This banner was suspended from a construction crane near Seattle Center by the Rainforest Action Network at the beginning of the WTO meetings there in 1999. Protest activity surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, which was to be the launch of a new millennial round of trade negotiations, occurred on November 30, 1999, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened in Seattle, Washington, USA. The negotiations were quickly overshadowed by massive and controversial street protests outside the hotels and the Seattle Convention Center, in what became the second phase of the anti-globalization movement in the United States. The scale of the demonstrationsâ€"even the lowest estimates put the crowd at over 40,000[citation needed]â€"dwarfed any previous demonstration in the United States against a world meeting of any of the organizations generally associated with economic globalization (such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the World Bank). The events are sometimes referred to as the Battle in Seattle.