| August
22 , 2006
Cops as Provocateurs on the Docks
The Iron Heel Revisited
By JACK
HEYMAN
Spying
on grannies in Sacramento who were planning to “mark Mother’s
Day urging the Governor and Legislature to support bringing California
National Guardsmen home from Iraq by Labor Day”; doing undercover
surveillance at a union rally for health care in San Francisco and
prompting police to fire “less-than-lethal” weapons
at anti-war protesters and longshore workers in the port of Oakland
-- this is the veiled face of the “war on terror” exposed
in a just-released American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report.
The
report, The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political
Activity in Northern and Central California, written by Mark Schlosberg
documents the trampling of constitutional rights by various government
agencies, the F.B.I., the Department of Defense, the State Terrorism
Threat Assessment Center, the California National Guard, at least
one Sheriff’s Department and several Police Departments.
Ominously,
the ACLU states, “If history is any guide, the stories documented
in this report represent only the tip of the iceberg.” Perhaps
these kinds of government interventions explain, in part, why organizing
efforts for an end to the wars in the Middle East and for workers’
rights at home have difficulty in achieving a modicum of success.
In
the case of the grandmothers’ protest against the war, along
with Code Pink and Gold Star Families for Peace, the press office
of Governor Schwarzenegger sent an email warning to California National
Guard brass, including Robert J. O’Neil, head of a new “intell”
unit called the Information Synchronization Knowledge Management
and Intelligence Fusion Program. It’s touted as a “one-stop
shop for local, state and national law enforcement to share information.”
When the San Jose Mercury News exposed the monitoring of the protest,
the Guard tried to nip criticism by inviting the peace groups to
tour its facilities.
This
PR ploy blew up in their faces when Code Pink members photographed
a poster in Guard offices of General “Black Jack” Pershing
who, during the U.S. imperialist conquest of the Philippines after
the Spanish-American War, quelled a Muslim rebellion in 1911, by
slaughtering 49 insurgents with bullets soaked in pigs’ blood.
The poster asks: “Maybe it is time for this segment of history
to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq? The question is where do we find
another Black Jack Pershing?”
After
a public outcry, the poster was removed and the Guard’s Fusion
program dismantled. However, it was revealed in State Senator Dunn’s
investigation of the Guard that similar domestic spying operations
exist around the country. And undoubtedly in California other government
agencies will continue the Guard’s surveillance.
Workers—Under
the Gun
When
Safeway employees in Southern California voted to strike over health
care issues in 2003, workers across the country organized actions
in support the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).
In Los Angeles, longshore Local 13 shut down the port and held a
solidarity rally with other unions to raise money for the largely
Latino strikers. In Northern California a group of religious leaders
planned a pilgrimage to the home of Safeway CEO Steve Burd in Contra
Costa County to hand deliver postcards supporting the striking workers.
On
January 23, 2004, two men identifying themselves as deputies from
the Homeland Security Unit of the County Sheriff entered the union
offices in Martinez asking about the pilgrimage. The following day
UFCW officials at a strike solidarity rally in San Francisco spotted
the same sheriff’s deputies in plainclothes at the rally.
After continuous prodding by Art Pulaski, Secretary-Treasurer of
the California Federation of Labor, the deputies admitted their
pernicious undercover role. Said Pulaski, using homeland security
justification to monitor union activity “is sending a chilling
and intimidating message to all of us.”
“Port
Security” in the Imperial State’s Homeland
Nowhere
is the bipartisan nature of the “war on terror” more
apparent than in the April 7, 2003 police attack on peaceful anti-war
demonstrators and longshoremen in the port of Oakland in which more
than 50 were injured by wooden dowels, concussion grenades, tear
gas, motorcycles and rubber bullets. The California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center (CATIC), set up immediately after 9/11 by Democrats,
Governor Gray Davis and State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, sent
a warning before the anti-war demonstration that there could be
violence. CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle even equated terrorists
with protesters, creating a volatile atmosphere in which cops were
armed with riot gear and prodded to shoot.
Even
after police videos of the demonstration showed police firing without
provocation, refuting the police version that demonstrators threw
objects at the police, still, Democrat Mayor Jerry Brown backed
the cops as he does today in his quest to be California State Attorney
General, the “Top Cop”.
Hypocritically, it was Brown who, in 1997, participated in a picket
line in support of fired dockworkers in Liverpool, England which
blocked traffic in the port, his ostensible reason for backing the
police attack this time. The difference: in 1997 Brown needed labor
credentials in his bid for mayor. Now, he needs to portray a “law
and order” image and get financial contributions from the
global corporations. Earlier this year the City of Oakland settled
out-of-court for some $2 million in damages without admitting any
wrongdoing.
The
ACLU report places much of the blame on the present loss of civil
liberties on the government’s overzealous response to fighting
terrorism after 9/11 and the bountiful rewards doled out by the
Department of Homeland Security. In the nascent days of the “war
on terror”, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
(ILWU) bore the brunt of government coercion, first exposed here
in the pages of Counterpunch (27 June 2002 Strikers as Terrorists?
Ridge Calls Longshoremen’s Chief). Defense Secretary Rumsfeld
and then-Homeland Security Czar Ridge telephoned ILWU President
Jim Spinosa to warn that any job actions on the West Coast docks
during contract negotiations would pose a threat to national security
and be met with an ironclad military occupation of the docks.
Such heavy-handed threats clearly played well with the Pacific Maritime
Association (PMA), the group representing international shipowners,
stevedore companies and terminal operators with whom the union had
been negotiating. When the PMA shutdown every port on the Coast
3 months later by locking out longshore workers, the Bush administration
saw no such threat to “national security” and eagerly
followed the employers lead by invoking the slave labor Taft-Hartley
Act at the request of California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein.
ILWU officials called the concessionary contract borne from this
double whammy a “victory” simply because the union survived
the struggle.
During
the employer lockout, some dockworkers carried picket signs reading
the “war on terror is a war on workers”. Port security
measures are jettisoning civil liberties over the side as surveillance
cameras are mounted not only in the dock area, but in some workers’
breakrooms as well. And “port security” has become a
euphemism for militarization of the waterfront, where some 750,000
port workers are being required to undergo intrusive background
checks, having little to do with “terrorism” and pay
$139 for an electronic ID card in order to work.
The
union-controlled hiring hall, the power of the union, won after
6 workers were killed by police in the 1934 West Coast maritime
strike and founded on the principle of an equal distribution of
work, is in jeopardy. Now the government, like Johnny Friendly,
the mobster bully in the film “On the Waterfront”, says
it will determine who works and who doesn’t. Prison records,
past psychological problems or activist politics could mean cement
shoes for waterfront workers’ rights.
The
planning meeting to march back to the Oakland docks to reassert
“free speech” rights one month after the bloody police
attack was infiltrated by undercover cops according to Deputy Chief
Jordan. Raising the spectre of agents provocateurs, he stated before
the OPD’s Board of Review, “…we’d be able
to gather information and maybe even direct them to do something
that we want them to do”. It is not unreasonable to assume
that in a climate of fear generated by the 9/11 attacks and fomented
by the “war on terror”-- where repressive legislation
like the USA Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Act are
rubber stamped by Democrats and Republicans -- that the right to
free speech, (demonstrations, rallies, and picket lines) and freedom
of association (the right to join a union) could be banned in the
ports.
IRON
HEEL REDUX
The
ILWU played a principled role during the witchhunting McCarthy period,
defending workers against waterfront screening and offering workers
purged from other maritime unions a safe haven. Although it was
targeted by the government and redbaiting union officials in both
CIO and AFL unions, the ILWU, to its credit, opposed the U.S. war
against Korea, and has taken the same stance on every imperialist
war since.
Today,
business unionist ILWU officials are cut from a different cloth.
While the official position of the ILWU (decided by a delegates’
vote at the 2003 union convention shortly after the military invasion)
is opposition to the Iraq war and for immediate withdrawal of troops
none of the ILWU’s International officers has implemented
that rank-and-file decision by speaking out at anti-war rallies.
Moreover, they buy into the “war on terror” and “partnership”
with the bosses like the rest of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win union
bureaucrats. The mantra they chant, “we’re the first
line of defense” in the ports, actually aligns the union with
employers and the government, while exposing the union and its hiring
hall to attack from the back.
Ironically,
the ACLU of Northern California was born in San Francisco during
the 1934 maritime strike when waterfront workers were under deadly
attack from police, the National Guard and anti-communist vigilantes.
This well-researched ACLU report meticulously identifies recent
government acts of repression. However, their conclusion reads “inadequate
understanding of privacy laws and protections for political activity,
and a profound lack of regulation” have led to governmental
abuses. The report recommends “reforms for law enforcement
surveillance activities”. Its liberal, myopic view blinds
readers to the reality that the imperialist state is a racist apparatus
of class repression, not changed or controlled by “a few good
laws”. FBI’s COINTELPRO program actually killed radicals
like the Black Panthers not just “disrupted political organizations”.
And while the report lists the FBI’s campaign to “neutralize”
Martin Luther King, it is silent on the government’s hand
in the murder of Malcolm X. The American road to empire is littered
with bodies.
Early
on, the ACLU report cites the 1976 Church Committee findings that
the U.S. government has “consistently used law enforcement
agencies to investigate and stifle political dissent.” That
Senate committee found a pattern of abuses dating back to 1936.
Actually, state repression of working class radicals is evident
with early 1900s anti-syndicalist measures directed against the
Wobblies of the Industrial Workers of the World, and through the
imprisonment of railroad union leader Eugene V. Debs, opposed to
the First World War, Tom Mooney and leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party and the Minneapolis Teamsters in the run-up to WWII.
The report skips over the McCarthy period, perhaps, because the
ACLU participated in that political cannibalizing of the workers
movement.
No,
we don’t need more legislation to control police activities.
What’s needed are intransigent defiance of unjust laws and
mass mobilizations against the war, racism and repression.
That’s
what stopped the war in Vietnam and won civil rights at home. In
that vein, ILWU Local 10 submitted a resolution to the union convention
in May for a one-day strike against the war calling on the rest
of the labor movement to join in. Unfortunately, union bureaucrats
scuttled the motion in committee before it could reach the convention
floor for debate and a vote.
La
lutta continua.
Jack
Heyman, a longshoreman who works on the Oakland docks,
was one those assaulted by police in their attack on the April 7,
2003 anti-war protest in the port. He has organized dock actions
against apartheid and in support of Mumia abu Jamal. For the video
documentary of the Oakland police shooting anti-war protesters and
longshoremen April 7, 2003 "Shots On The Docks".Send $20.00
check or money order to: Labor Video Project, P.O. Box 720027San
Francisco, CA 94172. Jack can be reached at jackheyman@comcast.net.
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