| Never miss a show! |  |
Email Signup |  |
Spotify |  |
RSS Feed |  |
Apple Podcasts |
An orange Seattle Space Needle wrapped in arrows symbolizing trade. On each side, a white graphic of a hand with a protest sign and a blue crowd of protestors. (Graphic by Lissa Deonarain)
On November 30th, 1999, tens of thousands of people shook the streets of Seattle, WA, in protest of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO symbolized the corporate takeover of human needs and the environment. On this edition, we revisit the voices from that week.
This episode, originally released in 2009, is part of the Making Contact Anniversary Capsule: celebrating 30 years of social justice journalism. The miniseries takes us from protests on the streets of Seattle to an Indiana family fighting for their daughter’s gender affirming care. It explores a racial reckoning in the world of romance writers, and tells the story of border walls from Gaza to Arizona. These shows embody how Making Contact has been digging into the story beneath the story since 1994.
Featuring: Music:
Making Contact Team
## Organizations: ## Books and Films:More Information:
TRANSCRIPT
[Making Contract Intro]
Jessica Partnow: This show is part of the Making Contact anniversary capsule, celebrating 30 years of social justice journalism. The capsule takes us from protests on the streets of Seattle to an Indiana family fighting for their daughter’s gender affirming care. It explores a racial reckoning in the world of romance writers and tells the story of border walls from Gaza to Arizona.
These shows embody how Making Contact has been. Digging into the story beneath the story since 1994. You can listen to the full making contact anniversary capsule at focmedia.org.
Tena Rubio: This week on Making Contact,
[Audio Clip] Protest: “…This is an action to reclaim the streets on behalf of the people and to shut down the WTO by keeping the delegates from reaching the convention center.”
Gopal Dayaneni: We killed the WTO. We killed the World Trade Organization. It is essentially a dead institution.
Tena Rubio: On November 30th, 1999, tens of thousands of people shook the streets of Seattle, Washington in protest of the World Trade Organization. The WTO symbolized the corporate takeover of human needs and the environment. On this edition, Making Contact’s Andrew Steler revisits the voices from that week and finds out how global economic forces have shifted in the past decade. I’m Tena Rubio and this is Making Contact a Program, connecting People, vital ideas, and important information.
Andrew Stelzer: The images and stories from that week have been told and retold over the past decade. Union workers came from around the US and marched with environmentalists and turtle costumes. International food activists held signs against genetically modified organisms. Faith groups called for the reduction of third world debt, and yes, the anarchists were also out in force. It seemed anyone who wanted a society based on economic justice and ecological sustainability made their way to Seattle that week. For some, it was a life changing event that launched them into activism. For others, it was one big victory in a lifetime of social change work.
Gopal Dayaneni: I went to Seattle in 1999 as a rank and file activist.
Andrew Stelzer: Gopal Dayaneni lives in Oakland, California. He’s been doing political work since the 1980s. Now, he’s a stay at home dad.
Gopal Dayaneni: I was a preschool teacher at the time. I was the director of a childcare center for children and families forced into homelessness, and I could see the direct relationship between global institutional governance and the policies that were being pursued, and the implications for poor peoples around the world, including the community that I was working in in San Francisco. And I felt it was a opportunity to go and be part of a global people’s movement.
Andrew Stelzer: So Dayaneni sat down in the middle of an intersection, locked arms with a number of his friends right up against the perimeter of the Seattle Convention Center. Where the WTO meetings were taking place. They stayed there all day from dawn until past dusk.
Gopal Dayaneni: There were those of us who were actually sitting in the street were prepared to not move, willing to stay there until we knew that we had achieved our objective, which was to create enough political pressure from the eyes of the world watching so that the US and other industrial countries and the corporations couldn’t just railroad southern countries on trade policy.
[Audio Clip] News: “You’ve got people here from all over. You got labor, you’ve got environmentalists, you’ve got teachers…”
Andrew Stelzer: In the documentary film, This is What Democracy Looks Like, Dayaneni is shown sitting in the street wearing a blue raincoat surrounded by other protestors.
[Audio Clip] News: “You got four. You got everybody out here because this hurts people. This is bad for people. It’s bad for our jobs here. It’s bad for the people over there.”
Andrew Stelzer: The protests that week were hailed as a success by many activists. The mainstream media reported that the opening ceremonies of the WTO meetings were called off, and that trade talks failed. Dayaneni says, that was just a new beginning for the anti-globalization movement.
Gopal Dayaneni: After it was clear that the ministerial couldn’t continue, that it wasn’t going to achieve its objectives. I think we felt that that was a victory and that it was time to move to the next level of organizing, to thinking about: how do we take the sporadic, episodic moment and actually leverage that into long-term organizing?
Andrew Stelzer: While protesters in the streets of Seattle were battling the police and fighting for their message to get out inside the WTO Ministerial, it was a different kind of chaos. Many delegates couldn’t get to the meetings because of street blockades. Many from global south countries decided they would not sign on to the agreements being written behind closed doors in what was called the green room, a space reserved for the elite nations of the world.
The conversation had changed and all of a sudden the world was ready to listen to criticisms of the way rich countries were writing the rules to their own advantage.
Mohau Pheko: My name is Mohau Pheko. I’m from South Africa. I represent the Africa Trade Network. I’m also the convener of the African Caucus to the WTO for Civil Society here.
The preamble of the WTO states very clearly that trade policy should be about development. For us, development is alleviating poverty. It’s ensuring that human rights are upheld. It’s ensuring that families are able to eat. It’s ensuring that people are employed and well employed and not exploited. It’s ensuring that people have basic services and basically.
What this round is suggesting and proposing is that we sign those rights away in the interests of multinational corporations. And this is really the agenda, and we can confirm that this is an the, this is the agenda of the multinational corporations because. Some of the corporations who have paid up to $250,000 USD can have four representatives in the US delegation to actually influence the process.
And this system is no longer about rules. It’s about who has the money to influence trade policy in northern countries. But I don’t think it’s so much about the money as much as if. It was a rules-based system where everybody followed the rules the way that they’re supposed to follow. I think that this system would work, but because they’re countries who constantly want to change the rules to suit their transnational corporations, the rules don’t work.
Trade is not about transnational corporations moving their goods back and forth, uh, across borders. It’s about real people who want development, who need to eat, who need to have housing, who need to have cheap treatment for aids, et cetera.
Andrew Stelzer: That was Andrew Geller interviewing Mohau Pheko, the convener of South Africa’s Civil Society Caucus to the WTO in 1999. She joins us now on Skype from Johannesburg to reflect on that time and where we are now. Welcome to Making Contact.
Mohau Pheko: Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure to be here.
Andrew Stelzer: So in the short clip we just heard, you mentioned that corporations had an inordinate amount of influence on how global trade agreements were written and that smaller, specifically African countries had essentially no influence. How has that changed in the last 10 years?
Mohau Pheko: I think corporate control has actually become much stronger since Seattle. Because after all, it is the corporates that stand to lose much more if these trade agreements do not go through. Unfortunately, for them alongside their power within the WTO has been a much greater understanding by the developing countries of the importance of the WTO and international trade. And of course, they have now refined their positions and come together as a collective on a number of very important positions.
Andrew Stelzer: And what about the WTO? Is it still an important institution? And, and if not, who’s making the decisions now?
Mohau Pheko: The WTO has certainly been weakened. I think that we have seen this through the failure of governments not being able to reach the development round and to begin to advance that agenda. However, having said that, I think is a much more dangerous. Emergence of the many bilateral trade agreements that we are seeing that are emanating both from the European Union and the Americas. And I think that the proliferation of these bilateral agreements is far more dangerous to multilateralism than anything that we’ve seen in a long time.
Because what is happening now is that both the Americans and the European Union are going after particular regions or countries in various parts of the world and assigning these bilateral agreements with them, which are far more binding than, what is that in the WTO, particularly when you look at their intellectual property rights regimes, they’re much stricter. They actually force countries to lose sovereignty. The very things which the developing countries are rejecting at the WTO are certainly emerging in the bilateral trade agreement, and I think that’s very dangerous.
Andrew Stelzer: So do you think it’s possible to have a fair WTO?
Mohau Pheko: No, I’ve never thought that we can have a fair WTO, I believe trade is important and I believe that, as countries around the world, we should all try and trade with one another, but not trade things that we already have. There is something very skewed in the way that the WTO has framed its rules. I don’t think it’s worth rescuing the WTO and I think 10 years since Seattle. I think that it’s time to rethink the WTO. We said this in 1999, and I think in 2009 it has become even more evident that we need a new structure of trade that does not breed inequality.
Andrew Stelzer: Feminist economist, Mohau Pheko is now the co-coordinator of the Trade Collective. Thanks so much for joining us.
Mohau Pheko: It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you very much.
Andrew Stelzer: Not everyone was locked down trying to shut down the ministerial that week. International activists used the streets as their platform to talk about everything from sweatshops to food policy. Anuradha Mittal was one of them.
Anuradha Mittal: Okay. Those guys have been telling us we’re doing the straight liberalization in agriculture because we are good people. We wanna feed those hungry and starving people in Asia and Africa and Latin/Central America. I think those guys know now that we’re not taking any more of their lives. We know the truth. They know that they cannot divide and rule anymore. They cannot separate us. This is an international force that’s gathered here and there’s one thing I’ll say: this is not just about the farmers. This is a movement for social and economic justice. This is for all of us. This is about the trade union rights. This is about environmentalists and they’re really scared, and we’re gonna continue doing that.
Andrew Stelzer: That was Anuradha Mittal speaking in November, 1999 in Seattle during several days of protests against the WTO. She joins us now to reflect a little bit 10 years later. Thanks for taking the time to be with us.
Anuradha Mittal: Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Stelzer: Do you feel like the WTO protests sparked some victories related to food and agriculture?
Anuradha Mittal: Oh, definitely. I think what was accomplished in Seattle, despite all the Ministerials and many Ministerials that keep happening and all these promises of doing good to the world, uh, we have basically put these agencies on a run. The fact that the so-called Doha development round has moved forward? I mean, anytime there was some movement in the WTO was after September 11th attacks in Qatar where the US government’s message was, you are with us or against us. And it applied not just to the war on terrorism, but also its straight talks.
I think the biggest thing about the Seattle movement was that people felt that we can, we can do something. It wasn’t a protest in Latin America, or in my own country, India, where we are used to seeing 50,000 farmers turn out for any protest. But in Seattle that people in the United States mobilized as well, that it was the Farmers of United States marching along with say, farmers from India and the Philippines and different African nations.
It was a spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood and unity of a causes. And it is that consciousness that has started questioning the myths that are fed to us, whether it is about trade liberalization, or whether it is of feeding the world through genetically modified crops, communities and Asia, Africa, Latin America are saying together with. In our civil society in Europe and United States, enough, enough of your lies, create alternatives and allow space for these alternatives to flourish.
Andrew Stelzer: What does an anti globalized food system movement look like? Uh, right now in 2009? Is it about community gardens, organic gardening? What does it look like?
Anuradha Mittal: The food system that we are struggling for is not anti anything,because it is hopeful. It is for something not against anything and it comes in different forms and shapes. Yes, it is about connecting with our farmers. It is about farmers markets, which are burgeoning everywhere. It is about community supported agriculture where we are getting to know our farmers and supporting them so they can produce healthy crops for us.
It is about buying local. It is about reclaiming urban sprawl and areas and growing food for the communities. Or it is about farmers in India who came out in September, more than 50,000 saying, “We want to grow food for our own people. We do not want a cheap sugar coming in from Brazil and the burnt that sugar that came in,” so they can have their markets.
It is about pastoralists fisherfolk, indigenous people, being able to say it’s time for biodiversity and for traditional knowledge systems, it is about small scale agriculture, which is sustainable. It takes different forms and shapes depending on where we live. It could be about being vegetarian.
It could be about knowing where your meat comes from. It is about dairy, which is free of divine growth hormone. But really it is rooted in the principles of food sovereignty. That is people, communities, countries, being able to decide what is grown, how it is grown, and who gets to produce their food.
Andrew Stelzer: Anuradha Mittal is the executive director of the Oakland Institute. We will link to their website, oaklandinstitute.org. Thanks so much for joining us.
Tena Rubio: We’ll be right back.
Andrew Stelzer: While the WTO talks officially lasted only four days, activists from all over the world were streaming into Seattle for weeks beforehand for workshops, skill-sharing and strategy sessions. On November 28th, Chuck Collins from United for A Fair Economy was one of many speakers at a Teach-in organized by the International Forum on globalization.
[Audio Clip] Chuck Collins: So where are we? Here we are in Washington, in Seattle. The WTOs meeting is this the trigger event. Are we about to come to the takeoff moment of a grassroots globalization movement in the United States? Maybe. I don’t think we know. I actually don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not that what we’re gonna do isn’t gonna be absolutely critical and important and that this will not advance the grassroots globalization by a quantum leap, but I think we’re still in a preparation stage. How do I know that? Because when I went to home for Thanksgiving and talked to my in-laws and told them what I was doing this weekend, no one knew what I was talking about.
The general sense, the public’s knowledge of what the WTO is, is very, very at a low stage. So this, these actions will do an enormous amount to reach people. And Wednesday morning, I think a lot of people are gonna open up the newspaper though and go, “Edith, what is the WTO and why are all these people so upset about it?” And we will have this amazing strategic opportunity if we are prepared to respond to that question.
So what do we do to prepare, in a preparation stage? I think we have to take the teach-ins that have happened here and we need to bring them home. We need to expand the narrow band. I don’t know how many thousands of people we’ll have marching in the street. I know in New England, where I’m from in Boston, it’s a fairly narrow band of people who are paying attention to these issues, who are actively organizing. So we need to expand through education. Those folks, the grassroots media work that a lot of you are involved with talking on local public radio stations and, and private stations and teach-ins and. Writing letters to the editor, picking a couple of strategic fights and building an infrastructure.
You need to have an education and a training and a mobilization, and all the components that go into building a strategic movement. So in conclusion, I would just say I think we need to prepare ourselves for the next 10 years for a very exciting, powerful. Inspirational movement. We need to make space in our lives.
We need to prepare ourselves individually and go home and, and, uh, and build this movement. Thank you.
Andrew Stelzer: That was Chuck Collins, the founder of United for a Fair Economy, speaking in 1999 in Seattle during a teach-in before the WTO protests we’re joined now on the phone by Chuck Collins. He’s working these days at another organization. He helped found wealth for the common Good. Thanks so much for joining us.
Chuck Collins: Hey, good to be with you.
Andrew Stelzer: Chuck, in the clip we just heard, you said that when you went home for Thanksgiving in 1999, your family didn’t have any idea what you were talking about in terms of the WTO, and the same went for people around the country. The general public just didn’t have any idea what the WTO was or why people were preparing to protest. Do you think that’s still the case 10 years later?
Chuck Collins: No, I think that the Battle of Seattle 10 years ago actually made visible a movement that had been brewing for, for many decades prior to that: people concerned about environmental issues and corporate globalization and the ways it was failing the planet. Groups concerned about debt cancellation. So I think that people not only understand more about the World Trade Organization, but they probably now inside understand that that global trade plan, that grand plan that they were trying to push through 10 years ago. It really isn’t good for most of humanity and isn’t good for the environment. That unbridled free trade has increased poverty, bad for the environment, bad for workers.
Andrew Stelzer: And you told the crowd of what were called at that time, anti-globalization activists to prepare themselves for the next 10 years for an exciting, powerful, inspirational movement. It sounds like you’re saying they did spark that movement. What does that movement look like and, and where can we see it today?
Chuck Collins: Well, I think over the last 10 years it’s had a tremendous impact on trade itself. Really, after Seattle, all the developing countries got a real lift and pushed back hard to put greater conditions on trade. And if you think back over the last 10 years, the World Trade Organization is just not as an effective a player.
We stop the momentum of these sort of wide, you know. Multilateral trade agreements, we’ve blocked some of the worst agreements from taking place, and many countries are forced into these sort of country by country agreements. In terms of where the movement is at, I think what happened in Seattle was it sort of came above the surface and you could see this convergence, but it’s still working away.
It’s the same people who are pushing for increasing fair trade, fair labor standards, people working on issues around water and resource rights both in the global south and in the north in a way. The movement continues. It’s just taking a different form. I like to think 10 years later that the movements we see around re-localization, community development of local food systems, looking at ways to strengthen local economies, that’s the affirmative side of the anti-globalization movement. That’s the program. It’s a bottom up grassroots economic development based on a real economy, not based on, you know, phony money moving around the planet.
Andrew Stelzer: So have these global economic powers changed since 1999? I’m wondering for those seeking global economic justice, is the WTO still a viable target or have the forces changed? Are there different entities still writing the rules for how the global economy works?
Chuck Collins: You know, remember 10 years ago that there was this saying which is, “There’s no alternative to corporate globalization,” and our movement was saying, “Another world is possible.” There are lots of other alternatives and I think that there’s a wide understanding now of the failures of market fundamentalism, which contributed to this global economic meltdown. So on the one hand, there’s a tremendous pushback. The arenas are sometimes changed. For instance, the wealthiest 21 countries, the G 21, is now the place where some of those debates are happening, where some of those struggles are happening. But the good news is within those wealthy countries, you have countries like Brazil and others who have very different economic development models. So another world is possible, and I think more and more people are seeing that.
Andrew Stelzer: Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the program on inequality and the common good. He’s also working with wealth for the common good, and we’ll link to them on our website, radio project.org. Chuck, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Andrew.
Gopal Dayaneni: So, we are on my back porch.
Andrew Stelzer: back in Oakland, California. Gopal Dayaneni takes me on a tour of his backyard. His is one of three houses that share a huge plot with a garden, a patio, and even a chicken coop.
Gopal Dayaneni: I live still with the people I went to Seattle with. I live in community with those same folks, and I’ve known those folks for many, many years from before that until today. And we raise our kids together and we try to support each other. We try to build a community here that allows us to act on our values out in the world. And that’s why this is my home. This is the place where I come to for, for comfort.
Andrew Stelzer: He lives in a community of nine adults, seven kids and eight chickens. Their idea is to model the type of society they want to create. Sharing responsibilities and creating a larger human family pick you
Gopal Dayaneni: I often hear people say, “Yeah, but what, whatever came out of Seattle?” We killed the WTO. We killed the World Trade Organization. It is essentially a dead institution. It forced nations like the United States to move towards bilateral and regional trade agreements because they couldn’t get a global trade agreement. So they went to a piecemeal system and the more local and the more regional, the more opportunities there are for grassroots communities to exert pressure on their governments to meet their needs.
Andrew Stelzer: Dayaneni says, the mobilization in Seattle helped lay the foundation for other grassroots movements of the past decade, the anti-war movement. He says, they use their already existing relationships, skills, and experience to do direct action to try to stop the Iraq war. The world and US social forums were born out of the global justice movement as well, 10 years after he attended the Seattle WTO protests. Dayaneni says he’ll be going to Copenhagen for the UN climate Change talks in December, 2009. He sees the same global economic forces at work behind both summits.
Gopal Dayaneni: Basically the new vehicle for global economic governance is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is not about carbon in the atmosphere. It’s about trade. It’s about development rights, it’s about housing, it’s about finance, it’s about markets. It’s about trade related, intellectual property rights. It’s about health. It’s about migration. It’s about all of the things that the corporations attempted to drive through the WTO Now. With a new vehicle under new auspices, they’re attempting to ostensibly deal with the problem of ecological crisis and transition, but still trying to maintain as much as they can of the existing system that got us here.
And so in some ways, we are in a. A new WTO period, not just in terms of Copenhagen, Seattle, less that than there’s a new vehicle that’s being constructed in which corporations are exerting pressure on nation states and nation states. Rich nation states are exerting pressure on poor nation states to act in very specific ways that serve very specific interests that both will exacerbate poverty and inequality. And as it looks like right now, most likely will not even begin to touch the problem of climate destabilization.
Andrew Stelzer: Dayaneni says his fundamental work is done on a local level. He’s trying to build a community around what he calls an intersection between ecology and racial and economic justice.
Gopal Dayaneni: We’re trying to create a vision for a new world in which there isn’t just an economy. There are economies, that they’re localized, that they’re place-based, that they’re democratic, and that people have control over the decisions that affect their daily lives. That’s messy business. That’s not, that’s not an answer in the, in the sense of we’re gonna come up with a new thing that meets everybody’s needs. We’re trying to create enough space in the world for people to meet their own needs.
Tena Rubio: That’s it for this edition of Making Contact. Special thanks to Andrew Geller from KBU Radio in Portland, Oregon, and to Dan Turner, Ron Rucker, and the Monday morning breakfast crew. Lisa Rudman is our executive director, Andrew Stelzer, producer. And I’m Tena Rubio. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
More stories like this:
Trade Shifts: Reflections on the Seattle WTO Protests
Family Matters: How Communities Support Trans Kids in Conservative States | 30th Anniversary Capsule
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Race and the Future of the Love Story | 30th Anniversary Capsule
World Trade Watch Radio
Saltwater Soundwalk: Indigenous Audio Tour of Seattle (Encore)
