WTO: 'We're Talking Online'

While the WTO protesters in Seattle made international headlines this week for being pepper-sprayed, activists are complaining that their message has not been clearly communicated to the news-consuming public.

But now that the Seattle streets have been cleared and the protests moved to the Web, any shortcomings of media coverage are being addressed by dozens of sites and email lists trying to explain why tens of thousands of people took to the streets in the first place.

"In focusing on the violence of vandals and police, the major media outlets are missing the real story," complained the Ruckus Society, an environmental and human rights group based in Berkeley, California, which has collected dozens of links to mainstream coverage of the week's events.

The real story, according to the Ruckus Society, is that "40,000 people representing more than 100 groups organized a nonviolent, peaceful protest."

One of the puzzles is why the protests attracted such a wide range of different groups, from organized labor to environmental and human rights activists, supporters of the Free Tibet movement and Mexico's Zapatista rebels, even the Young Republicans.

As an analysis piece on the BBC's World Service site puts it: "They might not have much in common, but the groups taking their protest onto the streets of Seattle are united by a common dislike for a process and institution they believe is inherently unfair.... All of them agree that the World Trade Organization is a body that puts profit and the good of the world's mega-corporations before the interests of people and the planet."

According to a widely publicized look-alike of the official WTO site by anti-corporate pranksters RTMark, the WTO is a secretive, cabalistic organization that is rapidly evolving into a de facto world government that panders purely to corporate interests.

"The WTO's purpose is to broaden and enforce global free trade," RTMark says. "Global free trade already gives multinational corporations vast powers to enforce their will against democratic governments. Expanding these corporate powers -- as the WTO intends to do in Seattle and beyond -- will further cripple governments and make them even less able to protect their citizens from the ravages of those entities whose only aim is to grow richer and richer and richer."

RTMark charges the WTO's relentless pursuit of free trade has been to the detriment of all kinds of environmental, labor, and human rights laws enacted by democratically elected governments around the world -- hence the range of different groups that took to the streets.

A site dedicated to the Seattle protests explains that the WTO is meeting to discuss expanding its powers. Believing it already holds too much power, the protesters turned out in force.

"There is growing concern among citizens around the globe, and an ever-increasing cry to review and repair the WTO before extending its reach," the site says.

The protest site also gives some background, helping to explain, for example, the WTO's role in ongoing trade disputes, such as the US' crippling tariffs on Euro treats like Rocquefort cheese.

"The WTO must be significantly changed if we are to enjoy a society based on human rights, labor rights, and environmental protection around the world," the site says.

The Seattle WTO page -- "mobilization against globalization" -- covers the issues in more detail, as does Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, which asks whether the WTO should stand for Whose Trade Organization?

In typically humorous style, Adbusters charges the WTO with promoting an agenda that has turned the world economy into "an ungoverned casino that may fail any day" and lead to environmental degradation that if unchecked will destroy the planet.

"Oddly, these issues hardly ever come up at these WTO meetings," Adbusters says.

Rather than rely on the "corporate media," Seattle's Independent Media Center is providing "up-to-the-minute, grassroots WTO coverage from Seattle. Coverage is a mixed bag of reports, photos, audio, and video "from the streets."

Likewise, WTO Watch has a number of breaking news reports from the protests, but also a lot of archived material, helping to explain the WTO's role in trade disputes and previous anti-globalization protests like this summer's anti-McDonald's brouhaha by French farmers.

On the other hand, the WTO gives its side of the story at its voluminous Web site, and is Webcasting the Seattle sessions.

More material can be found at the site of the WTO's sister organization, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.