FOUR WATERS
Earth First!
Afterward we discovered that law enforcement had gone to other armories, even outside Washington state, and picked up munitions that the chief had no idea they even had, and that they were basically in a rogue way calling their own shots.
That afternoon all hell broke out in Pike’s Place Market. I got teargassed along with the others. I was looking across at a medic trying to help someone who’d been shot with rubber pellets. Everything was full of tear gas and smoke. Everything felt so surreal, it felt very different from what you expect America to be. I say that having gone when I was young to a lot of civil rights protests, and to People’s Park. I lived in Berkeley in the ’60s when it felt very much like a war zone—and this was the way it felt.
BRIAN DERDOWSKI
King County Council
At one point on Wednesday my wife and I went into a building the protesters had rented. They had a place for food, a medical area. All of a sudden we tasted something acidic. The organizers calmly said, “We all have to evacuate again.” Why? “Every so often they blow something into our air system. We just leave and then come back.”
Later there was a KIRO reporter on the radio talking about how the police were spraying rubber bullets indiscriminately on Capitol Hill. We thought, Well, we better head up there. Police stopped us and said we couldn’t go in the area. I ignored that and went around. People said that police would arrive in vans, jump out and shoot, then jump back in and drive off. I said, What you need to do is clear the streets so emergency vehicles can get through and then they’ll have no pretext. And I started to make that happen, and that’s what I did for the next five hours. A couple guys moved out a dumpster they were going to burn, and a couple others I’d recruited pushed it back.
I didn’t know, but it was getting quite a bit of publicity. Pretty soon Maria Cain, a former Bellevue City Councilwoman who worked for me, showed up. Nick Licata showed up, then Judy Nicastro and Peter Steinbrueck, and they said, “What can we do to help?” We decided we needed to call the police chief. We’d all been given his right-hand man’s direct number, but he didn’t return the calls of any of the city councilmembers.
There was a police line in front of the precinct. I thought if everybody just got back on the sidewalk, that would defuse the situation. We managed to get every single person up there except, I think, two. The folks said, “We have a right to demonstrate. We live here!” A lot of them were Capitol Hill people who resented what was going on in their neighborhood. I tried to explain to the sergeant in charge, Hey, guys, if you downplay this a bit, everyone on the street here’s going home. They wouldn’t budge.
Some of the demonstrators went home. About 75 hung around, just sitting in the middle of the street singing Christmas songs. One guy did a kind of a weird circle dance. At one point I turned my back on the police for the first time, and I’ll be darned if they didn’t shoot the tear-gas canisters. Apparently one hit me—I didn’t hardly feel it but my shirt had a bit of blood on it when I got home.
That was the first time I’d ever done anything like that. I was pretty conservative when I was young. During the Vietnam War I never participated in any demonstrations.
That sort of experience gives you a different perspective on things.
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Published: November 2009
Lots of insight in this entertaining story. Good job Eric and team!
You captured the inside story better than most other story I’ve seen. Pretty good ten years after the fact!
Maybe readers will be moved to learn more about how corporate dominated globalism is negatively affecting all of our lives. The corporate dominated WTO is still promoting its agenda of profits over people. These policies are largely responsible for the current global economic crisis that is still unfolding.
Fortunately, a growing world-wide grassroots movement is still at work promoting sustainable economics, democracy, and justice. That movement expressed itself in Seattle ten years ago, however imperfectly. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are all in debt to a relatively small group of people who worked together to change the trajectory of history.
Great work, thanks.
600 people were arrested and jailed during WTO; how many were convicted?
zbz
“we are all in debt to a relatively small group of people”
yes, yes you are — to the same globalist financiers who funded the protestors through foundations only so they could be hung out to dry afterwards as the globalization juggernaut became further insulated. See Soros, George: Open Society.
Good reporting!
I was in the streets that entire week, and the only violence I personally witnessed was from the police. I encourage everyone who cares about what really happened in Seattle that week to read David and Rebecca Solnit’s book which is just days from being released: “The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle”. David was one of many early visionaries in making this event such a huge success.
I’m also thrilled that the ex-police-chief ended up working for the reform of marijuana laws. The existing laws are a disgrace in this so-called democratic society.
Thanks again, Eric Scigliano!
I was in the streets that entire week, and the only violence I personally witnessed was from the police. I encourage everyone who cares about what really happened in Seattle that week to read David and Rebecca Solnit’s book which is just days from being released: “The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle”. David was one of many early visionaries in making this event such a huge success.
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Got some great information here. I think that if more people thought about it that way, theyd have a better time understanding the issue. Your view is definitely something Id like to see more of. Thanks for this blog. Its fantastic and so is what youve got to say.You make a great point.
More than 20 years and we are in the same point, maybe worst in term of unequality of tradings between reach & poors. The crisis haven’t changed the rules…
I’ve seen. Pretty good ten years after the fact!