What lessons can we learn from the shutdown of the 1999 WTO Ministerial in Seattle 9 years ago today and from the last decade and a half of global justice organizing as we face today's major crises under an Obama Administration? This was the question a group of organizers from different parts of the last decades of global justice organizing responded to last week at a forum in New York City put together by Deep Dish TV, an independent video/media pioneer. Here are my thoughts.

Nine years ago today: Tens of thousands of people from across the US and around the world rose up against the WTO's meeting in Seattle, as movements demonstrated across the planet, we shut down the WTO with mass nonviolent direct action and sustained street resistance all week in the face of martial law, police and national guard violence, arrests, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. By the end of the week, the poorer countries' government representatives, emboldened by the street protests and under pressure from movements at home, refused to go along and the talks collapsed.