Ten years after the Battle in Seattle, two thousand came together on a cold windy Saturday in Portland to once again say No to the WTO.
Spearheaded by the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign and Jobs with Justice and backed up by 75 labor, environmental, immigrant rights and social justice organizations, the D5 mobilization against the WTO was a great success. People came from throughout Oregon and the Northwest. JwJ Chapters in Eugene, Bend, Southern Oregon and Salem as well as Portland were well represented.
The March and rally were loud and spirited. Teamsters and turtles were back together again as the Teamster truck led the march with protesters dressed in turtle outfits close behind. Union locals and other organizations marched behind their colorful banners while radical cheerleaders and a rousing drum corps led us in chants and cheers. As there were in 1999, large puppets were sprinkled throughout the crowd. A contingent of unemployed workers marched behind an “Organize the Unemployed” banner.
The action highlighted the role “free trade” has played in the loss of jobs, environmental destruction, “forced” migration and the erosion of workers’
Ten years ago this week I marched with labor activists and environmentalists (dubbed “Teamsters and Turtles”) and indigenous people from across the world against the corporate policies of the World Trade Organization.
The famed “Battle in Seattle” that shut down the meetings wasn’t at its core about the police vs. demonstrators or even about free vs. fair trade. It was about the power and rights of people and their elected representatives to set labor, consumer, environmental and commercial laws vs. the power of transnational corporations to abolish those laws and prevent new ones from being enacted.
The WTO’s agenda of trade liberalization and deregulation (i.e. fancy words for abolishing democratically-enacted laws passed by nations, states and regions) includes not only cars, toys, clothing and other stuff manufactured in one nation and shipped to another. Very relevant to today, it also includes a Treaty enacted under the WTO called the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which has gutted banking, financial, and insurance rules across the planet over the past decade.
Virtually unpublicized in the corporate press, WTO’s financial deregulation provisions under GATS locked in domestically, and exported internationally, the model of extreme financial service deregulation
