5 Days In Seattle that Shook The World

JIM PUGEL

It would have happened, I guarantee you, in any city that hosted the WTO. Afterwards I spent two to three days of every month briefing every police department from Boston to Philadelphia, for the 2000 convention, to the FBI Academy. In Washington, DC, they said, “Thank God it happened there, because it could have happened to us.” No one knew this was coming at this level.

It’s remarkable how little damage there was, and a credit to the Seattle Police. As far as I could tell it was a morale boost. Where the patrol officers park their cars there’s a bulletin board for lost-and-found notices—“Lost, keys. Found, ski cap.” I went by about midnight Monday and saw a big sign there, “Found: Pride and Dedication.” I was never more proud to be a Seattleite or a Seattle police officer than I was that week.

The experience further developed the way we patrol and police all types of demonstrations. Some felt after September 11, 2001, that protest was un-American, but Seattle has shown it can protest and exercise free speech, and the Police Department can work with anyone.

Assistant Chief Pugel heads the Seattle Police Investigations Bureau.

JOHN SELLERS

We really challenged corporate power on the streets of Seattle. It was like a Hail Mary moment—we spanked these corporate conquistadors out of town, we drove them from our shores! Since then, trade agreements have been under much more scrutiny. The WTO has been under much more scrutiny. There’s been a significant uptick in global People Power, and great campaigning around it. Ruckus and the Rainforest Action Network were involved in getting Lowe’s and Home Depot, the largest sellers of timber products, to sign historic agreements. After them, we went after some of the biggest banks on earth, got historic agreements from Citi and Chase.

But the movement made a big mistake in determining success or failure on whether they could shut down meetings. The legacy is very strong, and the attraction of trying to run the table like we did in Seattle. The tactical advantage we had there we won’t have again. They’ve been debriefing it ever since, sending Pugel and everyone else on the road.

I had twins on the day Bush was reelected, November 2, 2004. It was a real wake-up call. Having a radical analysis is one thing, but I’ve got a real responsibility living in this country. I’ve been playing electoral politics, building power for the Democratic Party. It’s much more radical to speak to the mainstream in a language they understand.

Sellers married a fellow protester and moved from the Bay Area to Vashon Island. His company Agit-Pop does “online hellraising.” He is now president of the Ruckus Society board.

FOUR WATERS

I don’t do Earth First! work anymore. I do a lot more political organizing—in the belly of the beast, the Democratic Party, and at the grassroots level. It occurred to me a couple years ago that we could save all the trees one at a time. We could even save whole timber harvest plans one at a time. But ultimately, if we didn’t learn how to use the political system, we were going to lose the war.

Waters now operates Four Waters Media in Sacramento.

KATHY SCHWARTZ

After that we lost the 2001 Asian Development Bank meeting. The Treasury Department wanted ironclad guarantees that Seattle would shoulder all expenses, including security, but Seattle officials were so shell-shocked from the WTO that another international meeting was anathema. The ADB moved to Honolulu, where they only had to worry about demonstrations over native sovereignty.

People wonder if it was all millennial madness. I think it had to do with a regrouping of the politics of grievance. After communism collapsed in 1989, activism needed a new ideology to justify itself. Seattle was the perfect battleground: liberal and tolerant and easy on security.

It also made karmic sense. Seattle began the 1990s with the International Convention of Alcoholics Anonymous, 48,000 visitors here to celebrate sobriety, loving our city, loving our coffee, loving life, and sharing that joy. We closed the decade with the worst debacle in our history. In his “Blue Mountain Feng Shui” blog, Shan-Tung Hsu writes that energy travels from continent to continent—from Europe in the nineteenth century to the United States in the twentieth to Asia in the twenty-first. Seattle is the last stop in the continental United States, so maybe the WTO meeting was a fitting farewell to the American century.

Schwartz can’t say what’s going on in the convention biz these days. She retired from the convention bureau in 2003 and never looked back.

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Published: November 2009