January 2000 • Photo Gallery (ILWU)

Story and photos
by J.D. Lloyd
Contributing editor

Along with organized labor and human rights organizations, the Sierra Club peacefully protested the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle on Nov. 28-29. Contributing Editor J.D. Lloyd covered the

50,000-strong event for the Southern Sierran. Here’s his first-person account of the protest that analysts say will forever change the course of this international trade group.

“You only conspire when the odds are against you. The WTO is not as inevitable as it would have you believe,” Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope told a crowd of protesters, referring to the international body as a “legal conspiracy.”

On Nov. 29, the day before Club activists were scheduled to join other environmental, human rights and labor law groups in a peaceful march, Pope exhorted the crowd to “take this protest back home to our friends, neighbors and families.”

His statements held a sentiment and message I’d been hearing ever since I arrived in Seattle on Nov. 28. I had stepped from a bus into the heart of downtown Seattle and into the thick of a protest. A half block away, a speaker stood on a flatbed truck, megaphone in hand, recounting the horrors of WTO policies. On the corner, costumed protesters with picket signs circled in front of a store. In the street behind them, a line of policemen watched from horseback.

I had come here as a Sierra Club activist with a somewhat vague notion of how the undemocratic nature of the WTO has resulted in trade agreements that many times override basic workers’ rights and environment laws. I now found myself in a whirlwind of activity and information that would keep my head spinning for the next three days.

Many of my friends didn’t know what the WTO was, much less why I was going to protest it. Luckily, AngelesChapter member Joan Jones Holtz, who was also going to attend the Seattle protest with her husband Don put me in contact with Kathleen Casey, the chief organizer for Club activities in Seattle.

I spoke with Casey before leaving L.A. She said the Club would be stressing two chief rallying cries at the protest: “Make Trade Clean, Green and Fair!” and “No Globalization Without Representation.”

The Club was scheduled to be one of the primary sponsors of Environment and Health Day on Nov. 29, whichincluded various conferences, along with a rally and march.

Club members were then to congregate again the next morning before joining the large labor contingent for a rally and a march through downtown Seattle.

Casey was excited to hear that Los Angeles area Club members would be attending.
Gearing up for events

I stopped at the headquarters for Global Trade Watch, another primary organizer of protest activities, the space was abuzz with activity—banks of phones jingling, eraser-board calendars filled with post-it notes, and people swirling around, wide-eyed. One wall was filled with drawings of sea turtles made by kids from a local YMCA.

Inside, I met Rob Faulkner, a journalism masters student at University of British Columbia who was here to develop a story on how the press covers large-scale protests. He asked me a few questions about my purpose, and I told him how important I thought it was that people find a way to identify with the protest on a non-intellectual basis. “It’s the little motivations that bring people here,” he said.

At Sierra Club offices north of the city, Conservation Organizer Sam Parry and Responsible Trade Program Director Dan Seligman were busy readying fliers for the People’s Rally and March for Fair Trade. While Seligman paced around the office with his cell phone pressed to his ear, Parry and I loaded boxes of fliers into his rental car and drove downtown.

At a Club staging area inside Seattle’s First Methodist Church, I finally met Casey, a brown-haired dynamo who shook my hand in the middle of giving instructions to young volunteers. While I and other Club volunteers from all over the country distributed fliers about the upcoming events, a troupe on the altar area of the beautiful domed church rehearsed interpretive dance numbers designed to highlight the WTO issues.

The next day, the Club held a panel of the “People’s Tribunal” which discussed issues related to environment and WTO policies.

On the left side of the large altar sat a “tribunal” of several world government representatives, among them U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters from Los Angeles. On the right side was a six-person panel of experts and activists from various countries and organizations. Behind them all stretched a large white banner with the Sierra Club message of the day: “Make Trade Clean, Green and Fair.”

Panelist Steve Shrybman from the West Coast Environmental Law Center in Canada summarized the issue that brought many of the protesters to Seattle: the basic lack of democracy inherent in WTO procedures. “There is very little public support for WTO policies,” he said. “The power brokers, the ‘Big Four’—the U.S., Canada, Japan and Great Britain—largely set the WTO agenda in the interests of capitalism.”

While the second panel discussed the effects of WTO policies on public health around the world, I headed downstairs where former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, a lifelong populist and now radio show host, echoed some of the views being expressed upstairs regarding the WTO, whose policies he referred to as “globaloney.” “This antidemocratic organization is usurping the authority of ‘we the people.’ The WTO did us a favor in coming to Seattle. This week, for the first time, the majority of Americans will be learning about the issue—learning that there may be a downside to the glories of economic progress.”

At the back of the room, Humane Society activists were outfitting themselves with turtle costumes and stapling together picket signs, their main target of protest—recent WTO policy decisions that weakened the Endangered Species Act, allowing the use of shrimping nets that kill sea turtles.

Two types of turtles
A week earlier on vacation in Hawaii, I had been swimming with sea turtles in the warm, clear waters on the coast of Kauai. Now I was marching with turtle-costumed activists into the cold, gray drizzle of Seattle.

We paraded to a location about two blocks from the conference center, where the WTO meetings were to take place. In the center of a block, next to the shell of a building under construction, about 2,000 protesters gathered as Anne Pheeny, the “Janis Joplin of the labor movement,” sang folk standards on the back of a flatbed truck.

At this rally, Paul Wellstone from Minnesota told the crowd: “I see this gathering with a sense of history.” Then, as the crowd chanted ‘Just Say No to the WTO,’ California Rep. George Miller oversaw the WTeaO Party, during which items representing bad WTO policies—hormone treated beef, steel jaw traps, gas guzzling autos, toxic pollution, biotech foods—were dumped into two garbage cans on the stage.

Nov. 30 was another gray and drizzly morning when I arrived at Denny Playfield on the northern edge of downtown. On the same flatbed truck from the day before, Seligman had joined local folk singer Francisco Herrera is singing “We Shall Overcome.” Club officials and activists were gathered here with other environmental organizations here for an hour-long rally.

With about 2,000 protesters looking on, Club board member Michael Dorsey took the stage with an evangelical tone. “Today is judgment day—the court is in session!” he said. “We will not sacrifice clean air for Exxon, Shell and Mobil.” He was followed by a succession of notables, among them Club board member David Brower and state Sen. Tom Hayden.

“These are invisible people used to invisible and devious ways. They are being taught a lesson that their very existence—their very right to meet—depends on the blessings of this ragtag mob of demonstrators here in Seattle, from all around the country. It is a very important lesson for people who are not used to the exposure of democracy, for people who are not used to accountability,” Hayden said.

Our band of protesters then marched several blocks east along Denny Way to Memorial Stadium, where we joined the AFL-CIO sponsored People’s Rally for Fair Trade. The turtle-suits were here, alongside yellow ponchoed longshoremen from Seattle and steelworkers from Pittsburgh. Neo-pagans and earthfirsters in hippie garb mingled with a group of airline pilots in neat navy blue uniforms.

The field area was covered, the bleachers were full of chanting union groups, and the railings at the stadium’s east end were packed. At the west end, a covered stage was flanked by two large projection screens. Early among the speakers was Club director Pope, who this time was seen on a giant screen.

For the next three to four hours, I marched in one of the largest peaceful protests in recent U.S. history. And it was with a sense of history that I marched—not only the history of a national and world, but the history of my life. I was part of one of those events that mark our lives, that we look back on with a sense of awe, almost as if the event was so outside the norm of everyday existence that it couldn’t have been real.

My small steps, combined with tends of thousands more, were making a difference. The delegates were listening, the press was reporting and the government officials were spinning.

And I thought about what that Canadian journalist Faulkner had told me: “Little motivations bring people here.”
That was certainly true for me. But what I was feeling now was the power of those little motivations assembled into a chorus of change.

J.D. Lloyd is a regular contributor to the Southern Sierran.

For more on the SeattleWTO protests from the IWLU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), see http://archive.ilwu.org/0200/whatsay200.htm