It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Port Militarization Resistance

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

As a new anti-war movement sweeps the country we revisit an interview about the forgotten direct actions of the last anti-war movement.    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And today we're going to talk about how things were also bad in falling apart in the 2000s, which are a profoundly cursed time period. period and specifically we're going to talk about i think a part of the anti-war movement that does not get much attention um which is the port militarization resistance that happened sort of 2006 2007 and with us today to talk about this is two people who were part of this movement uh we have juliana newhauser hello hello and. And Brendan Maslowskis-Dunn. Yeah, both of whom were organizers and activists while this was going on. Yeah, thank you both for being here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So, yeah, as I was saying a bit in the intro, I think this is a part of the anti-war movement that is not very well known i think i think a lot of people know about the initial stuff that happened in 2003 and people might know about some of the stuff that was happening

against the war in afghanistan like right when it started but i don't think most people know that it like you know even after 2003 sort of doesn't work that it continues and it continues sort of in forms that are that are very interesting and so i guess i want you to to start out i want to ask how we sort of got from the early part of the anti-war movement into this and how you two got involved i would say that there's this narrative about the movement against the war in iraq that there is the largest protests in human history at least at that point I don't know if it's still true against the

invasion and then it didn't work and everyone kind of went home and ended there and to a certain extent that's true but like you said the people that didn't go home went in interesting directions. And so at the time, direct action was not as acceptable as it is now. dominated either by big liberal coalitions or PSL front groups that were basically indistinguishable in what they actually did, which was basically nothing. And in the best of cases, and in the worst of cases, counterinsurgency. But then there were small groups of people that, when we saw that it didn't work, and we saw that these giant peaceful marches from one part of town to another, or voting for John Kerry or whatever, didn't work, that we started to look for other options. options. Yeah. And, you know, I got involved, you know, I'd say with the anti-war movement, that idea of how war is unjust was really taught to me from a very young age. I mean, my parents were, you know, children of the 60s and they had family members fighting in Vietnam and, you know, friends dying in Vietnam and were against the protests back then. So I grew up hearing these stories and of course, stories from family members, particularly one of my grandfathers, both of them were veterans in

World War II. One of them was a Marine in the, you know, in the Pacific theater and still into his 70s, 80s, and 90s until his final days was just dealing with horrific PTSD and had always taught me from a young age never to get involved. And I remember when very clearly, I'm sure it's on everyone's minds now, when the invasion of Afghanistan started, when the invasion of Iraq started. I was at that massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. that Juliana just mentioned. And I ended up, I'm from Utica, New York. I went to a rural high school just outside of Utica, you know, Rust Belt, generally speaking, impoverished and also very conservative area

of New York. And, you know, I had the recruiters bothering me, military recruiters in high school, recruiting my friends, and they were just everywhere in the hallways. So it was very present with me. When I was younger, I moved out to Olympia, Washington in 2006. And that's when a new student activist group, Students for a Democratic Society, was launched. That's how Juliana and I first met. We were both in separate chapters of that new organization in the Pacific Northwest. And the port protests started just a few months after I moved out there

in Olympia in 2006. So wait, just to clarify this for a second, because I've never quite been clear on this history. So there was a second SD, like Students for a Democratic Society that was like unrelated to the first one? Yeah, it was reborn briefly um at the end of the bush of mass state that explains a lot of things that were otherwise very baffling

we're not that old yeah we were definitely in the in the second uh you know the rebirth of it um so you know i think it it took on some things in spirit um but also was, I'd say, different in many ways. And it was very active. To me, at least, it was very exciting to be a member of the new SDS because there are over a dozen chapters in the Pacific Northwest, and it was a great way to connect with young activists all over the US. So SDS is emerging in this time period. One of the other things i was interested about is

something something you were talking about in in the early part of this which has to do with the the way that these giant both the sort of answer coalition psl frank group and i guess the iso was still around back then uh coalitions work versus how like anything else worked i'm interested so so what was was sds sort of like consciously set up in in opposition to those groups i don't think it was conscious but there was just like i mean these days i mean like there's a lot of controversy around psl with like anarchist versus tanky politics none of that mattered at that time like none of that mattered the only thing that mattered was that answer which was the PSL front

group was completely fucking useless like they completely indistinguishable from any peace police um liberal democratic front group there was literally no difference just in terms of their aesthetics maybe like is there a donkey or a hammer and sickle on something that's the only difference we saw so i don't i don't think there was it wasn't there wasn't like a conscious like political opposition to it it was just like they're not doing anything and and so we had to look in another direction actually you know it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup of authoritarian communist groups at times but this was actually answer for those who don't recall it was a front group for the workers world party the wwp which yeah i mean it's it's hard to keep track right

yeah it's the same thing like i think so so okay so for people who are sort of unaware of this there's a network of connected but sometimes feuding, like, weird Stalinist cults that kind of, like, they hold on through, like, the 80s and 90s, and they start sort of rebuilding again around the anti-war groups are also still these people, which is incredibly depressing. Something I want to talk a bit about towards the end of this. But yeah, just for people who have not spent the last half decade in the trenches of extremely weird anti-war politics. anti-war politics. So, yeah, so I think we should get into how the sort of the first action

starts in Olympia. Yeah, so, and there were actually a couple actions that happened in the year preceding that, you know, before I moved out to Olympia in 2006. It was not yet under the banner of PMR, Port Militarization Resistance. That was a name that was officially coined in, you know,

in May and June of 2006. And so just to give you an idea, Olympia, it's a college town, right? The Evergreen State College is there. It's also the capital, Washington State. So you have that going on. It's also a military town. It's a little over 20 miles south of what we called Fort Lewis. It's now called JBLM, JBLM, or Joint Base Lewis-McChord. It's an Army and Air Force base.

Now it's one base. So you had all these different kind know, different kind of elements in, you know, in tandem in that town. And the public port, the Port of Olympia, is one of about 70 or so public ports in the state of Washington, some of which are, I mean, they're used for all kinds of things, you know, for commercial private industry, but also the military and the U.S. government. So, you know, I heard from someone, I don't even remember who, that the military was sending a ship to the port of Olympia in late May of 2006. 2006 and this happened for 10 or so days and it was just kind of a natural instinct for a whole bunch of us to go down to the port of olympia it was it was the war machine in our backyard and the idea was to just block the vehicles uh it started out with just like less than 10 people, a number of folks getting arrested, and that very rapidly culminated into larger protests every single day and active blockades. Those of us like Juliana, myself, and other folks using civil disobedience or what we prefer to call civil resistance to try and stop or at the very least slow down these striker vehicles. And to give folks an idea of what a striker vehicle is, you can look it up online, but it's kind of halfway between, you know, a tank and a Humvee. It doesn't have the slats, you know, that a tank would have.

It's, you know, and they were being used in both Iraq and Afghanistan for raids of residential areas. They were really on the front lines of the war in both those countries. And that's what we were trying to stop. I only got involved later because I wasn't living in Olympia at the time. I was in another SDS chapter, but my roommate was from Olympia and he had been involved in that first round of protests in Olympia before moving up to Bellingham. And so like hearing his story has got me very excited because it's like finally someone's someone's doing something like someone's they're not just like you, it's like everything else was just so liberal. Whether it's marching from one place to another or writing to your Congress people or occupying their office. It was like asking someone else to do something, which you knew from the beginning they were never going to do.

Yeah. And finally, this was, finally someone was like actually getting into it. I think the first one of the things that happened here was that they started to avoid that. thing that I think for people who either don't know Washington or because they're normal people don't know like the port areas of these cities

very well because it's like unless you're a longshoreman like why would you go down to like the port of Tacoma yeah there's nothing there yeah no but they kept moving it around because Ompia is also not very big. And so it's, there's really only two roads into the port, which is very small.

And so it was, it's very easy to block it. And so then I think the first time that I got involved was in 2007 when they had moved it because they kept moving it around to try and switch things up wait they're moving the ship around?

is that no it's like each time they had to make a military shipment they would once the ship was in the port, they would just have to go through with it. But then, you know, it's like every six months or so they had to make another military shipment. And they would change the port, usually each time, to try and, basically to avoid us. It doesn't seem like this is like normal practice

um the first time i had gone down was in um tacoma which is a much much much more industrialized port than olympia it's you know it's like a big port a more normal port i guess and that one was honestly pretty crazy because you're just trapped in this giant industrial maze, basically at the mercy of the riot cops. The best success we had was definitely at the Port of Olympia. seven in olympia was definitely i guess like the glory moment which was um when people were able to on and off like actually hold the port and control its entrances and exits yeah and i want to you know just emphasize that like the one the the military changing their approach right to avoid us so jumping from port to port with these different shipments, they actually went so far because we were so successful as a movement in the Pacific Northwest to ship striker vehicles by rail out of the Pacific Northwest

and even going so far as to ports in Texas. But one thing that we did is that we built up contacts with other activists, with longshore workers all up and down the West Coast in California. There are other activists we're connected with in Texas, Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York. There is a desire in the anti-war movement. And, you know, in some extent extent maybe it's like it was small but some folks in the labor movement especially in oakland where the ilwu the you know longshore workers union is a lot more militant than say in a place like olympia yeah um but yeah i mean people

wanted to replicate this model because as juliana said we were successful in 2007 we shut down the port of Olympia for a total of it was essentially two days they were not they're not shipping anything in or out uh we set up blockades we're willing to throw down with the police in the street and one of the things that was cool about that blockade is that um one two entrances, like I said, and one was completely blockaded. And then the other one, we had a moving... I don't really know what it was, but something with wheels that we could move in and out to open

it up. And so then we could allow civilian cargo to move in and out, but then we'd wheel it back in place to block military shipments. Were you able to actually stop them from...

In that one intercom, were you able to actually stop them from moving this off altogether, or did you eventually get cleared out by the police and they moved it? We would eventually get cleared out by the police. It's like we were never able to... It's like we held it for two days. Those protests took place over a series of two weeks or more or less.

We were only able to fully hold it for two days before eventually they would clear us out. But one of the things is that it did create problems for the army. It did create problems for the army because when you work with a port, you know, it's like you've got like a certain timeframe that you've contracted with the port to do whatever it is you're going to do. And it's not too happy if you take longer than you said you would. Yeah. Yeah.

And the other thing I want to add is you know i think the other really important element with this whole movement going on is the pacific northwest was um it is specifically western washington where the two of us were living it was it was uh you know the center and in a sense it was the heart of the anti-war movement in the country at that time. One, because of this militant direct action that we were, you know, we were building up in the streets and trying to throw a wrench in the gears of the war machine to at the very least slow it down, which in some ways we did. But, you know, we were up against so much. But the other added element, of course, is the GI resistance and the soldiers who are resisting. Ivor, also known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, was very active there. They set up a GI

coffee house literally across the street. The gates for one of the entrances for Fort Lewis. There are a whole bunch of soldiers that were going AWOL. We had friends who were active duty soldiers who had fought in, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan that were AWOL and they were hiding, you know, refusing to go back into the striker brigades that joined us in port militarization resistance. There are a whole, you know, long list of soldiers that were very publicly saying, you know, I'm refusing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan for, you know, various reasons. And so we are very much connected with this movement too. And, and I think the higher ups in the military, they're, they're hyper aware of that. They studied us very well, um, you know, to the

point of actually spying on us. So that's like a whole other element of the story too. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen to post run high on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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from talking to other people who were involved in this was that like wow like during these protests like the level of police militarization just like skyrocketed and like i remember i was like about this it was like you know if you go back and look at like old system of a down videos you know they'll have these things yeah you'll see these you see these riot police and like you look at them and it's like these people they look so much less armored than like the people that we have now and one of the things that i thought was interesting about this was that like this is i think one of the points where you start getting the modern riot police showing up that are just like you know completely concaved in like armor and yeah i want to talk about just like the police response to this because

i think that's that's another thing i think i think there's there's a kind of a tendency to sort of project back what the police look like in 2021 just onto the whole history of police and i think it's like it's it's it's gotten worse even in the last 20 years? Yeah, I mean, so I live downtown in Olympia and probably just like a six minute walk away from the port of Olympia. And also very conveniently, just a few blocks away from the police station. So lucky us.

So we actually saw, you know, we could see from the front of, down on the road, down on the sidewalk, from the front of our house, some of the military shipments going by. And we did see that. Absolutely. And at times it was terrifying. I mean, I lived in an activist house we jokingly called HQ because that's just, you know, where because of its proximity to the port. because that's just, you know, where it, because of its proximity to the port, that's where a number of us were having meetings, uh, you know, around these protests early on in 2006. And, um,

yeah, I mean, we like, they look like RoboCop and it's something I had, I, you know, I hadn't, like, I had been to like mass marches and demonstrations, like the RNC protests and DNC protests in Boston, New York and like in Washington, D.C. And so I would see these like riot cops, but they were, I mean, ubiquitous in these port protests. It was like a whole army of them that was sent out. I mean, when Giuliana said that things got kind of crazy at the Port of Tacoma protests, I mean, there was like a police riot, you know, like the cops went absolutely nuts. They're shooting people with tear gas and pepper balls and brutalizing people. I had never before witnessed anything like that. And it got to the point in, you know, in Olympia where we kind of knew early on that we were being traced by the police to the extent where, you know, one friend of ours was followed from our house to the bus few friends, a few fellow activists from Olympia to Aberdeen about an hour's drive.

So Aberdeen, there's a port of Grays Harbor there. Pretty conservative small town. It's where Kurt Cobain is from. Home of the famous Kurt Cobain themed McDonald's. Home of the famous Kurt Cobain themed McDonald's. They served billions and billions served in that one McDonald's and Kurt Cobain's McDonald's. But yeah, I mean, they were following, they had orders, the Washington State Patrol to pull over a car full of known anarchists. There was a lurk going on to all the police departments. They pulled him over.

They made him walk the line. He wasn't drinking, had no drugs, like nothing in his system. But he was driving under, like, one mile per hour under the speed limit. They arrested him for DWI, you know, eventually fought the charges, sued them and, you know, won a big settlement out of all that. But that's just one example of many

of the lengths that the police would go to. It was pretty severe. Even there's a house of a bunch of anarchists, younger anarchists called Pitch Pipe Info Shop in Tacoma. And that was also a big target. The police were swarming around them all the time. They had cameras set up specifically just outside the info shop. There weren't surveillance cameras there before, but then it was like, oh, we'll just

conveniently put them on this one specific street corner. Yeah, I think that was one of the things I was reading about this is you have that stuff and then also i think one of the scariest parts of this is that like army intelligence gets involved and yeah do you want to talk about uh the man named quote unquote john jacob who was in fact not that yeah so uh you know i'm curious what what memories you have of our our good dear friend john jacob juliana i don't think i ever actually knew him in person but he was the um the moderator of the listserv wasn't he yes he's one of the moderators of our listserv now that i look back on it i'm like the the port militarization resistance the serve was always just like this dramatic shit show and it's like looking back on it i was like oh a cop that did nothing did absolutely nothing to like establish order or

huh i wonder if that was on purpose yeah so i think there's definitely some things that happen like you know looking back uh from our vantage point today there's definitely some things that happen, like, you know, looking back from our vantage point today, it's like, okay, things make a little more sense at the time though. I mean, we're in this movement, right? And so that means like meeting people where they're at. We would find all kinds of people that would like want to join the movement. Like I, like I said earlier, like active duty soldiers that were joining. So I met this guy named John Jacob and, uh, he sent an email out to me. I was one of the contacts for the Olympia SDS group. And it's like, Hey, you know, there's kind of like a parent organization that some old, like elder activists are in, uh, to kind of mentor us called movement for a democratic society.

Very small, never really took off, but it's like, I'm interested in getting involved. Uh, we met up in public and he seemed like an all right guy. I mean, he was, you know, 40-ish, early forties. He told me he had like, you know, been in the military for years and he actually still worked at Fort Lewis. So he was always open about that, but it only went that far. He didn't ever tell us what he actually did there. And it wasn't abnormal for, you know, we had many folks that worked active duty, you know, on base and civilian roles or soldiers, as I mentioned, that were in port militarization resistance. So he gets involved and he gets really involved with port militarization resistance. He goes to protests. He gets pretty close with this militarization resistance. He goes to protests.

He gets pretty close with this group of anarchists I mentioned who lived in Tacoma. And he seemed like a really solid guy to most of us. As the military responded to our, you know, how effective we were in the anti-war movement and the GI resistance movement by changing their tactics, we noticed that, okay, when we first started the protests, we had the ability to catch the police by surprise by setting up, you know, a blockade here or having a surprise action there at this time or this port etc etc and as time progressed we found out that you know we were having these making these decisions for tactics in our strategy we thought that we're in private and then for whatever reason the police kind of knew about where we were going to be before we even showed up and that i remember that clearly happening in 2007 the port of olympia yeah in tacoma there was a lot of things like that like there was one time when there were like some people who um had a meeting in a closed room with like all their they had taken like the batteries out of their cell phones they had

simply written on the whiteboard the time and place they were going to have their next meeting, which is going to be in a diner near the port. And so that way, if for any reason the room was bugged, it wouldn't be caught up because it was just written on a board. And then it was like

a small meeting, too, so it's like there wouldn't... And then when they got to that diner, there was like a small meeting too. So it's like there wouldn't. And then when they got to that diner, there was like full of cops. And like clearly waiting for them. Like at that point, it's like, it was very clear. There was some level of infiltration involved. Yeah. And I think we, from early on,

like, you know, we knew our history. I mean, you know, one of our fellow activists in PMR and a friend of ours, Peter Bomer is a professor at the Evergreen State College. He was in the original SDS back in the sixties. And, you know, he was essentially a political prisoner for a couple of years in both Massachusetts and California. I mean, the feds essentially tried to assassinate him back in, in the seventies when he was active in the anti-war movement in San Diego. Like we knew, you know, former Black Panthers and we read our history. So we knew about the history of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program of the 60s and 70s, and the war on the anti-war and civil rights and Black Power, American Indian movements, etc.

So we knew, you know, just intuitively early on. But there was one thing that happened in particular, which prompted some of us to file for a public records request with the city of Olympia. And another activist walking down the street in Olympia, I'm a member of the Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World Union. And we had like a one of those metal newspaper boxes downtown and it was locked to a pole um you know with a bike lock and there are some city workers there with a pickup truck and they're cutting the lock to this newspaper

box and they threw it in their pickup truck and so our you know this friend of ours was there was like what what the hell what are you doing what going on? And one of the workers just kind of shrugged and was like, I don't know, the police told us to do this. And they drove off, like they stole, you know, our essentially like our union property or whatever. you know call and kind of threaten the city and and then a number of us got together like hey you know let's do like a public records request um with the city of of olympia freedom of information law right and so we did and the request was you know just requesting any all information the city had um any exchanges communications by email etc, between the police and like other agencies about anarchists, the IWW, Students for a Democratic Society. And their initial search that the city clerk did yielded something like 30,000 responses. So she's like, OK, I got to narrow this down. And I don't know, I was working on the request at the time. And for some reason, like, I don't know, we're poor protests, we're near a military base, just copies of emails, etc.

that were little puzzle pieces for this massive puzzle. And it was just a few of them. And there was an email talking about our guy in the Navy going to a PMR meeting to get some intel. There's all kinds of things like that. There are a few emails in particular, and the email address was something like johnjtauri at army.us, whatever the email address was. So there's a crew of activists that got together, put their heads together, did some

research quietly for a few months, and eventually found out by publicly accessible information like voter registration records and also finding out something about like a motorcycle club called like the i don't know like the brown butte club or the brown butt club or something and and uh like found out that this john towry guy that was in this motorcycle club and had his you know was registered to vote outside of tacoma in this motorcycle club and had his, you know, was registered to vote outside of Tacoma in this town there. It was actually John Jacob. It was this guy that we thought was a fellow activist, an anarchist, and a friend. You know, I thought he was a personal friend of mine. Turns out he was actually essentially an army intelligence officer working for something called a force

protection unit at uh at joint face uh joint base lewis mccord and also working with a whole list of different agencies and what turned out to be like a massive surveillance network that was national in scope this guy was sent by the army along with many others to infiltrate us, to spy on us and to disrupt us. It was huge. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and

the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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better offline.com yeah and that's one of the things that i've always always really so like i i learned about poor militarization resistance basically because i was like poking around the history of like informants and I ran into this and I was like, what? One of the things I thought was really interesting about this is that like, like I think this chapter, the anti-war movement is even on the left is like not very well known. But like the seriousness with which the army seems to have taken it is really remarkable. Yeah, I'm wondering what you two think about that. One thing we have to emphasize is that we were not a large group of people. Yeah.

Like, the number of people who are actively involved in militarization resistance at its peak was... How many people do you think it was, Brandon? Well, it depends i mean i'd say they're probably like at its peak maybe uh probably 40 to 50 people that would like consistently show up to things you know maybe a slightly smaller very core group but we would have demonstrations with like and then like 400 people you know yeah and like that would be like the max like there is it's. It's like the peaceful support actions, you'd get a couple hundred people. And then for the stuff

where it's like the first night that the entrance to the Port of Olympia was occupied, it would be like 40 to 50 people. These were not very large groups of people. I feel like, and like I said, it's like one thing that we need to keep in mind was that the peace police were much stronger back then than they are now.

Nowadays, like as we saw last year, it's like people in the US have learned to throw down, but that was not the case at the time. And so this is a very, very small group of people. And I think we accomplished a lot with how small it was. If it had been larger it would have accomplished way more but even that small core of like 40 to 50 people with maybe expanding out to like a larger group of a couple hundred had them that scared that they went that far to try and disrupt it yeah and and this is one of the things i've been thinking about a lot recently of this seems to be a very consistent thing which is that like the the the the the two things that are guaranteed to like just have a

hammer drop on you if you touch them is pipelines and ports and that was that was something you know we've talked a lot on here about pipeline protests um but i was interested in what you two think about because yeah this this is like a very particular moment right now in which you're dealing with all these logistics chain failures. And I was wondering if you do think there's anything that we can learn from how your versions of the sort of port demonstrations worked for potentially

trying to leverage that in the future, especially with like contract negotiations for like port workers in Oakland coming up next year? Yeah, that's a great question. There's this old saying in the IWW, direct action gets the goods, right? And I think it really boils down to that. It's building up mass movements and social movements from below that rely on direct action,

that rely on civil resistance, civil disobedience. Yeah, and the pipeline protests that have been ongoing where Indigenous people have been on the front lines of that for many, many years now, I mean, the kind of repression and surveillance that we face really pales in comparison to the kinds of, you know, surveillance of repression that folks were facing at Standing Rock, for example. You know, I think of course, one of the, well, one of the main differences is, is that it was primarily the military, you know, with us, right.

That was surveilling us because this this is very specifically you know a war issue and a military issue um but yeah i mean i think um you know like i think there's a big questions like what what do we have to do that's that's new and to me i say you know for both that kind of militant action but also for the labor movement it's like what's not you know we don't have to reinvent the wheel there are things that have a tried and true track record of getting the goods and that is you know these more disruptive kind of actions and and movements um and so one of them would be, you know, I guess my suggestion would be to like, go back to the basics. And even like, I would say now, you know, this, remember this at a time when like Facebook

was around, right? Like, but we weren't really using that for our organizing. We really relied on like face-to-face meetings, you know, phone calls and building up trust with people and building up our capacity to like take actions and make change. You know, I think I'm not saying throw out everything that, you know, at least some of the good that social media has to offer, but like, I think going beyond that and going back to these older tactics and then for the labor movement, like the big thing is, you know, and it's just like a bigger question for mainstream unions in

particular. I mean, the whole idea of like union contracts is that workers also lose a lot. Yeah, they get some things, but business owners and bosses have rights carved out in those contracts. And with the longshore workers, I mean, the difficult thing with that, of course, is like there would be some symbolic strikes that of course, like longshore workers have done and continue to do, you know, around like the war in Iraq, historically supported Mumia Abu Jamal, Mayday, et cetera, like in Oakland. But they have some things for that written into their contracts. And, you know, for all these other like unions, it's like, well, we can't strike at all for the next two years or next three years, whatever the life of the contract is. I think it's a bigger question and challenge for the labor movement to move beyond that and not be putting this straitjacket of contracts like that.

and not be putting this straightjacket of contracts like that. Yeah, I think that the no-strike clause part of contracts, I think, is an interesting thing because it... I don't know. There are some unions that will actually do stuff around fighting it, but mostly people just sort of don't care. And I think you wind up in a situation where it seems like you kind of have to plan your tactics around when contract negotiations are happening, because otherwise you can't actually get people to do anything more than like a one

day symbolic strike. Yeah. And or, you know, the challenge is like, you know, we have this great American tradition that's not unique to the US. It's universal, really. And it's one that resonates with me, breaking the law, right? And like, you know, we're like civil disobedience. That is what we are doing in the streets and blocking the ports. We were breaking the law and we knew it. And that's what the civil rights movement, the Black Freedom Movement did in the 1960s. But like, we have recent examples of workers breaking the law in mass, like the West Virginia teacher strikes that happened a few years ago. Like teachers in every single county in that state went on strike, they broke the law, and they won something out of that. And I think that's what we really need to encourage people is this idea of breaking out of the norm and breaking the laws that are in place, which are not there to expand our freedom.

They're there to contract it. Yeah, one of my friends had a joke about what was the exact line? It was, it's only illegal if you get caught and it only matters if you lose which i think is a good way of thinking about uh both yeah absolutely and yeah and you know yeah i think it's also like it's worth mentioning that like the other sides the law doesn't matter to them at all like they just tear it up and like light it on fire constantly so don't don't bind yourself if you can if you can not get caught and not like go to prison for the rest of your life don't bind yourself by a bunch of like paper that the other side just

doesn't care about yeah and that's an excellent point, because that's the big thing, you know, with the army and law enforcement in general, like surveillance of us, they were in the police, just their actions or brazen actions on the street, like the riot police. They were just breaking the law all the time. They absolutely have a deep, visceral hatred of the Bill of Rights, of civil rights and civil liberties. And so there were a number of court cases that sprung out of this movement. There was a case called Panagakis v. Tauri. Juliana Panagakis was another PMR member, co-plaintiff in that case. And it was a case against the army that we you know, we, we waged and brought up to the ninth circuit court of appeals and, you know, eventually lost and, and it could have

brought it to the Supreme court, but didn't, but, you know, like the, the other thing is like the violation of the posse commentatus act. It was a whole other thing. You know, we don't have to get like so tied up into like the legalistic thing, but like the point, your point is valid. Like they don't care about the laws that are already there. They'll, they'll just intentionally break them, break their own laws that they have set up. And,

you know, they'll just get a slap on the wrist. Cause that's really all. That's all that happens to them. I think, I think, I think that's a good note to end on a break the law. It's fake

it's also bad do you two have anything you want to plug other than that other than you know encouraging people to break the law do anarchism blockade your local port yeah yeah I mean

I think it's you know I guess just encourage people to do as, you know, it sounds like what you're doing by having us on the show. And like, there are some in our very recent history, you know, movements and wins that we all as activists today can still learn from and i think part of that um you know i don't want to call us elders because we're not that old but like one part of that is like making sure like our movements are still like multi-generational and like we we learn from each other and also as as juliana and i did like i mentioned earlier like we learned from the movements of the past, SDS, the Black Panthers, the Black Freedom Movement, etc. But there's a lot that these struggles, I think, have to offer us today. All right. Thank you both for coming on and talking with us. Thank you for having us.

Thank you. Well, this has been It Could Happen Here. Find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. And the rest of our stuff is at Cool Zone Media at the same somewhat accursed social media places. I don't know why I'm saying somewhat. They're just accursed. See you next time, whenever that is. It Could Happen Here is a production of

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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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