Below is an account of the N30 protests I wrote shortly after the tear gas cleared and the WTO left Seattle in disarray. I had come to Seattle a week before the protests to write about it for my website.

November 30, 2008

What lessons can we learn from the shutdown of the 1999 WTO
Ministerial in Seattle 9 years ago today and from the last decade and
a half of global justice organizing as we face today's major crises
under an Obama Administration? This was the question a group of
organizers from different parts of the last decades of global justice
organizing responded to last week at a forum in New York City put
together by Deep Dish TV, an independent video/media pioneer. Here are
my thoughts.

Nine years ago today:

Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 22:53:26 -0500 (EST)
From: ****
Subject: Re: The end of the story from Seattle..

Warning -- this is possibly the longest email I have ever written.

I've been in Seattle since Friday before the big day, leaving tonight... Here are some more parts of the story. I haven't had much chance to follow the media outside Seattle and I would love to know what came across and what didn't. I'm going to get on the internet and check it all out soon.
lw

--

Here is a quick image to get started... I'l post more snippets later.

Roaming the streets on N30. It has been so long I can't remember the name of the intersections anymore.

One of the environmental groups (Greenpeace, perhaps? Or the Humane Society?) brought a giant inflatable killer whale. Huge, perhaps 30' long.

(This article was originally published in the December 1999 issue of UltraViolet, newsletter of LAGAI Queer Insurrection. More recent issues of UV are online at www.lagai.org.)

This article was originally published in the December 1999 issue of UltraViolet, the newsletter of LAGAI - Queer Insurrection (more recent issues are online at www.lagai.org).

Between the protests of the WTO in Seattle (Winter 99) and the protests of the World Bank and IMF that following Spring - Whispered Media produced this short, informative, recruitment piece - SHUT EM DOWN! Enjoy

Shut Em Down - on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq9YFfLof4w

I went to the WTO protests in Seattle in November, 1999 somewhat reluctantly. I had many commitments at home, my stepdaughter was in town that weekend for Thanksgiving, and I had lots of leftover pie to finish. But I knew some of the organizers, old friends from many years of nonviolent direct action campaigns against nuclear weapons, militarism, and other forms of injustice. And I had a posse of friends coming from up and down the West Coast—many of us veterans of those same campaigns going back to the Diablo Canyon blockade in 1981.

It was November 29, 1999, and three friends and I were speeding up Interstate 5 on the way to Seattle for the big protest against the WTO. We had left San Francisco at dawn, hoping to make it before midnight. We had no idea what to expect, but we all had the feeling something big was about to happen, that we were somehow making history. We had not taken part in the previous weeks of direct-action training, but we were eager to join the fray. Shortly after passing through Eugene, I turned to my friend at the wheel, a longtime environmental activist, and asked him why he was going to Seattle.

Over the course of the year leading up to the Seattle WTO Protests in November/December 1999, I was involved in five different groups, each of which had its own founding principles, strategic guidelines and organizational narratives assisting the writing of their respective members into the common story of the unfolding events: mine were the Industrial Workers of the World, Direct Action Network, Workers and Students For a Walkout Network, Seattle Tenant's Union and Seattle Anarchist Response.