5 Days In Seattle that Shook The World

LAURIE BROWN

Special Assistant to Mayor Paul Schell

I was brought into the administration because I’d been a union representative and worked on labor-management partnerships. I would be asked to informally mediate various problems—what I call messy human-being stuff. With the WTO, I never had a formal, sanctioned role. I had the confidence of the mayor, who said, Go see what you can do.

I’m 55, and I started as an organizer in my mid-20s. We used to hand out flyers and make phone calls to get people to show up at a demonstration. Now there was a lot on the Internet. There was no way of gauging how many were going to show up, but they hoped to mobilize tens of thousands and shut the WTO down.

I talked to Paul and [Deputy Mayor] Maud [Daudon] and said, You do know, don’t you, that while labor leaders say they intend to honor their agreements, there’s a lot of people out there who don’t know who those leaders are and don’t give a rip about what discussions have been going on in the mayor’s conference room? And they plan to do everything they can to stop this thing.

BRIAN DERDOWSKI

King County Council

I’d had a staff person research this thing for months, and I was aware of the depth of the opposition and how it was being organized, and I pointed this out to my colleagues.

The response that I got from one councilmember was that this was fringe craziness, LaRouche type stuff. The local political establishment couldn’t imagine that 50,000 people just like them would go out into the streets.

JIM PUGEL

Seattle Police

There was some confusion about how far we could go gathering information based on political or religious ideology. We were working with the Investigation Ordinance of 1981. The World Wide Web was relatively new at that time, and we weren’t sure what we could collect on it. We weren’t sure if looking at websites was sneaking or investigation. We asked our lawyers and didn’t get a clear answer. The old law had not caught up with the new technology.

JOHN SELLERS

Executive Director, Ruckus Society

The Oakland-based Ruckus Society provides training and support to progressive activists.

A month or two earlier Ruckus rented a warehouse in Lynnwood where we made probably four or five hundred lockboxes—basically plastic and metal tubes people would chain their arms in, and then others would chain their arms in the other side. It was like a sit-in with steel reinforcements. Not so scary as they like to make it sound.

And we were coordinating different actions; we called them framing actions. We knew that once tens of thousands of people got into the streets, message control and message discipline would be very hard to keep. So we wanted to start the actions early and often, to frame it, so the message wouldn’t get lost. A week before the conference, we did a banner hang at Old Navy around sweatshops, using some of our student trainers. I was hanging the bottom of it when all of a sudden this Seattle Police captain pulls up and I say, Whoa, it’s kind of unusual to get a captain this early in an action. We’d heard the Seattle Police Department had been doing these war games and that one officer had gotten his shoulder broken or something, and I wondered just what they were preparing for.

Captain Jim Pugel came out, and I went up and said, Hey, man, I just want to meet you and want you to put a face to who we are and to let you know we’re going to be as disciplined as possible, we’re going to adhere to the principles of nonviolence, it’s a deep part of our ethic.

And he said, “You know, we’ve gotten reports from the feds. They say the Seattle Police Department could lose two to three officers during the WTO.” I said, What do you mean you’re going to lose two to three officers? Are they going to go to Tacoma and take a wrong turn?

Pages:123456789101112131415161718192021

Published: November 2009