NEWS - Rage Against The Machine Des

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Subject: NEWS - Rage Against The Machine Despite, and because of, violence, anti-WTO protesters were heard

Rage Against The Machine Despite, and because of, violence, anti-WTO
protesters were heard
BY RICHARD LACAYO - Time Magazine

At the Seattle meeting of the World Trade
                Organization, the bureaucrats may not have
                accomplished all that much last week. The
                chaos that surrounded them did. In this
                moment of triumphant capitalism, of
                planetary cash flows and a priapic Dow, all
                the second thoughts and outright furies
                about the global economy collected on the
                streets of downtown Seattle and crashed
                through the windows of NikeTown. After two
                days of uproar scented with tear gas and
                pepper spray, Americans may never again
                think the same way about free trade and
                what it costs.

                At the very least, the dull but profound
                business of trade rules--which are usually
                hammered out by technocrats in closed
                meetings with corporate lobbyists hovering
                outside--will figure differently in the thinking
                of the millions of Americans whom the
                decisions affect. That might even happen
                soon enough to influence the next U.S.
                election, which helps account for some of the
                ways that Bill Clinton, who arrived in Seattle
                smack in the middle of the chaos, positioned
                himself when he got there. But neither
                Clinton nor U.S. Trade Representative
                Charlene Barshefsky was able to avert what
                must be viewed as a disaster: the WTO
                representatives' failure to reach agreement
                on launching the "Millennial Round" of trade
                talks. The delegates went home
                empty-handed.

                Not so WTO opponents, who left claiming
                victory, believing that what they hate about
                globalization will now come into focus as
                clearly as the familiar arguments in favor of
                it--that freer trade creates jobs for everybody
                and lower prices for consumers. Indeed, free
                trade has been an important reason for the
                '90s boom. Even as Seattle assessed the
                damage on Friday, the Dow was soaring
                nearly 250 points on news that the
                unemployment rate was stuck at its 30-year
                low. But the protesters were in Seattle to
                insist that globalization has become another
                word for capitulation to the worst excesses of
                capitalism, a cover for eliminating hard-won
                protections for the environment and workers'
                rights. "Before Seattle, we were dead in the
                water on trade," says George Becker,
                president of the United Steelworkers of
                America. "The big companies had their way
                completely. Now we've raised the profile of
                this issue, and we're not going back." Says
                Larry Dohrs, an activist with the Seattle
                chapter of the Free Burma Coalition: "Strong
                majorities of American voters support basic
                labor rights and environmental provisions in
                trade agreements. It's that simple."

                Trade issues are anything but simple.
                Demonstrators who want justice for poor
                nations were reminded last week that Third
                World delegates to the WTO don't want
                developed nations to force them to allow
                union organizing. Cheap labor is their
                competitive advantage. Environmentalists
                who want the WTO to keep its hands off U.S.
                laws that protect endangered species would
                happily force Venezuela--against its
                sovereign will--to clean up its gasoline
                exports.

                Because it deals with so many separate
                issues, from farm subsidies to
                intellectual-property rights, the WTO attracts
                a very mixed bag of opponents, which is one
                reason that opposition to it has been hard to
                focus. Some of the WTO opponents want to
                reform the organization. Some want to
                abolish it. Virtually all of them resent the
                secrecy in which the WTO makes decisions
                that its 135 member nations are supposed to
                abide by.

                Dohrs' Burma group mobilized against the
                WTO in part to advance the right of states
                and localities to boycott companies that do
                business in Burma, now called Myanmar,
                which is one of Asia's most saw-toothed
                dictatorships. But the U.S. State Department
                sees such boycotts as a violation of federal
                sovereignty and free trade. Then there are
                the environmentalists. To protect sea turtles,
                an endangered species, they want an import
                ban on shrimp caught in nets that don't have
                escape hatches to let the turtles swim away.
                Congress has adopted such a ban, but the
                WTO forbids it; member nations can't block
                imports on the basis of the way they are
                produced. The organization may also
                eventually forbid American "antidumping"
                laws that bar the import of low-cost foreign
                steel. Those laws are important to American
                unions. The WTO used the same logic in
                siding with the U.S. against European nations
                that wanted to prohibit the import of
                American beef fed with hormones that
                Europeans believe may be unsafe.

                In the aftermath of the Battle of Seattle, no
                single objection to the WTO may stand out
                any better than it has before. But from now
                on, every objection will be illuminated by the
                fires of last week. The WTO trade ministers
                and other delegates had come to Seattle to
                draw up an agenda for a new round of global
                trade talks, which are scheduled to last about
                three years and take up issues like
                European farm subsidies--of huge
                importance to U.S. and Canadian agricultural
                exporters--and whether to tax sales on the
                Internet.

                The backlash in the streets started Tuesday
                morning, several hours before more than
                25,000 largely peaceful marchers headed
                from a union-backed rally at Memorial
                Stadium, near the Space Needle, toward the
                shops and hotels of downtown. Many
                thousands of other protesters were already
                converging there, some engaged in peaceful
                sit-ins that blocked traffic. Things got serious
                when scattered groups of self-described
                Black Block anarchists, wearing all-black
                outfits with handkerchiefs or hoods covering
                their faces, started to smash windows and
                trash businesses, giving special attention to
                companies such as the Gap and Nike that
                have been accused of using low-wage or
                child labor to produce some of their
                merchandise. Peaceful protesters,
                horror-struck, shouted, "Shame! Shame!" at
                the rioters. Once word got out that the
                streets were haywire, however, a wave of
                garden-variety thugs headed downtown to
                smash the windows at Radio Shack and walk
                off with CD players. Anarchist websites
                subsequently complained that their boys in
                black were blamed for the apolitical looting
                by the later group that ruined their
                well-planned attack. But the thing about
                anarchy is, it has a way of getting out of
                control.

                Most of the WTO
                visiting
                dignitaries--including
                U.N.
                Secretary-General
                Kofi Annan,
                Secretary of State
                Madeleine Albright
                and
                Barshefsky--spent
                part of Tuesday
                trapped in their
                hotels. With the
                morning's opening
                ceremonies
                canceled,
frustrated delegates spent the hours
muttering into their cell phones. By late
afternoon, as police moved through
downtown in armored personnel carriers, a
stunned Mayor Paul Schell asked
Washington Governor Gary Locke to send in
the National Guard. Schell also slapped a
dusk-to-dawn curfew on the city's downtown
and imposed a 50-square-block no-protest
order on downtown, which left demonstrators
furious.

On Wednesday, police arrested about 500
demonstrators, dragging many of them
feet-first into buses and speeding them off to
detention centers, where some of them idly
communicated among themselves by flashing
in Morse code with their laser pens. Schell
and his police chief, Norm Stamper, seemed
taken by surprise by the calamity caused by
the demonstration. If so, they were the only
ones. Protest leaders had long promised as
much, and websites have been bubbling for
months about the gathering. Hundreds of
would-be demonstrators attended camps in
civil disobedience this summer in
preparation. In a building not far from
downtown, organizers literally mapped out
about a dozen areas where they planned to
choke off central Seattle so that delegates
could not reach their meetings.

The police lost control first of downtown and then, in some
cases, of themselves. Many of the demonstrators
complained that the cops were using rubber
bullets, tear gas and pepper spray against nonviolent
protesters while a few blocks away vandals freely roamed the city
throwing litter baskets through store windows. These complaints
were seconded by angry residents of the city's Capitol Hill district,
where police pursued protesters with tear gas and concussion grenades
despite the fact that the area was outside the no-protest zone.

Early Wednesday morning Bill Clinton arrived. After being driven through
the streets of broken glass and police lines, he ascended to a suite on
an upper floor at the Westin Hotel and flipped on local news,
where he saw for the first time the scenes of chaos that had raged all
around his hotel earlier that day.

Clinton moved quickly to adapt to the new
conditions, keenly mindful of the fact that
labor unions and environmental groups are
crucial parts of the coalition that Al Gore
hopes will take him to the White House. At
two appearances the following day, Clinton
departed from his prepared text to
emphasize that it would be necessary from
now on to explain to people more clearly the
ways that trade benefited them and to open
up the WTO so that its rulings were more
legitimate in the eyes of the people they
affected. "If the WTO expects to have public
support grow for our endeavors, the public
must see and hear and, in a very real sense,
actually join in the deliberations," said
Clinton.

Before the president left, an interview with
him appeared in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer that unnerved some WTO
delegates almost as much as the rioting had.
Low-wage, developing nations at the
meeting, led by India, Egypt and Brazil, were
incensed that Clinton told the paper he
wanted a working group on labor to be
established within the WTO to develop "core"
standards for wages, working conditions and
other labor issues, and that such standards
should be part of every trade agreement.
Ultimately, he said, they should be enforced
through trade sanctions, the WTO's ultimate
weapon.

The word sanctions sent delegates from
developing nations up the wall. Thailand's
Minister of Commerce, Supachai
Panitchpakdi, who takes over as WTO chief
in 2002, warned that if Clinton insisted on the
issue, developing countries could "walk away
from any agreement on a new round" of
talks. To them, Clinton's words were nothing
but protectionism wrapped in progressivism.
But that position happens to be the one
taken by the AFL-CIO. Unhappy about the
White House trade deal to admit China to the
WTO--an agreement that labor is now better
armed to fight in Congress--the unions had
pressed Clinton to push their case on labor
rules in Seattle.


                By late Friday night, negotiations to get
                agreement on an agenda for a new round of
                global-trade negotiations collapsed.
                Exhausted WTO delegates said they would
                try again next year in Geneva to bridge huge
                differences.

                Public attention will eventually shift from the
                mayhem of last week, but a new political
                sensitivity may endure--one that gives
                unionists, environmentalists and others a
                platform for concerns heretofore ignored by
                the WTO bureaucrats and elected
                representatives alike. "In America trade
                policy has been conducted by elites inside
                the Washington Beltway," explains Craig
                Johnstone, senior vice president of the U.S.
                Chamber of Commerce. "Now the issue is
                very visibly moving out into the streets.
                Those who want to promote trade are going
                to have to make their case much more
                vigorously to all the American people."

                It is a pretty compelling case. And if they can
                make it with anywhere near the vigor that
                was demonstrated by the antis last week in
                Seattle, free trade may yet win the day. 

                --REPORTED BY ADAM ZAGORIN AND STEVEN
                FRANK/SEATTLE, MARGOT HORNBLOWER/LOS
                ANGELES AND JAY BRANEGAN/WASHINGTON

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