hey thought no one was watching, but they were wrong.

For five years, in the name of world commerce, the World Trade Organization, the international treaty group that regulates—or rather, de-regulates—world trade, has quietly protected the rights of corporations worldwide to operate sweatshops (often with the aid of repressive regimes), to poison our food, to pollute air, water and land and to push endangered species over the brink of extinction.

Seattle police moved against some blockaders with tear gas and pepper spray but with few arrests. With the property damage as an excuse, however, the city went all out, declaring a curfew and a “no-protest” zone and arresting hundreds of demonstrators the next day. But rather than suppressing the protests, the arrests merely changed their character, and demonstrations both against the WTO and in solidarity with arrestees went on for the rest of the week.

Thanks to months of careful planning, wide-ranging outreach and the extraordinary (if uneasy) coalition of activists in different causes, the WTO was completely prevented from holding its opening meetings. When President Clinton arrived December 1, he may have precipitated a WTO crisis by admitting that the organization should take the unions’ objections into account.

The Seattle protests were a high point of what was already a good season for U.S. activism. Among other events, October’s March of the Americas drew hundreds to its five-state protest against so-called welfare reform (a month later march organizer Cheri Honkala of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union was arrested at the WTO protests); November’s School of the Americas Watch action once again doubled the number of people opposing the United States’ infamous school for assassins in Georgia. So as we turn the calendar page over for this much-hyped New Year, the Nonviolent Activist devotes this first 2000 issue to a look at nonviolence USA today.