Camp Greyhound

Transcription

♪♪♪ I'm going to talk about things in this book called Black Flags and Windmills and I'm also to actually going to have... This my only shameless talking that I'm going to do is that I'm going to copies for sale for fifteen to twenty dollars, a sliding scale if you want one, but mostly what I want to do is our talk about a lot of ideas that are not in the book also. And we'll talk a little bit about histories, because social movements and us within social movements as activists, as concerned citizens and stuff takes time to get to where we are, right? And to do that... To become what I would call a revolutionary, which doesn't mean you want to overthrow governments or take up arms, but you actually want to dismantled the systems and create other systems takes time. It takes analysis, it takes practice, and it actually takes falling down a few times. The stories I'm going to tell are personal stories of my own, not because I want to leave here thinking that I'm a hero, That I did things that you can't do or that you will never do or that other people did these things that we can't do, but hopefully that you will see yourselves in these stories. And recognize that it's all of us are going to make this change in our own communities. And I think that's a really important thing. And recognize that we're all born revolutionaries. We're all born with these emergency hearts that are these beautiful things that give us compassion, they give us the feelings to change things, to want the world to be better for humans, animals, and the planet. And that it's what we learn to do with them that makes us pick down these paths. I'm not a historian, and I don't even consider myself an activist, although I have been an activist in the past. Really I'm a father, I'm a neighbor, a worker, I'm just a regular person, but I've been a community organizer for a long time, and it's one of the vocations that I do. Actually, just until recently I was driving a forklift a lot. So anyway, with that I want get started. The way the talk is going to go is I'm going to break it down in a little bit of history. It's nonlinear history, so pieces of history here to get to it in a narrative. And then we're going to get to a present situation and talk about the future, about what we can do as individuals, and what we can do as movements, and what we can do as activist and organizers in our own communities. The title of my book Black Flags and Windmills as a reference the black flags that anarchist have carried for a long time since the beginnings. And anarchists have a tradition of carrying black flags, communist carry the red flags. so as a reference to that. Also, Don Quixote. Anybody here read Don Quixote? It's Cervantes book. I often have felt like Don Quixote. Where I have been at times a pure jackass, and other times I've been somebody who's really going towards noble causes. There's times when I actually have sleighed giants, but then other times that I just tilted towards windmills. And I think that I need to know that and remember that about myself in my journey on this. So with that I want to start. I grew up in a rural town outside of Dallas, and it was actually a factory and farm town. I was gonna be the first person my family to graduate from high school but I quit high school because I didn't want to, because I had already seen the outside world, but I knew I wanted out of that factory town. I didn't want to live near US Steel, I didn't want to live near the paper factory, I wanted out. But I didn't know how to do that. But in quitting high school, that I was in the first person not in just my immediate family, but my extended family to that. They had this big meeting and they're like You gotta be here, you gotta do this. Because you're gonna be the first person to go beyond eighth grade. And it was a lot of pressure, but it was my first open act of rebellion where I said no, I don't want to do that because I know that something's different out there, I've got to get there. But I did go to college for a few months, and... I'm going to get to that picture first... And then, that's when I first cut my tooth on protesting. And this is me rocking a mullet back in 1985. This is my first protest against anti-apartheid movement, and this... but I started to work on these issues that became court issues to me from 1985-1990 I started to really learn about the animal rights movement through the environmental movement and politlcal prisoners And political prisoners I started with really thinking about them in outward world. People like Nelson Mandela or Steve Biko in South Africa. But then I started to learn that there was political prisoners in our own country. Here, former members of the Black Panther Party and all these other groups, these revolutionaries from the sixties and seventies who were facing prison time. The other thing was animal rights and environmental issues then became really core. How many people are part of punk rock scene or have been part of hardcore punk rock scenes at a certain time? Yeah quite a few people, and there's a lot of political music in that. But when I was growing up in Dallas, that stuff did not speak to me and all. Actually most of the punks I saw at the time I thought were really nihilistic and kind of assholes. Can I say that? But there was a political consciousness, but I really came to political conciousness, I really learned about things through music. But through industrial music, bands like Consolidated and Skinny Puppy and Ministry, these are the people that really started to connect the dots for me. And I really appreciate that because there was no books, I wasn't in school so I was having to pull information here and there, wherever I could. And I stumbled along. And then in 1988 I also go to... I became vegan and vegetarian, I also got to see the Berlin Wall in person, I got to travel to communist the socialist countries, and what I saw there was miserable. And you have to understand at that time in the eighties communism and socialism dominated the left, all the political movement on the left was communist and socialist, to be an anarchist was really really outside of that, and I wasn't even an anarchist then. But what I saw there was grey misery. And so I knew capitalism was failing in political terms, but then I also saw the failures of of socialism and communism, And I was like, there's gotta be some other way. And I also had one of my first experiences of dealing with privilege because being from them the US, I would assumed that I just had all this privilege when I would travel to all these other countries and stuff. And I got into a big riot between three hundred football fans and three hundred skinheads and about two or three hundred riot police, and it was the first time I ever tasted tear gas and ever saw molotov cocktails thrown and rocks and stuff and being the true revolutionary that I was, what I did was I went to the cops and said, hey man, I'm an American, I'm not part of this, and they pushed me out in the middle of the melee. And so, being a revolutionary, I stood up and I was like, alright, I'm going to do what I need to do and I took off running, and I hid until I could get out of there. But it was shaping. But I was also lucky because I was in a group in Dallas where there's a big chapter the Black Panther Party. Has anybody here ever heard of the Black Panther Party? You all know about them? Right. How many people here think that they hated whitey? How many people think that they only took up guns? Okay, sometimes people actually raise their hands. You know what the black panther party did was, they wanted... They did a few things that were really amazing. They were the first political movement in the US that started to say, we want to connect the struggles that are going on. They didn't just want to feed somebody who was hungry, they wanted to say why are they hungry and they said, is it because they didn't have access to good education, because they don't have access to good jobs with dignity? Because they had poor health, so we'll build clinics and stuff, and they called them Survival Programs Pending Revolution. Now the Black Panther Party went away and through state repression and their own dissolution throughout the seventies, but their models influenced a lot of people. And for a guy in Texas, that was pretty influential stuff even though I was finding out about it way later. And then these indigenous people rose up in Mexico, in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, they were called the Zapatistas. Has anybody heard about the Zapatistas? And what they did was they actually took the same ideas, they weren't the only group, because the Black Panther Party's models influenced lots of groups. And they took the same models but they added these other elements to it. One, the idea that you don't have to have all the answers. That revolutions are living and that we can think about them as we go. The other thing is that they didn't... They also added this element of horizontalism to it. Where there was no one supreme leader. That was one of the failures of the Black Panther Party and a lot of those movements, is they had one person telling people what to do, or five people telling telling somebody what to do. And it was easy for the government to take out, but also it wasn't very participatory. And they opened up this thing where all of our voices count in making the decisions for our worlds around us. And they called it Zapatismo, and they asked more questions than they tried to solve. And then in the nineties it came back to anarchism. The animal rights movement having grown a lot, it still have been participating in an environmental movement. Anarchism was running through that. And the anarchism I'm talking about that I came back to was not this dogmatic anarchism of only revolution and things, but this little a anarchism. The anarchism I call common sense. It's based on these really simple ideas. Participatory democracy. That we share our voices and get rid of hierarchies. That we also, that with that personal liberation and collective liberation are tied together in connecting the struggles. The other thing is cooperation. Mutual aid, the idea is that what happens to me, it matters what happens to me, what happens to you, all of us we're doing better together. That I don't want to make money on the back of you and I don't want you to make money on the back to me. Is non exploitative. And those ideas all have a political reference, and anarchism is a political reference, but it's things that we do it every day. What we do in a lot of our communities that we never think about, and anarchism just became a political reference for it. And when I came back to it, it made a lot of sense, I felt like I'd come home to something that really really made sense. And then at the time there's this alternative globalization movement that was building. It had to go around the world for the people who are most directly affected by policies made by these secret institutions that were above... That were making decisions for corporations above governments themselves. So where farmers couldn't even grow their own rice without having genetically modified organisms in it. To where farmers... Where people didn't have the right to their own land. Or communities didn't have control of their own water because corporations were taking it. Corperations you might know the name of, like Bechtel or Nestle. It wasn't like super... And they used the World Trade Organization, the World Bank to do these things. It was rising up because these people were dying literally from it. And finally in 1999, There was fifty thousand to a hundred thousand people gathered in Seattle and nobody cared about it. That all these people had gathered, that labor organizers... All the sudden these things started to happen where these things started to happen where people were gathering with their different issues like labor unions, environmental groups, immigrant rights groups, were starting to come together nobody paid attention to it. It was like fifty thousand, one hundred thousand people were saying these things are undemocratic, way beyond governments not being democratic. Until somebody put a brick through a window at starbucks. site trigger this combat their it doesn't make it a brick a Starbucks, and that was the coming-out party for the anarchism united states. And in that, all the sudden these ideas started to come back to the surface again. And here's some common threads I want to talk about in these three disparate movements that don't really have much to do with eachother, but have overlapping ideas. Autonomy and self-determination. Each of these different movements believe that communities can and will determine their own futures. And that doesn't mean at the expense of the planet, animals, or anybody else. But they have a right to do that, the politicians don't have a right to do that, corporations don't have a right to do that. And the idea of dual power. Each of these movements always proposed the idea of resisting all the oppression that's on one hand, but also creating a building on the other hand. Also, participatory democracy. That all of our voices together will make these changes, not any one person's voice. Community and self defense. That we have a right to defend our communities from attack in any form, whether it's the police, whether it's corporation stealing our water, or undemocratic unelected officials doing things. And defense is not always about armed struggle, it's about us using whatever means that we need to defend our communities. And then language and narrative. I think this is really important. That all of these movements talk about dreaming of better futures, about better worlds beyond what we have today. And I think that's a really important thing, because they don't want to just make one thing better, they want to make the whole world better. And they've also connected the struggles. Anarchist today have a really good analysis of connecting struggles in their communities, but also broadly, and I think we need to remember that and then all these other movements before that. So, that window getting smashed didn't solve the problem, but all the sudden it was on front page news, and all the sudden the alternative globalization movement meant something, and all the sudden people are like, what's happening? The old left, the socialist and community are, you know, they're not organizing and controlling all the movements anymore, and anarchism became the largest sphere of influence. The ideas of participatory democracy. The consensus decision making, affinity groups, direct action. That we do not have to wait other people to do something, that we can do it ourselves. To make that change, whether it's to resis, or it's to build. Direct action, really important. And for me these were important things to figure out, and so I was stumbling along and trying to figure out things, and there was that beautiful thing that was happened, these big summits were starting to gather. And some of the... Has anybody participatd in some of these big summits in the early parts? Yeah. And so... At these summits, these beautiful things were happening. These temporary autonomous zones were being created, where thousands of people were part part of it, and they were cultural they were political. And these these things like, we were tearing down on one hand the old paradigms and the old ideas, and we're creating a building mass movement on the other hand. And it was the first time it was a movement of movements in the United States. It wasn't one movement, one big umbrella movement, but it was all these undercurrents that were going at the same time. That was a powerful shift. And the idea of having consensus decisions was a powerful shift. Having one group not control everything, those were powerful shifts that the occupy movements have been inheritors of. But this other things were happening, is in these autonomous zones we were taking care of each other like, people had become street medics with different levels of medical experience. Some doctors, some nurses, some people with just EMT's, some people who had first aid training would try to help out protesters an activist doing things. Food Not Bombs which had been around since the seventies was feeding people, not only around the country, but would come into these things, these convergences. We were building these convergence spaces where people were at Legal teams would would come into play in these different cities where we would be. And occasionally, we would build things that would stay after everything dissipated because that was the sad thing is that, it would all go away at the end of a few days, and people go back to their lives. But these were powerful little elements that would just come back to life, and people would go back to their community organizing. And so, these pieces started to makes sense to me, And I started to focus on anti-corporate campaigns a lot. I was still doing political prisoner support, but I started working on campaigns where I was tired... Because by this time I had been voting, I had been petitioning, I had been using some forms of civil disobedience, and I was tired of those things because we stand up for these giant buildings and nothing would happen. You know, it was the lowest common denominator of things. And then, if I could out this friend of mine, Josh came to speak to us in Dallas one time to talk about othis campaign that came through that's called the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty Campaign. It was a campaign to shut down a single corporation, that was the second largest vivisector in the world. And the ideas were that it would be using direct action and decentralized organizing to do it. And that we would hold the people who made the decisions accountable for what they did. Not at their offices, not in state institutions, but in their homes. At their churches, at their grocery stores, anywhere they could, where they were making money on exploitation they would not be able to do that. We didn't even want their company to be able to buy toilet paper. It was of direct campaign, a direct message to say you can't do this. Enough! And in that, it combined the ideas of using above ground and then clandestine actions within that too. So maybe something would happen, but we didn't know who was all doing all of these things, and I wasn't an organizer, I was just part of this campaign. It was decentralized, which is a beautiful thing. And it wasn't a campaign built on building mass movements, but on a single focus of bringing this company down. And there was a lot of repression to follow that was to come from that, but that's what I started to work on. And I started to think differently, and I started to use anti-fascist work I was doing with anti-racist action. Did anybody here work with anti-racist action over the years? So I worked with anti-racist action for a long time, and we used the same thing against white supremacists. And then we started to use the same models in the environmental movement against companies... Against a company in Houston that was doing all of the redwood deforestation in northern California. Does anybody know about the redwood campaigns that were going on since 1985? So we started the target individuals at their homes and say that they couldn't do that. So this is kind of my trajectory, and all of these currents are kind of going on. And september eleventh really had changed a lot of what was happening in the current of what we were doing. So anarchist movements in radical political movements, people try to figure out what was happening. And then all the sudden the storm came ashore called Hurricane Katrina. And people know about Hurricane Katrina? Remember this :It was not the storm that caused the disaster, it was the levee failure that caused the disaster. It was criminal neglect by the government that caused the disaster. Because they left tens of thousands of people to die. You're seeing it now with Sandy, but it was way worse in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of people were trapped on the rooftops and in their homes and stuff. One of those people that was trapped was a friend of mine I had given long-term political prisoner support for. This man in the middle, his name is Robert King. He's a former member the Black Panther Party, all these guys are former members of the Black Panther Party. They are the longest held people in solitary confinement in modern US history. He won his just freedom after twenty nine years in solitary confinement, thirty two years in prison. You're thinking like, what is solitary confinement. He lived in a six by nine cell, that's about the size your bathroom. For twenty nine years he's lived in that. And these two men on the on the outside, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, they're at forty one years living in that. Their crime? Being members of Black Panther Party who refused to give up. They stopped prison rape, they organized hunger strikes to get better conditions, they wanted integrate the prison. These are the crimes. They wanted to get food not thrown through a cage at them, but actually delivered on a tray. Basic human rights. And for that they were criminalized for this. Robert King was under investigation for crime that he could not have committed because he wasn't in the prison, for seventeen years they didn't tell him. Locked away and forgotten. And he was trapped in New Orleans, or at least I thought he was trapped in New Orleans because he had moved back after he gotted out and I had been giving him support, but we had lost communication right after the storm. And this man named Brandon Darby called me, and I hadn't talked to him in a year because I had this problematic relationship with him... He's like, hey we need to go get King, and I was, like that's crazy because we're not we're not disaster people. But we did. And so the levees failed. The storm hit on Sunday, the levees failed on Monday, we were there on Wednesday and we brought food, water, rescue boats, and guns. Because we didn't know what the situation was going to be, and that's when I saw criminal neglect. Now you have to understand when tens of thousands of people are trapped on their rooftops, it's one hundred degrees out and there's no food and water and people are trapped in their attics. Now if it's a hundred degrees outside, it's a hundred and forty degrees and their attic. And this is families. This is families, children, grandmothers, people died in their attics because they couldn't go back down because there was water there, and they couldn't get out of the acts because they had nothing to break through with it. And you know what the government wanted to do? Restore law and order. Not rescue people, they wanted to restore law and order. It was criminal neglect. I was so angry when I saw it, so we started helping people, but our goal was to get to our friend King. What we were gonna do, we had this crazy idea of taking a flat bottom fishing boat out into the open ocean in the gulf into a storm and then we were gonna come around through what used to be neighborhoods that were flooded underwater. And these neighborhoods were not neighborhoods that had storm damage, these were neighborhoods there were thrown into the water. And that was the first time I saw dead bodies. And we were the only boat coming in. And the crazy idea was to come in through this canal right here... Through this opening of this levee, because this used to be twenty feet of dry land, twenty feet down righ here, to come through here and get in this inner city. And this place is the place called the Lower Ninth Ward which you may have heard of. Crazy half baked idea, but we felt desperate like we needed to do it. And it was twenty years of political activism and organizing had brought me to that point. But when we were almost here, it had took a long time to get here, it took almost a whole day by boat to get there and we started hearing rumors of people shooting at rescuers. And we were afraid that we might have to shoot somebody to save somebody else and we didn't want to do it. So it violated one of the the biggest principles that I had, which is that you never leave anybody behind. I've done a hundred actions before that I'd never left anybody behind. Political prisoners who are in prison, I don't feel like I'm leaving them behind. They're with us, and when I was leaving them I felt ashamed for it. I'd taken all this privilege, all this political organizing to get to where was, and I was leaving. I was not proud of it, I felt guilty. There's tens of thousands of people are still trapped, it's only Saturday when i'm leaving, it's only been five days. And then enter in this man, this other former member Black Panther Party in knew who was also in New Orleans, a man named Willy Rahim called me and said, listen, we need some support. We got white vigilantes driving around in my neighborhood and they're gonna kill me. When he said he needed support, I knew what he meant. He meant bring guns. They really were gonna kill him, the police were out of control and the vigilantes were out of control. And you have to understand that everything that you think you know about this world was gone. Everything. The frame of reference is different. You can't even imagine the scale of what happened. I can promise you that if your house burns down, you can go to your neighbor's house, right? If a tornado hits your town or an earthquake hits your town, you can go to the next town. But what do you do when town after town and city after city and hundreds of miles in every direction is gone. It is unimaginable. When cell phones don't work and there's no food, there's no water, there's nothing. And the government's only restoring law and order. That's when crazy people start to come out. And the vigilantes were these guys who decided that they wanted a form to protect their own property, and that's fine, whatever. They live in this very white wealthy area on the west bank that's only about eight square blocks. But there's like seventy thousand other people that are poor and middle class and mostly black. And they decide to start driving around and meting out justice the way they saw fit, and Malik was one of the targets. We came back, and this is what I saw. You have to understand that when we came back, its only Monday. It's only been one week now, we are one of the only vehicles coming in. There's military convoys that were coming out and doing things, and we see an incredible militarization of what's happening. Again restoring law and order. There's sandbags with fifty caliber tureks. I'm like, who are they protecting themselves from? Looters? What's looting? Taking food and water because civil society left you to die and governments left you to die. Take it! Bust in and take it, it's just property, it doesn't mean anything. And criminalization of people. The police were out of control, the New Orleans police were out of control, homeland security was out of control. It was infuriating. And we get to Malik's house and this is the first thing I have to deal with. Is that two kids come up to us, they said there's a dead body around the block can you do something about it? We get to this man which I could could smell for blocks away and he's bullet riddled. And he's without a shirt, totally left to die an indignant death. And so we did the least that we could do is we covered him up. He'd been left there for days. He was left there more days. And he was only one of the two bodies that we saw. I had already seen drowned people and I was getting my head around that, but not bullet riddle bodies. Who killed them? Was it the vigilantes? Or was it the police? We knew that things were out of control. So we decided, two white guys from Texas and three guys from the neighborhood took up guns, And we said, we will protect Malik's house and the people in the community around there. Twenty years of a political organizing took me to that point at that time. And we had decided that if the vigilantes came around again that we would drive them off. And we were stone cold sober and they were drunk. They come around the corner and they start spouting their racist stuff against Malik and the other men and they talk to us being race traitors. And, for a second... They're sitting there drunk in the back of their truck, they look just like the klan, except they don't have the little hats on. And we're stone cold sober standing on this porch that's tall and ready to level a hundred rounds at them, a hundred and fifty rounds at them. All they had to do was level their gun and I would have shot them all. It was terrifying. But it was also one of the most proudest things I ever did in my life. You always think, I'm gonna do this. I was willing to die for it that moment. They drove on luckily, and we started these patrols to keep people safe in the neighborhood. And the three men in the neighborhood who I could never name took great links to do this and they can even be known for it because of the repercussions that would have happened to them in the days afterwards. But this other thing was going on, I was like, you know, King was finally... Brandon had finally went to go get King and FEMA help bring him back to us. And I can tell you, that was one of the proudest days of my whole life was to see King alive, because it had already been ten days, and I thought he was dead. The man who had given his life to do all these things I didn't want him to die with indignity for nothing, and when he came back I was really happy. We got King out of there, and I've been thinking for days, what would people do in previous histories? What would the Black Panther Party do? What would the Zapatistas do? What would we as anarchists, what could we do? So I started formulating this idea for this organization. And the idea would be that Survival Programs Pending Revolution. We'd go into communities and ask them what they need. We'd start to build social services to help them get a foot up, and then they can build the self-determination for their communities. It's all political language, but it's just basic community organizing. And three people end up forming this organization. This man Malik Rahim I've been talking about, a lifelong organizer, former member of the Black Panther Party. Lifelong organizer in San Francisco and in New Orleans. This woman who's a warrior named Sharon Johnson that nobody's ever heard of who was a bookkeeper before this, but lived in Algiers and took in on herself to do this and then my own knuckle head self form this organization called the Common Ground Collective. And the idea was solidarity not charity. That we would lead by obeying, by asking communities what they want. In the very first meeting, we asked, when we gathered people together, we said, what can we do? I thought to be really complicated, it was gonna be something really hard that we can't do in building political power, I said can you take the garbage out? And that's what we did, we started to take the rotting putrid garbage out and after that, we just started a first aid distribution center. And then we started to did to do things. But what we did was we told this narrative of revolution. That people like yourself and myself, that we could all meet change together. And the narrative spread and all the sudden from three people on fifty dollars, thousands of people just like to you begin to come. All of us, ordinary people compelled to extraordinary situations to do the right thing. And we started to raise money, just from people who couldn't come there. And your school is one of the schools that actually was sending people down there. People just like you who were saying, my emergency heart says to do something and I'm going do it. Didn't need to wait on governments to tell you what to do, didn't need to wait on some supreme leader to do it. You just came because it was the right thing to do. And after the floods were gone, we still continue to do programs and stuff. And we started with distribution and aid distribution. And we also use civil disobedience to do these things. So what we would do is we would break the law for higher moral law. One of the things that Robert King from the Angle of Three says is you cannot confuse morality and legality. And so if scummy landlords were evicting people, which started in October of 2005 when people have had not even gotten to come back to their homes, they would kick their stuff to the curb. We un-evicted them and put him back in. Now I didn't do all of these things myself, there was lots of people that did it, and some of them are in this room, Jenka. who started the eviction defense stuff in 2005. But people kept coming and we kept building programs and we started clinics. We had a clinic going that on day twelve after the storm, just people like you who were street medics. Because the idea was like, couldn't we take ideas from the alternative globalization movement for anarchist ideas. To which, could street medics form a clinic, could a clinic become a hospital, could Food Not Bombs come in and feed people and then begin to open up worker cooperative restaurants or long-term shelters for people because it was going to take a long time. Could legal aid people form really long term legal defense for people, and help people get through this. Open source computer programming, all these little components that we had, these networks, we were wondering if we can make them longer. And we also did occupations. So in the Lower Ninth Ward, they weren't allowing people in, and in that part of that civil disobedience was where they said we couldn't go, that was the first place the common ground went because we took the privilege that we had to do it. And we said, if there's one person left in that community, or two people, fifteen people, and they said please support it, we went to that community. And it wasn't one size fit all, we also, we said what do you need? Some people needed medical attention some people needed defense for the police, some people needed, they wanted food and water. Basic things with tarp rooms. I mean, we just started with these service programs, but the idea was to to build these larger things. And occupation was part of that, and one of the things that we did was that we occupied this house in the Lower Ninth Ward, some people occupied it when the governemnt said you cannot be here because nobody wants to be in the Lower Ninth Ward. They were starving people out. They didn't what people to have aid, they wanted people to leave so they could bulldoze the whole area. And we said no way. So people occupied the house, and when homeland security removed them, more people occupied the house and with that became another distribution set of the Lower Ninth Floor. We went into first nation communities on the coast, we went into Cajun communities, Creole communities, Vietnamese communities, all these other communities you never hear about when you talk about solidarity not charity. Which you never hear about when we talk about Hurricane Katrina. Invisible communities who self organized because nobody was there to do it. And we gave them support to build their own clinics, their own health care, their own food. Social services connected the struggles to build these basic foundations of civil society, and we also used direct action. And for this we were targeted because they thought we wanted to take over the government. Within the first six weeks, three times I thought the police we're gonna kill me. One time they laid me face down and said they're going to blow my brains out. The second time I was on my knees with a seventeen year old kid, and the guy was waving his gun at us and said he was going to kill us. This is the New Orleans Police Department. Homeland Security, just as contentious in that, and actually the military strangely enough became this weird buffer between us. Even though the military were not our friends, they kept us from being killed and drop in the street. That violence affected me. The trauma from that affected me. I took years to get over that, but I was willing to die for what I believed in, and there was hundreds and then thousands of other people just like you who are willing to die for what they believe in, to help rebuild a better world for these people. And let them control their own futures. We started gutting houses and providing legal support, and these basic ideas... Direct action, mutual aid, community organizing and outreach. Those four basic concepts, we did these things. Open source communications centers, Food Not Bombs, legal support, eviction defense, service work. We created a women's shelter so women could have a safe space outside of mixed areas, or they could have safe space for themselves and their children. We gutted houses, we did food security, we built community gardens, we did community defense, whatever that meant. To stop landlord from arresting people, cop watch. We started doing cop watch, Jenka was a major person in that. We, at one point people were getting arrested at random, and taking this thing called camp greyhound, they took a greyhound station and just made it a makeshift jail. If you got arrested for jaywalking or murder, it didn't matter, you were put in there and you just disappeared for a long time. And a bunch of people used advocacy to bring it to the surface, but mainstream media didn't talk about it. And cop watching because the police were out of control. We filmed a lot of the stuff that they were doing. Now I didn't do all this myself, it was thousands of people again just like yourselves doing this. And there's some people I want to point out really quickly who have done a lot of stuff. These are core organizers who wanted to keep it decentralized. Who kept a lot of the machine going at different times, and one of them who is not on here, I also want to point out is Blank, who's right back there. I want to thank him for all his work in building our open source stuff at the beginning. But Lisa Fithian, Suncere Shakur, Emily Posner... Jackie Sumell, Jenka Soderberg who's right here, Brian Franks and Kerul Dyer, these are people who are core people who you've never heard of that have been written out of the history of it all, who did amazing, amazing things that people should know about. Because it was just all of us doing this together. In common ground theheyday was kind of over and after about 2008 it became a traditional non-profit, the scale became smaller, we moved into a building. And now they're doing wetlands restoration because you know storms are moving further up the coast, further inland because there's no... All the wetlands have been destroyed, all the sandbars in the name of commerce and oil. And so we're trying to work to rebuild that, doing legal advocacy for people, we'll be building work cooperatives. And I'm not associated with Common Ground directly anymore. I spoke there recently for the first time I'd been back there since 2008. It was beautiful to see what they were doing, they're building houses and restoring hope for people. And that little house that was by the barge earlier, this is the house now, it's the headquarters for Common Ground in the Lower Ninth Ward. So, in 2006 I came back and I had post truamatic stress really bad I was trying to figure things out and then I found out I was listed as a domestic terrorist. And the first time I'd ever been sort of accused of being a domestic terrorist was in 1999 when I heard the words animal rights and domestic terrorist together. I was visited by the FBI at my work in 1999 and some low-level vandalism had gone on around Dallas, it was against fur stores, and it was like gluing locks and spray paint, things like that, so pretty low level vandalism, and they were trying to to identify it as domestic terrorism. This is pre 2001, right? So, it begins this pattern that you start to see of targeting of animal rights and an environmental groups and individuals along the way And I was removed from... I was still on the visiting list of Herman Wallace who was in Angle of Three, I was removed that list, and that was the first time I ever heard I was a domestic terrorist. Environmental extremists and animal rights terrorists. But here's the thing is that no charges were being brought against me. I was just being targeted but I couldn't do anything about it. And they scared the police departments and different communities that I was at, so when I get pulled over for, you know, just driving around, I'm like, why am I getting pulled over? I'd have to get out of the car and it was real scary. And some of you have also known this, Josh you know you know this, I mean other people here, know this same thing, We couldn't do anything about it. It was like world where you weren't really being charged, but you were being harassed like you were a terrorist. but you're being harassed like you were terrorist And in 2008, the man Brandon Darby that you heard about earlier turned out to be informant. He helped to set up two friends of mine who ended up going to prison at the Republican National Convention. They had built some molotov cocktails to do some property destruction, and they decided not to use them. One of them ended up going to jail before he was ever going to do anything with it, and the other guy decided not to use them, but brandon had been an informant since 2006 and he had been encouraging them to to get to that point, and they ended up serving four years. Fifteen of my friends have gone to prison in last ten years for conspiracy of terrorism. Terrorism is the new gruber to, you know... The war on drugs failed. Took a long time, they took the money out of and they're starting to bring it back. They targeted people who worked in the shack campaign, Josh Harper here. Josh did three years for conspiracy. It's criminal what they're doing to people. The thing is, terrorism doesn't exist in this country, right? But they have to create terrorists. Really, of the five hundred cases that have happened since 2001 that have been tried, actually, I think only four of them actually involved somebody who was really try to do something. There's a guy who tried to stick it in his underwear, One guy who had it in his shoe. There was a guy in Times Square, and one other one I always about forget about. Those are really the only ones. The FBI was involved out of five houndred cases at about two hundred fifty of those cases. Fifty of them they lead the plot. So why is that? Well they're creating paper tigers. If you're gonna have a war on terror, you've got to have... You've got to make it happen. So political activist became the target for it because, Why? Because we're in the communities where you're at. Anarchism sounds scary, animal rights sounds scary, but who really is the largest of people who were targeted by this? By far, 95% it's Muslims and people Middle Eastern dissent. That is the largest category of people who have been targeted. Those communities are being wrecked by this. And it's a criminal shame. We focus a lot on animal rights and environmental people because that's the people that we know and anarchists. But we are a much smaller percentage of this, and I think we need to put that in perspective. Muslim people and people Middle Eastern dissent are also facing the longest charge... The longest time served in this. My friends who have gone to prison, it's usually seven to twenty years which is criminally insane. But other friends of mine who are Muslim are sixty five and seventy five years. Like the Holy Land Five, which is a case which I work with two of those guys through the nineties and the early to thousands, and those guys are absolutely been set up by the government. Definitely, I encourage you to look into the case. But really, let's let's talk about what it really is about, it's about money. Seventy five billion dollars in the war on terror. Eight hundred and fifty four thousand new jobs, this is Obama's job package right here. Targeting and criminalizing people. Four thousand government agencies created were reassigned to that, took people out of the war on drugs and started to militarize all the police at all different levels. Again, this is affecting immigration, it's affecting targeting the growth of the prison industrial complex, all of these things are starting to be tied into all of this. And it's a revolving door too, it's not just the government, it's also private corporations who are making a lot of money on this and they're sharing information. And actually a lot of times their way scarier. In the Shack Campaign, and in the Dirty South Earth First Campaign, these guys were way scarier because they were ex law enforcement and they knew the grey area to get into to scare the heck out of you. And to break the laws just gray enough. But they also targeted us and they shared a lot of information with the government. They sell information to the government. Have you all heard about Fusion Centers? Yeah, those are private companies that are selling information. And they're gathering it on people like us. And this is a facebook from 2004. These documents were leaked to us. This is a company called Stratfor that was actually based in Austin though one of the first companies that really was selling information to government agencies. And they were targeting people, there's my old knuckle head self who were at public protests against companies like Exxon Mobil and Halliburton. And they were sharing information, there's photos that will show up of people at different protests around the country, and using that. And incidentally, when all these documents were leaked, they also leaked to us all the privates cell phone numbers and the pagers of all the security teams. And so we distributed them across the country, and we offered free spanish lessons and free vacation trips for those people, and so they got lots of calls on those days of action. But why are they doing this? Well one is really to maintain power of the status quo, right? The elites at the top who are making money and control, politics, culture and economy want to keep that. The other thing is money, money, money. Private corporations, being able to sell drones to the seattle police which had happened recently. To be able to get all this high-tech gear. There's lots of money to be made at it, and fear. This is the thing I want to talk about really quickly. Fear in our political, within political movements and as people who are concerned about things is a big, big thing to stop us, and we must not be afraid. Because if we are afraid, they have already won because we've given up before we even started. Even though scary things have happened to many of us, I still have a great love of the people who are around me, and the bonds that we have with each other, and wanting to create social change. They cannot break those unless we are afraid of each other, and we are afraid of them. I really was us to remember that, do not be afraid. That doesn't mean that we have to be macho and tough and things. Look, I have amount of fear, in my life I've had great amount of fear, but remember those bonds are really really strong. We need to create movements beyond fear. What I want to do now is I'll move into some proposals and some ideas about rethinking how we engage in political struggle and maybe what would it even means these days. So it's called creating power from below, and rethinking our movements. And one of the frameworks I use for organizing is this framework and I take it with me everywhere. That we dream the future, know your history, organize your people, and fight to win. Dreaming the future is imagining these worlds that don't exist today. Not science fiction world's off the other hand, but right here. How do we reimagine the worlds that we engage in. I don't mean just beyond a kinder gentler prison system, a kinder gentler capitalism, beyond these systems, and then knowing our history. It's not only people of color and marginalized communities that have had their history stolen, we have all had our history stolen as individuals, as communities, as political movements, and reclaiming and knowing that history is really important, because we don't want to make mistakes from the past. First we have to know who we are, then we don't want to make mistakes from the past and continue to move them forward. We want to look and see what they did good and take it from that. Organizing your people, that's the thing that we all do really really well. We're great at mobilizing a people, we're not good at keeping people in there, but we need to keep people organized and fight to win. Stop asking for bread crumbs. We don't want a just... A kinder gentler immigration thing, we don't want kinder gentler prisons, we don't want prisons. We don't want borders. We don't want exploitative systems for animals, we don't want exploited systems for the environment that we live in, there's no reason for us to kill ourselves. We need to fight to win, and the fighting to win is not taking power over power here, but building this power from below because there's more of us, we have more creativity, and have more experience amongst us than any of them, I guarantee you. And we can do it. There's not very many people on the top of that pyramid. A pyramid's big, right? There's way way more of us worldwide, and it's happening everywhere. There's more worker cooperatives than there used to be, there's more intentional communities, there's more people taking back things and saying these are ours. Indigenous people around the world are rising up and said, this is ours and we're going to claim it, they're stopping corporations, they're stopping government from doing these things. And we just have to recognize that we want to fight to win. I think one of the other things that we need to recognize is that what do we do as concerned citizens, what do we do as activists, what is our role? And one of our roles was the bring ideas for the margins to the mainstream. That's the thing we do, we take these radical concepts like slavery should never have existed, the black people are people should never have been taken from their country, that we should never have enslaved them, yeah. Radical ideas like that, and we abolish them. That women should have the right to vote, that they should have a say. Those were radical concept at one time that the economies and the political power said no no no no no no, we don't want that stuff. Our job is right here, we're the innovators. We take these ideas and we have to push them up these long hills, and so we start getting other radicals and progressives, and then we get into liberals, and then you get here, this is where economics comes in, and then right here's where laws come in. All laws are reactionary, bureaucratic, and arbitrary, and selectively enforced. They only come in after we've been doing this work. So our primary role in my opinion is culture shift. Shifting the way we think about things revolutionary thought that we don't kinder, gentler things, we want a different system altogether. And I don't know what that system is or those systems are, But I know that we all in our communities can come up with those systems. And so, the other part of that of being a radical or a revolutionary is, why do we do what we do? We know what we do really really well, we know how we're going to do it, right? Protests, letter writing, all these things, legal strategies, and we do... Really, why do we do these things? We need to ask ourselves what our emergency hearts tell us. And if we were able to translate those stories to people, they mean so much more. When the Zapatistas started talking about these... One world were many worlds fit. That was a revolutionary concept, and it was really taken in by a lot of people worldwide. When we start to imagine these ideas that all of our voices count, those of the why we do things. So here's some other ideas. I think in our political movements we have a very reactionary political culture in the United States. We protest really well, we resist things, but we don't offer alternatives a lot of times. And if I want people to leave these systems, I want to offer alternatives to it that look good, that make them want to be a part of it. So we need to start figuring out what we're for. That's the why and then we need to explain that. What we are for? And then once we figure that out, we start making long-term strategies beyond capitalism as we know it, beyond the power structures as we know them, and beyond this unsustainable civilization that we live in, that's exploitative to all of us at different levels. Some of us benefit more and some benefit less, but it's exploitative to all of us at certain levels. And then we begin to take the actions to achieve those goals. And I would be even posit the radical ideas if sometimes that means not even protesting. If you've got a strategy and you've got some goals already set in there, it doesn't mean we have to react to everything. Because everybody knows things are bad. Long-term strategies begin to do that in each community has to figure out what those are. And then we begin to take those actions. The other thing I think is that thinking and the ideas of dual power for every action that we take as an individual or as a community or as a political movement should have dual power. It's resisting on one hand which we do well, but building on the other hand. And I think it's really important to recognize that right now ninety percent of what we do is resist. We got this big old popeye arm over here that we're resisting like crazy and we got this little atrophied building arm. Let's continue to build and be conscious of that and our actions that we take. And the other thing I would think about is think beyond activism. Activism is what we get pigeon-holed at by mainstream media, by mainstream culture stuff. I'm a father, I'm a worker, I'm a neighbor. I'm all these other things, and I'm an active person in these things. But recognize that I don't want to just be an activist because that removes me from the rest of my communities that I live in. And we are all part of multiple communities. So don't just be the activist, you're doing these things, I think it's important think about. And then we need to remember to connect our struggles. Anarchist do this on small scales, and other communities need to do it, we need to do it. How does a corporation relate to animal rights? How do smashing borders... How does that relate to prison industrial complex? We need to connect these struggles and make real strong connections in these things. And I think we need to widen our mirror of reflection because you know this happens in school. Like you only talk to people at your school, or we only talk to people in are subcultures and with animal rights, will only talk to some some people in these other subcultures of anarchism or whatever community that you're in. Get out of that community, find out. For me it's like... What's the person at the gas station think? What's the person at the grocery store think? How do we relate to each other, and make our work relevant to those people? Not to draw them in, cause I'm not here to convert anybody. I want us to want to come to these ideas because they meet sense to all of us. And I think that we have to recognize what I mentioned earlier that we are a movement of movements. There is no one movement anymore. It was smashed. And we are a movement of movements with all these things, if we connect the struggles we recognize that we can build these strategies. Think about this, this being the analogy I like to use. Before we had this big tent philosophy, and we still try to have... We're like, come on, we're all in this together, let's all do this. We are but we have different interests within that. So, imagine that the goal is the horizon over here, right? And these are our common dreams and ideals in the future that we want to build. Instead of getting into one big boat and disagreeing and fighting with each other and kicking people off the boat and stuff, what if we said we're gonna get multiple boats and get across there. A movement of movements. Some of the both are going to be little rafts, some are going to be little john boats, some are going to be armada's, some are going to be fancy and sleek, and we're all gonna get there in our own time. And we try to help each other to get across there, we don't try to sink eachothers boats. That is a movement of movements, and that is powerful thing because then it's like I don't always have to agree with them, but I don't have to dumb my ideas down to the lowest common denominator to get them across, but I can help them along the way. And I think in thism there's a term called diversity of tactics. It's the idea that recognizing and remembered that it takes all kinds of tactics to make change., For those who only one protest in the street and say that voting is a waste of time, I think you might want to re-look at that. The same with people who say voting is the only way to do it. You know there's all kinds of tactics. Ther'es a spectrum of tactics it takes to make change in here. And I'm not going to talk about this real specific, there's diversity if tactics within street culture. I'm going to talk about this in broader terms and recognize that it takes everything. If you... Listen... I'm never going to vote, you can hear me say that. But, I'm not going to stop somebody else from voting, though. And I'm not going to put a moral overlay on them voting. I think it's the... If you're not gonna do anything else, it's the least you can do. Pull the lever, how difficult is that? But don't tell me that what I'm doing is a waste of time, because I can argue the same thing, right? It's a diversity of tactics. It takes people suing corporations, it takes people suing governments to do the right thing. I don't have to agree with it, I don't even have to be a participant in it, again multiple boats going cross the same thing. So I think the other thing, we're going to talk about shifting narratives in cultures, and recognize that if we are going to move beyond being just consumers and voters, that we're going to forge these other paths, that we're going to build the road by walking. It's what the Zapatista propose, that we don't have to have the answers we have to asked the questions. What can we do in our communities to begin to make these changes, and how do we dream that? And that sometimes we are going to come to a dead end. Instead of just pushing through, back up and come back around. Right? It's okay. We're going to build the roadways as we're walking. And you know what, Ii think one of the things... If you're going to be in revolution and culture for a long time, you've got to remember that we... We have to be kind to ourselves along the way. Guilt, shame, all of those things that we tell ourselves like, I must sacrifice... Those things do not matter in the long term. They make people leave political movements, they make us stop doing things we do. They're not sustainable. And we also been need to be nice to the people that we don't agree with. And I'm not talking about my enemies, I've got a whole special reserve for those people. The people that are sort of in the same boat. Like, I don't want to sink their boat, but I don't want them to sink my boat. In, we need to be kind ourselves along the way. And remember to keep it sustainable. If you were in it for the long haul, if we want to make revolutionary changes. And I don't believe it's one day that everything's going to fall and we're going to do this. It's going to be stages and stages and stages of this. There's going to be setbacks along the way. Some of us are never going to make it to that horizon and that's just part of it. But we need to keep a sustainable so we stay in it because a lot of times after people are in their teens and twenties they leave, right? It's not sustainable, and we end up with the walking wounded for people who start to be our ages who have been in for a for a while start to have a lot of trauma, and we don't recognize that. We need to learn to keep it sustainable. It's our emergency heart that drove us there in the first place and what are we going to do with it. So end with this. Do not give in, don't give up, resist, rebel, create, and build. Thank you very much. [Applause] Alright, I guess we'll open up for questions, comments, concerns. Yes sir. Thank you for fighting for all of us. It's gonna take all of us man. Other than things like being vegetarian and vegan and volunteering with social services and things, and resesarching how we build with our dollars and all of our purchases, what are some other practical things that we can do while being students and while being fathers and partners and citizens in general. We can be working towards this better future that we all dream of. One, we have to recognize it's structural shifts that we're working on too. There's individual choices we can make in our culture shift, you know like, the radical idea that being vegan or vegetarian. That was a radical concept also, that was a marginal idea. That was a personal choice that people made. But we need to recognize that there's structures that have to be changed. I don't want a kinder, gentler, vegan, capitalist world. What I want is animal liberation, which is like no exploitative farms, no factory farming. It's not sustainable for any of us, actually. For our diets, it's not sustainable for the animals, it's... You know. Like all of these things, so I think anything that we do, we have to work on structural analysis of that. And I think it starts with asking the questions. And I can give you some ideas, but the thing is, I don't want to tell us what to do, I want us to think about the harder thing. Building the road is gonna take all of us, right? And so I'll tell you one of the things I did on my path was... I work on worker cooperatives. Horizontally organize worker cooperatives without bosses because I could join a union and get a pretty decent job somewhere, but I'm still stuck in the structure. But it doesn't change the structural system, it's just another way. But what I could do is start to build worker cooperatives from the bottom up and create jobs with dignity for ourselves and economic engines that can fund healthcare, education, all these social services in my community. It's just a step towards that direction, right? So then we have the jobs of dignity and we're starting to create these things, and then start our own banking systems, then we start having our own small community lending institutions, and then we start funding our own healthcare and education. Even if there's universal healthcare in this country, there's millions of people who will fall through that net. People in my neighborhood, Ms. Betty or Allan... They're not going to get those social services. Why not build a clinic in every community? How does our food rate in that? We got to pull food into that. There's whole things on education, healthcare, food, basic shelter, like basic things. They're all going to look different. Like I can give you ideas, but they're all going to look different, and you have to make choices within your community to do it. But you're not going to do it by yourself, it's getting together people face to face, and talk about this. Thank you all for coming. Getting together with people to think about those things. There's writings on it, you know transitional cities, there's a worker cooperative, building social centers. But there's also people who are working resistance movements for like abolition of factory farms, abolition of prisons, abolition of nation borders that we have now. You know because immigration issues are totally a bogeyman. So it's like, how does your individual choices tie into structural things. If you can do it yourself, what kind of support can you give? You know if you're raising a small child, what can you do? Can you form a childcare cooperative with other people? You know, small-scale things. Everything that we have to do has to scale down. This big behemoth that we have now, giant politics and giant corporation hasn't always been like this, right? We have to recognize that we need a break it down again, and start to look at things in smaller scale even within Portland. There's multiple communities that overlap in Portland and they all might even before form their own micro economies. These are just ideas. Again, I'm not giving the answer, these are just some thoughts. Anybody else? Questions? Go ahead, yes. How do you feel about radical anarchists like the Black Bloc and stuff like that? Do you see them as agent provocateurs, or do you see them as more of a necessary evil that kind of puts a smear sometimes on anarchist movement? Do you listen to info wars? The Black Bloc is a tactic, and it can be a very effective tactic if it has a strategy in it. Remember we were talking about diversity of tactics it takes even within street culture there's a whole diversity of tactics, right? I think the Black Bloc is absolutely necessary, but... The insurrectionary movements that have kind of come up within the Black Bloc, where it's like people will endanger people without responsibility. I'm not down for it. I'm totally against it. If I'm at a large scale march and, say it's an immigration march, and somebody smashes a window standing next to me, and I'm endangered from that, I'm going to punch that person, because they just endangered me and the larger. amount of people that are around them without any concern for that. But there are strategic times it has happened. In the shack campaign, there was two hundred people that went to Little Rock in 2000-2001, and there was a big Black Bloc contingent there and basically shut the city down. You know the companies that were targeted, Bank of America, Stevens, the two companies and the whole town was shut down because they were afraid fo it. And it made these issues come to the front. And I think that's a valuable thing. And I think property destruction we have to recognize has a time and a place. An absolutely valuable time and place, and a long history. I mean like the tea party. Even, think about this. When we had chattel slavery with black people, if you cut the chains off of somebody, that was property destruction. You know we don't think about that now, it was property destruction, but it was absolutely necessary for total liberation. And so, the Black Bloc definitely has a place. It just needs responsibility and strict strategy in it. I was just going to ask if you could maybe elaborate a little on your notion of love and how that plays out into your conceptualization of your enemies and how you treat your enemies. Well, there's always degrees in all of these things, right? The spectrum. But the thing is, I think we all do these things because we love things, we love the world, we love people, we love animals, we love... We don't want to see the natural world exploited. We don't want to see ourselves exploited. And I think that's a beautiful common denominator that we have. But, even if I don't believe that somebody is evil, because I would even argue that people like Hitler probably had some nice qualities to him or George Bush. Doesn't make them my friends, and it doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to attack them, but I can have an understanding of it. I mean, I have a situation now with this guy who's an informant with somebody that I stood there with and I struggled with, and I had to deal with trying to sort that out. That we actually almost gave our lives for this one thing, and then he in turn almost put me in prison two years later. But I think we have to remember that hate doesn't build movements. It's the underlying love actually that does build the movements and what do with it. That doesn't mean I have to like everybody, and there are people I will not get along with, and I'm okay with that. It's actually one of the reasons I don't believe in the big tent philosophy because then I have to get along with people I don't get along with. I believe that we form groups, we form affinity around people that we get along with. Because if we're having enough trouble getting along with eachother already normally, why would I want to put destructive people in there, people I totally disagree with. They can form their own groups. Anybody else? I think it's amazing what's happening at Occupy Sandy. Have you all been paying attention to this at all? This is amazing. It's the thing where movements build on another. Think about this, like the occupy movements. When people came... How many of you here, did anybody participate in occupy? So, think about this. All the sudden these ideas, horizontal organizing, participatory democracy, spokes council's, direct action... All these things people came into them just like, that's the way things are. It hasn't always been like that. And so, it's been built on twenty years of organizing that's happened from around the world. I mean, you know, longer than that, but the last twenty years for sure the United States, or fifteen years in the United States. And so Occupy Sandy is the same thing. You know, like Common Ground can't take credit for it, but there's definitely the influence of that where people with our emergency hearts are like, we're gonna do localized actions to build support for people, and I think it's been amazing. It's been really inspiring to me. In fact, I wrote an open letter to radicals and anarchists yesterday that's making the rounds and should read it. About what a beautiful thing it is to see. Seeing all these people doing these things. And it's beautiful because it's not for glory it's for love, right? Anybody else? Man, thank you all for coming out today, I really really appreciate it. Thanks to Victory for hosting this and for the school, for bringing me to PCC. Thank you very much. And if you want to find me, you can find me at facebook. [Applause] ♪♪♪