<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><i class="">Just a reminder that the </i><b class="">#MySeattleWTOStory hashtag</b> <i class="">is now active</i><i class=""> through the end of the month. We’re asking individuals and organizations to post photos, written recollections and/or video testimonials about why the 1999 Seattle WTO protests are worth remembering. Please post them directly to your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts with that #MySeattleWTOStory tag. And check out the great two pieces below. Thanks! </i></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="https://nwlaborpress.org/2019/11/looking-back-on-the-battle-in-seattle/" class="">https://nwlaborpress.org/2019/11/looking-back-on-the-battle-in-seattle/</a></div><div class=""><div id="main-content" class="mh-content"><article id="post-46768" class="hentry post category-labor-history category-trade post-46768 has-post-thumbnail tag-world-trade-organization status-publish format-standard type-post">
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<h1 class="entry-title"> Looking back on the Battle in Seattle</h1></header></article></div></div><div class=""><p class="p1"><strong class="">By Don McIntosh</strong></p><p class="p1">On, Nov. 30, 1999, 50,000 union members, residents and
activists from a huge variety of causes came together in downtown
Seattle to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). At
the invitation of then-president Bill Clinton, 700 trade officials from
134 countries were in Seattle to talk about expanding the WTO, and
hundreds of journalists from around the world had come to report on it.</p><p class="p1">Until then, few people in the world had heard of the WTO,
established five years earlier to police a new set of global trade
agreements. Earlier international trade agreements dealt with trade in
goods, and focused on reducing tariffs as barriers to trade. The 1994
agreement that created the WTO went well beyond that, opening up trade
in services, enforcing commitments to respect “intellectual property”
(state-sanctioned monopolies like patents and trademarks), and giving
unelected trade dispute judges the authority to strike down “non-tariff
barriers to trade” — such as public health and environmental
regulations. By 1999, WTO trade tribunals had ruled repeatedly for
corporations and against regulations intended to protect dolphins and
sea turtles, food safety and many others.</p>
<h2 class="p1">This is what democracy looks like</h2><p class="p1">What happened in Seattle the week of Nov. 28-Dec. 3 was
the reaction to all that. It was the product of nine months of diligent
organizing and coalition building. Labor and environmental groups
committed significant resources.</p><p class="p1">Labor’s main contribution was massive turnout on Nov. 30,
Day One of the four-day WTO summit. Roughly 25,000 union members and
allies filled Memorial Stadium in Seattle Center and — joined by another
10,000 students, environmentalists and community members — took part in
a mile-long march to the Washington Convention Center, where they
collided with another 15,000 people who were already occupying the
streets.</p><p class="p1">For labor, it was a logistical feat that has never been
repeated since. From San Francisco to British Columbia, as many as 30
national AFL-CIO staff worked with allies in groups like Jobs with
Justice to get commitments for local union participation and coordinate
the logistics of getting people to the event. All told 185 buses, nine
charter planes, two trains and countless cars brought union members to
the rally.</p><p class="p1">The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
arranged its annual meeting to take place in Seattle just beforehand so
that hundreds of trade unionists from around the world could be there.
So did the United Steelworkers (USW) with its Rapid Response conference,
which drew over 500 local union officers. International Longshore and
Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down ports all up and down the West Coast so
members could take part. As many as 1,000 members of 19 Teamsters
Washington locals from mobilized. Portland Machinists Local 1005 paid
lost wages so members could afford to take the day off work. Seattle
Machinists Local 751 volunteered several hundred members as marshals for
the march.</p><p class="p1">And that was just the union side of the coalition.</p><p class="p1">Today, Mike Dolan works as the Teamsters union’s top trade
policy lobbyist in Washington, DC. But in 1999, he was the field
director for Global Trade Watch, a division of the non-profit group
Public Citizen. More than anyone else, Dolan was the Paul Revere of the
Seattle WTO protests. Starting in March when Seattle was announced as
the meeting site, Dolan invited local, national and international labor,
environmental and non-profit leaders to form an ad hoc coalition. The
coalition soon opened an office in downtown Seattle and undertook a
region-wide mobilization against corporate globalization. Staff and
volunteers working with Dolan spent the next six months visiting college
campuses, churches, union halls and neighborhood groups with a call to
join the WTO protest.</p><p class="p1">Dolan’s vision was for a week of massive protest
demonstrations led by labor and non-profit groups — to send the message
that WTO was a threat to workers rights, the environment, and democracy
worldwide. Others got busy with plans for non-violent civil
disobedience, and formed the Direct Action Network, a West Coast network
of local grassroots organizations opposed to corporate globalization.
To train hundreds of protesters in Greenpeace- and EarthFirst- style
blockade tactics, the newly formed Ruckus Society held three-day
“Globalize This” training camps at a farm north of Everett, Washington.</p><p class="p1">As the WTO meeting neared, there were tensions between
those who wanted to protest the WTO and those who wanted to shut it down
by preventing WTO delegates from getting to their meeting. Labor
officials wanted nothing to do with the street blockades.</p><p class="p1">The week of activity began Friday Nov. 26 with teach-in
that packed Seattle’s 2,500-seat Benaroya Concert Hall for two days. On
Sunday, Nov. 28, the Washington Council of Churches filled St. James
Cathedral with a “Jubilee 2000” prayer service calling for third world
debt relief. On Monday, hundreds of Steelworkers, Teamsters and others
marched with about 250 environmentalists dressed in cardboard turtle
costumes. That night, thousands of people turned out in pouring rain to
form a human chain surrounding a corporate-sponsored reception for WTO
delegates, while several miles away filmmaker Michael Moore and singer
Michael Franti entertained thousands of others at a Key Arena “people’s
gala” sponsored by USW, Teamsters, Rainforest Action Network and others.</p><p class="p1">And all that was trivial compared with what was to happen the following day.</p>
<h2 class="p1">Whose streets? Our streets!</h2><p class="p1">Jeremy Simer today works as a strategic researcher for
SEIU Local 49 in Portland. In 1999, he was a recent graduate of
University of Washington. In mid-summer, he began working full-time for
Dolan’s group doing neighborhood-level organizing. But after having
worked for months to get people to come to the big labor rally and
march, Simer himself decided to go to where the civil disobedience would
occur.</p><p class="p1">The day activists had dubbed a “festival of resistance”
began at 7 a.m. with not one but two giant puppet parades. As the
parades wound through downtown, organized “affinity groups” peeled off
and made their way to agreed-upon intersection where they linked arms,
sat down, and in some cases locked themselves together. The tactic took
police by surprise.</p><p class="p1">But it wasn’t long before police moved in to try to clear
streets. Twenty years later, Simer still remembers seeing protesters
prodded by police batons, bruised by rubber bullets, hit in the face by
gas canisters, and sprayed at close range with chemical agents. He also
remembers the courage, discipline, and determination of the protesters
as they stayed put and held on to intersections, or when dislodged,
regrouped to try again.</p><p class="p1">Over the next six hours, police managed to clear some
intersections, but with most delegates unable to get through, to
worldwide shock, the WTO canceled its opening ceremony.</p><p class="p1">Meanwhile, with streets occupied and tear gas in the air,
police appealed to labor leaders to delay their march until the streets
could be cleared. But at a certain point, labor leaders could no longer
control the thousands of union members. Two hours and dozens of speakers
into the rally, large numbers began leaving the stadium to assemble
outside for the march. By the time then-AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
took the stage, the stadium was largely empty.</p><p class="p1">The plan had been for labor marchers to set out, led by
Harley-riding Machinists, be met by feeder marches from University of
Washington and Seattle Central Community College, and proceed to the
Convention Center where the WTO meeting was to be held. But outside the
stadium, careful plans melted into organized chaos as contingents of
Tibetan monks, topless women protesters, French farmers, church groups
and students crammed in next to groups of union members in matching
colored ponchos.</p><p class="p1">And as the slow-moving march neared the Convention Center,
the streets they expected to pass through there were still occupied,
full of demonstrators linking arms and blocking intersections. Concerned
that the labor march would disintegrate or be exposed to tear gas, the
decision was made to turn the march several blocks shy of the planned
route. Brian McWilliams, then president of the ILWU, remembers it as a
pivotal moment.</p><p class="p1">“At the front there was a huge mass of people determined
to intervene with what was going on outside the Convention Center,”
McWilliams recalls. “I think it was a huge mistake not to go forward,
because we were all of singular mind about interfering with the
blueprint the WTO had for workers and business and the world, and we
needed to take it straight to the convention center.”</p><p class="p1">As Machinists in orange parade marshal hats struggled
mightily to turn the march around, individual labor union members made
their own decision. Others stood in the street and caucused with fellow
members. Maybe a third of the marchers kept going, and were greeted with
cheers like reinforcing cavalry when they arrived at occupied
intersections.</p><p class="p1">Union steelworker Erv Schleufer is one of those who kept
going. Now retired, in 1999 he was a participant in a bitter
strike-lockout at the Kaiser aluminum smelter in Spokane and had
traveled the West as a union “road warrior” speaking about their
struggle.</p><p class="p1">“We had spent all those months and tens of thousands of
miles preparing for this,” Schleufer says. “I started thinking about my
history teacher in high school.… I realized this was becoming a moment
in history.”</p><p class="p1">While Schleufer and thousands of other labor marchers
lingered with the occupiers for an hour or two, police held back from
further attempts to clear the streets. As unionists left, the police
moved back in forcefully. As night fell, Seattle mayor Paul Schell
declared a curfew and police pushed the remaining protesters out of
downtown into the Capital Hill neighborhood.</p>
<h2 class="p1">Police crackdown</h2><p class="p1">Further protests had been planned throughout the WTO
summit. But now the mayor declared a huge area of downtown Seattle a
“protest free zone,” in violation of the U.S. Constitution. On the
morning of Wednesday, Dec. 1, National Guard members stood watch near
the Convention Center. Squads of police in riot gear zoomed through the
streets in armored personal carriers on the lookout for protesters.
Groups of protesters who entered downtown were subject to mass arrests.
Over 500 were arrested, put on buses, taken to Sand Point Naval Base,
and later transferred to King County Jail, where they were held until
the end of the WTO summit. Unable to assemble near the Convention
Center, protesters and community members surrounded the jail demanding
their release. Contingents of unionists brought food and supplies to the
jailhouse vigil, which continued for days.</p><p class="p1">In the afternoon on Dec. 1, the USW led hundreds on a
march to the Seattle waterfront, outside the protest-free zone. When the
rally there ended, activists pleaded for unionists to enter downtown
and defy the ban. Schleufer and others marched into downtown and soon
felt the shock of police concussion grenades and the sting of tear gas.
“We could see canisters flipping through the air, and people running
from the gas. I lost about half my vision and had a hard time
breathing,” he said.</p><p class="p1">On Dec. 3, the final day of the WTO meeting, the King
County Labor Council was ready to defy the “protest-free” zone. With
marshals holding ropes to mark the perimeter of the march, unionists and
allies marched into downtown … and were left alone by police.</p><p class="p1">Meanwhile, local labor leaders had pushed for jailed
protesters to be released. McWilliams, the ILWU president, threatened to
shut down the port again if the mayor didn’t release them. The mayor
relented.</p>
<h2 class="p1">The WTO talks collapse</h2><p class="p1">Lori Wallach, then and now the leader of Global Trade
Watch, spent much of that week inside the WTO meeting, lobbying foreign
trade ministers as a credentialed observer. Wallach says leading up to
the summit, there’d already been tensions among trade negotiators. The
United States and some other developed countries were pressuring poor
nations to agree to things like stricter pharmaceutical monopolies, and
arrogantly dismissed the proposals of African and Latin American
nations. What brought the situation inside to a boil was the existence
of invitation-only “green rooms,” where delegates from the “important”
nations met for long hours to hash out a final deal they expected the
rest of the nations to approve.</p><p class="p1">“Because of that there were extended periods of time where
there would be a whole set of delegates from Africa, Latin America, the
Caribbean, basically left in the halls watching the protests on big TVs
hung in the halls,” Wallach said. “They’d come all this way and now
they were being left out of the negotiations, watching these American
protesters being beaten up and tear gassed.”</p><p class="p1">“The passion and commitment displayed in those protests
was the last special ingredient to tip over the edge a process that was
already seen as illegitimate and not in the interests of a lot of the
member countries.”</p><p class="p1">On the final day of the summit, the WTO announced that the
meeting had failed: Delegates were unable to agree on the terms of a
new global deal.</p>
<h2 class="p1">The aftermath</h2><p class="p1">Exhilarated by the Battle in Seattle,
anti-corporate-globalization activists tried to recreate that success at
other international summits, but with less success. The WTO held its
next meeting in 2001 in Doha, Qatar, a Gulf State monarchy where visa
restrictions prevented a recurrence of protest. After the 9/11 attacks,
the anti-WTO activist movement subsided. But the political stigma of the
WTO persisted.</p><p class="p1">“The WTO never recovered from its crisis of legitimacy,”
Wallach says. Negotiations continued for 15 years, but never resulted in
a new agreement.</p><p class="p1">Now, even the WTO’s trade dispute process is grinding to a
halt. When two member nations can’t resolve a trade dispute, it’s
supposed to be decided by a three-judge panel selected from a
seven-member WTO court of appeals. But as their terms expire, the Trump
administration has been unilaterally blocking the appointment of new
judges. The body is down to just three members, the minimum needed to hear
a case. On Dec. 9, the terms of two more judges will expire, at which
point the WTO will be incapable of hearing appeals, and thus no have way
to enforce its rules.</p></div><div style="text-align: center;" class="">======</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/11/20/opinion/they-called-us-flat-earthers-we-were-right/" class="">https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/11/20/opinion/they-called-us-flat-earthers-we-were-right/</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><h1 class=" | font_secondary bold padding_top
margin_bottom headline margin_horizontal_0--mobile
">They called us ‘flat-earthers.’ But we were right</h1><h2 class=" font_secondary subheader gutter_20_0--mobile | margin_bottom
"></h2><div class="container row--desktop row--tablet
flex gutter_20_0--mobile byline | margin_vertical column--mobile"><div class="authors | margin_right"><span class="label | bold margin_right_3 font_primary">By</span><span class="align_items_center author | bold margin_right_3 font_primary"><span class="bold"> Chas Walker</span><span class="| separator bold"></span></span><span class="| affiliation color_gray font_primary">,</span><span class="margin_right_3"></span><span class="inline_block | datetime container"><span class="font_primary | color_gray date">Updated November 20, 2019, </span><span class=" time margin_right color_gray font_primary
|">12:00 p.m.</span></span></div></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class="lead | border_box gutter_16--desktop gutter_16--tablet relative"><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render">Twenty years ago, I was among tens of
thousands of people who took to the streets of Seattle to protest the
unfairness of the global economy during the meeting of the World Trade
Organization (WTO). We were scorned as violent and ridiculed as naive —
but we were right.</span></p><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">The WTO protests took place as the economic upheavals and US
manufacturing job losses of the previous two decades were intensifying —
and almost exactly six years after the bipartisan approval of the NAFTA
free trade agreement. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/people-vs-wto/" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">An editorial in </a><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/people-vs-wto/" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px"></a><i class="">The Nation</i>
on the eve of the protests warned that, with the 2000 Presidential
election approaching, “the vacuum of progressive leadership” on trade
could leave the field to right-winger Patrick Buchanan’s “nationalist
demagogy,” allowing him to use the issue as “a perfect example of how
both parties abandon workers.” In the 2016 election, the singer might
have changed, but the song was the same.</p></div><div class="body gutter_16--desktop gutter_16--tablet
|"><div class="column arc_ad float_clear border_none border_box margin_vertical_40 container | text_align_center color_gray background_transparent width_full ad_position_ad_clinarticle1" id="ad_position_ad_clinarticle1"><p class="font_primary font_size_11">That November morning in Seattle, I
felt both fear and resolve as a group of friends and I chained our arms
together through heavy pipes and sat down in the street, knowing that
across the city hundreds of others — who like us had been trained in
nonviolent civil disobedience — were doing the same in a coordinated
effort to block key intersections in a wide ring around downtown and
prevent the WTO from meeting.</p></div><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render">As we held our intersection,
thousands of people — including union members and environmental
activists soon dubbed the alliance of Teamsters and Turtles — marched
past us; some estimates put the crowd at 50,000. There were
stilt-walkers, drummers, and puppeteers creating a vibrant spectacle as
people sang, chanted, and carried banners proclaiming loudly that
another world was both possible and necessary. The WTO was not the
source of all of the world’s problems, but it became a flashpoint in the
fight over an economy ruled by corporations and billionaires who raced
around the world in search of cheaper labor and weaker environmental
regulations — a global race to the bottom.</span></p><div class="column arc_ad float_clear ad_position_ad_clinarticle2 border_none border_box margin_vertical_40 container | text_align_center color_gray background_transparent width_full" id="ad_position_ad_clinarticle2"><p class="font_primary font_size_11">In the middle of downtown, a group of
black-clad anarchists began smashing windows and vandalizing corporate
storefronts; police in riot gear responded by firing rubber bullets,
tear gas, and concussion grenades into the crowd. The television cameras
swarmed, and the “Battle in Seattle” was underway — with a strict
curfew, a dystopic “No Protest Zone,” the National Guard, and hundreds
of arrests and injuries to follow. Debates swirled within the movement
as to whether the property destruction had overshadowed our message or
drawn attention to it — and given the way that the news cycle works,
both were probably true.</p></div><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">Some commentators called us “violent,” and used the property
destruction by some to try to delegitimize the message of the many.
Others told us that we were naive and idealistic, that there was no
alternative to unfettered capitalism — hadn’t we gotten the memo? <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/01/opinion/foreign-affairs-senseless-in-seattle.html" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">In a column on Dec. 1, 1999</a>,
that typified this view, Thomas Friedman called us “a Noah’s ark of
flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions, and yuppies looking
for their 1960s fix,” and advised us that instead of protesting we
should use “the power of trade” to achieve our aims. Free trade, they
promised, would lead to improvements in the world’s living standards,
labor standards, and environment.</p><div class="column arc_ad float_clear border_none border_box margin_vertical_40 container | text_align_center color_gray background_transparent width_full ad_position_ad_clinarticle3" id="ad_position_ad_clinarticle3"><p class="font_primary font_size_11">Two decades later, it’s clear that they were the ones being
idealists. The problems that the Seattle protesters highlighted haven’t
been fixed — they’ve gotten worse. The examples are numerous: the Rana
Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000
people laboring in the supply chain of retailers like Wal-Mart; the
poisoning of Flint, Mich.’s, water supply five years ago and the
system’s continued disrepair; the wildfires ravaging California, while
its privately-run power grid collapses; the fact that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest-americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study-finds/#593bcc683cf8" class="" target="_self" style="font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.5px;">three billionaires control more wealth than half of the country</a>, with <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/11/that-was-typo-the-median-net-worth-black-bostonians-really/ze5kxC1jJelx24M3pugFFN/story.html?p1=Article_Inline_Text_Link" class="" target="_self" style="font-size: inherit; letter-spacing: 0.5px;">one report</a> showing that the median net worth of Boston’s black families $8; and on and on.</p></div><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render">These disasters are not bugs. They are
features of an economy whose primary function is to generate profits
for those at the top rather than meet the needs of humanity. The market
searches for efficiencies and shortcuts; real people suffer as a
consequence, with the damage falling especially hard on black and brown
people both in the US and around the world. Thankfully, real people also
fight back. Popular movements did not begin in the streets of Seattle
in 1999, but in many important ways the WTO protests were a precursor to
today’s resurgent fights over economic injustice and climate change in
the United States. People are fed up, and they are rising up.</span></p><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render">In 2011, Occupy Wall Street arrived
with a call to unite the 99%, after the economic recovery from the 2009
recession helped the rich but not the rest of us. Occupy dramatically
shifted the conversation about inequality in our society; on its heels,
fast food workers organizing through the #FightFor15 — led by many
courageous workers of color — delivered a shot in the arm to the labor
movement, bringing new energy and a renewed sense of mission and
possibility. The 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Union’s strike was an inspiring
example that was followed within a few years by teachers in West
Virginia and elsewhere — including Dedham, where teachers just proved in
October that a strike is only illegal if you lose.</span></p><div class="column arc_ad ad_position_ad_clinarticle4 float_clear border_none border_box margin_vertical_40 container | text_align_center color_gray background_transparent width_full" id="ad_position_ad_clinarticle4"><p class="font_primary font_size_11"></p></div><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">It’s not just teachers — health care workers,
telecommunications workers, grocery store workers, autoworkers, and
thousands of others have walked off the job in recent years. A sick-out
by air traffic controllers at key airports ended the government shutdown
in early 2019. Although union density remains low, <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2019/20-major-work-stoppages-in-2018-involving-485000-workers.htm" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">2018 saw nearly 500,000 workers on strike in the US, the highest number since 1986</a>,
and the strike wave shows no signs of slowing down. Workers have grown
more militant about the injustices they face and more confident in their
power to change them, and per <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/265916/labor-day-turns-125-union-approval-near-year-high.aspx" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">a recent Gallup poll</a>, unions enjoy more popular support today than they have in almost 50 years.</p><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">Similarly, given the intensifying nature of the climate
crisis, present-day environmental movements are changing both the terms
of the debate and our understanding of our own power to do something
about it. Until recently, climate change policy debates were often
confined to market-based ideas like cap-and-trade. People were counseled
that the only thing we could do was to change our individual consumer
behavior — a strategy that lets industry off the hook for its dominant
role in pollution (best exemplified, perhaps, by a <a href="https://twitter.com/BP_plc/status/1186645440621531136?s=20" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">Twitter ad campaign about measuring your personal carbon footprint</a> from BP, the company responsible for <a href="https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/deepwater-horizon-bp-gulf-mexico-oil-spill" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">the largest oceanic oil spill in world history</a>).</p><div class="column arc_ad float_clear border_none border_box margin_vertical_40 container | text_align_center ad_position_ad_clinarticle5 color_gray background_transparent width_full" id="ad_position_ad_clinarticle5"><p class="font_primary font_size_11"></p></div><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">Not content with these limited approaches, social movements
are growing bolder in both their demands and their actions. Protests
over the Keystone XL pipeline included civil disobedience; thousands of
Standing Rock Water Protectors laid their bodies on the line to prevent
the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 (and faced a <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/11/27/devotion-despair-fill-teeming-north-dakota-camp/LLGXoU1BzX4WxINxWabDeJ/story.html?p1=Article_Facet_Related_Article&p1=Article_Inline_Text_Link" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">brutal response from police and the National Guard</a>, and later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/wave-of-new-laws-aim-to-stifle-anti-pipeline-protests-activists-say" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">state laws that criminalized such protests</a>).
Direct action tactics by young people of the Sunrise Movement and the
Global Climate Strike have pushed big picture policies like the Green
New Deal into the center of the debate. These movements are smartly
connecting the fight over climate change to questions of human dignity,
racial justice, jobs and economic inequality, native sovereignty, and
immigrant and refugee rights.</p><p class="
paragraph gutter_20_0
|">With economic inequality at record highs, and <a href="https://www3.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2019/10/29/scientists-triple-their-estimates-number-people-threatened-rising-seas/KGHT1NMDE6ePV1jN3SvIzI/story.html?arc404=true&p1=Article_Inline_Text_Link" class="" target="_self" style="color:auto;font-size:inherit;letter-spacing:.5px">sea levels poised to be</a>, our world is in a profound crisis. Today’s social movements are crying out that something fundamental must be done about <i class="">all of it.</i>
Their renewed militancy and confrontational tactics, going beyond the
boundaries of what has traditionally been considered “civil discourse,”
will surely make some people uncomfortable. Good. That’s the point.</p><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render">Twenty years ago, those at the top
ignored and dismissed us; humanity cannot afford for them to do so any
longer. Millions of ordinary people are fighting back with courage and
determination, and we should join them — before it’s too late.</span></p><p class=" paragraph gutter_20_0
|"><span class="html-render"><i class="">Chas Walker is a long-time community and labor organizer who lives in Dorchester. Follow him on Twitter @chasbwalker.</i></span></p></div></div><br class=""><div class="">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; " class=""><div class="">Arthur Stamoulis</div><div class="">Citizens Trade Campaign</div><div class="">(202) 494-8826</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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