stealing a giant letter “N.”

It's a long way from the civil-rights marches in Selma, Ma., to smashing up a Starbucks, but the story of the siege in the Pacific Northwest suggests that liberal activism, all these years later, is not yet dead.(13)

- Kenneth Klee, Newsweek

 

 

Lorelei Juntunen is a former-resident of Seattle, who was taking pictures during the WTO protests.

Lorelei Juntunen:
I went down there on the first day of the demonstrations. I wasn’t really part of any organized group… I just happened to live in Seattle, and was more-or-less aligned with the anti-WTO cause, and wanted to see what was going on. And by the time I got down there, things were just starting to go very badly.

I think I actually saw the very first canister of tear gas, and the first rubber bullets being shot. ‘Cause the police were just lining-up to start the motion into the crowd of protesters that was blocking one of the main intersections.

I walked up, and there were police in a “V” formation heading up to the intersection. I was behind the police –I was looking at their backs, looking into a crowd of protesters that were sitting in the corner. The police said: “This is your final warning,” and nobody moved. And they started firing rubber bullets and throwing tear gas canisters. I think that was really the first moment when everything started going crazy –so it was pretty amazing.

The [protesters] were definitely not being violent, but of course… they were not complying with orders. And they were doing that very intentionally. I guess you could call that "provocation," but they were just sitting there. They were a sitting target.

 There were groups of people who had locked themselves to each other, and to street signs, so that they physically couldn’t be moved. It was pretty intricate! Not just bike chains, but duct tape, and all sorts of crazy things to make it difficult to move them. I think you would have probably needed a chainsaw in some situations to get them out of there!

I didn’t see any of the protesters throwing things at the police, except for maybe one or two who lobbed back tear gas canisters. They just grabbed a hold of them, and threw them back towards the police. But I didn’t see anyone throwing rocks, or anything. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t happening, but I didn’t see it.

Later on in the day, as I was wandering around, I did see some black bloc people who were breaking windows and graffitiing. But that was the closest thing to any sort of violence that I recall.

 

           None of the vandals were arrested. On this, the mainstream media and the demonstrators both agree. Instead, police fanned-out into the surrounding neighborhoods, attacking other nonviolent protesters(14) -as well as ordinary citizens who happened to get in their way. King County Deputy Sheriff John Vanderwalker was subsequently fired after being caught on video attacking students from the Art Institute of Seattle; kicking a woman who was already down on her knees.(15)

I'm not going to attempt to put a positive spin on the damage that was done yesterday, the terror that was created in the hearts and minds of many people that were downtown.(16)

- Police Chief Norm Stamper, Seattle, WA

 

Lorelei Juntunen:
You mean like firing rubber bullets at people who were just sitting there doing nothing?!

I was actually quite scared for myself. I think it’s as close to a battle scene that I’m ever going to be. The vibe in the air was very confrontational. The police were in their full black Darth Vader garb, with all the rubber and the plastic to protect them. There were horses around, and there was tear gas, and there was noise. It was an aggressive environment.

     “John T. WTO #199055676” (the name and number assigned to him while “John” was awaiting his arraignment in the King County Jail)(17) was one of 200 people who were arrested(18) after taking refuge in a public park. John writes:

I was certainly NOT going to be arrested, so when more riot cops started closing in on us from the rear, I left the group. The cops shoved me and quite a few others who had the same idea back inside the tightening circle of riot cops. Pretty soon, an outer circle of National Guard formed to keep the growing crowd away from us… Then they told us over a megaphone to disperse or risk arrest. Of course at the time, we were being forcibly detained.(19)

     John was charged with two misdemeanor counts of “failure to disperse” and “pedestrian interference”(20) (i.e., the refusal to disapparate, or simply teleport away).

  By the end of the week, over six hundred people had been arrested on misdemeanor charges, of which only six cases went to trial, and of those six, only one person was actually convicted.(21) Local anger was directed primarily at law enforcement, not the activists. On Dec. 14, 1999, at the second of two public hearings on the WTO riots, more than 200 citizens testified before Seattle’s City Council, complaining that police had “turned on local residents.”

Many wanted to rebut what they felt were lies told by police or the media. "I heard police claim there were no injuries," said Paul Marini, his left arm in a sling. "But they broke my arm."

He said he was on the sidewalk on his way to an insurance company when he was injured by police. "This is gross injustice, and I am in the company of thousands."(22)

- Seattle Times, Dec. 15, 1999

     Three years later, on January 16, 2004, the City of Seattle agreed to pay out $250 million in damages to 157 residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood who were tear gassed and arrested outside their homes -beyond the limits of the 50-block “No Protest Zone.”

Lorelei Juntunen:
I think that that would be an interesting perspective to try to capture: the people who were just going about their daily business downtown, who didn’t necessarily understand what the WTO was all about. And I don’t feel like they were educated in a positive way by the protests. I don’t think that they learned anything about why the WTO might not be the greatest way to go about running the world’s business.

Gordon Edgar:
Unfortunately, our movements attract wingnuts.(23) In a group of a few thousand people marching down the street, someone’s going to be yelling some shit that’s just stupid. And you’d get these wingnuts in the middle of the crowd running up to pedestrians and yelling, “Revolution!” And you’re just like: “Dude, shut the fuck up!”

I do think that it’s a very small minority who do those sorts of things. I think most people can see beyond that. Those are always the depressing aspects of demonstrations.

 

Lorelei Juntunen:
I definitely knew enough about the WTO to be opposed to what was going on, and to want to participate in some way in sharing that message. But additionally, I knew it was going to be one of the biggest protests that had ever happened in the city of Seattle.

I knew a lot of people who were planning to go down there specifically to protest with different organizations, and I was interested to see what it would look like to have the unions and the younger environmentalists come together… it seemed like a very momentous occasion.

There were a lot of people from other countries who had come out for the protest. I was amazed at how many other languages I heard on the street. All the global forces aligning against globalization! (Laughs.)

It was really cool to see the blue-collar workers with their union jackets on hanging out with the hippies with the dreadlocks. I don’t know of any other situation where you would see those two forces coming together like that. And that was really fantastic! That seems like a potentially very powerful force. But because of the way the WTO came down, it maybe isn’t going to come together again in quite the same way.

 

Gordon Edgar:
To me, I’m looking at this whole event as this amazing thing—and people’s emotions were high—but there was an amazing sense of possibility… to use that kind of kind of clichéd Teamsters-and-Turtles together motif. But it was so obvious that all this gathering-together was incredibly fragile; that there was no guarantee that this would ever happen again. But it was still amazing to see people trying to do that publicly—for the very first time—trying to link up those different kinds of movements. It gave me a lot of hope.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE

     “Hope” was not the image being painted by the mainstream press. Network newscasters freely editorialized on the air, none more so than the local ABC Television affiliate, KOMO-4, whose News Director Joe Barns had announced ahead of time that KOMO-4 would not be covering news of the WTO protesters:

KOMO 4 News is taking a stand on not giving some protest groups the publicity they want…(24) So if you see us doing a story on a disruption, but we don’t name the group or the cause, you’ll know why.(25)

- Joe Barns, KOMO-4 News, Seattle, WA

    “City, County, and State Police Keep Their Cool in a Hot Situation,” declared the headline in the Seattle-Post Intelligencer (whose own reporter, Kery Murakami, was tackled and arrested). Not to be outdone, Newsweek substituted an image of the Unabomber—a convicted serial killer—for that of the actual protest organizers(26) (whose names were reportedly too foreign-sounding for the Newsweek’s semi-literate subscribers: “Americans have never heard of them,”).(27)

      Pundits and editorial boards were quick to weigh in on the side of Global Capital: with the Wall Street Journal blaming Democratic Mayor Paul Schell for being too soft on the protesters:

The relevant issue is whether the modern left is capable of maintaining civil order in a society. Is the left unable to act, when it is obvious that there is a need to act, until it is too late?(28)

      And the Wall Street Journal was not alone. What follows is just a sampling: “Return of the Luddites,” (Time Magazine); “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates,” (The New York Times); “Brainless in Seattle. Also spineless, witless, hopeless, and shameless,” (The National Journal); “Protest Aimed at the Wrong Target” (Financial Times); “Seattle spectacle: The shrill voices of freedom's foes must not drown out truth about trade,” (The Gazette); “The Isolationist Threat to e-Commerce,” (PC World); “Left Is Wrong on Protectionism, Free Trade Has Been the Most Progressive Force of the Past Two Centuries,” (Greensboro News Record).

      But the Fair Trade forces had come prepared.

      Armed with cell phones, camcorders, and computers, the protesters did an end-run around the corporate press, beaming images of armored Stormtroopers around the world. While the lapdog press was spinning tales of “a guerrilla army”(29) with “only a vague notion of what the five-year-old WTO actually does,”(30) the newly-formed Independent Media Center was giving hourly reports, straight from the frontlines, challenging the mainstream media to back up some of its outrageous claims.

      The news looked very different from overseas. India’s second largest newspaper, The Hindu, called on its 3 million readers to take “the Seattle resistance seriously.”

This unprecedented popular backlash has built up at least over the last decade against the World Trade Organization and the global trading regime that it promotes, in the form of a potent global movement of Northern and Southern NGOs, students, farmers, women and other activists. This "Seattle resistance" was quickly dismissed in the West as a misguided and fringe "disruption" that blinds us to the real long-term benefits of free trade. To the extent that the protests were reported in the media, the focus was more on the tactics of confrontation - such as skyscraper climbing and use of tear gas - and very little on the substantive issues that the protesters were articulating.(31)

- The Hindu, Dec. 11, 1999

Many of the protesters were absolutely furious with “the black bloc anarchists,” for this very reason: their militant tactics were becoming a distraction. The media was focused on lawlessness and window breaking. No one was taking the time to discuss the real issues.  Indy Media activist John Tarleton wrote:

This sideshow would later become the pretext for the police violence that rained down on the 99% who were peaceful. It turned a massive but peaceful direct action into a media-caricatured “riot”. It was a betrayal of thousands of other genuine anarchists. If the vandals had not existed, the authorities would have had to invent them.(32)

Gordon Edgar:
The capitalist press is always going to pick on something to try and discredit you. It was really no big deal.

I found it really disheartening when certain public spokespeople denounced the protesters... You’re not going to win that battle of trying to make your demo palatable to the newspapers. So on some level, it’s not even worth expending the energy to try.

The fact is: Niketown is going to get its windows smashed if you’re taking over downtown. Niketown is a symbol. It’s a symbol of international capitalism that people don’t like. So some of that [destruction] is bound to happen, but it’s really a side issue. Who are the real criminals and the real war criminals? –that’s what movements should be focused on.

That being said, you should actually have good spokespeople, and people who will not look like idiots in front of the cameras.

 

Mimi Nguyen is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Mimi Nguyen:
I question the tactics of “fucking shit up” because I recognize that it's going to be the poor people, and people of color who are going to have to clean it up. I understood why they were doing it, but I wasn't very impressed. The motives are sketchy for doing that kind of thing. Is it because you feel so much rage against The Gap? I'm not quite clear how I feel about that… It’s not like the president of McDonalds is going to come down and clean that up. It’s going be the old Filipino lady, an immigrant, who is going to have to clean up the shit.

 

Gordon Edgar:
My feeling is: I would have been fine if it didn’t happen. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over Starbucks losing its windows. And the biggest thing is the press: how things get portrayed, and how things get manipulated in the press.

 

 WHERE DID ALL THESE PEOPLE COME FROM?!

Who are all these people? Where do they come from? And what do they want?

- The Globe and Mail, Dec. 1, 1999

      The media were shocked by the size of the WTO protests, which seemed to have “come out of nowhere.” The Battle of Seattle had also brought the "black bloc" to the world’s attention. Newsweek rushed to print a sidebar on “The New Anarchism.”

    There was nothing “new” about it. The anarchist revival had been going on for more than 20 years. DAN spokesman David Solnit was a veteran of the anti-nuclear movement, while the "black bloc" had its roots in the protest tactics perfected by the West German Autonomen in the early 1980's.

   All this talk about "the new radicals" and "these mysterious anti-globalization activists" made me laugh. I had met some of the organizers of the WTO protests at previous political gatherings.

    In 1987, a coalition of U.S. and Canadian anarchists staged a five-day conference in Minneapolis, MN called "Building the Movement." In the years that followed, Minneapolis became the home of three anarchist newspapers, two theoretical journals, and an anarchist info-shop (the Emma Goldman Community Center). During the Gulf War, anarchists were a visible presence at anti-war demonstrations; they would later play a key role in the Coalition for Reproductive Freedom. In 1996, hundreds of anarchists protested outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where then-President Bill Clinton was basking in the glory of the newly-signed Welfare Reform law (official known as "The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act"). At the time of the WTO Ministerial Conference, I had just returned from England, where I’d been staying with a group of musicians who were active in the squatters’ movement and Reclaim the Streets!.(33) Did the anarchical character of “the WTO riots” surprise me? Not in the least.

      Many of the tactics employed by the Direct Action Network were already familiar from anti-road protests in the U.K. (Twyford Down and the No M11-Link Road Campaign). When homeowners on London’s Clarement Road were evicted to make way for a bypass on the expressway, they fought to save their homes, using sophisticated lockdown techniques (such as chaining their arms inside of PVC pipes embedded in concrete), even going so far as to dig escape tunnels and passages beneath the street. The No M11-Link Road protesters held out for two years before the houses were finally demolished.

     In 1998, a similar wave of anti-road protests erupted in a working class neighborhood in south Minneapolis (the so-called "Minnehaha Free State"), resulting in the largest police action in Minnesota state history. On the morning of December 20, 1998, 600 riot police backed by helicopters and an armored S.W.A.T. team converged on seven occupied houses located on Minneapolis's Riverview Road. Using tear gas and nightsticks, brandishing automatic weapons, the officers forcibly evicted 37 nonviolent "housesitters" who had refused to make way for the planned reroute of Highway 55.

     Many of the future WTO protesters were directly inspired by their example, and tapes of the No M11-Link Road Campaign were widely circulated in activist circles.

     In England they had a name for it: DIY Culture.

NEXT PAGE: DIY Culture | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |