Interviewee:  Mike Dolan
Affiliation:  Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Citizens Trade Campaign
Interviewer:  Jeremy Simer
Date of interview:  3 March 2000

MD

(Singing a song about being at the PFT office.)

JS

You ready Mike?

MD

I’m ready.

JS

Are you all warmed up?

MD

I’m all warmed up.

 JS

Let’s start off with … Can you give me a sense of how it all started. Once the announcement was made that the WTO was coming to town, what did CTC, what did you start doing?

MD

Leaped into action.

JS

How did you do that?

MD

Well, first of all, I thought it was either going to be San Diego or Seattle, so what I did was you know, as we’re waiting for the decision to be made, which city, I was just sitting on tender hooks, there, sitting on the edge of my seat. And I’d been calling San Diego, talking to Labor and the different people, the border activists who work on the maquiladoras and so on and said, “Stay tuned! It might be San Diego and then I’ll be coming there.” And at the same time I was also talking to our friend Sally Soriano up here in Seattle with the Washington Fair Trade Campaign and called different kinds of people up here. And then finally the decision, getting ready to leap either way, making sure everyone’s ready as soon as the decision is made. And then they said Seattle. So, um, it was about, right before lunch in Washington DC, so it was actually still pretty early out here. First call I made was to, actually was to David Korten, best selling author of When Corporations Rule the World, Hyperion Press, 1995. And then my second call was to Sally Soriano, um, third call was probably to Ron Judd, although actually I didn’t know Ron yet. I was just kind of in there. A few calls to a few of the Seattle folks that I have known and worked with in years past. Then my, finally I called my travel agent and made a reservation to come out here a week or so later. I tried to get a little bit of a good price. But I was eager to get out here.

Having established that, I called Sally back and said, “We gotta have a first meeting, you know, of local activists who want to be involved and engaged and be part of this mobilization.” And, you know, “I’ll bring copies of stuff and we’ll just get going. Reserve us a room um, and start to put the word out among the networks.” So for the first meeting which was I want to say, late January last year, 1999. Over a year ago. And she reserved the basement, you know, the big conference, big Union hall, at the Labor Temple for the first meeting.

Eighty-something people showed up over a year ago. And we spent that first hour of that first meeting just doing introductions. I mean, Tyree Scott was there and people from LELO and some folks from Labor and different environmental groups. I remember, what her name, Pat Rasmussen from the Washington Environmental Council was there. A few faith-based leaders, I think somebody from Jubilee 2000. It was a good mix and a whole lot of people had never met one another before. We spent the first hour of that first meeting just doing introductions, right?

In the second half, trying to figure out how we wanted to get organized, whether committees, you know, sub-committees, different, I guess you’d call them working groups these days. You know, the media, some logistics, an education committee, different kind of outreach stuff. And it was just a seminal first group. Um, I remember that um, what’s his name, um, Dohrs, um...

JS

Larry Dohrs?

MD

Larry Dohrs was there at that first meeting. Somewhere extant there’s a sign-in from that first meeting. Sally Soriano may still have it, or maybe it’s in my boxes still. But that was the first meeting, we established at that point that we would have, you know, monthly meetings. there was established a steering committee, a self designated steering committee at that first meeting. And that was people like, that guy, he was the MIS guy here for a while ...

JS

Forrest?

MD

Forrest. His girlfriend, Linda, a guy who had come up from Olympia who was eventually…

JS

Jimmy.

MD

Jimmy. That’s right, Jimmy Madsen was there. Really interesting first meeting. Lot of different folks who didn’t know one another and that’s what was really exciting to me was a bunch of people didn’t know one another, were at the first meeting. And the steering committee formed, I think Bill Aal was at that first meeting, and Stan Emert with the Reform Party, and bunch of people formed this first sort of steering committee. Which eventually fell away over the course of the summer. But that’s sort of what were my first moves. Getting some materials together, getting some folks together, just getting it going.

JS

How and why did that steering committee fall away?

MD

 Well, that was over the summer when, we moved from a volunteer sort of ... We moved to sort of a staff driven, rather than a steering committee and volunteer-driven structure for the operation for the office. That was about the time that we found this office. And it really wasn’t functioning very well, and it just wasn’t... we outgrew it, basically. And, what was the “Street Committee” transmogrified into the sort of the Direct Action Network thing, so that the people involved in the street piece, people like Erica, Erica Kay was at the first meeting. Erica moved over and sort of DAN formed out of the “Street Committee”. And, the sort of People for Fair Trade/NO2WTO became more then.

I made the decision to open an office and to hire staff and there was a lot of brain damage over how the staff was going to relate to the steering committee and what my role was in it. And I just decided to, for my purposes to tighten up the operation into a more staff-driven, more hierarchical, very unpopular organizing model out here, as you know. The more hierarchical kind of model and I didn’t really need the steering committee as much anymore, although I wanted there to continue be working groups and so on. That’s just sort of the structure of the office changed in the course of the summer when we opened the office and hired staff and all the rest.

There was still plenty of places, by this time, for people to go and to be involved, whether it was in DAN or you know, in the Labor piece. Martha Baskin was part of this thing, way back in the early days. People just found new ways to be involved. The steering committee, the way I look at it in retrospect, was just a way to get things moving and to have people doing outreach and it was transitional and it was not going to be the same structure from, you know, in January of ‘99 as it was in September of ‘99. By then, all kinds of different structures were forming. Environmental sort of, um, you know, collaboratives, and the Labor thing was figuring itself out and this office was opening and DAN was growing and Ruckus and RAN and other, Global Exchange and other different groups were getting involved. And the AFL-CIO was making its commitment. So things just changed, they just sort of transmogrified.

JS

Speaking of the AFL, can you give me a sense, can you trace the development of the AFL’s involvement and some of the key points at which they made policy decisions or mobilizing decisions that were significant to the whole movement?

MD

Well, I first met Ron Judd in Louisville, Kentucky, last March. I went down to the Jobs with Justice uh, deal down there… and I had just received a fax from the …

JS

When you say “last year” do you mean, actually, ‘98?

MD

No, no, ‘99, in March of ‘99 I went to Louisville to the Jobs with Justice. I had a banner that Sally had made up at a Kinko’s or something, you know, just a sort of easy overnight banner-maker. And it was “Join the Protest of the Century, WTO Seattle. November ‘99.” And I set up a table at the Jobs with Justice and started to get people excited at Jobs with Justice. This was March of last year, as I say.

And Ron Judd was there. I knew that Ron Judd was a member of Jobs with Justice and went to these things. And so I found him, had someone introduce me to him, another Labor leader in the country who I knew, actually, Stewart Acuff from Atlanta. I said, Stewart, introduce me to Ron Judd because I think I’m going to be working with him this year. He did and we met, and I handed him this piece of paper. And the piece of paper was from the corporate coalition, what was it called, the Seattle Host Organization - SHO.

And somebody had faxed that to me, I think Patti Goldman from Seattle. And it showed a schematic of, how the SHO was going to be organized and how the liaison to the non-governmental organizations was structured and what the outreach and liaison was going to look like. And it was a reference to Ron Judd and to Patti Goldman. Patti Goldman representing the environmental community and Ron Judd representing Labor. And Ron had never seen it. He was very interested to see this thing. I said, “Look, you’re on a schematic. This is probably the first time you’ve ever been on a schematic organizational chart with Phil Condit or Bill Gates. And, here’s them, and here’s you over here. See, look you’re on this thing.”

And he was very interested to see that, very interested that I had it and I said, “you know, this is going to be a pretty amazing thing,” and he was like, dimly aware of it. It was going to be a pretty amazing thing. I don’t think any of us in March last year realized how big it was going to be. And I said, “Well, when I come out there, let’s you and I hook up, have lunch and we did and that was probably in April or May and I had my first person-to-person lunch, face contact with Ron Judd. I was telling him what I, my dreams and aspirations were for the thing. And Ron was really into it.

Sally had assured me that he really knew the issues and had been a big champion of fighting Fast Track and NAFTA expansion all along. And so what happened is - and this is the same way it happened with Fast Track and other fights that the Fair Trade movement in this country has been involved in - was from the bottom up.  And it was Ron Judd and the local Steelworkers and the local Teamsters that I met with and Jobs with Justice and other, you know, Jonathan Rosenblum who I’d talked to here putting pressure on D.C. to say, “Let’s make this a priority for the AFL-CIO and for organized Labor, this year.”

And, so they did and it was Ron Judd going back to DC and getting meetings with Sweeney and so on that over the summer more and more of the AFL-CIO and some of the bigger Internationals, the Steelworkers and the Teamsters and the Longshoremen and the others, putting pressure in D.C. up the food chain on the International presidents who in turn were putting pressure on Mr. Sweeney to make it a big, you know priority.

By June or July, two organizers were dispatched out here to help Ron Judd, who’s, of course the King County Labor Council and his right hand guy, Rich Feldman with the Worker’s Center and Bobby Gorman, the AFL-CIO’s guy out here. He works for the AFL-CIO itself. The AFL-CIO in DC sent out two veteran organizers, Vinnie O’Brien and George Kurtin to help with the organizing.

Over the next two or three months, those initial two organizers from the field mobilization department, grew and grew and grew until they had like twenty organizers on the ground out here working to build a crowd for what they decided to do, which was the you know big Labor rally and the Labor march on Tuesday, November the 30th.

At the same time, this is a very interesting part of the story, I was in touch with what is now called the Direct Action Network. David Solnit from Art and Revolution, a different group....  So, I was talking to David fairly regularly and I was talking to Labor. But Labor wasn’t yet talking to Art and Revolution. And they were actually talking to the nascent DAN networks through me. So, the DAN people were trying to figure out - they weren’t even called DAN yet - trying to figure out when they should do their action -  some direct action against the World Trade Organization - and they wanted to know when Labor was planning their thing, and Labor wanted to know when DAN was going to do their thing. And they were all talking through me.

One weekend, this must have been in July, David Solnit called me and said, “When is Labor wanting to do their thing and what’s their feeling about when we do our thing, our direct action, cause we want to do our thing the morning of the 30th when the opening plenary is going to be at the Paramount, if even if we knew that then. But at the opening ceremonies to shut it down. Will Labor have a hard time with that?” And I said, “Well, get back to you, I’ll let you know.” So I called Labor and I said, “The Direct Action people want to do something on Tuesday morning the 30th. I need to get right back to them because they’re going to be having a big conference call to decide this to make a decision and if you have a serious objection, they need to know it soon.” It’s like a Friday afternoon. Labor didn’t get back to me. So, I called David and I said, “You know, they didn’t get back to me. So, I guess you have the tacit, you know, agreement ….”

JS

Was the meeting over the weekend?

MD

Yeah, the meeting was over the weekend. Um, so they went ahead and put that out there. And meanwhile...and then the following week Labor got back to me to say, “No, we don’t think that’s such a good idea.” And I said, “Labor, it’s too late, all right?”

JS

When you say “Labor” are you talking about Sweeney’s office?

MD

No, I’m talking...there’s two people. There’s Joe Euhline, with the Field Mobilization Department in D.C. and Rich Feldman on behalf of Ron Judd here in King County. And I said, “It’s too late. I think the Direct Action people want to do their thing Tuesday morning.”

Now, it’s really interesting that that missed phone call and that lack of communication for a brief moment in July created the mutually-supporting Labor march and direct action that made Tuesday November 30th, sort of like the prominent moment in history, you know, the last cool thing that happened in the twentieth century was that day.

JS

Did it not also create a lot of tension between the two groups for a while?

MD

Yes. There was some tension. Right. Particularly based on Labor’s fear that the cops would be all wigged out by things that happened in the morning and would be all tense when the Labor march itself on downtown Seattle, on the World Trade, I mean on the Conference Center, when that began. And so, yeah, there was a lot of tension and pretty much no communication between DAN and the AFL-CIO except through me. Which was fine with everybody.

JS

Wasn’t there...I think I remember a meeting around September when there was a joint meeting…

MD

That was the only one of those that ever happened. Talking about the one over at Patti Goldman’s shop?

JS

That sounds right.

MD

 Yeah, that was the only time that DAN and the AFL-CIO were in the same room at the same time.

JS

And what happened at that meeting, in general and also specifically between the AFL and DAN?

MD

The third party that was involved in the scheduling sort of concern was Jubilee 2000, the Washington Association of Churches. In that meeting was also Michael Ramos with the Washington Association of Churches. And Michael wanted to do a “hands-around” also that morning, at the opening thing, but DAN had already decided to do something Tuesday morning, the Labor march was shaping up for that afternoon, it looked like things were getting too crowded.

So a decision was made right around then that the Jubilee 2000 hands around shtick, would be rescheduled for the previous night, Monday night, the 29th of November. And I think Labor and DAN agreed to stay in communication with each other to avoid, you know, too many conflicts with respect to the choreography of Tuesday, November the 30th. All right? So what was resolved was that the faith based people would be the night before and that somehow we would manage with respect to the choreography the following morning.

JS

In terms of the development of plans for the big mobilization on the 30th and the week of, how did it go with negotiations with the City and the local cops and the Feds? How many negotiation meetings were there around that?

MD

I first met with the cops back in April. And I did it on my own. The first person I met with was Clark Kimmerer, an Assistant Chief. It was just an introductory meeting. He didn’t say much to me. There wasn’t much, you know, he could say. I mean, this is kind of a constant theme that I heard from them, from the whole, every time we met. “We respect people’s First Amendment rights, we know how it’s done, we’ve had big protests in this town before. We know, that some people will want to get arrested, civil disobedience and all that. We have a lot of experience with that. But by the same token, you know, we don’t want these meetings disrupted and we will be working in an inter-agency way with other law enforcement and security apparatus out of Washington D.C., including FBI, Treasury, Secret Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, King County Sheriff’s office. Washington State, Police and Patrol, and of course, Seattle’s Finest, the Seattle Police Department. And we’ll be ready, we’ll be prepared.”

And then I went over and I met with a guy named Keith Orton over in the Mayor’s office, Department of Intergovernmental Affairs. I met with him as well. And just let them know who I was, gave them my card, told them I would be interested in talking with them as we prepared, wanted to make sure that everything went fine and I’ll be wanting to get some permits for marches and so on, and how do I do that and they turned me on to Virginia, uh, what was her name? Virginia Beecham or whatever her name was with the Parks Department...The woman who does the permits. And so I agreed to do that and I contacted her office and got some permit applications. And this is still pretty early, this is like May or June. I was doing a little of this with a guy named David Ortman.

JS

At this time did you have a sense, were you starting to get a sense that it was going to be big? Or did this--

MD

No, no, no. I figured whatever I created that was all it was going to be. No other people were going to get involved. I knew that part of my task was to get other people to take ownership of this opportunity. But this way it wasn’t big yet. Itwas really not big yet. It wasn’t getting big yet. But I was planning for it to be pretty big.  I was planning to bring people from all over the country. At this point, I was also talking to hotels... it was sometime in maybe June that I was talking to the Youth Hostel you know, and I took a tour of the Youth Hostel and reserved 140 beds there. Was talking to travel agents about securing hotel space. The hotels really weren’t aware of it yet.

The WTO had secured all the major hotels, The Westin, the Sheraton and so on and so on. But there’s like, the Edgewater. It was way back then that I reserved oh, ten rooms in the Edgewater for myself and Ralph Nader and some others way back then. And it was in fact right around then that it was in June - June the 28th - that I had a very big dinner meeting at the Edgewater. And this is really what helped pull Labor in. This goes back to your previous question about getting Labor involved.

I organized the Steelworkers, major Teamsters, the Longshoreman sent somebody. Ron Judd was there. David Smith the head of the Public Policy Department of the AFL-CIO came out. And I invited a whole bunch of Labor leaders.  We paid for this dinner. It was like a $1,200 night for us. You know, room at the Edgewater. And a whole bunch of Labor leaders, as well as community leaders. Sally was there, Martha Baskin was there, LELO was there, it wasn’t actually Tyree Scott, it was Juan Jose Bocanegra was there.

The people who were involved in the whatchyacallit, the Biotech stuff, both Phil Berreano and what’s her name, Beth Burrows were there.  They were both there. The Washington Association of Churches. Both Michael Ramos and the head of the Washington Association of Churches, John Boonstrow were both there. Lori Wallach came out. And I was there, I was the host, I organized it. I got a private room at the Edgewater, and that was like, this is in June. It was really one of the first big, you know, meetings. Patti Goldman was there, of course. Who else? Rosalinda from Jobs with Justice was there.

One of the first big meetings of grass tops. And that was a really important meeting cause Ron Judd was, by then, really invested in it. And, putting pressure up the food chain - all the Internationals were. John Youngdahl was there from the Steelworkers. Maybe thirty-five, forty people um, at a big grass tops dinner that I hosted. Very important first meeting.

JS

You just named a lot of the major players in the mobilizations.

MD

Yeah, we first, we had a big dinner to get them together in June.

JS

When did the folks like the Ruckus Society start to come into the picture? Was that not until…

MD

… Not until...Yeah. I mean, Ruckus decided sometime over the summer that they wanted to be a part of this. And in, late July maybe, they decided to have an Action Camp. In Arlington called “Globalize This!” And I don’t remember the actual dates of that, you were there.

JS

I think it was September, wasn’t it?

MD

August? We can figure it out. And they decided to do it, and um, to get involved.

JS

What about, were the Ruckus people there? Like Han Shan or John Sellers?

MD

No, not yet. What you need are my notebooks. You need both of those, I have two of those that I kept that shows day to day what I was doing, who I was calling.

JS

That would be nice.  So what happened at that meeting?

MD

Well, I told them what I knew about what the WTO itself was planning, you know, their schedule for the week. By then, you know, the NGO’s had decided on our parallel symposium structure. I had reserved by then the Methodist Church, I did that way early. So much of the stuff I’d set up, I mean, just really early, and that we’d decided on a weekly schedule of parallel symposium stuff, and I wanted people to know about what the NGO’s were going to be doing in terms of panels and plenaries and you know, our press conferences and so on. And how our days, the NGO days were going to look like. And I wanted the Direct Action people to understand how they could complement our organizing for parallel panels and stuff.

We had decided on a weekly schedule.  The first day was going to be Environment and Health and the second day was going to be Labor Rights and Human Rights And the third day was going to be Food, no, was going to be Democracy and Sovereignty and Women and Development. The fourth day, Thursday, the 2nd was going to be Food and Agriculture. So, I wanted to tell them what I knew about the Convention Center and where the hotels were and I’d brought down a map to show them and I just wanted to give them a sense of the logistics and the advance. And the opening session at the Paramount Theatre and I wanted them to focus on that opening session and whether or not Clinton was going to be there and whether or not Gore was going to come in. Just to talk about the opportunities and the organizing that we were already undertaking.

JS

When and how were those decisions being made about the symposium structure? And was it just Public Citizen and CTC or were there other organizations involved?

MD

We decided. Public Citizen. Basically it was Lori Wallach and me decided about that, right? We said, and this always works with the NGO world. We just put it out there. We said, “We’ve been talking to a lot of you,” because everybody thinks that they had just been left out of the loop and but that a decision had been made. Lori and I simply decided, put it out there in some e-mails and some faxes and some direct mail. Talk it over with people, there was a little problem with the Food and Ag piece because Phil Berreano and Beth Burrows had decided that they wanted a particular day working with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, IATP, that particular day was going to be Food and Ag day for them. So, you know, it was like, we moved things around a little bit from our original conception, and then identified some steering committees for putting together each of the days. Like having Dan Seligman with the Sierra Club and the Center for International Environmental Law and Patti Goldman, with EarthJustice, and others taking responsibility for the first day, for the environment and health day.

Lots of parallel meetings going on in D.C. among NGOs, most of whom don’t do a lot. They go to meetings, you know, but they don’t really do much. They weren’t really organizing and it was Public Citizen driving that process. We took an MAI working group that we’d set up during the Multilateral Agreement on Investment fight and we renamed it. It became the MAI -WTO working group and my organizer back there, Margareta Strand and I ran that with Friends of the Earth an other people. We just had regular meetings every couple of weeks of this working group in D.C. to set up the parallel NGO structures. We’ve got the venues, now we need to fill the venues with product, you know. And so they were working with that all along.

It’s almost too much. There was too much happening. I can’t even remember it all. I mean, this conversation is making me remember all the different meetings and parallel things. It’s an unbelievable amount of crap was going on all the time.

JS

I mean, it was really intense. I remember working with you here in the office, I remember how many hours you were putting in and that probably was going on, not just right at the end, but for months in advance.

MD

What was brilliant was, the great thing was, that how early I set up the basic structures. I didn’t know how the organizing was going to go in this town and , you know, and I wasn’t coming in to you know, I mean when Geov Parrish did his thing during the summer, you know, about, after coming to some of the summer monthly meetings about how I came in imposing a structure … it wasn’t really the case. I mean, it was, I wanted a structure to develop indigenously but I wanted it to be big. And every day bigger than the day before.

But getting the churches, getting the hotels, setting up the housing piece, especially getting the churches and the venues. Doing the original meetings with the NGOs in D.C.. Doing the original meetings with Labor and environmental grass tops here. Doing the original meetings, creating the original meetings with what became the Direct Action Network. It’s just that we set up the structures to create momentum on all different fronts, logistical, action, message … the different, you know, cross-sectoral stuff, really, really early. So that by the time we set up the actual office, the thing really had a life of its own and the office was set up here to basically focus and to coordinate all the different strains that were coming together. It needed a clearinghouse, a place to just focus all the growing energy and this enormous international mobilization against globalization that was going on. A place where, there was a clearinghouse for information.

DAN set up sort of separately, in a parallel way, with Erica Kay and those people setting up that office over at that church over in the U District that grew and grew and grew. And pretty soon DAN had its own parallel thing going. Just as the AFL-CIO stet up its own thing that was separate and parallel.

In the beginning there was only one real effort and it was sort of the People for Fair Trade/NO2WTO-Public Citizen thing and it grew and it had children you know, and a family of sort of parallel efforts. Jubilee 2000 you know, growing out of the original interest. I took a meeting with John Boonstra and Michael Ramos in February of last year, that eventually became a hands around deal around the Exhibition Hall the night of the 29th.

The music piece, the cultural music piece. I knew early that we would have to set up, we would have to have concerts and different kinds of stuff and so I made contact with the Musicians Union and met Scott and Bob and worked with them all year long about different plans and visions for different kinds of concerts and Carleen O’Dell with, whatever the name of her group is, came, and she wanted to help with concert action and raise money and stuff. I mean it was just all these different parallel, independent strains of organizing that were going on that eventually congealed into a week of fun.

JS

So as DAN was coming together, um, what was your relationship with… I think I remember some moments of hen it seemed more or less appropriate to be working closely or that a more …

MD

Right. It varied.

JS

So how did that work?

MD

Well, I mean, when I was trying to get, first of all, I have, we had the option, Citizen’ Trade Campaign and Public Citizen of being a formal endorsing sort of piece, of the Direct Action Network. Actually on their … with Global Exchange, and Rainforest Action Network and Ruckus, one of the institutional sponsors of the Direct Action Network. Declined to do that for political reasons.

JS

Why?

MD

Well, a couple. One, I had to still maintain really good relations with the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, the more moderate NGOs that weren’t comfortable with the message of the Direct Action Network to shut down and to completely oppose the institution of the WTO. They were still forming their message. They didn’t know exactly what they wanted to say yet. The AFL-CIO was working on materials. The Sierra Club was working on materials. They hadn’t decided what their message was. DAN’s message was very straightforward. Very simple. Shut it down. It’s an illegitimate institution, shut it down. So, what I did was on the quiet, I gave money to DAN. Ultimately around $6,000.

JS

Of CTC money?

MD

Yeah. Right. Without telling anybody. A couple thousand here, a couple thousand there. Nobody had to know about it and we could support the Direct Action Network quietly. And that was fine, okay, without becoming an endorsing....

The second reason was, my relations with the city. Right, so on the one hand, relations with the NGOs and on the other hand my relations with the city. For example, you will recall that the People’s Gala was held in the Key Arena. Well, I had originally demanded because we put a bid in and reserved the Kingdome.  Why? Because the Kingdome’s right next to the Exhibition Hall, it was the night before the big corporate fucks and the political and corporate elites were going to be meeting together. We wanted to have our People’s Gala right next door. And the City said, “No! That’ll create a riot! That’s really a bad idea.” And I said, “No, we got it. We’ve got the Kingdome and we’re going to have a big concert in there and that’s all there is to it, so just back off.” And the City said, “We can’t allow it. We won’t give you the permit.” “Permit, shmermit, you know, we’re, you know, I’ve reserved it, and we’re going to have a big concert in there and it’s going to be great.”

And so, back and forth, back and forth with the City, right? Well, the City’s final offer was to give us the Key Arena. To give us the Key Arena. All right? Now, I’m sitting on budget for the Kingdome that was like $120,000 that I didn’t have. Most of my negotiations were a bluff, because there’s no way I have that kind of money, so I’m still bluffing with the City, saying, “Now we’ve got the Kingdome, we’re going to do it!” “Naw, it’s too close to the Exhibition Hall, there’ll be a riot, we can’t let you do it.”

And I’m selling it, actually, as a public safety analysis. I said, We get people in the Kingdome having a concert, having a good time, it keeps them off the street, it’s a public safety ... this thing sells itself.” The City wouldn’t buy it, they weren’t falling for that. So they finally offered the Key Arena, straight up, they’d pay for it. This was a $20,000 value. And they said the County will provide the security.  Right, to have the Sheriff’s Department um, provide the security on the outside of the Key Arena, and that’s another $20,000 value. So they basically put 40,000 dollars on the table and said, “Will you please move your People’s Gala away from the Kingdome to the Key Arena?”

I said, “Well, okay. All right, I’ll take your 40,000 dollars in-kind value and I’ll do my People’s Gala in the Key Arena.” I just want to say one thing. I could not have achieved the success in those negotiations without Ron Judd with the Labor Council. He put a lot of political chits on the table there, and he cashed in a lot, and it was very, it worked out.

So, during the process of those negotiations, the City said, “Well, we’re going to have to check out your website,” and they went to Seattle99, some of the web sites that we’d set up. SeattleWTO  as well as our own and started to look through our website. And they noticed that we had links to Art and Revolution and to the Direct Action Network, which was calling for the shutdown of Seattle, and you know, shutting down the WTO.

So there was a time when I instructed our MIS people to sever those links because the negotiations were going on with the city and they were very, very tender. So we severed the links with Art and Revolution until we closed the deal. This is a woman named Lori Brown in the Mayor’s office who’s flacking for the Mayor and wondering whether or not to go through with this deal. She was the one who brought up these links. It was at a meeting over at the Labor Temple. She said, “We’d like to do this with you, we think it can work out, but, you know, people go to your website and they find out that you’re going to shut down the city. We have a legal problem with that, because we’re endorsing this thing, we’re helping you out, and you’re helping out people who want to shut down the city. And, we think this might come back and bite us on the butt politically.” I said, “I understand that completely.” So, I mean like, literally, this was a power move, sitting at the table with them at the Labor Temple, I whipped out my cell phone, made one call, I said, “Sever the links.” Actually I made two calls, I called Bill Aal and I called (inaudible). “Sever the links to the Art and Revolution, right now.” I said, “Done!” I was able to actually lay my cell phone back on the table, and say, “Okay, that’s fixed. Anything else? Right?”

They said, “No.” They realized that I was a guy who was like a can-do guy, get stuff done. And they were impressed. And so we went and that was the other reason I had to publicly distance myself from DAN, even while I was supporting them under the table. Right? Like when they got the convergence space, right? I was one of the first guys in line with the thousand dollars to help them close the deal, to get the space up there on Denny Street.

When Ruckus came into town … now Ruckus, of course, you know, had their own problems with DAN. Or I should say, DAN had their own problems with Ruckus. Because you know, Ruckus was like, “Okay. We’re here, you know, we’re the experts ,we know how to like, you know, we’re media sluts with climbing gear strapped onto us.” And DAN of course, is based more on an affinity group and consensus process that like, you know, Ruckus I don’t think was always sensitive to.

Not that I was always sensitive to it, but Ruckus wasn’t either, and so I was making sure that Ruckus was in touch with the mayor’s office, once again, people were going through me in the same way that the AFL-CIO was going through me to talk to DAN so was the city going through me to talk to Ruckus and other DAN elements. So I was still being the clearinghouse …. with Jeremy Madsen and you and others, now, with a staff and an office supporting our efforts. Just to kind of move information from one side to the other. From the dark side to the forces of light.

JS

All right. Well, we’ve actually already been talking for 45 minutes. And what fraction of the information do you think we’ve touched on.

MD

Oh, I don’t know, maybe 10 percent now.

JS

I consider it one-tenth of one percent ….

End of Interview