Nonfiction
Was Global Trade a Mistake?
Across two new books, the ideal of a global free market buckles under pressure from protesters, politicians of all stripes and the Covid pandemic.
Supported by
ONE WEEK TO CHANGE THE WORLD: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests, by DW Gibson
HOW THE WORLD RAN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Inside the Global Supply Chain, by Peter S. Goodman
On a cold November morning in 1999, Harold Linde, a member of the Rainforest Action Network, was trying to hang an enormous sign from a construction crane hundreds of feet in the air over downtown Seattle. Loosely attached to a rope, he rappelled off the crane, lost control and began to plummet.
Linde might have died, but thanks to the Ruckus Society, a nonprofit that trains activist groups, he knew to rip off his frictionless fleece gloves, grab onto the rope with his bare hands and wait for his colleagues to help him back up. After some spiritual assistance from “a circle of pagan witches on the ground” who were “sending prayers up,” Linde and his friends succeeded in unfurling a 100-pound banner. It showed two arrows pointing in opposite directions, one labeled “DEMOCRACY” and the other “W.T.O.”
This stunt, which kicked off the Battle of Seattle, a protest of the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, captures the combination of high idealism, drama, detailed organization, radicalism and public relations savvy that defined a movement against the rising tide of globalization in the decades after the Cold War.
DW Gibson’s comprehensive oral history “One Week to Change the World” gives a panoramic view of the multiday festival of dissent, from its authorized marches and semi-legal “direct actions” to its extremely illegal vandalism. There was even a concert.
The protests attracted the attention of progressive elected officials like Sherrod Brown and Dennis Kucinich, grunge scene stalwarts like Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil, the presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky and the British actress Julie Christie. “Wow — we’re really going to give them an experience,” Nader recalls thinking. The experience ended with mass arrests, broken windows and tear-gassed protesters.
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