nolympics writes:
The Media and the Movement at the Oakland Docks"

David Martinez

I don't see any difference between one TV station and the next, all corporate
media is the same, and they are all our enemy, he tells me angrily. I?m talking
to a young radical, while we are both marching in a picket at the port of
Oakland, just after dawn, both of us stomping our feet to shake off the wet
chill that is still rolling in from of the bay.

The man I am talking to has just slashed the tires of a television van. I am
arguing that we, the radicals in the antiwar movement, should have a stance not
opposed to ALL ?corporate media?. We should instead focus our efforts on the
?worst? stations, those who are renowned for their shoddy and unfactual reporting.
For my comrades and I, those stations are channel two, the local Fox
affiliate, and CNN. The other stations we should try and cultivate, as if to
say: if you screw us over, this will be your punishment. Be warned.

The man responds as above. All media is bad. I reply that we could say the same
thing about capitalism, as regards our targets during mass demonstrations. We
could attack every storefront, every business, under the pretext that all
capital is capitalism. But we don?t: we attack specific targets, like starbucks,
the gap, etc, and this focus has made us appear as more than just hoodlums, at
least to some people anyway.

He refuses to be swayed, and walks off. The sun is beginning to warm up the
docks where we are engaged in a picket of two maritime shipping companies, one,
APL (American Presidents Line, a fitting name) that delivers war materiel, and
the other, SSA, which has received a contract to run the newly ?liberated?
Iraqi port of Oum Kasar, liberated from the Iraqis and delivered to American
business, courtesy of the United States marines.

There is a fine turnout for the action, especially for so early in the morning.
Three large groups of picketers walk in circles at the entrances
to the docks.

The police have already arrived, and they are decidedly NOT the SFPD we have
been used to in the past weeks. They are the Oakland cops, from the same city
as the Hells Angels, the Black Panthers, and the Oakland Raiders, whose fans
regularly throw riots themselves. The OPD has arrived WITH GAS MASKS ALREADY
ON, which lets us know immediately where their minds are at. They form a line
and declare us an illegal gathering, if we don?t clear out we will be arrested.
Nobody is feeling up to fighting these bullies, so we pull back from our
picketing positions as they advance.

A woman asks me, did they say where we could go? I mean, to the sidewalk, or
the other streets, or what? Myself and the comrade next to me chuckle. I don?t
think the OPD makes those distinctions, we say. These guys kill people for fun.

We have regrouped, several hundred of us, in the street just past the entrance
to the SSA shipyards that the cops cleared us away from. Myself and another man
are blocking a string of 18 wheeled cargo trucks from moving into the docks,
but its purely symbolic, cause they couldn?t get past the cops straight ahead
anyway.

At this point a news cameraman approaches to film us. What station are you
with, I ask?
I?m making a documentary, he lies.
That?s funny, says a woman behind him, It says CNN on your camera.
At that, I block his shot with my SHUT DOWN THE WAR PROFITEERS sign. You?re not
welcome here, I say. don?t film us.
He persists, but the crowd around us keeps harassing him, pushing him and
blocking his view, until he leaves.

We are immediately admonished by two of the organizers of the action. They are
irate at us for doing anything without their approval. Don?t make unilateral
decisions, they tell us. We invited the media here, okay? Don?t harass them
without a ?consensus?.
Look, we tell them, we can do what we want. We don?t want to be filmed by CNN.
When CNN starts doing real reporting, we will cooperate with them. And by the
way, don?t call people to an action and then try and order them around.

The CNN shooter has retreated behind the police, who are lined up, masked
up, and ready with various crowd-control weaponry and bandoliers of ammunition.
The sun is now directly behind them, and blindingly in our eyes. No sooner have
we finished arguing with the control-freak organizers, when the Oakland cops
explode, without warning, into their own brand of low-level violence.

I see a cop lob a metal projectile into the air, and I watch it drop toward us,
wondering if it?s tear gas. It detonates on the street with a tremendous
blast-a concussion grenade-and then I am hit several times by small, painful
sandbag rounds fired with shotgun charges. The sounds of shells firing
repeatedly, people are screaming, running, and falling. More crack of guns.

I?m not hurt, just bruised on my arm and ankle. We have retreated, naturally,
about 75 yards. People appeal for calm, and we stand our ground. Some are
singing, others still wave their signs. The cop line moves up slowly. A friend,
carrying a large marching-band drum, asks if I?m okay.
Sure, I tell him.

How far away were they from you all when they fired? he asks.
About like where they are now, I tell him, and sure enough, another concussion
bomb explodes near us, and there is the sound of ?non-lethal? projectiles
whizzing through the air. A woman is hit in the face, and her neck is swollen
the size of a grapefruit. They are no longer aiming low.

It continues the same, over two and a half hours. They fire, we retreat a
hundred feet, regroup. They advance and fire again. I am impressed by the
resilience of the demonstrators. There are many older people among us, union
organizers and labor people, and they are taking the heat along with everyone
else. Although we are being forced back, it is hard not to feel powerful and
alive. This is what they will do, if we merely threaten to shut down business
as usual. They will use wooden bullets and bombs, against signs and songs.

I am walking next to a man in his forties. He is dressed like a priest, I
think, and is singing the ?aint gonna let nobody turn me back? song, as he
calmly walks-not runs-in front of the oncoming police line. I fall in and sing
with him, then tell him heads up as they open up on us again, and he and I are
suddenly jogging while wooden ?baton rounds? fly around us. More people are
hurt, and yelling for the one antiwar medic who is among us.

I can see the men with the weapons clearly now. They are arched forward,
leaning slightly into their weapons, the way I was taught to fire at rabbits
and fowl in the gun-safety classes I took when I was a teenager. They are
enjoying this, the bastards, and they don?t see any problem in firing on
completely nonviolent demonstrators.

Later they will claim we provoked them by throwing rocks, and I did see some of
that, but only AFTER we had been shot at several times. Besides, they have
helmets, armor, and guns. More power to the rock-throwers, I say.

Finally we are out of the port, and at a regular intersection, with West
Oakland neighborhoods behind us. Some people start a picket circle again, and
we block more trucks trying to enter the docks. For the last time today, the
cops shuffle into position, and open up a fresh volley. We scatter through the
traffic and onto the railroad tracks beyond, as baton rounds ricochet off the
vehicles of trapped and astonished motorists. Then we begin the walk back to
the BART station.

When we arrive, there are already media interviewing demonstrators outside the
station, and photographing their wounds and injuries. People are raising their
shirts and displaying rows of bleeding welts the size of compact discs across
their backs. Since wood bullets are fired in clusters of three, most people
have more than one wound. Surely, I think, this story has to come off in our
favor. The police ordered us out of the way under threat of arrest, they said
nothing about getting shot at. There was no provoking violence, and everyone
here will attest to that. They have several hundred witnesses.

Of course, by now we are all nauseatingly accustomed to outright falsehoods
from the media. But even so, it surprises me when my friend Scott phones me
that evening and tells me what the news is saying. He has been at the hospital
(he was hit twice and had two bleeding wounds), and returned home to watch all
four television stations report the same thing: protestors clash with police at
Oakland docks. The police say they were pelted with rocks and bottles and so
they were forced to fire upon the picketers. Scott is livid. I know it sounds
ridiculous to say, he exclaims, but they are straight out lying! all of them!
I read the papers, and catch what television news that I can. Scott is right,
no one, not one media outlet, is giving us any credibility. It does not take a
genius, or a hardboiled investigative reporter, to write this story
truthfully. There are at least four times as many people (cops vs. protestors)
who will say that the police attacked us unprovoked. And yet the police get
more screen time, more weight in the stories, more credibility. Sure, there are
some ?statements? allowed by individual demonstrators, but they are for all
intents and purposes overruled in each instance by the voice of the Oakland
police chief.

Which brings me back to the young man I was talking to early that morning. I am
beginning to sympathize with him, even though he is a stereotypical ?hotheaded
anarchist?. Maybe we should be regarding ALL the media as our enemy.

Rumsfeld, Bush, et al keep using world war two as their metaphor for this war
which is anything but. It is their pathetic and desperate attempt to create
legitimacy behind their insane project. I do, however, agree with the WWII
analogy on one issue: the media is behaving the same as in 1942, in other
words, as a tool of the pentagon. The TV stations and radio channels (including
NPR, who are arguably the worst) might as well be broadcasting ?why we fight?
newsreels. They are acting like ?wartime media?, bound by duty and patriotism
to ?support our boys?, and attack or discredit anyone who doesn?t. For the time
being, we should refer to them not as the ?corporate media?, but as the ?state
media?, because in any case, united states capital seems to have refocused
itself through the state, after the private sector took a hammering in the
current profit crisis. Such is the flexibility of capitalism.

My mother always said that a righteous person could admit when they were
wrong. I was wrong, and the young hothead was right. While I don?t agree with
slashing their tires, I do think that all the media, every station and every
frequency, should be treated with the scorn and derision that they deserve,
until they prove otherwise.