"RNC Not Welcome"

The Good Riddance

The Good Riddance [TGR] recently met with one of the founders of RNC [Republican National Convention] Not Welcome to talk about organizing against the upcoming Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to occur in New York City, close to the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. We started off by talking about the Demilitarize the Police rally that occurred at One Police Plaza a few days earlier. The rally focused partially on the use of "less-than-lethal weapons," such as rubber bullets and tear gas to control demonstrators.

RNCNW: I wouldn't be satisfied if, for instance, the cops decided that they weren't going to use less-than-lethal weapons, because in New York, they rely more on systems of control than they do on brute force.TGR: Like the pens [set up by police to physically contain demonstrators].

RNCNW: Pens, permits, carrot and stick crap. People are just so compliant with everything they say that you end up with, like February 15, fifty blocks of totally controlled protesters. And the only times when they over-stepped their boundaries, they got out of control, that's when people started freaking out. But most of the people that freaked out weren't activists. They were people who came out, and were like "This is fucked up. I'm trying to go over here, I'm trying to go over there, and I can't even get out of this place." And they started jumping barricades, or pulling on barricades, or pulling on cops. For me, you know, it's more about control than it is about brute force.

In Miami, at the FTAA rallies, they have this proactive kind of policing where it's just offensive policing, and it's John Timony, the former police chief of Philly, just having a very offensive strategy. But they don't really do that here. It's not that they can't do that here. People look at that [Miami], and they're like, "Oh my God, they're going to do this here." But I'm more concerned about groups that are too passive, and just go along with the permit process, which allows them to be totally controlled. People have such a lack of defiance toward authority that they just go along with it, and then we end up in a pen and we can't even use the bathroom. You're standing there with a sign, and when you go home you feel like "what the hell did I just do?" We're just going to go home feeling like we did our part and things are going to stay just like they were.

TGR: Well, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how this project came about and how the web site got started.

RNCNW: Well the flagship of the project, I suppose would be the web site, which I can talk a little bit about. It was the winter of last year and a few friends of mine and I were doing a lot of organizing around the war that at that time seem pretty imminent. You know, it didn't happen until March, but at that time we were organizing in affinity groups and planning actions and stuff. And perusing the newspaper, we saw that Bloomberg had invited the RNC to town and it became official almost immediately. There was no real input from the people who live here about whether or not that was appropriate. It was pretty much a business decision. Bringing the RNC here, you know, the local business elite obviously loves this, and I'm not talking about the people who sell pretzels in midtown, I'm talking about the people who are making up the finance committee of the RNC and pledging all of their money to this conference. And there was no public participation in this whatsoever, and it seemed really funny, because although our project is non-partisan -- we're not involved in electoral politics -- it's really arrogant, and I think it was considered an affront, you know, that the RNC would come here. This city is such a Democrat-run city, which is another problem, but the fact that they would come here and make a push in New York City just seemed really offensive. So we were really shocked by that, we were really offended. I'm from New York, and I know I lot of people here who aren't necessarily social progressives, but they feel the crunch of the Bush administration. And New York has been experiencing, with a Republican governer and a Republican mayor -- or whatever he is because he switches -- the city has been impacted by the policies of the Republican leadership in the last eight years, between Pataki and Bloomberg and Giuliani, and now Bush.

We were pissed off, so we thought, why don't we just throw a site up? Just some resources to let people know that not everybody is totally united behind this idea of the RNC coming here, and from our position as New Yorkers being like, this is such a bad choice. So many people have been impacted, when you think about all the people that are being detained right now by the INS. So many of those people are from Atlantic Avenue, they're from Jackson Heights -- these are our neighbors and they're being shipped out, they're being liquidated. It's like World War II with Japanese internment camps, and the people who are pushing this whole war on terror are going to come to our town, and claim somehow that weíre going to benefit from them coming here. That somehow the minimal economic benefits are going to trickle down to the average New Yorker. I just don't buy that. I don't want them coming here. And it's not just that, it's that we're fundamentally opposed to everything they've been doing for the past couple years. It's not just about the fact that they're coming here, because in any town that has the RNC, there's going to be protest. And the Democratic convention also, we support protest against that as well, because it's a party of the rich. It doesn't really matter -- when you look at the differences between those parties, there are pretty few, and they're minor. They're all pro-PATRIOT Act, they all support the bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, they're supporting the war on terrorism and the war on drugs, they do shit for poor people, it just slight ideological differences and with different corporations supporting each party. It's just the same thing.

TGR: Well, to take things on a little bit of a tangent, what are you feelings about Dean? Do you feel like he's a substantial departure from business as usual for the Democrats?

RNCNW: No. I mean, I think he's probably the only one who has a chance of beating Bush, but I feel like he's just more of the same. He's a Clinton-era centrist Democrat. The Republican party has basically won the battle of ideology by moving the center so far to the right that you don't know what the left is anymore. The left isn't even a loyal opposition anymore, they've just adopted the mindset and the policies [of the right]. And I think it's funny that his party doesn't think he's electable. You know, and the fact that all these people are vying for the nomination, as opposed to thinking about who has the best chance proves to me it's all more about self-interest and political careers than it is about even beating Bush. And beating Bush is really a pretty bare political goal. It's a big goal in the sense that it could potentially change things, but it's the pretty bare minimum. Let's say we're trying to get rid of the shitty president, and that's our goal, that's it. But they're not even doing that. They're fighting each other.

TGR: I think that was probably made pretty clear in the last debate.

RNCNW: Yeah, they were at each others' throats. But our project isn't Democrat. We're anarchist and you can pick up on our policies just by reading what we're writing and what we're promoting. We're not out there trying to convert people. They're no anarchist party. We're just trying to let people know that you don't need a big group to do something about the RNC. We're not a big group. We're four people and we started this web site and we put a lot of hard work into it, but you don't have to listen to what the big grassroots groups say. I like United for Peace and Justice, but sometimes it emboldens a sense of, just, it's just another person telling people what to do. At the protest, people come around with the garbage bags and you drop twenty dollars in there and we'll do the work for you. Weíre trying to be like, look, weíre going to put up this site, put up some information, and organize really hard. We're small and it allows us to be more fluid and to make decisions quicker. We kind of have a joke -- we usually write a little slogan at the bottom of the index page. It's always really small and you have to look for it to know it's there, but the one that was up there recently was, "We don't know what you should do to oppose the RNC. That's up to you." You know, we're not the experts, anybody can put stuff up.

TGR: So you're not really going to be endorsing any specific protest groups?

RNCNW: Well it's not that. We're in solidarity, at a general level, with any group opposed to the RNC. But we also have to understand that there are some differences with the way people go about things. There are some hard leftist groups that spend a lot of time trying to sell their newspapers, or they endorse more of a Maoist ideology, that there's a certain select few who know what's best for the masses. I don't really think that we see masses who need to be converted to our political ideology.

But we've been participating in the RNC Clearing House meetings. There's a coalition that meets in Brooklyn that we're kind of involved with, but we're not really officially part of the coalition. We're just trying to provide resources and help out. A lot of us have experience organizing, so we try to do a lot of on-the-ground organizing and training for direct action and legal issues. We're trying to get people trained now so that we're not a month from the RNC with people who are like, "I've never done this before and I'm not part of an affinity group and I've never even broken the law." We obviously want to put our resources for people to take direct action. That can be a pretty amorphous term. It can be anything from laying down in the streets to not paying your taxes for war reasons, or it could be breaking the window of a Starbucks. We're not really endorsing actions per se, but we're definitely trying to promote events that are going on. The worldwide call, I think it's August 30th. That's the day that Bush is going to be giving the speech at Madison Square Garden. So United for Peace and Justice has put out a call for that day, and we're obviously not going to try to do something counter to that. There's also been a call made by School of the Americas Watch for non-violent direct action, there's a Food Not Bombs world gathering that's going to take place.

We're trying to set up -- and this is kind of a joke, but it's also serious -- we're trying to set up an activist underground railroad, encouraging the west coast activists. If we could get like 15,000 people from the west coast to come, who maybe have more experience with mobilization stuff, and go to the Earth First rendezvous on July 1st, and go to the DNC on July 26th, then come to the RNC, so they can spend a bunch of time in each place, getting to know the city rather than just dropping in for a protest.

TGR: Well, one thing I wanted to get clear, I take it there's a connection between RNC Not Welcome and Counter Convention. You guys are involved with that, right? So maybe you just want to talk about that?

RNCNW: Yeah, I'm a collective member of RNC Now Welcome, but Counter Convention is a different thing. They're trying to organize all the different groups involved against the RNC. We're pretty similar but we're focused largely on direct action and they're also doing a lot of the logistics work involved in bringing people here, like housing boards and transportation boards. Our housing and transportations pages are basically just resources for people to find out where to go to find out, like, how much air fare will be. Counter Convention is going to do a lot of the hosting of boards where people can actually post their name and info to tie people up for housing and transportation. But we're definitely working together, though we're talking, in some ways, to different people. Our site definitely has a big activist focus.

And we put a lot of flyers out, we put a lot of labels out on phones and bathrooms, and a lot of people, because we've been up for six months, a lot of people who support our cause are doing a lot of promotion, so we're getting a lot of traffic. So we've gotten e-mails about graffiti about the web site -- we've been accused of that -- and we definitely get some negative mail from people who are like, "how dare you complain about the RNC coming here," and stuff like that. But we're just like, you have your opinion, we have ours. We don't really deal too much with the negative mail. We don't really answer it because it ís too much of an energy-suck.

TGR: And it's hard to imagine that you're going to change somebody's mind.

RNCNW: Yeah, if they're totally Republican.

TGR: Right, and actively enough that they're offended by your site.

RNCNW: Yeah, well we've gotten some feedback, mostly good with some bad. The New York Times published a list of the funders with photos and company affiliations of the people who make up the RNC finance committee. And we put up a page, and we're just like look, these are the people who are brining them to town. This is how much money they're spending on a red carpet. This is how much they're spending for the chairs. It's astonishing. We're having a budget crisis. We're having to close fire stations -- some of the same fire stations that put out the fires at the World Trade Center. These people are being fired, or they're being transferred, or neighborhoods are going without a firehouse, and we're being told that the library can't be open when kids get out of school because there's not enough money. But they have enough money to get the RNC to come to town, which has cost ninety million dollars already, and it's nine months away. I think it's offensive, and I hope to provide the names and contact information for all those people, so that people can write to them or call them, which is still a constitutionally-protected right. Ashcroft hasn't taken that away. The city should be held accountable, and they should know that there are millions of people here who think itís crap.

TGR: If we could talk a bit about the actual preparation for the RNC. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Demilitarize the Police campaign, which is something that, if it's going to be effective, has got to be effective prior to the protests. So, RNC Not Welcome put up a post about their demonstration a couple of days ago. As an organization that's supporting that effort, what would you hope to accomplish in terms of the policies of the NYPD prior to the protest?

RNCNW: Well, I think it's hard to say what kind of impact any of this will have. Obviously, the police are going to follow orders. The question is, will pressure being put on the mayor's office or whoever have any impact on the way the police treat us, and I feel like it may have an impact. But I've been at mobilizations, like at the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 -- that was my first experience with less-than-lethal weapons, and we were shot at with rubber bullets, pellets, tear gas, and pepper spray. Some of it was expired tear gas and there were a lot of stories about people getting really sick. It's really toxic stuff, really horrible. But it's really hard in New York, because you talk to people and say, "Look, they are going to get crazy." If something goes down, if something gets broken, if they lose control, they will bring out that weaponry, and they will use it. But people think it's like chicken little. There hasn't been a major riot or disruptance here, arguably since Crown Heights in 1992 or the Tompkins Square Riot. But the media portrays us as trouble-makers, so the public is going to have to be convinced that the NYPD has the potential to use this weaponry.

Unfortunately, the question that people come up with is, "Well, what are you doing to provoke them?" There's obviously this kind of sad respect for authority that exists in society, that I feel is the result of years and years of brain-washing, and the idea that the law is pure and that the cops are the heros. And that's an attitude that's expressed in liberal, upper-middle-class circles across the board. But a lot of communities of color know what the cops are all about. Just a few weeks ago the cops raided a party in Brooklyn, at a space called Critical Resistance, they're a prison abolition group. The police were just insane. They sent 23 cruisers because they said there was an open container. But the bottom line is that in that neighborhood, with all the craziness that's going on, the police choose to fuck with the community-based organization that's having a party that night. It just coincided with the fact that it was anarchist people of color having a fundraiser. So, I think the point is that you really need to put the cops on the defensive. They've had this get out of jail free card for so long after 9/11, but a few cop shootings later, people start to realize that it's the same bunch of thugs that are going around and doing these no-knock warrants and shooting people in the back. Most times, the victim is Black, and no one cares. It's a person of color, so who cares? They don't say that, but that's the result.

If we can put enough pressure on the mayor, having them not shoot us with pepper spray is a good first step. But I'm really less concerned with them and more concerned with what people are ready for with the RNC, or what are people's goals? There's a lot of things that can happen. But it's not a trade summit, so shutting the RNC down maybe isn't the first goal. I mean, there will hopefully be more than a million people in the streets, and the result of that may be that it gets shut down, but it's really more about the message that's put out there. Is the message, "anyone but Bush," or is the message that this is an empire in formation and that whatever kind is in charge of the empire, that empire is still moving forward?

TGR: So, is one of your goals that the protest movement, the counter-convention, should have a coherent message?

RNCNW: I don't think it has to all be coherent. I think people need to have their own coherent messages, themselves. But I there is going to be a diversity of views. People should find other individuals and groups that are in line with what they think, and they should implement some sort of action plan from there. But these are all things that are still very much in the discussion phase. We're talking about stuff, but there's not plan right now. There's the permit process, there's going to be a poor person's march on the 29th, but the direct action plans are pretty much in formation right now. Obviously, there's no one way of thinking about it. There are a lot of affinity groups that are forming and thinking about what they want to do.

You want to have an impact, you want to get your message out there, and you also want to be coherent in some way, but there are going to be a lot of different messages. There's going to be Democrats for Dean or Kucinich, there's going to be socialists and anarchists, and people who are concerned with more revolutionary goals. There's going to be everyone under the sun out there for some reason. For me, it's more about getting the people who aren't activists out there -- the people who feel less inclined to allow themselves to be put in police pens. There's something to be said for when you're directly offended by an issue. When people are getting fucked by the state, or police, or whoever, they have anger, and I think anger is a very healthy emotion. So I hope that people who are affected are not put off by the media's misrepresentation of the movement as a crazy lifestyle, you know, "those crazy anarchists." But that will happen -- Fox and the Post are definitely going to try to marginalize these protests, and make them look nuts.

TGR: Actually, that's something else I wanted to talk to you about. Our site it obviously geared toward talking about media issues, and there has been some mainstream coverage of RNC Not Welcome. The AP mentioned you, and also the New York Times had a piece about you. So how do you feel the media has been portraying you? Do you feel like there has been a lot of misrepresentation already?

RNCNW: Well, some of them have gone to the site and gotten a sense of who we are, but the story that has been around for the last few moths is just that the RNC is coming to New York and there are people organizing against it, and here are the public faces of that organizing -- RNC Not Welcome and Counter Convention. We've given one or two interviews, but those were for magazines. We never spoke to the AP person, though she did contact us once. We sort of missed the deadline, which is kind of embarrassing. But our media strategy is basically that we review requests on a case-by-case basis. But the corporate media is horribly biased, and no matter what the reporter's sentiment is, the editors of the magazine are going to try and misrepresent you. But the battle of the story happens whether we participate or not. So we're choosing to intervene when it suits us, and when it doesn't suit us, we're not going to talk to hostile reporters.

We are taking media requests from community-based organizations and other people that we're in solidarity with. The New York City AIDS Housing Network, Critical Resistance, or Counter Convention. And there's a bunch of videographers -- I think there are three or four films being made about the RNC and the organizing. I find it to be pretty funny. I think it's kind of horribly self-indulgent in a way. They're concerned about the story of the people involved, but we're not doing this so that people can make movies about the way we do things. It's much more important to me that people understand the points that we're putting out there. It's really all about DIY.

TGR: Do you feel like having films produced might help your goal of getting more people to participate?

RNCNW: I don't know because they might not be put out in time. These are projects that will be put out afterward. I feel like it's more important for RNC to be addressed on sources like Democracy Now, or even that there are moments of intervention in the next year. Already, Bush was in town on June 17th, the RNC was in town during the summer and there was a small protest, just fifty people flyering and kind of disrupting things, and the cops were freaking out. But I think there are moments of intervention, when we can get the fact that they're coming here out there. We have a download page with about fifty flyers, we've been producing flyers and stickers, and we've been getting those images out there. I feel like that has a big impact in getting people to look at the web site, in getting information out there. That's one really important facet, as well as getting involved in alternative media. I think we're going to have an article in In These Times. There's one in Left Turn that's coming out, and there's a British publication that wrote something on us. And there have been some interesting pieces on the BBC that mention our site.

TGR: Do you have a sense of what the response to the site has been, in terms of how many people have viewed it?

RNCNW: We have web stats and on an average day we're getting about 500 unique visitors. On days when it's featured in the Village Voice or in the Times, we've gotten 6,000 visitors, which is pretty promising for our site, considering we're pretty young. And also that it's kind of a raw site. We designed it so that people could view it on really old computers or library computers. You don't need plug-ins or adaptors. It's just simply HTML. We're all self-taught web people.

TGR: In terms of getting the word out, besides having media outlets, independent or corporate, contact you, and having people put up flyers, what other ways do you have, as an organizer, to get people to mobilize on whatever sort of ideas are central to their protest?

RNCNW: Well, that's a hard question. While we're trying to suggest that just joining and organization and having them tell you what to do isn't the best idea, there are a lot of people, especially people who have really busy lives, it's hard for them to organize in affinity groups. But I feel like an "affinity group," is really just a fancy way of saying friendship circle. You can talk to people now and say, "Hey, the RNC is coming and we want to get involved." We met groups during the anti-war protest who had just started. They were just community groups and they planned these actions. They weren't trained activists. And as well, we're trying to pull a lot of people in by doing these direct action and legal trainings. There are people that are going to feel more comfortable contacting an organization, and there's room for people to come to these meetings.

We're also setting up a voicemail, and using it to reach out to people who don't use computers in New York City. I think we get caught up in the idea that a lot of us make our living by doing office work, or temp work in offices. We're looking at computers all day long, and we forget that there are tons of people that aren't. So we're setting up a voicemail that has information about when the meetings are, and helping people to plug in.

TGR: We were talking a little bit about the negative images of the protesters put out by the media, but in terms of something more official, in terms of people who are actually involved directly in making the convention, I notice that if you type www.rncnotwelcome.com rather than www.rncnotwelcome.org you're redirected to the GOP page. What other sorts of counter-protest have you encountered?

RNCNW: What I've seen so far, besides the actual funding of the RNC by the elite class of New York City, somebody reserved rncnotwelcome.com and rncnotwelcome.net, and had them pointed toward the official Republican National Committee page. At first we thought that perhaps it was the actual RNC, but it turns out just to have been some crank. The information they have when they reserved that domain name was all fake, so it was impossible for us to actually contact him. That was kind of a faux pas for us. We should have reserved those names. Besides that, we post on the political section of Craig's List, which is a really great community-based web site that I'm a big fan of. It has a lot of non-commercial aspects, as well as the fact that it doesn't take advertising. We've posted announcements in the political section and we posted a graphic for the Critical Mass bike ride. And somebody else basically posted a call for vigilante action against protesters. We were in contact with Craig, the guy who runs the site, and he just thought that it would really feed the fire if we contacted him. So we just let it die. We didn't suggest that his link be taken down. Craig's suspicion was that it was just a lone crank calling for violence against protesters. It was starting to sound like the anti-war protests in the sixties when construction workers on Wall Street beat the hell out of hippies.

But I don't think that problem exists today. Social justice movements are cognizant of the need for self-defense.

TGR: About the possibility of violence against protesters, you do have the possibility of people who sympathize with the GOP or the RNC acting in some sort of vigilante manner, but really the biggest danger of violence comes from the police. And something that's important to me personally, in terms of the success of an protest movement, is the distinction between individual officers and NYPD policy. Just as we ask the police not to view protesters as the enemy, the protesters understand that individual police officers are not out there by their own choice. So could you talk a little bit about police-protester interaction, in terms of how violence can be kept to a minimum.

RNCNW: Well, I think I disagree pretty strongly with what you said. You're saying that the police are not there by their own choice, but the thing is that when the police become police, they swear to uphold the law in, basically, a semi-militarized organization that maintains complete obedience to authority -- to the police chief, and on another level the mayor. The police chief is basically implementing the will of the government. That's a military philosophy, and that philosophy is what allows atrocities to go on. And I'm talking about real atrocities -- slaughters, massacres -- but I'm also talking about the day-to-day violence, which is the culture of police officers. It's a culture I find to be very racist, very classist, thought there are lots of cops who are considered working class people.

You know, my father was a cop for 25 years in New York City. We lived in Queens in a neighborhood that was very racially diverse, though somewhat racist. The white people were primarily Irish and we were working class. But my father, when he was walking the streets -- he was a transit cop -- he had a pre-determined way he looked at the world. He noticed Black folks, he noticed poor folks, and so I think it's not just a job. Being a cop is a way of life. Cops have a joke that cops never retire. They stop getting paid but they never retire. A certain kind of person becomes a cop, and I'm sure that there are cops out there that love their families, treat their children well, and give to charity.

There are left-leaning and even liberal cops, but the bottom line is that their occupation supports the arming of citizens against each other. It supports the idea that there are morally wrong people and that they need to be punished and it supports a lot of the bullshit behind the idea of crime, ignoring the social and economic factors that cause crime. What is crime? And what are the worst crimes? The way that this society looks at things, if I were to walk out of this cafe with a muffin in my hand, that would be worse than white-collar crime. I would go to jail longer for stealing a muffin than for stealing five million dollars though Enron. I think that cops are the guardians of that.

Some people go to a protest just to fuck with the cops, and I think that's sometimes counter-productive, but they're the guardians of the gate. If you want to get from point A to point B, and they're blocking you, then obviously there's a little bit of a conflict there. But some people come to protests -- and this is what I would call a "radical-liberal" thing to do -- they come to protests to pick a fight. But I'm hesitant to judge that because I feel like, if your sister does something really stupid it may impact the way people perceive you. People will look at you and say, "His sister keeps doing shitty stuff, and he doesn't do anything to stop her." It's similar in that the cops are this semi-military, fraternal organization. They rely on the blue wall of silence. Cops, by becoming cops, are basically saying that they're complicit in what goes on here, in what this organization does, and I tacitly agree.

TGR: Don't you think ñ-- to clarify what I meant -- that there's a class issue at work with people becoming cops? Like you said, you're forced to agree to these power structures when you become a cop, but working-class people who are looking for a job, especially with the economy like it is now, being a police officer pays well and for a lot of society, it's a respectable job. Do you feel like maybe, though this is getting a little off-topic, that an individual officer could do anything other than agree with those power structures?

RNCNW: Oh, I don't doubt that. It's truly unfortunate, and it's a symptom of capitalism that people are forced to do things that they don't want to do. In the same way, I detest working in offices, but because I have this useless college degree and I've learned to use these computers, it's basically all I can do. But I work for non-profits, and I generally agree with what they're doing, so it's not really hurting anybody. I think it's unfortunate that people choose to become cops because it pays well. It's also unfortunate that our tax money goes towards that. I mean, New York is a really safe city. People think of New York as a really dangerous place, but I've been living here for years and even in the seventies the crime rate wasn't that bad. I think the perception is that cops keep crime down, but I think that economic factors have a lot more to do with it. I regard cops as my enemy because of their behavior, their actions, and their culture of complete obedience to the power structure. They screw with people who I am in solidarity with, so they're my enemy.

In terms of tactics, and how to deal with the police, I think defending yourself is a damn good thing. You shouldn't let them just throw you around. But you also have to recognize that you're up against this heavily-armed group of military-types, so I don't think it's a good idea to pick fights with them. Some cops may feel bad about doing things, but unless they're going to break with their orders and refuse to commit atrocities, I won't support them. It's like that saying, "I'll support the troops when they shoot their officers." It's really hard to get behind any of this "bring the troops home," stuff because I know what they're doing over there. Definitely, in the army, there are a lot of people who are recruited, who are lied to about all this money that they're going to get and they don't get it. I think that's really unfortunate, and there should be a support system for those people.

But the bottom line is that people are responsible for their actions no matter how poor or rich they are. We should be held accountable in that way. I think cops that kill people should have demonstrations at their homes. Their neighbors should know. They should be held accountable. These are the same people who are saying that criminals should be held accountable, so why not them?

TGR: How about outside the realm of the protest, in terms of daily interactions with the police. Are you an advocate of the idea that, if possible, the institution of policing should be dissolved?

RNCNW: Well, it's really hard to know how to get from here to there. It's like the concept of prison abolition. If we dissolve the prisons, there'll be millions of people on the streets, and some of those people are institutionalized, meaning that they've been in an institution so long that they think in a prison context. There is no easy transition from point A to point B.

I think that policing should be severely limited. Unfortunately, our culture is so full of this cowboy bullshit -- all these guns. The idea that cops shouldn't be armed would drive the Policemen's Benevolent Association completely nuts because they think the police are just going to get plugged. It's hard to know how to get out of the hole that we're in, as far dismantling this heavily-armed thing. I think it would have to be a really slow change to remove that apparatus, or completely revolutionary change. The apparatus grows very quickly, but it doesn't necessarily dissolve. After Reagan, the arms race is still happening. The number of nuclear weapons actually grew under Clinton. It didn't shrink. We were told that we weren't going to be spending so much money on weapons, so we were going to have all this money for social services, but that was a big lie. We kept spending money on the military, and it got bigger under Clinton. That's when I lost faith.

TGR: Well, the only other thing I wanted to ask you about, was regarding people who are already convinced that they're going to participate in this protest with or without an affinity group. What advise would you have for them in terms of direct action in protest of the RNC.?

RNCNW: It's hard to know what to say. People say you should think of actions that are creative and that illustrate the problems we have with their agenda. I mean, there's a million things that could be done. For instance, drawing the connection between oil, Iraq, and Bush through the use of political theater or the occupation of companies who are profiting off of the war in Iraq. There are a lot of things that can be done, but I think that making your actions self-evident, so that when people hear about it, they know. For instance, I'm assuming to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the shutdown of the WTO, there were nineteen or twenty-three Starbucks in Houston that had their doors glued shut with messages from the president of Starbucks, that were obviously fake, saying that after all these years, they felt the need to close these Starbucks to commemorate the shutdown of Seattle in 1999, and also to say that people are right, that Starbucks really should be changing their attitude toward small farmers. It was sort of a media intervention. It stops somebody in their tracks and makes them think about something that they never thought about before. I think that if people really want to seriously consider disrupting the conference, they should think, "how can we stop the delegates from getting to the party?" We know they're choosing Bush. It's a re-nomination. It's a party. They're spending millions of dollars to celebrate their man and what they conceive of as their imminent election victory.

So if people are serious about it, get hooked into groups. Collective change is where it's at. Individuals can change things, they can do great things, but change is really about collectives and collective action. If you really want to shut it down, that's what you should be involved in. And I think there are millions of ways that that can happen. Really it's about putting New York on the map and saying that we're not into this fucking president, we're not into this agenda, we're not into this empire, and the empire's going to be marching forward no matter what. At a very symbolic level, bad things happened because good people don't do anything. At the very least, people should pull their support out of this and not enable the belief that somehow this convention is good for the city.

Obviously it's a complete nightmare. The city's going to be insane. They're going to try to clean it up with a bunch of federal money, and it's going to be intense. We're going to have the Secret Service here, the FBI, all of that. And they're going to be inconveniencing people as well. It's one of the hottest times of the year, coming into August. They pushed the date of the convention back to coincide with September 11th. They're going to come here, and Bush is going to find some rabid Republicans who lost family on 9/11, and he's going to trot them out there and exploit that to death. And I think that's hideous, just like the war. In my mind, the government is responsible for those people's lives.

But that's about it in terms of advice. I don't have a whole lot of advice. That's the myth, that we have this website so we must have advice, but I actually don't. I want advice because I don't know what the fuck's going to go on. It's unknown, what's going to happen. And it's not just about the RNC, it's about the buildup to the RNC, making sure that our movement grows afterwards and doesn't get destroyed by years and years of legal trouble. Like the last RNC still has people awaiting trial. Their trial is in April and it's been four years. There's this guy Camilo Viveiros who's facing assault charges against John Timony, who was the police chief of Philly and is now the police chief of Miami and consulting for the DNC in Boston.

It's horrendous, and I hope the RNC protesters don't have to deal with these entangling legal difficulties for years because we didn't prepare ourselves, or because the cops go wild.