Seattle--One Year Later A New Green Movement Emerges

What Seattle Wrought
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
November 27, 2000

Exactly this time a year ago a truly prescient person monitoring bus, car and
plane traffic into the city of Seattle could have predicted that Al Gore's
presidential bid faced serious trouble on its left. The mostly young people
pouring up Interstate 5 from Oregon and California and other states were the
green street warriors who had managed by November 30 to paralyze downtown
Seattle and shut down the opening ceremonies of the WTO conference. And these
same young people made up the core organizers of Ralph Nader's Green Party
candidacy which denied Al Gore the crucial margin in Florida and New
Hampshire.

As the WTO delegates abandoned Seattle in defeat at the end of that
tumultuous week, illusions were almost as thick as the tear gas along Pike
St. Exulting in the humiliation of the free traders in the Clinton-Gore
administration, many on the left hailed the coming of age
of a new coalition. Among its supposed components: the militant greens in the
form of Earth First!, Rainforest Action and Direct Action Network; more
mainstream green groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth;
Ralph Nader's citizen's trade campaign; labor's
legions mustered in Seattle under the banners of the AFL-CIO.

Amid the general euphoria there were those who pointed out that labor's
leaders such as AFL-CIO chieftain John Sweeney had in fact played a very
prudent role, ensuring that their members stayed at a safe distance from the
turbulence of downtown. Indeed, months earlier Sweeney had told his Seattle
subordinates that the AFL-CIO had no interest in shutting down the WTO, but
wanted to make enough noise to guarantee Big Labor a seat at the table.

Similarly, while the 650,000-strong Sierra Club sponsored a police-approved
"Turtles and Teamsters" parade the day before the WTO was scheduled to
officially convene, the Club's executive director Carl Pope rushed to condemn
what he decried as the violence of the street protesters. Pope had no such
condemnation for the indiscriminate brutality of the Seattle police.

With the advantage of nearly twelve months' hindsight we can now see that
those (present authors included) who questioned the notion of a broad-based
anti-WTO coalition were on the money. These twelve months offer us a
political parable of a very different nature, a parable about the ability of
a relatively small number of militant people to shake the system by sticking
to their principles.

After all, what happened to Sweeney's labor legions after the WTO was run out
of Seattle? It was not long before the Clinton administration thumbed its
nose at the AFL-CIO by pushing through Congress permanent
trade normalization status for China, a campaign led by then-Commerce
Secretary William Daley, now Al Gore's campaign manager. Big Labor fumed, but
the fuming was impotent, as Clinton and Gore had reckoned
from the start it would be. After getting a sound kick in the teeth over
China (and precious little else over the preceding eight years) the AFL-CIO
threw itself into the task of electing Al Gore.

For their part, the established mainstream green organizations like the
Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters knew well enough (though
they would sooner die than admit it) that in terms of
environmental achievement the Clinton-Gore years had mostly been a bust.

It took a lifelong long rebel like the late David Brower to say as much
categorically on the record. But like Sweeney's AFL-CIO, the big green groups
rallied to the Gore campaign, demanding nothing in return.

The ties between mainstream environmentalism and the Democratic Party are so
enduring that even Friends of the Earth which vigorously opposed Gore in the
Democratic primaries, and which endorsed Bradley, came crawling back into the
fold. By late October FOE's executive director, Brent Blackwelder, was
touring the Pacific Northwest, urging Nader supporters to back Gore.

But a huge gulf now separates the official leaders of America's green groups
from activists across the country. Carl Pope could get his board to commit
the Sierra Club's financial resources to Gore's reelection, but that didn't
mean that the Club's activists obeyed Pope's call to fall
into line and abandon Nader. The young folk on those Seattle streets who
locked down and awaited the gas, pepper spray and batons a year ago were not
of a mood to be intimidated into support of the Democrats by
furious sermons from Pope, Blackwelder or Gore's Hollywood surrogates such as
Ted Danson, Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford.

There is a new breed of green: people who have come of age during the
Clinton-Gore years, and who have cut their teeth as activists fighting
projects that had been given the okay by Gore's people at EPA, or by Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt or by Forest Service chief Mike
Dombeck. These are militants have gone to jail protesting the WTI hazardous
waste incinerator in Ohio, or who hung from redwood trees in northern
California.

After Seattle last November these green militants went on to protest against
the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC in April of this year. And then they
decided it was important to organize protests at both political conventions,
first against the Republicans in Philadelphia, then against the Democrats in Los Angeles.

One would have thought that Al Gore and his strategists might have scented
danger as the LA police trampled green activists with horses and sprayed them
with gas and rubber bullets. But they never woke up until it was too late,
because they had been operating so long under the assumption that these green
activists had nowhere but the Democratic Party to turn to, regardless of how
far to the right that Party might have drifted.

Now the Democrats gnash their teeth as they look at those 95,000 green votes
in Florida that went to Nader. In a southern state like Florida this
defection was as inconceivable to Democratic party regulars as was
the prospect to the mayor of Seattle of having the WTO meeting shut down a
year ago.

The leaders of the Democratic Party and their friends at the top of the big
green outfits had done business amiably for so long that they entirely missed
the reality of a new generation for whom these accommodations were entirely
repugnant.

A year has passed since Seattle and they remain deluded. One the
environmentalists' top lobbyists recently warned Nader's supporters that
he'll be looking for them "on the front lines in DC" when Bush takes power.
But the front lines aren't in Washington DC. They're in the forests of the
Pacific Northwest; in the chemical plants and oil refineries of Cancer Alley;
in the wildlands of Montana; the strip mines of Appalachia. Here have been
the battle fields, the training grounds for the direct action that humiliated
the organizers of the WTO in Seattle a year ago.

CounterPunch November 27, 2000