Tension is high across Greece, in the days before the start of Alexandros Grigoropoulos assassins murders. Besides the intensifying winter urban guerrilla offensive in Athens, farmers are gradually blocking the entire national highway network, while the assassinated boy's mother accuses the judicial authorities of both turning a blind eye both clues regarding the murder and inhibiting the proper course of the trial by transferring it in a remote mountain town.

On the occasion of its ten-year anniversary, the antiglobalization movement has been brought out of its slumber. This is to be expected, as anniversaries and nostalgia often trump the here and now in political action. What is troublesome, though, is not the celebration of a historical moment but the attempted resurrection of this movement, known by some as the Global Justice Movement, under the banner of Climate Justice.

While officials, pundits and the everyday folks who have to pay bills lament unemployment rates that won't go down and wages that won't go up, some Rust Belt planners and union leaders are feeling optimistic: they're taking inspiration from the Basque region of Spain, where a network of worker-owned cooperatives launched amid the rubble of the Spanish Civil War has grown to become the country's seventh-largest corporation, and among its most profitable.

The D.C. government and a nonprofit civil rights organization have settled a class-action lawsuit brought by hundreds of protesters and bystanders arrested during a downtown demonstration in 2002.The District agreed to pay $8.25 million to almost 400 protesters and bystanders to end the lawsuit over mass arrests in Pershing Park during World Bank protests, according to lawyers involved in the suit.

In recent days the city of Washington DC has announced that they will pay hundreds of protesters who were illegally arrested during the April 2000 protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Over 500 protesters arrested on April 15th will receive $18,000 each. The protesters were arrested after police sealed off the streets and arrested every person in the trap; well almost everyone.

On November 30th 1999, protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) rocked the city of Seattle. This meeting was the final WTO meeting of the century and for many represented an opportunity to confront an ever-growing complex of globalization driven by the economic forces of neoliberalism which sought to expand control over international markets and dismantle social support systems as a path towards massive privatization. Growing out of previous demonstrations in Berlin and Madrid, this protest was an opportunity to set the tone for resistance to neoliberal economic policies for the 21st century and many hoped that these actions would extend into the next century.

The International Labor Rights Forum has named Abercrombie and Fitch, Gymboree, Hanes, Ikea, Kohl’s, LL Bean, Pier 1 Imports, Propper International, and Wal-Mart to its new "Sweatshop Hall of Shame," as Working ITT recently reported. Let's take this opportunity to remind ourselves that we are part of this problem.

Today, on November 30, one week before the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen open, and on the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle in 1999, major demonstrations, teach-ins and civil disobedience are taking actions place in cities around the North America.

Reports are now starting to come in from:

• Chicago, Illinois: Activists target Carbon Trading @ Chicago Climate Exchange – 12 arrested
• Denver, Colorado: Citizens ‘Die-in’ at Department of Public Health and Environment in Coal Protest
• Greensville, SC: Blockade of shipment of generator to Cliffside Coal Plant, 4 arrested
• New York City, NY: Occupation of the Natural Resource Defense Council Office with James Hansen exposing their ties to industry
• San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Climate Justice Action at Bank of America; 200 Rally with at least 23 Arrested
• Whitby, Ontatio: Sit-in for Climate Justice at Finance Minister's Office
• Washington, DC: Downtown march targets major polluters and lobbyists

Swiss police have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at anti-capitalist protesters who broke windows and set cars alight during a demonstration ahead of a major World Trade Organisation (WTO) conference in Geneva.

 

Ten years ago tonight, I was sitting in a spokescouncil in a warehouse in downtown Seattle, surrounded by a sea of dreadlocked youth, preparing to rise at dawn and hit the streets the next morning.  Was it that night or the next I went with my friends Margo Adair and Bill Aall with whom I was staying, to the late-night grocery store for some emergency vinegar to soak our bandannas in case of tear gas? Some of the memories have faded after ten years—although I won’t soon forget the caustic bite of some sort of intense Japanese wine vinegar that was all we ended up with—and as bad as the tear gas itself, in my opinion.  But I recall that I wasn’t too worried.  I hadn’t seen the police use tear gas on a political demonstration since the Sixties, and I didn’t really comprehend that they would.