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November 27, 2000
Nature
and Politics
What Seattle Wrought
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 paralyse 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 Partyare 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 relection, 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 accomodations
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. CP
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