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237| In an ironic way, the invasion from the South had been good for business to this point because it had driven the entire white middle class out of Los Angeles proper and into the areas she specialized in: Calabasas, Topanga, Arroyo Blanco. She still sold houses in Woodland Hills—that’s where the offices were, after all, and it was still considered a very desirable upper-middle-class neighborhood—but all the smart buyers had already retreated beyond the city limits. —t. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain (1995) the beginning of December 1999 was not the time to head to downtown Seattle for some holiday shopping at nordstrom’s or an expensive dinner at the Dahlia Lounge. Bricks were flying through store windows. Police were chasing ski-masked rioters through the streets. Members of the global economic elite were trapped in high hotels, thinking (perhaps) that they could have stayed home in Caracas or Kiev if they’d wanted disorder in the streets. the cause of the disorder was the World trade organization (Wto), the international consortium of governments that administered the complex rules that regulate international trade and travel. Mayor Paul Schell and other Seattle officials, committed to promoting Seattle as a “world-class” city, had lobbied long and hard to bring the 1999 meeting of the Wto to the shores of Puget Sound. With the expected presence of finance and foreign affairs ministers and even some heads of government, it was supposed to give Seattle world attention. instead, it gave the city a headache. Fifty thousand CHAPter foUrteen Transnational Urbanism | CHAPter foUrteen 238 anti-Wto protesters converged on the meeting, held from november 30 to December 4, 1999. Most demonstrators were peaceful, but several hundred started a rampage through downtown that triggered overreaction by unprepared police. the battle of Seattle was part of an international movement. Similar disturbances had marked an earlier Wto meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Large demonstrations soon followed against the international Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., in 2000 and against a Wto meeting in Genoa, italy, in 2001. Protesters were convinced that the Wto is a tool of huge transnational corporations that tramples on local labor and environmental protections in the name of “free trade” that benefits only wealthy nations and their businesses . Wto defenders pointed to the long-term effects of open trade in raising net production in the world economy and thereby making more wealth available for developing nations. opponents asserted, in turn, that such wealth never reaches the workers and farmers in those nations. American opponents demanded that U.S. firms, such as sportswear companies, that make their products overseas make sure that those overseas workers have decent living conditions and wages. the context for Wto policy is a global network of economically advanced cities that drive and steer the engines of world trade, and the Seattle/tacoma metropolis was a full-fledged member. the lumber mills and smelters that had once lined their waterfronts were gone by the end of the 1990s, leaving space instead for cruise ship docks and bike paths. there were far fewer factory workers than a half century earlier and many more residents who earned their living by trying to sell airplanes to international carriers, handling containers full of Chinese-manufactured shoes and toys, writing software and searching for killer applications, teaching science to students from abroad, peddling books over the internet, and taking cappuccinos global. each Seattle worker who did punch in at a factory time clock produced an average of $129,000 in exports—the highest figure among all U.S. metro areas. For Seattle there was also a special irony about December 1999: the scale of the protests caught authorities by surprise because much of the organizing had taken place online through Web sites, list serves, and chat rooms that many of the protesters accessed through Microsoft Windows–operated PCs. Before the Wto embarrassment, Seattle’s business and political leaders had already been staking their claim to international importance. Seattle and tacoma competed for the lion’s share of transpacific container trade with business leaders standing (metaphorically) with their backs to Mount Rainier and their eyes to the ocean. As the north American Free trade Area was following the Canada–United States Free trade Agreement, a local think tank published a key report on “international Seattle.”1 the state of Washington and province of British Columbia had already tried efforts to market the region for biotech and environmental engineering investments, and Seattle...

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