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Kevin Danaher Affiliation: Co-Founder of Global Exchange Interviewer: Miguel Bocanegra Date of Interview: February 15, 2000

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Kevin Danaher Affiliation: Co-Founder of Global Exchange Interviewer: Miguel Bocanegra Date of Interview: February 15, 2000 Interviewee: Kevin Danaher Affiliation: Co-Founder of Global Exchange Interviewer: Miguel Bocanegra Date of interview: February 15, 2000 Interview Summary: Kevin Danaher describes how his anti-Vietnam War background and education led to his co- founding Global Exchange. With the goal of preventing the WTO meetings, Global Exchange joined Rainforest Action Network, the Ruckus Society, and Art and Revolution to form the Direct Action Network. Danaher says that the events in Seattle garnered support for several different protests around the world. He also describes the “massive civil rights abuses” of the police, the importance of technology for speedy communication and decision-making about global issues, and his belief that we are in the stages of the “first-ever global revolution.” ♦ ♦ ♦ MB This Miguel Bocanegra. I am interviewing Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange. It is February 15, about 12 p.m. Kevin Danaher, is okay for us to use this interview for the purposes of the WTO History Project? KD Yes, sir. It’s totally okay. MB Great. So, can you give us just a brief bio of yourself, and maybe, since you’re a co-founder of Global Exchange, maybe what led up to Global Exchange and then participation in the WTO? KD Yes. I was born in 1950 in New Jersey. I grew up in a lower income working class Irish Catholic family. My government tried to send me to Vietnam when I was 18. I found that very frightening. That caused me to start questioning what my government was doing, bombing the hell out of people who were no threat in any way to us, couldn’t be a threat, and the more I studied U.S. foreign policy, the more I realized that the United States is seen as an arm- twisting bully by most people in the world, and I was raised by my father to not like bullies and to stand up against bullies. So that questioning continued through college. I went through and got a PhD from the University of California, did my dissertation on U.S. policy towards South Africa, which U.S. policy was pretty consistently on the side of the side of the white minority against the black majority, so that helped educate me even more about the main connection between U.S. elites and Third World 1 elites is a commercial connection. It’s about money. It’s about transnational corporations, and then it forces the policymakers to lie to the American people about why we’re involved in these different countries to make the American people believe that we’re actually on the side of the good guys when, in fact, it’s about making money, making profits. So my education and my research and writing tended to focus on these global institutions, the World Bank, IMF. I started researching them back in 1975, so I had quite a bit of experience with them. When the World Trade Organization came along in 1995, I had already known about GATT, the treaty underlying the WTO. So it was natural for myself and my organization, Global Exchange, to commit itself to educating the public about this institution, trying to force it out into the light of day, the Dracula principle. You get these institutions out in the sunshine, and they wither up and die real quick. The background on Global Exchange is we were started in 1988. There were three of us. Had no money, no office or anything like that, and we gradually built it up to where we’ve got about 40 staff people now, about a 6,000 square foot office in San Francisco. We have fair trade stores in Berkeley and San Francisco that sell fair trade crafts and fair trade coffee. We do reality tours where we take people out to other countries with a sort of reverse Club Med ideology. Get people off the beach and get out there and meet real people. We’re up to 40 trips a year just to Cuba. We do Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Senegal, Iran, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, a lot of different countries. What people learn when you take them to those countries, the first thing they learn is not about those countries; it’s about the United States. They learn they’ve been lied to, that the people in those countries really want to be our friends. They don’t want to be our enemies, and it helps undermine racism by taking Americans there and making them realize they have more in common with these people than they do separating them. We put out educational materials, books, videos, comic books, tapes, a lot of public speaking. We have a speakers bureau that brings in foreign speakers, usually grassroots leaders, to go around the U.S. and teach people what’s really going on in the world. We do all sorts of grassroots linkage building, because we think that that’s the future. If there’s going to be a democratic global government and a democratic global economy, it’s got to come out of the grassroots and it’s got to be participatory rather than the current representative system where you get to choose this rich white guy or this rich white guy that will represent you. We don’t think that that’s really democratic as we witnessed in the last election where the guy who got less votes became president. What’s that? What’s the Electoral College? So basically what we’re trying to do is educate the citizens in the United States as to what’s wrong and what’s our responsibility for the social crisis, 2 massive inequality in the world, children starving to death, etc., environmental crisis, all the major biological systems are in a state of collapse, and the moral crisis that a lot of people are putting their heads in the sand and trying to ignore what’s going on or cynical responses. “Yeah, I know there’s hunger, but, but, but…” There’s always a but, and the but is their excuse to do nothing. I think if you look historically, whether it’s the “Good Germans” who stood by while Hitler killed millions of people, or the people who didn’t fight against slavery, etc., we will be judged one way or the other, by God if you believe in God or by the god of history if you don’t. We will be judged and we want people to participate in making history and fixing what’s wrong with the world. MB Great. So I guess that leads perfectly into why you guys participated in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Can you articulate Global Exchange’s participation in the protests in Seattle? KD It was kind of interesting in that we knew that Clinton had invited them to have this big ministerial meeting in the United States. We knew it was significant, that they were going to try to launch a new round of trade negotiations and a round can last seven or eight years, and during that time a lot of legislation for the planet gets written. And we knew they were only going to meet in the U.S. once, so this is our one big chance. As it turned out, I happened to be in Seattle giving some talks up at the UW on the day when is was announced, and I remember very distinctly when we heard, because we were thinking it would be Honolulu or San Diego or someplace remote or right wing or something like that. When we heard that it was Seattle, it was like, “Yippee!” We immediately jumped on our cell phones and email networks and started spreading the world and saying, okay, it’s Seattle. Part of the reason they picked Seattle, I think, was because Boeing and Microsoft ponied up a lot of money. The contradiction there is that companies like Boeing and Microsoft rely on very well educated workers and very well educated workers expect a certain level of transparency in government. They can read critical literature as well as rah, rah, the system’s great literature. You have a long tradition of trade unionism, of forest activism defending our old growth forests, etc. People don’t say the Left Coast for nothing. So Global Exchange was already very involved in struggles around the World Bank and the IMF, struggles around the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, which was a major victory. All the G-7 governments, the industrial country governments and all the big corporations wanted that MAI treaty to go through and grassroots citizen pressure stopped it. We were involved in the struggle against NAFTA. We were involved in the successful 3 struggle against Fast Track, the abdication of congressional power over finessing the details of trade agreements allowing the President to basically present a trade package to the Congress and Congress only being able to vote up or down without the ability to mess with the details. That was defeated. We had been involved in a lot of those struggles, so it was perfectly natural for us to be involved in the WTO protests. We got together with three other groups, Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society and Art and Revolution, and we put together a call to the movements to form a Direct Action Network to not just protest the WTO, but actually to do mass nonviolent, and I stress nonviolent, civil disobedience to actually try to prevent the meetings from going forward. The response to that call was overwhelming and very soon, within a matter of weeks, the problem was how do you find a room big enough to hold all the representatives of the Steelworkers and the environmental groups and all these other organizations that wanted to participate in this act of defiance.
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