World Trade Organization

[caption id="attachment_7143" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="InvestigateWest photo by Christopher Crow."][/caption]

The InvestigateWest team is back from the massive climate protests that brought something like 30,000 to 50,000 demonstrators to the streets of Copenhagen today. They're protesting the global "cap and trade" climate treaty being negotiated there under the auspices of the United Nations.

InvestigateWest correspondent Alexander Kelly says the march was largely peaceful. In one incident, though, several hundred people dressed in anarchist black tossed bricks at police and set off homemade explosives.

Sounds pretty tame compared to the riots at the Seattle meeting of World Trade Organization in Seattle 10 years ago, or even the WTO meeting in Geneva just a few weeks ago. The Seattle protests involved a number similar to those mobilized in Copenhagen today.

We'll be posting video and pictures here, and Kelly will give readers insights into what motivated one of the marchers, as well as convey what speakers told the demonstrators.

 -- Robert McClure

As the orderly column of peaceful protest marchers rounded a corner in downtown Seattle, the scene changed suddenly. And dramatically. People were running every which way. Smoke billowed from dumpsters set afire. A young man ran past me clutching the silver “N” he had just snatched from above the entrance to the Niketown store. A voice behind me boomed into a megaphone: 

Everybody go down this alley – we think we’ve found a back way into the hotel!

I turned around to see that the guy with the megaphone was Michael Moore – the filmmaker, not the guy by the same name in charge of the World Trade Organization. It was the WTO’s presence in Seattle that sparked this scene 10 years ago today, as 40,000 or more protesters descended on the city.

I’m not big on anniversary journalism, but that protest known as N30  remains the largest anti-globalization protest in North American history. And, 10 years on, this week marks the start of what will no doubt be another series of globally significant protests.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators are expected a week from today in Copenhagen, where negotiators from around the globe are traveling to supposedly try to reach a global accord limiting green-house gas emissions. Will the negotiators succeed?

Ten years after Seattle witnessed the largest anti-corporate globalization action the United States has seen, protesters will take to the streets of Copenhagen in a week to oppose the global capitalization of the struggle against climate change.

The delegates attending the upcoming high-stakes negotiations are expected to entertain mostly market-based solutions to climate change, which critics say improperly treat carbon as a commodity to be traded among the world’s largest polluters.

Plenty of activists aren’t buying it, and like their predecessors at the WTO rallies in ‘99, they’re ready to let world leaders know.

Nor are they buying the rhetoric spouted at Singapore’s recent international economic summit, where the official goal of the Copenhagen meetings was reduced from the development of a “legally binding treaty” to a “political” one. The announcement has activist groups like Bill McKibben’s 350.org and members of the Climate Justice Action network in an uproar, with street-side frustrations on the rise as the will to tackle climate change seemingly takes a political nosedive.

As tens of thousands of protesters from the world over converge on December’s climate talks, so will InvestigateWest.

Just days before the 10th anniversary of N30, the biggest day of rioting at the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle, protesters went on a rampage overnight in Geneva at the latest WTO meeting.

Cars were set on fire and police said perhaps 200 of the 3,000 protesters were intent on violence. Authorities responded with water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets.

Watch this space next week, as InvestigateWest will have an exciting and related announcement.

 -- Robert McClure