"It's a free Country"

[Severian]

One of the only articles I've ever seen which conveys some of the practical experience and challenges of doing politics on the street. In many smaller U.S. cities, there are few busy public sidewalks, so it gets even harder - you gotta deal with supermarket parking lots and other private property.

(Then again, the one time I was actually arrested, and the other time I came closest, it was on public sidewalks.)

This article conveys some of the difference between formal democratic rights and the political space you actually take and use....

I'd like to invite people to share experiences of doing this kind of work. The problems of dealing with cops, rent-a-cops, property owners and others standing between the activist and the people you're trying to reach....

From SeeingRed.com (http://www.seeingred.com/Copy/free_country.html)

It's a Free Country

by Steve Eckardt

(GLENSIDE, PA.) - The college student and I were outside the theater with the Che T-shirts for maybe three minutes before the owner charged out shouting "You can't do this! You can't do this!"

In fact I was still parking the car when the big graying red-head made his appearance, threatening the college student like a 200-pound rooster who'd forgotten his chest had fallen into his belly long ago.

The squad cars showed up two minutes later.

Thing was that the Afro-Cuban All-Stars band was playing the theater, and we wanted to reach the crowd. We hoped to sell some Che T-shirts to raise some cash for a big group of local young people organizing themselves for a trip to Cuba, thanks to a nationwide invitation from Cuban youth groups representing like two million people.

T-shirts for sure, but mainly we wanted to meet people who liked the Afro-Cuban All-Stars, let them know what was going on, and invite them to a big-ass party we were organizing.

Arguing with the proprietor meant letting the people pass by. And the squad cars and uniforms weren't exactly sending them a you-want-to-get-involved-in-this message.

Now the heat's pretext was "vending without a license," though they would've used anything from an 18th century law requiring horses to be hitched (yep, we hadn't hitched any horses) to a drug-positive nuclear analysis of our hair thanks eating poppy-seed cake three months ago.

Sure, there is such a thing as the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press), and the Supreme Court has ruled that banning sales of things like Che T-shirts with anti-vendor laws is stone unconstitutional. And 18 months after the crowd was gone --and after an evening in the lock-up, a bunch of missed days at work, and a thousand dollars of attorney's fees-- we would have won. Hey, it's a free country.

So, duh, we kiss crew-cut blue ass --all concern, apologetic smiles, and "yes sirs"-- put the shirts back in the big cardboard box, and start handing out leaflets for the party.

Eight minutes later the squads are back. "You can't hand out leaflets in front of the theater," they say.

I smile and show my palms. "Well, we're on the public sidewalk here, officer ... but why don't you show me the line we should be outside of so and we'll stay there." The crowd's passing by again and seeing us with the uniforms.

The bulls show us where they'll let us stand and we go there smiling. We hand out some more leaflets. But the cops don't leave. One beckons us back to the squad. "Problem, sir?" I ask cooperatively.

"People can tell what's in the box," he says. And sure enough we'd --oops--left enough of one hanging out so that people could tell we had a box of Che T-shirts. "You need to remove the box."

So I stuff the exposed shirt inside the box and move it further down the street. "Best I can do, officer, I have to wait for someone to pick me up. OK?" But now there's only a few stragglers left so we hand out a few more leaflets and leave.

"Does this happen every time you go out?" the college student asks. I realize that the kid, though he's done alot of things, has never worked the street before.

But I can't help just saying, "Yes."

Later, over a cold one or three, I wonder if I'd said the right thing, thinking of ways the answer could have been finessed and possible raps about capitalism's hostility to democracy, about police power being constrained by the legacies of struggles like the civil rights and antiwar movements, the international context of it all, and volumes more of blah and blah.

But the question was "Does this happen every time you go out?"

And the answer is "Yes."

Every time you do people's politics on a U.S. street, you meet a uniform within a matter of minutes. (OK, how many cops and how soon varies a little depending on what part of the U.S., whether it's rural or urban, if there's a President around, etc., etc.)

Every time.

In fact, there's a hierarchy of which First Amendment freedoms are actually allowed (as for where, almost nothing's allowed on "private property" --which is virtually everywhere except most sidewalks). Petitioning to get on the ballot, even for a Socialist, will usually be tolerated. Non-ballot petitioning runs into more trouble, but still flies much of the time. Handing out leaflets is more of a problem --they'll usually let you proceed only after missing a lot of people and being moved somewhere less effective.

Selling a newspaper --freedom of the press, right?-- is lucky to be allowed half the time. Selling posters or T-shirts fares even worse.

And the worst thing you can do? Sell books. Try setting up a table full of books anywhere outside the space of a demonstration or a political meeting ...or on a good day, a college campus, and you're almost guaranteed to be shut down.

A hundred words on a leaflet is one thing, fifty thousand is something else. People will start getting ideas, fer crissakes.

And I remember my first trip to Cuba. It's for a small international conference on the 30th anniversary of the TriContinental Congress (famous for Che's "two, three, many VietNams" speech). I walk into it --been in the country less than 12 hours-- and here's three Australians with some boxes of political books, many of the same ones I've helped sell over the years.

But there's a problem --we don't have a table.

And then the women in charge of the conference goes charging by, trailed by assistants trying to get her attention on a panoply of pressing details like microphones and air conditioning and chairs. She sees the books, stops so dead in her tracks that there's nearly a pile-up and says, "You've got books!" And gives every one of us a hug.

Then she looks again, puts her hands on her face and exclaims "But you don't have a table!"

It's intolerable. "I'll get you one myself," she declares and shoots off to find one, leaving the assistants standing there hanging, but then nodding understandingly.

"Holy shit," I say to one of the Australians. His face crinkles into a smile. "Hey, it's free country, mate."

[Ironhammer]

Geez, did this actually happen to you? Geez, what's the beef with El Che?

[Severian]

Not to me, to the guy who wrote the article. But I've had worse happen. And as Eckhardt says this kind of thing is pretty routine.

The beef is, with working people engaging in politics; cops exist to discourage that.

[Ironhammer]

We need the police around, just not *these* police. I mean to say, we will have police when the revolution is done, at least if I am in charge, they just won't practice brutality against marchers, politicos, or minorities.

[YSR]

Hah.

Then you won't be in charge, will you? No one person will be in charge, and after hearing that, it certainly wouldn't be you anyway.

[Niall]

Originally posted by [email protected] 21 2006, 01:42 AM
Not to me, to the guy who wrote the article. But I've had worse happen. And as Eckhardt says this kind of thing is pretty routine.

The beef is, with working people engaging in politics; cops exist to discourage that.
its typical of the government in charge of these types of country, they try to opress everything? Freedom of speech and expression? my arse

[dusk]

Yep where I'm from they do their best to limit our freedom of speech.

[YSR]

Hell yeah. And then liberals come along and give you "freedom of speech," or at least just enough to stop you from openly rebelling. But if you try, that's where the freedom of speech thing stops, as far as they're concerned.

[rouchambeau]

Yeah man. If free speech, in itself, changed anything it would be illegal.

[Severian]

Hm. Maybe I'll tell one of my fun-with-cops stories. Again, I'd like to encourage others to do the same.

This one's kind of embarassing, really. I was 19 and pretty inexperienced - almost totally inexperienced with anything union-related.

So Boise Cascade had hired a non-union contractor - a notorious unionbusting outfit called BE&K - to expand their paper mill in International Falls, Minnesota - a town which, BTW, brags it's the coldest spot in the continental U.S.

There was a construction workers' strike against this. Rumor said there was going to be some kind of strike support rally up there.

So a the St. Paul/Minneapolis branch of the Socialist Workers Party sends a couple people up to see what's going on, including yours truly. It's about a 6-hour drive, and we had only the vaguest idea what was going on with the rally. I'd been up and visited the picket line once before, but that helped only a little.

As it happens, we were late. (Didn't really know for sure when to get there, anyway.) Union construction workers from around the area had converged on International Falls, marched to a trailer camp BE&K had set up to house scabs, knocked over a fence, and torched a whole lot of trailers. I saw TV footage of this later, and it's really impressive what a whole bunch of people can move if they all push together.

Anyway, when we arrived in front of the paper mill, things were pretty much breaking up. Local and state cops, uniformed and plainclothes, many of 'em with videotape cameras, were all over the place. So the construction workers weren't much inclined to stick around and get arrested.

But, y'know, we drove all that way and just got there. So if we've missed the rally, we decide to go door-to-door with the Militant - if nothing else, we'll get some feel for what people in town are thinking about the strike.

Turns out they're pretty riled about it. This is a company town, and class lines are sharply drawn.

But it also turns out the cops are too. They musta followed us from the plant, and they warn us we're violating the "Green River Ordinance" by "peddling without a permit."

So we go to a laundromat with a pay phone, and phone home for advice. While I'm on the phone, my parner sells a subscription to a laundromat customer. Told you people were riled.

Anyway, we regard this as just bullshit. Somebody musta called to complain about us, we naiively figure at the time, what are the odds of that happening again? We'll just go to another part of town.

Doesn't take us long to get arrested. This time even us greenhorns manage to figure out the cops musta followed us (or Vance Security? same difference.)

Anyway, we end up at the end of a line of construction workers waiting to get fingerprinted on far more serious charges. As the Koochiching County Jail is pretty full, we get offered a deal - pay a hundred each, plead guilty, promise to get out of town, and they'll let us go. Naturally we take it rather than wait around til they decide to charge us with helping torch some trailers.

The great stupidity here, of course, was thinking that the usual rules applied. This wasn't Minneapolis, and it wasn't a normal situation. This was a company town, where there was very little middle class or middle ground. Democratic rights rapidly evaporate in the middle of that kind of class polarization.

And of course a frickin' lot of scab housing had just been burned!

As usual, it wasn't abstract ideology that the ruling class was out to get - it's always the class struggle that really gets under their skin.

(The other time I almost got arrested on charges of selling the Militant, it was during the first Gulf War, on a public sidewalk near the Great Lakes Naval Base in North Chicago. I.e. antiwar propaganda aimed at sailors. Another comrade did get arrested that time, but based on my International Falls experience I knew to back off fast when the cop started foaming. So I was able to help bail her out.)

***

Anyway, how'd the strike turn out? A short time after the events I've described, a massive strike support rally was held outside the state capitol. A lot of working people were enthused by the militancy displayed in International Falls.

But from that point, the thing tended to decline and gradually die away. The unions hired lawyers for the workers arrested, but there was no major defense campaign. The strikers didn't make a big effort to reach out for solidarity, and tended to be afraid of a repeat of the Great Trailer Camp Arson. The biggest challenge here was the need to draw the paperworkers in the Boise Cascade mill into the fight - which happened to only a limited degree.

The SWP helped set up a solidarity event at the UAW hall in St. Paul late in the fight, but by then the strike was largely dead; the people who came down representing it had little to express but bitterness and cynicism, especially towards the labor bureaucracies which had failed to support them. Not the kind of thing which inspires anyone to fight.

As sometimes happened with strikes declining into defeat and despair, some of the strikers fell under the influence of the Workers League, a bunch of unprincipled operators who never did anything to aid a strike...but were awful good at complaining about the bureaucracy doing likewise.

The skilled-trade craft unions showed their narrowness, including a tendency for racism towards Latino scabs and assorted right-wing views. Super-militant tactics can sometimes be the flip side and accompaniment of that kind of craft narrowness.

As someone once said, the biggest right-winger in the plant can be, and usually is, a "militant unionist."

On the other hand, BE&K and Boise Cascade tended to take enough flak that it probably discouraged other companies from hiring nonunion contractors for major projects.

***

The cops' enforcement of the "Green River Ordinance" continued to be a problem for the SWP's efforts to relate to this fight. It was stone unconstitutional, of course, but lawyers cost money, and conducting a major defense effort at the other end of a 6-hour drive woulda been difficult.

At times we applied for their damn permits (even though that involved giving them permission to do a "background check", at other times we went to East International Falls or across the border to Canada (where there was another paper mill.) Had a fun experience with the Canadian border cops cataloguing all our literature one time there, but anyway.

One thing we were often prevented from doing: selling the Militant to paperworkers at shift change at the International Falls mill.....who, as I mentioned, were key to the solidarity needed by the strike.

Starting off by getting arrested...made it harder to fight or evade the ordinance later.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Don't want to dig up a dead thread; but I think this was a good one that never lived up to its potential.

I've got a story anyway..

Once there was a teachers' strike in Western Pennsylvania.. and I happened to be in the area at the time. So on a Saturday, I decided I'd drive up and show support (and also get out some literature, talk about the class struggle, etc.).

The school was about an hour away from me, out in the country a bit.. but not far from a small city (with about 20,000 people).

Well, it was a Saturday, and no teachers were on the lines. See, I had never been to a teachers' strike in the U.S., and I didn't know that many times they don't picket on weekends.. It's different in other places and in other industries.

But I had this big stack of lit, and I had driven an hour, and ran out all this gas.. so I decided I'd try to at least do something.

I looked for a store where I'd be able to find some workers in a centralized place (as Severian said, there aren't many in these small towns).. I found a supermarket. So I parked in the parking lot, and hung back from the doors a bit, and handed out literature.

Alot of people were receptive to it.. but I had one lady refuse, "Support the teachers?? Ha!" she said.

Another guy said "they make too much as it is!" so I kept walking after him and said "without teachers of some sort, no one is going to know how to do anything. Don't you think that makes them important?" And he just said, "they make too much I said, if they get a raise our taxes will go up again, and they're high enough!"

I knew alot about the strike 'cause I had been following the story for a while, so I responded by saying "somehow there's enough money now to give the superintendent a six digit salary".. he stopped, then said (as he was getting into his benz), I'm a member of the school board, and I say that's not true! So I pulled out the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (local bourgeois press) article I printed on the strike from my pocket and tried to point it out.. he got really angry and sped off. (I think he called the store, which lead to the later events).

After handing out a few more papers, and briefly chatting with some people.. an old man called me over to the van he was in.. He had a breathing machine and some tubes up his nose.. He was waiting for someone that was inside shopping.. He asked to see the paper. He was a really cool guy.. We talked about alot of things, how workers in the area got fucked with all the plant and mill closings, etc.

As we're talking, a guy comes out of the store with a white shirt and tie.. He looked like Super Mario with grey hair. He kept motioning for me to come over, but I acted like I didn't see him.

I told the old guy in the van how to contact me if he wanted to talk more, or get more papers, and he said he would..

Super Mario (or should I call him Super Manager) came over closer and motioned me over.. I asked him what he needed.. and he said "what you got there".. and I said "some papers".. He said "what's on them".. I replied that they were in support of the local teachers who were on strike.. His face turned beat red and he started rambling "No! You can't pass that out here!"

So I said, "Okay.. I'll go down to the end of the parking lot, onto the side of the state road, and hand them out there."

He got even madder "No! You can't do that!"

I laughed as I walked away and said "you can't tell me no, it's a public road. There's nothing you can do about it."

At this point he was so mad I thought smoke would come out of his ears. He started coming towards me fast so I stoped walking away and stood facing him incase he was going to try something.

"What nerve you have coming here and doing this without asking me!" He bellowed. I said "Look how you're acting, asking you would've prevented me from handing out the few papers that I did."

He got more angry. But backed off as he saw I was ready to defend myself.

He said "I'm calling the cops!" And I said "What are you going to tell them, that you asked me to leave and I did?"

At this time, some big bulky guy was coming out of the store hearing this and he said "Scumbag!" to me.. :lol:

I looked over, wondering who this guy was, and said "Why am I a scumbag?" and he replied "SCUMBAG! YOU'RE A SCUMBAG!"

I laughed a little, and said, "I'm a scumbag for supporting fellow working people?" and he yelled "SCUMBAG!" and got in his car.. It was rather od.

Well at this point Super Manager is about to blow.. He tells me "You get out of here now, or they'll have to come take you out in a body bag! I'm calling the police! NOW!"

So I said "Cool, when they get here, I'll be sure to let them know you threatened me. And laughed."

I got in my car, which had a big red flag in the back window and sped off.. I went quick so he couldn't get my license plate #.. I didn't want any shit from the fuzz.

I drove out of the parking lot and up the road, then turned around and headed back down, to see if there was somewhere on the public road where I could get some leaflets out (and frankly, at this point, I wanted to fuck with the manager some more) .

As I headed down the hill towards the store, I saw four police cars pulling in to the parking lot (!).. I eased off into a driveway on the road and turned around and darted off.

When I got back to where I was staying, there was a message on the table for me. "The manager from a super market called, he wants to know when you're available for an interview".

I applied for a bunch of shit jobs through a state employment office a few weeks earlier. The store that called just happened to be the one that all of this shit went down at!

I started laughing thinking about what the look on Super Manager's face would've been if I would've roled in for an interview the next day! :lol:

I know some other have some stories too.. post them up!

[Severian]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 29, 2006 09:59 pm
(I think he called the store, which lead to the later events).
I'd bet you're right. A lot of times store management won't even notice you're there unless somebody complains.

So it can help to mostly talk to people coming out....not in this case, of course.

[kaaos_af]

I was handing out anti-McDonald's gear out one day- was told to move on- turns out they had a legal right to tell me to do so. So in revenge (the McDonald's was down some escalators) I put some WARNING-DO NOT ENTER security tape across the entrance. Noone went down there for at least an hour and a half until they worked out why they weren't getting any customers.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

We can't be the only 3 people with those kinds of stories.

[Sadena Meti]

Well I have a vague one, it didn't happen to me but to some local people. I can't remember what store they were protesting at... simple picketing and literature. They were on the sidewalk, public area, and the police came and threatened to arrest them on libel, because by protesting here they "were giving the business a negative image and hurting their business, which is against the law." The police kept up this threat of arrest until the protestors left.

I wish I had been there, because we all have to die someday, and that would have been a great way to die laughing. "You can't protest here because it makes the business look bad, and I'm going to arrest you for that."