The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [98]
Despite its implicit threat to the well-being of people and the planet, the WTO (and international trade agreements leading to it) somehow managed to keep itself off the radar screen of the American public for half a century. And then 1999 happened. In 1999, some doofus at the WTO decided to hold the annual ministerial conference in Seattle, Washington. What were they thinking? Were they unaware of the city’s demographics and pro-environment politics? That meeting marked a major turning point in public awareness about the WTO. An estimated seventy thousand people from all over the world descended on Seattle116 to make their opposition to the WTO known, with nonviolence, teach-ins, strategy sessions, and marches. The protest was amazing in both its scale and its diversity. Alongside representatives from rich and poor countries alike, environmentalists and labor activists—two communities with a history of misunderstandings and tension between them—joined forces against an international regime that prioritizes trade over the planet, communities, and workers.
Of course I was there: how could I not be when this was going down in the town where I was born? My mother and my childhood neighbors were kind enough to open their doors and guest rooms and couches to my colleagues. It was my four-month-old daughter’s first big protest, and a local Seattle artist made her a little T-shirt with drawing of a baby pacifier and the words “WTO SUCKS.”
I heard speakers from India, the Philippines, Brazil, and Nigeria give firsthand accounts of natural resources and communities sacrificed to the goal of increased and unfettered trade. I got to walk the downtown streets the day before the big protest day and felt the peaceful, hopeful energy of the crowd. The people there were smart and dedicated, spending their days learning about issues of sustainability and justice—by and large good people. There were so many of us that we felt change was truly within our reach.
On the day of the big planned march, rumors spread about police hostility toward the protesters, and I decided to stay home with my baby girl. We watched the coverage on my mother’s little television, and I got regular frontline updates from my colleagues via their cell phones. It was surreal to see tens of thousands of people from all over the world marching past the department store where I bought my prom shoes in high school and the monorail stop where I used to disembark with kids I babysat twenty years earlier.
Watching the events unfold on TV was disturbing. The newscasters didn’t offer substantive background about the WTO. They didn’t note how amazing it was that nearly one hundred thousand people were paying enough attention to the WTO to know what a problem it was and that they had left their jobs and homes to voice peaceful opposition. Instead they showed one clip over and over again all day: a couple of young troublemakers smashing storefront windows in downtown Seattle.117 I was fuming. If they wanted to show faces of the real WTO critics there, why not interview those speakers from other countries who came to tell their stories? Or Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, who was also there? Lori knows the provisions of the WTO so well that during her lectures, she sometimes invites audience members to yell out some topic, almost like a game show—Health care! Banking regulations! Small fisherfolk!—and she explains exactly how the WTO will affect, and undermine, those sectors. I don’t think she has ever been stumped.
And if the news wanted to show violence to keep up those ratings, there’s plenty of violence caused by the system that the WTO supports! They could have run clips of workers in garment factories being made to work so fast they lost fingers in the machines, or of miners in the Congo being beaten for inadequate results after an endless day’s work. Instead the media grossly misrepresented