The "Seattle Round"? That may be our city's contribution to the lexicon of the World Trade Organization's effort to construct a global owners' paradise.

The WTO has announced plans to come to Seattle for its next round of negotiations, from November 29 to December 3 of this year. While Gary Locke, Pat Davis, and the Chamber of Commerce crowds are thrilled at the chance to demonstrate how globally business-friendly Washington state is, the stakes are rather a lot higher for those of us who consider economic justice more important than fattened stock values.

Losing the Olympics didn't seem to faze our local business community in the least; apparently, Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Phil Condit (Boeing) offered to chair the host committee, which made it impossible for the WTO to refuse. Even Patty Murray gushed: "This is like hitting the jackpot!" While downtown boosters pointed to our new restaurants and the Symphony Hall as the deciding factor, U.S. government officials cited our city and state governments' willingness to cooperate on security and logistics for the event; no details were given of what this "cooperation" entails, but you can bet it means spending lots of state and local money.

At any rate, this will be the largest single trade event in U.S. history and will focus on "open markets for agriculture and services...and trade issues for biotechnology and electronic commerce." Al Gore has already announced that the U.S. will propose to completely abolish export subsidies and liberalize trade in agricultural products--a direct slam against small, family farmers around the world (especially in Europe), who only survive because of price supports and trade barriers. And then there's the biotechnology issue: Monsanto was recently kicked out of India for conducting unauthorized and unsafe field trials of bio-engineered cotton plants. The WTO's main mandate is to break down such governmental prohibitions so corporations can enter any market they choose. "Jackpot," indeed.

Eager local security notwithstanding, have no doubt: there will be protests. In the less than three weeks since the WTO's announcement, groundwork is already being laid for a whole variety of expressions, from genteel presentations to street heat, of opposition to the free trade agenda. Progressive labor groups are promising a week-long confab before the WTO meeting, to spotlight that minority portion of organized labor not in bed with Clinton and Gore. Internet calls have sprung up from across the continent, urging activists to come to Seattle next fall to give a big North American welcome to WTO. (Hey, come visit in November, the weather's swell!)

The question for those of us in the epicenter of all this is, what kind of protests will work? At the last WTO convocation in Geneva, both the alternative conventions and the street protests were extensive. Of course, that was in the heart of Europe, where public awareness of the dangers of neo-liberalism is quite a bit better organized. In Italy, Germany, France, and Britain--and Switzerland--entire movements have erupted in the '90s to protect what little is left of the concept of the right of the public to an equitable distribution of society's wealth, and the duty of government at all levels to constrain, not enable, global corporate power.

Here in America, and here in Seattle, we've got a long way to go in building those movements. The two wings of our one-party corporate state, and the mass media that faithfully parrots their differences as the full spectrum of democratic choice, have succeeded in presenting to the American public the idea that global corporate greed is both a fait accompli and a desirable goal. The WTO contains (along with the very much still alive Multilateral Agreement on Investments) the seeds of a world where local and national governments have no power over corporations, and the mega- corporate urge to profit is somehow thought to contain the purest ideals and best interests of all in its greed-infested heart. That danger is intrinsically sensed by many Americans, but linking it to the specific agendas of the WTO has thus far been a very marginalized affair, put forward by a fringe handful of economic skeptics on the left and Pat Buchanan nationalists and New World Order conspiratorialists on the right.

The challenge of Seattle, for WTO oppositionists, is to make that alarm a mainstream affair. As such, talking heads holding press conferences won't do. Neither will a few hundred people in the rain at Westlake, listening to an endless program of the obligatory political rainbow of speakers parroting points of unity. Seattle organizers must do better on both scores. We must produce bodies--lots of them--demanding local control over corporate excess. That is a major, and primary, organizing job for the next ten months. And we must have something to offer: a positive vision of both governments that take care of public needs and corporations whose global resources are at least in part harnessed to not just profit but the public good.

It's not enough to say we're against what many Americans believe is inevitable; by being painted into that corner, protesters will allow themselves to continue being marginalized in the country providing almost all of the vision and muscle for the global corporate state. We have to find, and adopt as our own, models that work better. Technology and the erosion of national power has enabled corporations to run amok in a fashion that, if allowed to continue and accelerate, literally threatens life on earth (c.f. global warming, ocean pollution, etc.). The technology won't go away, but it can be used by organizing workers as well as economic elites, and dangerous technology (e.g., bioengineering) desperately needs limits other than the laughable self-policing of the Monsantos of the world. And the loss of local sovereignty is a matter of political will. We in Seattle have been handed a chance to contribute a powerful step in reversing the political momentum in these debates. Let's get to work.