Editors note: This is a three part series. Check out Part one and  Part two. And see all our stories from the #noNATO actions here. 

Monday May 21st 2012

Lucas, Emillio and myself woke up just after 9am, and made it down to the rally for the march against Boeing just before we circled up around 11am or so.  Boeing decided to close its headquarters rather than deal with a demonstration.  We had won.  I popped another party popper since we were all waking up and cheering a bit.  It was a small victory to be sure but a significant one given that slowing down that company’s business for even a day may have very well saved lives.  We learned about how Boeing had been given tax exemptions for well over two decades and free slave labor from prisons in order to build death machines to sell back to the government…in addition to all the really uncomfortable commercial jets they make.

The local organizers prepared some street theater for this action and protestors divided into groups of people who would lie down on the ground and pretend to die while other protestors drew chalk circles around them while pretending to be drones.  Emillio asked if was going to join in and I was, but my job is to play the pandeiro and help keep the beat or make it more interesting when we march.  I also saw other organizers stalking up not only on standard issue Revolutionary Games “weaponry” such as silly string, soap bubbles, bags of confetti and confetti cannons similar to the one’s I always like to bring on marches, but also lots of red balloons, our calling card logo.  Seeing unfamiliar faces flying the colors of my affinity group on their march made me feel completely at home and left me wondering as to which muse had spread the same ideas among so many deliberately disparate strangers.

Everyone on the march had been marching and working hard for days and weeks, but our bodies had grown increasingly addicted to the flow of adrenaline and endorphins and we let everyone who saw us in the streets and online know that we were at war with war and that we knew it had every bit as much to do with our economic enslavement as the devil’s bargains we had been forced to sign in exchange for education and homes.

It was a good march, I caught up with Lou and Matt, I had been playing my pandeiro and chanting when a photographer with a really cool looking old camera asked me if she could take my picture for a project she was working on.  Her name was Annie and she’d been taking pictures of occupiers from occupations all over the country and had accumulated nearly 500 portraits.  I thought it was a really interesting project and we stepped out of the march for a moment so she could focus the camera and get some good light.  She told me she was taking a picture of a movement and not me.  I liked that.  Annie wrote down my name, where I was from and she asked me just as she’d asked the others in her portraits what I would wish for if I were given one wish.  I managed to dodge the question somewhat by telling her I’d wish for the wisdom in order to make the best use of that one wish.

We chatted about Annie’s art projects and my academic projects for the rest of the march up to Boeing headquarters.  I took lots of pictures of the action outside of Boeing which included enough chalk, silly string, soap bubbles, explosions of confetti and paper airplanes to make children from the staunchest republican families want to stop and play with anarchists.

Nicole and John found me on the march again.  We traded our stories from the previous evening, marched, and chanted together through the streets of downtown Chicago from Boeing HQ past big corporate bank branches toward the last conference of the NATO summit on Michigan Ave.

I had been lost in conversation with John while we had paused onMichigan Ave for what must have been a moment of silence when he handed Occupied Stories flyers to three guys who had been casually listening to our conversation.  I’d heard one of them talk about our position next to a bus to someone on the other end of his phone before John asked him about what had brought him to the march and to write about it as well.  I thought that John was sincerely trying to do outreach so I asked the guy the same question a little differently to get him talking.  He said they were machinists and they were just there to check the march out.  He was vague, I asked them why they joined the march assuming they had wandered in having just seen it, but the most vocal of them with shades and cap said they new the march was coming but they were still vague and evasive.  Once the march started again and we drifted away from them  John told me he figured that they were undercover cops given that he saw them recording what we were talking about with their phones.  The thought hadn’t struck me as my mind had been elsewhere.  He also told me he’d seen perhaps six other people who were probably police slip on black block attire the previous evening.

The nature of oppression in our country is such that there is great joy to be found in transgressing against the system however transgression is hardly the same thing as terrorism, and these undercover cops at best caught me ranting, loosely based on the writings of Foucault and Nietzsche about how I think that everyone in society would probably be happier if our criminal justice system was still based on public torture like it used to be during the dark ages as opposed to the modern system of confined imprisonment we use today.  I could only wonder as to what those three undercover dicks and their backup could possibly think of the notion.

I later introduced Nicole and John to Annie and they hit it off as I thought they might.  The four of us decided to take a break from the rally and grab some deep dish pizza before John and Nicole had to split.  I walked around ‘The Bean’ while Annie took Nicole and John’s portrait.  She asked them both the same question about their one wish once we had made to the restaurant.  Those of us who are involved with this movement are able to put a lot of trust in one another because we see each other so often in the streets, but most of us don’t actually know that much about one another other than the raw measure and strength of character which becomes nakedly visible to all out in the streets.  It was a pleasure to slow down, eat pizza far better than almost any which can be found in New Yorkand talk without chants in the background.  A few Chicago Police Officers had stopped by for lunch as well and were seated at a table next to ours.  We exchanged pleasantries and stories.  One of them told me that there were cameras all over the area where I had been clubbed.  He didn’t seem especially fond of Rahm Emmanuel, ‘he’s the guy who signs my checks’ was the officer’s response when I asked his opinion of the politician.

I parted ways with Annie and then John and Nicole after we had finished eating.  They had to catch a flight and I had to retrace my steps and try to figure out the location of where I’d been whacked by the riot place so I’d have something to tell the lawyers.  I figured it was definitely on Wabash just off of VanBueren like the caption in the photo I later saw online of Shon and Becca checking me out when it had happened.

Tuesday May 22nd 

I was scolded by a cashier for using a woman’s bathroom at a rest stop somewhere close to the edge of Pennsylvania during our bus odyssey home, I told her it was a New York thing but that I had remembered to put the seat back down.  I also heard Mandolin say it was a New York thing as well after he walked out of it a moment later.  I used a bathroom in a different area of the rest station after I’d finished some really bad lunch.  The attendant mentioned to another man standing there that she only had another hour left to go in her day.  “The longest hour of the whole day I bet?”  She looked at me and said “honey you wouldn’t believe the kinda day I’ve had.”  I involuntarily smirked as I glanced down from her to pull change from my wallet; I may have also shook my head a bit in disbelief at her last remark and said “tell me about it” in the tersest acquired Brooklyn accent I could manage.  She asked me how my day could possibly be any worse than hers.  I told her I was stuck on an 18 hour bus ride back from the NATO protests in Chicago with five staples in my head from a riot baton.

The cashier stared at me in disbelief.  She made no attempt to convince me that her day had been more difficult than mine.  She paused with disbelief for a moment of such a duration that I wasn’t sure if we were having a conversation.  I angled over to the display case at the edge of the counter where all of the knives were because I have a shameless knife fetish.  I realized I probably shouldn’t salivate over them while talking to these folks and turned my attention back towards them with a polite smirk.  Clearly thrown off by the business suit I was wearing as much as my story, the cashier asked me why the police were beating on me given I was dressed the way I was and not my gritty occupier friends outside the rest stop.  I mentioned that I hadn’t been in my suit at the time, but that the police were still pretty indiscriminate.  It was a lot for them to process.  The Occupy Movement, at least in NYC has certainly not managed to abolish the boundaries of class which still painfully persist even in our community, however we certainly have managed to maintain our solidarity despite those boundaries.

The cashier asked me if I thought our protests had done any good.  I told her that the protests against NATO had turned into a 70,000 strong anti-war statement.  I told the cashier and the other guy in the store about the veterans who talked about what the war is really like before they threw their medals away and the action against Boeing and how they didn’t pay taxes and used slave labor from prisons.  I told them it did a lot of good I thumped my fist against my heart as I left them with a polite nod and smile.

The view of New York City from over that northern bridge over the Hudson was beautiful.  It made all of us anxious to get off of the bus.  Many on the bus wanted to start march directly after leaving the bus.  They got their chance with a Montreal solidarity march from Washington Square Park to Union Square shortly later that evening.  I swung byUnion Square after I’d missed the march.  Thorin, Lauren, Jack and others looked like they were ready for more marching.  Their choice is to take the streets or to live in them but I gratefully marched to the subway stop leading back to my apartment and shortly thereafter occupied my bed.

-Harrison Schultz-

Editors note: This is a three part series. Check out Part one and  Part two. And see all our stories from the #noNATO actions here.

RIVERSIDE, CA – Spilling out below the snow-dusted San Bernardino Mountains, California’s Inland Empire in Southern California is America’s storage shed. Its economy is a key link in the global supply chain. Goods from Asia funnel through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports that handle more than one-quarter of all the imports pouring into the United States every year, and much of it is warehoused here before finding its way into homes and businesses across the nation. If all the storage space was gathered under one roof, more than 700 million square feet, it would make a warehouse larger than Manhattan.

With manufacturing scant in the Inland Empire, an estimated 118,000 workers are employed hustling through cavernous warehouses to stack and fetch goods or hauling them in rigs. The area is infested with banal exurbs that clump in towns such as Mira Loma, which has been tagged the “diesel death zone” for the lung-searing truck pollution that envelops it. It was in Mira Loma that a few hundred members of various Southern California Occupy movements converged at sunrise  on Feb. 29 with the goal of shutting down a Walmart distribution center.

They were joining in the one-day “Shut Down the Corporations” action staged nationwide against Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Monsanto, Pfizer, Citibank, Koch Industries, BP, Bank of America, AT&T, Altria and Peabody Energy. According to “F29” organizers, these corporations are all big-money backers of the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), which critics say “rewrite state laws that … often directly benefit huge corporations.”

On a chilly, smoggy morning in front of the Walmart complex, Jared Iorio, a 33-year-old photographer and stalwart with Occupy Los Angeles, told me that the protest was the workers’ idea. Iorio says an organizing project called the Warehouse Workers United “came to the Occupy movement for support. The shutdown was our idea.”  Michael Novick, a retired Los Angeles teacher, explained that workers in the Walmart facility “called for a one-day strike today in an attempt to get union recognition and called for community support. Occupy Riverside put out a call to support their action and to have a community picket.” As for why the strike failed to materialize, Iorio speculates that was “because of pressure from Change to Win and those more entrenched in the union structure.”

The battle going on at the Walmart center in Mira Loma is an exemplary case of the chess match between capital and labor, as long as you realize labor is starting the game with virtually no pieces. On one side, Walmart’s center is run by Schneider National, a $3.7 billion logistics giant that provides services to two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies. Schneider in turn subcontracts for workers to Rogers Premier, one of more than 400 temp agencies in the area. The workers are “permanent temps” as they may toil on the same site for years. Walmart uses the layers of subcontracting to insulate itself from legal and ethical liability for the inevitable abuses in the low-wage warehouse industry.

In an open letter to the Occupy movement, workers employed by Rogers in a Schneider-run warehouse handling Walmart’s goods told of “working up to 72 hours straight [and] not receiving even minimum wage after working 16 hour days consistently for years.” On Oct. 17 six workers initiated a class-action lawsuit against Schneider, Rogers and others for “systematic wage theft” by deliberately underpaying them and denying overtime. The state of California was investigating the warehouses at the time and hit Rogers with a fine of more than $600,000 for labor law violations. A few days after the workers filed suit, Schneider dumped Rogers and dropped the ax on more than 100 warehouse workers. The firings were set for Feb. 24, but a federal judge blocked them because she found it was likely they violated “anti-retaliation law.”

Organized labor has been trying for decades to crack Walmart, which has perfected an anti-union strategy. In the very rare instance where an organizing campaign succeeded, Walmart excised the offending limb, whether it was closing down a store in Quebec after workers there unionized in 2005 or getting rid of all in-store meat cutting after 11 butchers in a Texas store voted to join a union in 2000.

So unions have been pursuing a new strategy with Walmart, particularly with the warehouse workers in Mira Loma. The Warehouse Workers United is a project of  Change to Win, which was set up in 2005, mainly by the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union, as an alternative to the AFL-CIO (and has since foundered). The organizing model hearkens back to the labor militancy of the 1930s before employers gained an enduring advantage after the Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947. Warehouse Workers United has engaged in door-knocking campaigns in the Inland Empire’s poor communities as well as establishing a workers center. It is trying to use the model of a corporate campaign, which moves beyond the workplace, to mobilize community support to pressure corporations. The goal is to force Walmart to the table, make it accept responsibility for workers in its warehouses, and improve their pay and conditions.

One of those other means is the Occupy movement. The sight of muscular unions (compared to other social movements) dialing 911 for raggedy anarchist-inspired occupiers is a telling sign of the power of the Occupy brand. Lending support to the Walmart workers on Feb. 29 were occupiers from Los Angeles, Fullerton, Riverside and San Bernardino. We arrived to find an overwhelmingly youthful crowd with a band of black bearing homemade plastic shields, gas masks and bandannas across their faces, adding color to the soul-crushing sprawl of the Inland Empire. We followed demonstrators as they wandered to and fro, discovering that all three Walmart distribution centers there had been preemptively shut down.

Lacking targets, the protest fell back to chants of “Whose streets? Our streets” and sauntered down the roadway. Vehicles began to stack up, and one hyped-up participant pounded his shield on cars, frightening some of the unfortunate passengers. Cooler heads surrounded him, and a few minutes later a cheering gantlet opened to let what were probably low-wage workers go on their way. The cops arrived and blocked off the main intersection, aiding the goal of stopping business for the day, and a police chopper started circling above.

As the sun climbed the group split up, taking positions at two side streets leading to other warehouses. At one post a car bearing amps was deployed and dance music lightened the mood as the group hunkered down for the day. Novick said “it was a victory” even though it was Schneider that had shut down the three warehouses. “They know there is community support for the workers.”

He wasn’t blowing smoke. For an event that was heavily promoted both regionally and nationally, the only surprise early on was the lack of police and private security. It’s not hard to guess why. Novick said so many police were deployed during the Dec. 12 port actions they caused far more disruption of business than the 700 or so protesters who engaged in the blockade. Plus, Walmart has been trying to curry – some say buy – favor with community groups and food activists. Images of a pitched street battle with tear gas and hundreds of arrests would not have burnished Walmart’s image.

I queried Novick as to why there were not more protesters there. Where was labor? Novick responded with evidence of a troubling trend for the Occupy movement – how fractures are appearing. He said in Los Angeles the big unions and faith-based groups have separated from Occupy and set up the “99 percent table.” Novick says he thinks the move is a retreat.

“I think labor has been committing slow suicide for a long time, and I think Occupy actually reversed that in a very positive way,” he said. “You saw a lot more dynamism and an attempt to do community organizing and relate it to workplace organizing.” Novick adds that there are some valid reasons for the retreat, mainly because the strength of organized labor in Los Angeles is the immigrants rights movement, which is at far greater risk from the repression than the average young white occupier in the center of the organizing.

A short while later the languid atmosphere vaporized the instant a trucker came toward us from one of the warehouses. About a dozen occupiers, including a woman in a wheelchair, flocked together and blocked the truck. Masks were pulled up and shields readied. The driver was Hispanic, as is much of the community and work force in the region, came to a halt, turned off his engine and exited his cab. Protesters engaged him in Spanish and English, others debated what to do, with one of the first speakers declaring that even if everyone else wanted to let the truck pass he alone would hold the line. The main point of contention was the effect of their blockade on this one worker versus the broader goal of stopping business as usual.

This type of maximalism bubbled up, with another youth proclaiming to all within earshot, “If we can’t stop the flow of commerce, why are we here?” Another suggested, “If he loses his job he can join Occupy.” Less strident voices weighed in with more sophisticated analysis, asking if the driver was a union worker or not. One woman reminded everyone of the context, “Our goal today was to stop Schneider.” Another protester noted, “The first thing he said to us was, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to lose my job.’ We’re not from this community and he has to live with the consequences of our actions.”

Jared Iorio explained how they approached the issue.

“There were more rowdy elements who were callous and that needs to be addressed,” he said. “We did talk to as many people as possible who were stopped in their vehicles. We handed them a bottle of water and a granola bar and talked to them that we were doing this action on behalf of unorganized workers who were trying to better their lives. We explained we were not trying to inconvenience them, but inconvenience the CEOS who were profiting from them. The outreach was pretty organized, and once we explained what we were doing there were a lot of truckers who supported us.”

The same debate broke out at the other blockade, Iorio explained, pitting the anti-capitalists who wanted to stop all commerce against those who favored a more calibrated approach.

“We do our best to mitigate the economic impact on individuals,” he went on. “We stopped a Walmart and a Micro truck, as well as two other drivers who were paid hourly so they were not really upset, but we let through a truck with an empty load for a company we were not targeting.” He says that the protest included “people who had family members who were truckers. They explained how being an independent contractor works as a trucker and multiple times a week they often are unable to get a load, so stopping it one day is not going to make them lose their homes or families.”

It was a fascinating experiment in crowd sourcing. The Achilles’ heel of the movement was out in the open, with a number of people pleading with the maximalists to consider different perspectives, while noting, “I can’t make you do anything.” But so was Occupy’s strength and idealism. Through collective debate and discussion the crowd can arrive at the correct decision through reason, not force.

The scene also brought to mind something Ruth Fowler of Occupy Los Angles had just told me: “Occupy is very odd right now. The people who have stayed are the cream of the crap, and the brilliant. The rank and file in between are at home … It’s an interesting dynamic. Not entirely comfortable. Lots of loonies floating around.”

As for the driver, who said he was hauling toilets, he was not interested in the finer points of solidarity and community organizing. He got into his cab and backed up as if he was returning to the warehouse. The protesters cheered their surprise victory. Instead, he slipped into a nearby parking lot and sped away. A few ran after his truck, but it was too late.

A handful of masked avengers spontaneously upped the ante by uprooting street signs and took revenge by barricading their nemesis, the parking lot entrance. I walked over to take pictures of their handiwork, and upset one of them. I find this perspective odd. Everyone there knows this is a public event. It’s occurring out in the open. They are desperate for media coverage. But this one fellow was indignant I was not granting him a sphere of privacy for his very public acts. He had remembered to bring his mask, but left his thinking cap at home. He accused me of being a cop. I shot back, “How do I know you’re not a cop?” and thought, why bother with the mask if you think you can be identified by my amateur digital camera? The area was probably festooned with high-tech surveillance devices by corporations and police that had already mapped every hair and pimple on his face.

Things calmed down, and it seemed a good time for a coffee break. We walked back to our car, and two occupiers passed by. One commented, “We were expecting riot cops and tear gas, not Lady Gaga.” The other responded, “I’d prefer the riot cops and tear gas.”

We returned an hour later and the storm had broken. At the north end of the facility were a line of riot police who blocked our path south. We went around the back end, parked and walked north. We could see 100 or more tan-shirted cops in the distance confronting a similar number of protesters and at least two police choppers. I counted 45 cop cars alone on the South end from agencies including the Riverside County Sheriff, Ontario Police, Moreno Valley Police and California Highway Patrol. One could have easily recorded the license plate of every unmarked police car within a 10-mile radius. We were again prevented from getting closer than perhaps a quarter mile. We watched with a group of protesters as demonstrators were moving in and out of a facility.

Desperate for information we started talking to anyone and everyone and noticed trickles of protesters casually walking to safety. It turns out many had entered the grounds of a food company and had made their way through a hole in the fence. Others who remained on the line opposing the police said the cops charged a few times, swinging batons but the demonstrators stuck together with the shield bearers protecting them. Iorio says he was aware of only two arrests, with one person “beat up by seven or eight cops.” He added that there were numerous “instances where protesters unarrested someone who had been grabbed by the cops.”

About half a dozen protesters came toward us wearily and plopped down under a shade tree on the manicured lawn. One supporter popped a pharmaceutical vial labeled “Executor,” fingered a neon-green bud and packed a bowl for a victory toke as cops at a checkpoint nearby warily observed.

Ultimately, says Iorio, “The police did what Walmart wanted. I also don’t think Riverside County had the capacity to arrest more than 200 people. They like to make a few examples, rough them up and arrest them but not prosecute them so they can frighten people away from direct action for a year until the charges expire.”

As the day wound down we talked with workers at other facilities. All were wary. We explained the conditions at Schneider, the allegations of wage theft and why the protesters said they were out there today. Not one worker knew what was going on, either with the protest or with Schneider, which was literally next door. A few workers had nothing but praise for conditions in their own warehouse. But none would give up information about how long they have worked there, their pay or what their jobs actually entailed. One said his company “was great. I don’t have any complaints.” He slyly added, “At least not today.” He said he had heard of Occupy, “I support it. They are for human rights, for workers’ rights.”

The story was the same outside a Lennox warehouse facility. Silence or praise of the workplace from a half-dozen workers in green safety vests chowing on pepperoni pizza. As we told of the conditions at Schneider, the anxiety seemed to increase. The workers shifted around uncomfortably, hunched over their food, averting their gaze. At the main entrance a woman in professional attire conferred with a man with a walkie-talkie. She turned quickly and went inside as he came up to us. We politely explained we were just having an informal chat. He had the bearing of someone who knows his place in the corporate ecosystem. With his green vest and walkie-talkie he was probably a line supervisor. Not one worker at the table would look him in the eye. But he appeared to share their fear, delicately choosing his words like someone who could be canned in an instant if he said the wrong thing. He said he wanted everyone to have good wages and working conditions.

Doesn’t everyone? Not even the most callous CEO will ever say they want Americans to juggle multiple part-time jobs for a lifetime of poverty as long as their health holds up, after which they can be tossed on the scrap heap. People like 22-year-old Alberto Hernandez, who came to protest with his brother. Alberto described factory life in the Inland Empire. He worked 70-hour weeks in an aluminum factory with shoddy safety equipment. At age 18 he was ecstatic at his wages.  “I made $545 a week,” he exclaimed. But the job came with panic attacks, having to move 12,000 pounds of aluminum a day, bloody noses and headaches from the aluminum dust. He realized that there could be a better life, and haltingly spoke of wanting to educate himself.

For half of America the reality is similar: poverty or one paycheck away from it. And that’s what Wall Street cheers every second of the day. Drive down wages, fire workers, bulldoze regulation. They all fatten the bottom line. The isolated workers with their lack of rights are precisely whom the occupiers were fighting for. Some of the workers know it, but they can’t see beyond the gulf of fear to risk for something better. Many of the occupiers are willing to take great risks, sometimes to their own detriment, but have difficultly connecting to people who aren’t looking to wage revolution. It’s not a new story, but the two sides are closer than they have been in decades. And that is what really frightens the 1 percent.

-ARUN GUPTA  and MICHELLE FAWCETT-

You can follow Arun and Michelle as they travel across the country to visit different occupations at www.occupyusatoday.com

This article was originally published at Salon.com