Labor, Direct Action and the Battle in Seattle
We talked with Nancy Haque with the Shutdown WTO Organizers’ History Project about simultaneously organizing the labor march and the mass direct action in 1999.
The Battle in Seattle, 22 Years Later w/ the Shutdown WTO Organizers History Project
It’s the 22nd anniversary of the direct action shutdown of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. The WTO is a transnational economic institution created to regulate and facilitate global (corporate) trade.
Listen in: https://bit.ly/ShutdownWTOGandR
Organized by a scrappy group of organizers, the shutdown kicked off an anti-corporate globalization moment in North America which challenged austerity and the capitalist political economy. Globally, those movements had already been fighting austerity and corporate power for decades.
We talk with Nancy Haque, Stephanie Guilloud and David Solnit – three organizers that were all part of Direct Action Network to Stop Corporate Globalization (DAN), the body that organized the shutdown.
This is What Democracy Looks Like. The WTO Shutdown 21 Years Later.
In 2020, as crises around COVID-19, a crashing economy, climate change and a racist police state crash into one another, and mass uprisings in the U.S. fight back against the crisis and the power elite behind them, I look back both at movement moments of the past and the current wave of global uprisings we’ve seen in the last year in places like Chile, Paris, Hong Kong, Beirut and elsewhere for how to move forward in these dangerous times.
This day in history, 21 years ago today, masses of people organizing under the umbrella of the Direct Action Network (DAN) blockaded and shutdown the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the streets of Seattle.