An eerie half-calm, enforced by marching columns of police and troops in full-body armor, settled over downtown Seattle today. Street corners that had been scenes of dramatic confrontation yesterday saw small-scale, unthreatening protests this morning and early afternoon, as demonstrators, trade delegates, journalists, and everyone else in this stunned city got down to the important business: trying to make sense of yesterday’s vast confrontations. What did it mean that Seattle, the mellow upper-left-hand corner of the richest nation on earth, had seen perhaps the most confrontational political demonstrations since the end of the Vietnam war?

What a gas.

Photo: World Trade Observer.

This correspondent would like to make a few factual points, on the theory that this will prove to be an historic moment in American progressive political history, one that’s already being misrepresented by the images and words that float across the tube. My biases have been made clear already: The idea of standing up to the endless globalization of economy and culture strikes me as powerfully sane. Add to that the fact that I got several lungfuls of pepper spray yesterday, which may explain some of my passion. On the other hand, the tears that spray produced may have cleared my vision in helpful ways. And so to work:

Misconception #1 — There were not two groups of protesters on hand here yesterday, a “good” group of lawful union members who held a parade and listened to speeches, and a “bad” group of violent protesters. There was also a third group, several thousand strong, and these were in many ways the most important.

The AFL-CIO march was, as everyone described, peaceful and pragmatic, though more militant than Al Gore wants to see. And there was a band of anarchists — perhaps 100 strong, many of them from a Eugene, Ore., collective — who did break plate-glass shop windows, set a fire in a dumpster, and spray the anarchist A all over the place.

But the third group were the ones who did most of the marching yesterday morning, took most of the chances, and received almost all of the punishment. They represented all the environmental and human rights causes that see the globalization represented by the WTO as a crushing weight. In the long run, they present far more problems for Clinton and other leaders than the unionists: you can compromise with organized labor, but you have to decide if your food is going to be genetically modified or not, if a free Tibet is important to you or not, if you’re willing to make real sacrifices to deal with global warming. Their issues are still marginal politically, but they grow in importance quickly. Just ask Tony Blair, who a year ago was as oblivious to the issue of GM crops as Bill Clinton is today, but who now sounds like some hippie Oregon organic grower whenever he opens his mouth.

Storm troopers taking over?

Photo: World Trade Observer.

And this week’s events will do nothing to moderate this third group. Yesterday morning they gathered in affinity groups at two spots on the edge of downtown, and then they marched toward the convention center. When they got to the edges of police lines, they sat down in intersections. They were totally nonviolent, remarkably good-humored, and they broke nary a window; indeed, they formed flying squads of their own to try and calm the few dozen black-clad anarchists who had come along for the fun. So when the police attacked them at 9:55 yesterday morning at the corner of 6th and Union, they were breaking only the laws about blocking intersections. Though they had carefully prepared to be arrested, the police did not even try to take them away to jail. They simply started spraying gas and firing rubber bullets and trying to provoke a stampede.

Which leads to Misconception #2: The police here did not respond with proportional force. Seattle is so used to thinking of itself as a calm and happy place that people here are stunned and a little defensive about what happened yesterday. The front page of the local paper this morning shows a gas-masked, shielded cop firing tear gas canisters at point blank range on a group of seated demonstrators.

Not on a group of window-smashing vandals. Those few thugs were left completely alone by the police, who could not pursue them because they were too busy keeping open roadways. A police spokesperson went on the radio to explain that the pepper spray his officers were using was a “natural compound,” not some gauche synthetic like tear gas. And the mayor said “the lack of serious injuries” proved that his men had used restraint. But they hadn’t — they’d just used gas. And in doing so, they’d done plenty of injury to the psyche of this place. Longtime residents were calling in the talk shows today to say they couldn’t quite believe it, that it didn’t seem like the Seattle they’d grown up in.

These things matter. Who fired first, and for what reason, has been a question in every American battle since Lexington. This time there were a lot of camcorders on hand; check the web to see for yourself.

But don’t get completely bogged down in the details. There’s still Misconception #3: No matter what the pundits say, this week’s street demonstrations do in fact matter, matter deeply. For over a year, Clinton, the most astute political weathervane the presidency has ever seen, could sense that the winds were starting to blow against him on trade. He came here today talking about the need to open up the WTO, to change its ways of doing business.

That won’t happen, because if it did the whole operation would grind to a halt. If every decision — is it a restraint of trade to care about sea turtles? — were carried out in full public view, people simply wouldn’t stand for the kinds of decisions the WTO makes, always in favor of corporate interests. That’s why they made it a secret court to begin with.

But it does mean that the new agenda will be dominated by issues like “transparency.” Even if the delegates here are able to inaugurate a new round of talks, and if the administration is able to squeeze Congress to admit China, the deliberations of the body will still be increasingly centered on the sorts of questions activists raised here. That won’t be enough to save sea turtles or anything else — the rise of international hyperconsumerism will continue — but the WTO’s ability to smooth that process will diminish, and the wedges for opening debates will increase.

You can tell by the shrillness of some of the reaction just how much difference this week’s protests will make. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and leading acolyte at the Church of the Transnational, called the demonstrations a circus and the demonstrators clowns. Not true. They were serious to the point of earnestness, and willing to lay their bodies on the line. They came to Seattle this week vowing no more business as usual, and despite all the spinning from the mayor to the president, I think they’ve done it.

The metaphor is irresistible. Between 8 and 10 this morning in downtown Seattle, the protesters owned the streets. Later in the day, they vied with police, back and forth; but as the day began the cops were back inside their perimeters, and the few thousand drumming, singing demonstrators were firmly in control. And so, as delegates began to arrive for the opening session of the WTO summit, they found the usual order of things completely reversed.

Hey hey, ho ho, WTO has got to go.

Photo: Lisa Hymas.

These people — elites from almost every nation on the planet — couldn’t get through the cordon of linked-arm demonstrators blocking every intersection and entrance. When they tried, they were politely refused: “The WTO is closed today.” A platinum card didn’t help, nor an official title, nor the self-assured manner of those born to power. People beating on drums, people dressed like butterflies, simply turned them away.

The delegates huddled in small knots along the street, easy to pick out by their clothes: They were the ones in suits, ties, dresses, not the ones in ponchos, war paint, bandanas. They couldn’t get where they were going, they couldn’t do their work, and they couldn’t quite believe it. A few of them panicked. “Protect us at once,” a man demanded of a police officer at the edge of the crowd, and indeed he was hustled away in a police car. But most of them just stood, bewildered or bemused, and eventually drifted away.

They’ll be back tomorrow, of course, and they’ll eventually have their meeting. However, and it’s a big however, the era when global trade decisions get made without anyone noticing is officially over. That’s the metaphor this day provides: In just the same way that activists managed to shut down the work of this summit, so too activists around the globe are learning to use the Internet and many other tools to slow down and confuse the rush to globalization.

Late last week, American agricultural organizations warned U.S. farmers not to plant genetically modified crops next spring, for fear they’d have no markets; they have no markets because the very same people who were marching through Seattle today have managed to convince most Europeans to demand actual food. It’s a different world. At least a little different, anyway.

At 10 a.m., the regular order tried to reassert its authority. The police had grown tired of people blocking the intersection of Union and 6th. And so they converged from two sides. From behind, looking Vaderish in black ponchos and gas masks, they shot tear gas and rubber bullets. From in front, looking storm trooperish in riot visors and full body armors, they wielded batons. People retreated before the charge — one of the few uses of serious force against unarmed, peaceful civil disobedients in recent American history.

A small tank rolled in to claim the corner. But the police were left with an intersection and not much more. Delegates couldn’t make it through the clouds of pepper spray which lingered in the air, burning eyes and filling lungs. And before long the protestors were back, this time with arms chained through PVC pipe. And that was just one intersection; there were half a dozen other corners where the same kind of battle was underway.

A few bands of balaclava-clad anarchists did circulate up and down the street, causing mild mayhem: broken windows here and there. But most of the crowd was peaceful, brave, and remarkably upbeat even after the police charges. There was little anger, and little fear — and a wave of good feeling when word began to spread that indeed the few delegates who had gotten through to the convention center were packing up and going home for the day.

Spreading their message.

Photo: Lisa Hymas.

Posters and t-shirts celebrated a hundred related causes: The redwood groves of northern California, the people of Tibet, the sea turtles whose slaughter the WTO had officially condoned, the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas, the Industrial Workers of the World. “Eat Local Organic Food,” “Stop Nigerian Genocide,” “Visualize a World Full of Soul-Sucking Parasites,” and best of all, “Wake Up, Muggles!”

Easy enough to dismiss them as a disparate group of unlikely campaigns, but easier still to see how they fit together — to sense a celebration of the local, the particular, the magic, the democratic, here in the shadow of a giant Niketown, a glass headquarters for sweatshop wages and homogenized taste. As corporations and bureaucracies get bigger, they simultaneously get more powerful and more vulnerable. That’s the gut feeling I’ll take home from the pepper-sprayed streets of Seattle. Here’s a way to understand what I mean: Ask yourself what city is going to volunteer to host the next meeting of the WTO.

I talked to a delegate from Jamaica early this morning, in the hours when the police had vanished, leaving them alone to face the demonstrators. He was on the steps of the Sheraton, where a line of singing young people had blocked his access. What do you make of it all, I asked him. He thought for a minute, thought hard, groped for a word, then for another. “I find it very interesting,” he finally said. Exactly right, I thought. The world is a more interesting place than it was yesterday.

In the USA today, according to USA Today, the holiday shopping season opened with a 6.4 percent jump in sales from last year. The Labor Department reported that personal income rose at the fastest pace in more than five years last month. Donald Trump vowed to spend $100 million of his own money if he ran for president (“very few other people can do that,” he pointed out cheerfully). The Exxon-Mobil merger is set to win government approval. The NASDAQ is up 57 percent so far this year. Amazon.com set a single day sales volume record last week. And Continental Airlines is upgrading it first class menu to include “hot shrimp and cheese on a rustic roll.”

Sea turtles stick their necks out in the Seattle streets.

Photo: Lisa Hymas.

You can forgive the powers that be for wondering why on earth the cold, rainy streets of Seattle are thronged with people protesting the ministerial summit of the World Trade Organization — people with buttons reading “No Patents on Life,” people dressed as sea turtles, people carrying signs demanding “Abolish Interest Rates.” If it’s the economy, stupid, why would anyone be complaining? Where on earth did these people come from, these people who seem unimpressed by the one unarguable achievement of the Clinton administration, its seven solid years of economic expansion? And the answer to that question is an interesting one: They came from out of thin air, really.

Four years ago, Sierra Club Books published an anthology of essays edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy, and For a Turn Toward the Local. The writers and activists whose work dominated that volume dominate this movement still: Vandana Shiva, the Indian treehugger; Richard Grossman, David Morris, Herman Daly, Wolfgang Sachs, David Korten, Satish Kumar, a dozen more. Their essays, and the mounting swirl of activism that accompanied them, have built a movement pretty much from nowhere — a movement less of the actively oppressed than of the analytical.

If you can track it down, find a copy of the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto cobbled together by Tom Hayden and a few others at a Michigan meeting that marked the dawn of the New Left in the early 1960s. When we think of the ’60s, we think of the great protests over civil rights and Vietnam, but student radicalism, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in particular, really started with an analysis of the stifling “multiversity,” with the realization that the prosperous children of the Eisenhower administration were being trained for a life of conformity with no higher goals or sweeter aspirations. And if you read Hayden et al, then you’ll have some sense of where the anti-globalization movement comes from, for it’s not so different.

It’s Helena Norberg-Hodge, watching the advance of Westernization in the Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh: “surprisingly, perhaps, modernization is leading to a loss of individuality … [before], as part of a close-knit community, people felt secure enough to be themselves.” It’s Mander, describing the introduction of television to Inuit villages in the Northwest territories: “Now the children want all kinds of new cars; yet most of the communities have no roads; TV makes it seem like the young people are all that’s important, and the old have nothing to say.” It’s Wendell Berry, the great Kentucky essayist and farmer, mourning the loss of American rural communities: “as we now begin to see, you cannot have a post-agricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, and postnatural — in other words it will be post-human, contrary to the best we have meant by humanity.”

Enviros and labor are in union at a protest.

Photo: Lisa Hymas.

There was plenty of hard argument in The Case Against the Global Economy, too. It tended to be environmental; to point out that our demands were increasingly exceeding the ability of the planet to produce resources and remove waste. But it was an equally comprehensive argument, one that allowed for no small compromises and minor reforms. In the words of Wolfgang Sachs, the task was not to increase efficiency or pass more stringent regulations; it was to “design cultural and political limits to development” before growth overwhelmed the planet.

Most of these people are in Seattle this week, and the protests reflect some of their thinking. But — as with the New Left — many others have jumped aboard, clouding the message. The labor movement in particular has begun to arrive in some force: men and women in windbreakers with the Steelworkers logo, or the Autoworkers, or the Longshoremen. But these weren’t Wobblies, the labor revolutionaries who made the Northwest their headquarters in the early days of the century. These were solidly middle-class trade unionists, whose banners read “Unfair Trade Destroys American Jobs.” Which is a particularly sensible slogan, and one that Al Gore is doubtless worried about — but one you can bargain with. It’s not the Port Huron Statement.

Standing next to a group of steelworkers, I saw a young woman with a t-shirt that said: “Buy Less, Work Less, Stop the WTO.” She was shouting especially loud as the march wound past the Levi’s Superstore, past Planet Hollywood. Like the writers in that Sierra Club book, she had a deeply different idea — one that has less to do with the USA today, but one that might be more threatening in the longest run.

Jos&eacute Bov&eacute takes on Seattle.

Courtesy of World Trade Observer.

If those two strands came together at all, it was during a late afternoon protest outside a downtown McDonald’s. French farmer Jos&eacute Bov&eacute, who had used his tractor to dismantle a Gallic Golden Arches, stood on top of a bus with an Indian farmer and an American. They spoke briefly about the destruction of local agriculture — about the destruction of a way of life. And then they broke bread, and passed samples of French Roquefort through the crowd that crammed the intersection.

It’s true that there was a band on one edge of the crowd assembled under a Vegan Resistance banner, who looked aghast at the thought of cheese. And it’s true that some organizer jumped up next to the farmers to demand the incredible concession that Starbucks start stocking “fair trade coffee.” But it’s also true that the farmers carried the day. People were nearly giddy with the good taste, and the good feeling; with the idea, embodied by those three farmers, that there really was something more to life.

For twenty years, the fight to globalize the world’s economy has been a rout. The largest transnational corporations expanded their power in every direction — Japanese conglomerates cut down forests across the tropics; American grain companies dictated the price of food; Baywatch found a billion viewers a week.

But that rout has suddenly turned into a contest, which is why the “ministerial summit” of the World Trade Organization will turn Seattle into the most important place on earth the week after Thanksgiving. It will be a battle zone — literally, as nonviolent protesters try to disrupt the work of the summit, but also intellectually. The two ideas that could define the next century will be on display.

One of those ideas — globalization — has been gathering force since World War II. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was periodically renegotiated to smooth the transactions of a growing international economy. In 1995, though, it took a quantum leap: The GATT agreement was transformed into the WTO, an actual decision-making body that, among other things, can enforce its rules by overriding the laws of its member nations. Bill Clinton provided the key final push for the WTO, persuading just enough congressional Democrats to ignore protests from labor and environmental groups to allow its passage. It became the cornerstone of his achievements in office, the permanent emblem of the economic boom that marked his two terms.

The other idea is harder to define. Opposition to the “new world order” comes from many quarters, including the buggy Buchanan right, but its most powerful voices are raised in defense of the local — local workers, local environments, local cultures, local economies. Its leaders come from around the world, south as well as north. They worry about erosion — of soil, of tradition, of the ability to feed a family. They care less about economic growth than about economic justice.

It’s easier to understand them when you look at their two recent victories. The first is their success in blunting the drive toward genetically engineered food. In the space of just a few growing seasons, Monsanto and other seed companies seemed well on the way to dramatically altering the agricultural systems that have slowly evolved for the past 10 millennia. This spring, nearly half the corn and soy planted across the Midwest were genetically altered varieties.

But this spring something went wrong. Consumers across Europe suddenly woke to the fact that this exotic technology was taking over their refrigerators, and led by a small number of environmental campaigners, they said no. Within weeks, Britain’s big supermarkets were pledging never to sell GM foods, and buying up tropical isles so they could guarantee a supply of unmodified bananas; within weeks after that, American farmers were worrying about where they’d sell their crops. Environmentalists, meanwhile, woke up to the threat when a study showed that pollen from the altered corn killed monarch butterflies, something Monsanto hadn’t bothered to test.

This sudden backlash, though, didn’t come out of nowhere. It built upon years of organizing, especially across the poor world, where peasant farmers and their advocates had long resisted seed-patenting, agribusiness takeover of land, and the other tools of this new agricultural economy. Now Monsanto and its allies plan vast ad campaigns to smooth the troubled waters, but it may be too late for them.

A year earlier, and with less publicity in this country, campaigners managed to derail an expansion of the WTO called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment that would, in essence, have prohibited nations from restricting international investments in their nations. Developing countries would have lost control of economic policies as surely as they have lost control of trade rights. Financial markets, by pulling vast amounts of money from small nations if they don’t do what Wall Street wants, already exert enormous control — but the MAI would have made that de facto power into a legal right, would have cemented into place the current power balances.

Cases like the MAI are hard to explain; much simpler are the WTO rulings that have overturned environmental or labor laws. So expect to read a lot in the papers about, say, shrimp — the WTO recently ruled that the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which required special devices on shrimp trawlers to guard against killing sea turtles, was illegal. U.S. law will have to bend; trade is mightier than turtles any day.

But the real issues — and the real stakes — are much larger. The real reason turtles are threatened is because globalizing trade has built up enormous fleets of industrial shrimp boats, that kill off not only turtles but the millions of fisherfolk in dories that have sustainably harvested shrimp for thousands of years.

Those who favor greater globalization, Pres. Clinton chief among them, will try and propose little remedies around the edges. A side agreement to calm those hotheaded environmentalists, some codicil to soothe big labor so it will stop complaining about admitting China to the WTO. “Every group in the world with an ax to grind is going to Seattle,” he said — to him, the protesters are a cloud of annoying insects to be lulled with citronella or swatted away. They can’t be allowed to interfere with the picnic of endless economic expansion that legitimizes his presidency.

Don’t be fooled, though. Right or wrong — and I think they’re far more right than wrong — the dissidents in Seattle have a fundamentally different idea of how the world should look. The battle is real, and its outcome is not as certain as the powers that be would like.