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\u201cThis is what democracy looks like!\u201d – that was but one of the many chants heard on the streets of numerous cities during the recent Global Climate Change Strike \u2013 a slogan that originated on the streets of Seattle almost two decades ago. When the images and voices of 50,000+ people shutting down a global convergence of wealthy elites rippled across media outlets in late Nov. 1999, the \u201cBattle of Seattle\u201d caught many by surprise. Corporate free trade apologists were quick to disparage the protesters as part of a misguided \u201canti-globalization\u201d movement, apparently unaware that the forces behind the direct action had been cultivating north-south solidarity for quite awhile \u2013 a new more powerful form of globalized resistance from below. Family farmers\/fishers, migrant farm\/food workers, and indigenous communities were critical to this grassroots victory \u2013 in particular, La Via Campesina (LVC) and its many U.S. allies such as Family Farm Defenders (FFD) and the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). It was in such epic struggle that the seeds of food sovereignty found fertile ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was among many who helped organize this historic encounter that brought together a vast array of radical environmentalists, labor unions, anarchists, global justice advocates, and \u2013 of course, family farmers, farm\/food workers, and other supporters of global food sovereignty. In fact, my very first night in Seattle – Mon. Nov. 29th – I was able to link arms with Vandana Shiva outside the corporate-sponsored WTO welcome celebration. This action was in part organized by Jubilee 2000, a largely faith-based grassroots campaign to expose and eliminate odious debts that had come onto the scene at the huge protest surrounding the G8 Summit in Birmingham, Scotland in 1998. In Seattle, the citizen blockade meant many elites were not able to get to the kick-off “cocktail party”, and all those uneaten hors d’ouevres were later dumpster dived to feed hungry protesters at the convergence space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Earlier in the day I had caught up with John Kinsman and Francis Goodman of Family Farm Defenders, Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, Ronnie Cummins of the Pure Food Campaign (later the Organic Consumers Association), Dr. Ridgely A. Mumin Muhammed of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, and other food sovereignty activists outside the downtown McDonalds for a slow food protest picnic. This was the first time I met Jos\u00e9 Bov\u00e9, the iconic farmer activist with Conf\u00e9d\u00e9ration Paysanne who had recently used his tractor to “dismantle” another McDonalds in France. Bov\u00e9 had somehow managed to smuggle several blocks of his own Rocquefort cheese through U.S. Customs and shared it with the crowd \u2013 a wholesome alternative to the junk food or \u201cla malbouffe\u201d as Bov\u00e9 described what was being served inside. Activists with LVC and NFFC had met earlier to plant trees in a Seattle park, and farmer delegates from over 30 countries would continue to build cross border solidarity at various teach-ins and protest actions throughout the rest of the week. At each such event the pungent smell of smuggled Rocquefort was detectable – some folks had saved their souvenir cheese! Within an hour of the protest picnic, the Black Bloc came through, and this McDonalds was also promptly \u201cdismantled.” The Black Bloc would take out many other corporate targets – Bank of America, Starbucks, Warner Bros, Niketown, Gap, Old Navy to name but a few – over the course of the next few days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Long before many of us arrived in Seattle, backdoor deals had already been made. Most notably, the AFL-CIO had promised government officials that their Tues. Nov. 30th post labor rally parade through Seattle\u2019s downtown would be used to siphon off protesters from participating in the actions to physically shutdown the WTO meeting that were already planned by the Direct Action Network (DAN). But this co-optation strategy soon unraveled as labor activists broke through the \u201cpeace police\u201d to join their comrades that had been clogging the streets around the Convention Center since 6:00 am that morning. Among the many militant unions that defied the \u201clabor bosses\u201d in Seattle were the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the Steelworkers, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). By 10:00 am Seattle police had already launched their first unprovoked attacks against peaceful protesters occupying 6th Avenue, including myself. Word quickly spread through indymedia that the \u201cBattle for Seattle\u201d had begun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judi Bari was not in Seattle (she had passed away in 1997 from a long struggle with cancer), but the fruits of her organizing work with the Redwoods Summer Campaign was evident among many of the Earth First! and the IWW activists who did show up for the protest. I was lucky enough to have met Judi Bari while I was a student organizer at Reed College in Portland, OR back in the late 1980s, along with another inspiration ecofeminist, Starhawk, who was in the streets of Seattle. Many of the young activists who traveled with me from the Midwest to Seattle had been inspired by EF! direct action protests against the Crandon Mine in northern WI in 1997, as well as the Minnehaha Free State resistance to the Highway 55 bypass in Minneapolis, MN in 1998. The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) – with lots of heavy lifting from Tom Goldtooth – convened a whole series of solidarity events between native activists and their allies in Seattle. Among the indigenous participants were members of the U\u2019Wa from Colombia, resisting ecocide at the hands of Occdental Petroleum and the rest of the violent fossil fuel industrial complex. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mutual enemy that brought so many family farmers, farm\/food workers, fisher folk, and indigenous activists to the Battle of Seattle was industrial agribusiness and neoliberal capitalism. Thankfully, the grassroots resistance inheritance we brought with us had even deeper historic roots, like the tallgrass prairies and old growth forests that pre-dated settler colonialism. The 1970s farm crisis that swept across the Heartland had convinced many rural folks to \u201craise less corn and more hell\u201d – as did their populist ancestors a century before \u2013 and prompted the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) to organize a massive tractorcade demanding an end to farm foreclosures and a return to parity pricing that shut down Washington DC for weeks. In MN in the 1980s the \u201cBolt Weevils\u201d inflicted millions of dollars in damage to unwanted high voltage powerlines, inspiring Dana Lyons’ EF! folksong classic, “Turn of the Wrench.” Flagrant price rigging and anti-trust violations by the dairy giants in the 1990s prompted WI farmers to again dump milk \u2013 as their grandparents did back in 1933 – and stomp on blocks of Kraft Velveeta outside Gov. Tommy Thompson\u2019s office in the State Capitol. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back\non the streets of Seattle the tide had already turned by noon on Tues. Nov. 29th with\nofficial cancellation of the WTO\u2019s opening session – not enough delegates could reach the venue.\n Authorities\nhad\nexhausted\ntheir cache\nof pepper spray and tear gas and scrambled\nto dispatch\na captain by plane to a military weapons depot in Casper, WY to\nresupply.\n Seattle firefighters had refused to turn fire hoses on their union \nbrothers and sisters. Hundreds of protesters and bystanders had been \narrested and soon clogged detention centers (often for absurd reasons \nsuch as speaking to media or driving a taxi),\nbut more activists simply took their place in blockading streets and impeding\nWTO\ndelegates.\n Radical\ncheerleaders kept morale\nhigh, while Food Not Bombs delivered sustenance. Hip Hop artists\nfrom South Central LA were among those reclaiming public space, blasting \u201cTKO the WTO\u201d from a mobile sound\nvehicle courtesy of Alli Chaggi-Starr with Art and Revolution. By 3 pm Seattle’s mayor had\nthrown in the towel, declaring\na state\nof emergency, a blanket curfew, as well as a fifty block wide \u201cno protest\u201d zone. \nPres.\nClinton\u2019s arrival on Wed. Dec. 1st to\naddress the WTO meeting,\nalong\nwith a couple hundred National Guard troops,\ncould hardly extinguish the raging dumpster fire.\n \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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More\nimportantly, this \u201cstreet heat\u201d was being acutely\nfelt\ninside\nthe residual WTO\nnegotiations.\n\nDelegates\nfrom the Global South looked outside the convention\ncenter\nwindows and could see for themselves that public opinion in the U.S. was\nnot as monolithic in favor of the \u201cfree market\u201d as they had been\ntold by corporate\napologists.\n Thinly veiled threats of\neconomic\nretaliation from US Sec. of State, Madeline Albright, and US Trade Rep.,\nCharlene Barshefsky, hardly\nhelped,\nand ultimately many delegates\nsimply walked\nout. As a post WTO\ncollapse\npress release from the Organization of African Unity (OAU) stated,\nthey\nwere\nfed up with\n“being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital\nimportance for our peoples and their future.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On\nThurs. Dec. 2nd food sovereignty and anti-biotech groups took to the streets\nagain in one of the more tranquil marches of the “Battle of Seattle” with nary\na police\nofficer\nin\nsight. Protesters gathered\nat a farmers market to distribute organic apples and then marched to\na rally outside the Seattle headquarters of Cargill. A\nnew\n\u201csolidarity in struggle\u201d identity was\nemerging, and\nI\nwill never forget being with John\nKinsman as he proudly proclaimed\nhe was a peasant, too, as\nwe marched\ntogether\nwith\nLVC\ncolleagues\nfrom Mexico, South Korea, South Africa, and India. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\nfundamental\ndemand\nof protesters in Seattle was a moratorium\nto\nWTO negotiations. Some went\nfurther, calling for abolition\nof the WTO itself, along with the\nother\ntwo\npost WWII \n\u201cHorsemen\nof the Apocalypse\u201d\n– the\nWorld Bank and the International Monetary Fund. \n Premised\nupon neoliberal\ncapitalism,\nthey were beyond any reform. Their\nmere existence violates\nfood sovereignty in so many ways \u2013 from forcing countries to trade\nfood against their will, privatizing the commons (water, seeds,\nland), and denying people\nthe right to know where their food came from and how it was produced,\nas well as weaponizing\nhunger as a tool\nof state terrorism.\n As one LVC protester in\nSeattle\nremarked, \u201cyou cannot put sugar coating on a rotten pie.\u201d After\nthe meeting collapse,\nLVC sent a tongue and cheek \u201cthank you\u201d to the WTO for\nhelping to unify small farmers worldwide: \u201cDuring the weeklong work\nin Seattle, we have now succeeded in globalizing the struggle and\nglobalizing our hopes.\u201d Thanks\nto the \u201cSpirit of Seattle\u201d\nthe concept of food sovereignty was\nalso popularized among\ngrassroots activists and has\nnow\n\u201ctrickled\nup\u201d to\nradically\ntransform future\nU.S.\ndebates\nabout food\/farm issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking before the American Sociological Society Meeting in DC in 2016, Filipino academic and activist, Walden Bello, reflected back on those historic days in late 1999: \u201cIn Seattle, ordinary women and men made truth real with collective action that discredited an intellectual paradigm that had served as the ideological warden of corporate control.\u201d The Battle of Seattle was a critical inflection point in a growing global grassroots movement, bridging generations of seasoned activists and weaving together diverse resistance struggles. When West Coast longshore workers arrived in Madison, WI in March 2011 to support the \u201cCheddar Revolution\u201d against Gov. Walker\u2019s union busting austerity budget this was no accident \u2013 such solidarity was crafted in Seattle back in Nov. 1999. When Midwestern family farmers traveled to Standing Rock, ND in 2016 to support indigenous water protectors in their struggle against tar sands pipelines and extreme fossil fuel extraction this was no accident\u2013 such solidarity was nurtured in Seattle back in Nov. 1999. Twenty years on, the \u201cSpirit of Seattle\u201d continues to inform and inspire many activists today, and clearly points the way to another world being possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By: John E. Peck, executive director, Family Farm Defenders \u201cThis is what democracy looks like!\u201d – that was but one of the many chants heard on the streets of numerous cities during the recent Global Climate Change Strike \u2013 a … Continue reading