Why Seattle's 1999 Protesters Were Right The WTO demonstrators were the "Occupy" movement of the late-20th century—mocked, maligned, and mostly right.
By Noah Smith
The Atlantic - Jan 6 2014
In 1999, my friend moved to Seattle, where he was hit with rubber
bullets, tear-gassed in the face, and nearly arrested by police. He had
joined the famous protests of the WTO Ministerial Conference, widely
known as the Seattle Protests.
The Occupy Wall Street of their time, they focused on globalization
rather than the excesses of finance. And, quite like the Occupy Wall
Street of their time, they were often mocked by critics as silly,
aimless, and overly hand-wringy about the future.
The organizers were a hodgepodge of groups—unions worried about
competition from cheap foreign labor, environmentalists worried about
the outsourcing of polluting activities, consumer protection groups
worried about unsafe imports, labor rights groups worried about bad
working conditions in other countries, and leftists of various stripes
simply venting their anger at capitalism.
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