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August 2006 Bechtel headquarters action
This week is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan.
Groups across the country are stepping up their anti-war and anti-militarist actions as part of a campaign that includes another of Cindy Sheehan’s “Camp Casey” encampments in Crawford, which will then follow Dubya back to Washington to become “Camp Democracy”, and which will then culminate in the Declaration of Peace campaign and civil disobedience actions toward .
I went to a “spokescouncil” where representatives of San Francisco groups were planning an action focused on the war contractor Bechtel, which is headquartered in the city.
The meeting, of about 25 people from about as many local activist groups, was uncharacteristically efficient and on-topic.
There was an agenda, which was followed, and the meeting finished early, with everyone knowing what the next step was and who would be responsible.
Nobody sabotaged things by rambling about the imminent arrival of the benevolent Andromedians, or by complaining about their favorite minority being underrepresented and demanding mea culpas all around.
Keiji Tsuchiya spoke for several minutes, through an interpreter.
Mr. Tsuchiya was a 17-year-old draftee training at a base across the bay from Hiroshima .
He saw the “boiling cloud” rise from the city and was among the first responders who went over to try to help.
As he spoke, he held up child-like drawings that he had made a few years ago from his memories of the aftermath of the bombing.
Here are people with skin hanging from them like sheets walking like ghosts through the city as we clear paths through the debris.
Here is the corpse of a horse that smelled so bad we stopped everything else to dig a hole and bury it, towels around our mouths to block the stench.
Here is a woman, so badly burned we did not know how she could scream, trapped under the wreckage of a house.
Everywhere people yelling, “Soldier, give me water!”
Two charred corpses along the road, probably elementary school students from what was left of their clothes.
Everywhere, messages written on stones and walls and fragments of buildings from people who were trying to find their loved ones.
The soldiers, who had been given horse meat earlier in the day to supplement their usual rice and soybean meals, pulling corpses from the river (men floating face-down, women face-up) and cremating them on makeshift pyres on-shore.
Here’s the river, and those are the corpses, and here are our fires.
“One, two, lift!”
we would dump the body from a stretcher onto the fire.
On the last day before returning to base, Tsuchiya found a completely-charred body but with a relatively-untouched lunchbox at its feet full of the same food the soldiers usually ate — soybeans and rice (though lately it had been hard tack and water).
He cried out in anguish, desperation and anger at a God that would allow such cruelty.
Later he learned more about the horrible injuries people had suffered and about the after-effects of the radiation.
He himself has had many health problems connected with the radioactive black rain that fell on the city while he worked there.
Now Keiji Tsuchiya is the Vice-President of a chapter of Hidankyo, an organization of atomic bombing survivors that works for global nuclear disarmament.
He will be speaking at the Bechtel action as well.
After he spoke, the group began to discuss the possibility of a civil disobedience action at the Bechtel protest.
Questions like “do we want to do an action where people risk arrest?” and “who here is planning to risk arrest?”
The discussion went on in this vein for a while, with getting arrested seeming to be an end in itself, with no discussion at all of what specific action would be leading to the arrest or what noble goal the people being arrested were going to be thereby thwarted from accomplishing.
I’ve seen this before, this weird reverence for getting arrested doing civil disobedience as if it were itself a magically powerful thing.
I’m not sure I fully understand the psychology behind it.
I asked the group at that point — the only occasion on which I spoke up, actually — “what is the goal of the civil disobedience action — to get arrested, or to inconvenience Bechtel, or to get press coverage, or what?”
The consensus seemed to be that inconveniencing Bechtel — or “shutting down” Bechtel if you allow for hyperbole — was the goal.
And then it got interesting.
Two women at the meeting spoke up, saying that they had tried, on their own, to deliver a message to Bechtel’s C.E.O. one day.
Bechtel’s security, realizing that some sort of protest action was in the offing, started their standard procedure for such things — which was to shut down the building and let nobody in or out (even employees).
Two people, not intending to be arrested, managed to shut down the Bechtel home office for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak with the boss.
A civil disobedience action, with a dozen protesters sitting down and locking arms at a police cordon around Bechtel until they are arrested and hauled away, might be just as effective at meeting the same goal.
Nonetheless, people remained enthused about doing the standard civil disobedience action (about two-thirds of those in attendance planned to participate), and the rest of the meeting was spent seeking volunteers for various roles that are useful in such an action — police liaison, convener, communicator, legal/jail monitor, follow-up coordinator.
In general, a very encouraging meeting.
People got down to business with appropriate seriousness and efficiency, and what needed to get done got done.
My usual complaint about “cargo cult” civil disobedience applies, but perhaps I’m missing something.
Today was the protest at Bechtel headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
I reported about the planning meeting for those people who were organizing civil disobedience at the event, and I’ll give a report of how things went.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day in downtown San Francisco.
The main body of the protest had a few hundred people, demographically white tending to grey (the Grey Panthers and Raging Grannies were perhaps the largest organized contingents).
They gathered in “S.D. Bechtel Plaza,” a semi-public courtyard nestled between skyscraper office buildings.
Speakers recited a litany of complaints about Bechtel, which from the sounds of it seems to have been there collecting and handing out checks at just about all of the great government misdeeds of the last century or so.
There were musicians.
Keiji Tsuchiya spoke about his experience as a Hiroshima survivor.
People sang and chanted.
Someone wrote slogans on the ground in chalk, and a Mercedes logo in place of a peace sign.
People waved United Nations flags and signs with slogans like “Support Indigenous Rights” and “Mad Cowboy Disease.”
There was a big papier-mâché Gandhi holding a sign that read “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
The front and back entrances to 50 Beale Street, where Bechtel’s headquarters is located, were blocked off by short metal fences which were guarded by security guards and San Francisco police, who were letting people in if they had appropriate pass cards.
There are additional entrances to the building, or so I was told, from a parking garage beneath the building and from 45 Fremont Street, which shares the same block.
Late into the morning, a group of about 25–30 of the protesters met off to the side to plan their civil disobedience action, with a few police officers milling about and sometimes eavesdropping.
Some of what the participants did in this meeting was the countdown-to-launch checklist: does everyone have a buddy and an affinity group? has everyone checked in with one of the legal observers? is everyone okay with the nonviolent action guidelines?
But some topics seemed to me to be things that should have been settled well ahead of time.
The group paused to consider whether or not they should have demands.
Most thought they should, and the one dissenter was willing to go along with it.
They settled on a demand to speak to the C.E.O. of Bechtel.
But as far as I could tell, they never reached consensus on what they would speak to him about if their demand were met, and they made no attempt to, say, call up and make an appointment with him or send him a letter (or even determine if he was in the building).
The demand seemed to have been chosen as an afterthought, and with the expectation that it would not be met.
It would have been hard for the participants to give this aspect of their action the attention it deserved.
Traffic noise made discussion difficult, and it really was a last-minute sort of meeting.
But this impresses on me the importance of planning and deliberation in such civil disobedience actions.
If you’re going to make a demand, it should be one that could conceivably be met, you should have a plan for what happens if it is met, and you should ask politely for the demand to be met before just launching into civil disobedience.
If instead you’re just using civil disobedience as a weapon of disruption, go ahead, but then don’t feel like you have to confuse matters by coming up with a token demand.
Last-minute demands aside (and I don’t know if the protesters ever actually presented their demand to anyone), the real purpose of the civil disobedience action was “to shut down Bechtel” — which is to say, more honestly, to temporarily inconvenience the people working at its corporate headquarters.
Of course there are always a number of unstated goals of civil disobedience actions like this one as well — to radicalize participants and onlookers, to impress people with the depth of the protesters’ commitment, to feel like you’re doing something important and risky that is a threat to The System, to give the media something to use as a hook for their coverage as a way of encouraging them to cover the protest, etc.
To these various ends, the participants split up into a handful of groups — the largest blockading the barriers around the front doors of the building, a smaller group trying to secure half of the back-door barriers, and another small group blockading the entrance to the parking garage.
The main body of the protest began to circle the block, following a contingent of drummers and shouting chants like “Bechtel!
Bechtel!
Hey Hey!
How many kids did you kill today?” and “Bechtel: War Profiteer — shut it down!”
One man handed me a flier from the 9-11 Truth Alliance advertising a lecture about The Report from Iron Mountain.
I’m a connoisseur of hoaxes, and I’ve seen this clever old modest proposal trotted out by conspiracy theorists in the right-wing patriot movement and by Islamic revolutionaries.
This is the first time I’ve seen it at a leftie rally, although the hoax originated on the peacenik left.
What goes around comes around, I suppose.
The blockading began around , but the police seemed to be in no hurry to make arrests, and in fact the blockade was fairly porous.
At times, employees simply pushed through the passively-resisting blockaders at the front of the building, or just jumped over the barricades.
And the number of protesters blocking the back entrance was never really sufficient to actually prevent people from coming and going, so they were reduced to lying down on the paths and making employees step over them.
Many employees adopted strangely sheep-like behavior, though.
They’d see one entrance blocked and then just give up and start standing around and complaining, or getting on their cell phones to explain to someone or other.
I walked back and forth between the various entrances and at all times (except for about 15–20 minutes which I’ll get to later) there were employees coming and going — and for the most part, you could see this from either side of the building through its mostly transparent ground floor.
I suspect many of the employees were just using the excuse to extend their lunch hours.
Some people were angry about being blocked.
One man in particular, a short, overweight, balding fellow in a tight, harshly-colored striped polo shirt, was a heart attack waiting for a good time to happen.
He shoved through the barriers and the protesters trying to blockade them, yelling all the while, then tore at protest signs as he stomped down the street, only to stop and yell at the security guards and police for allowing this insult to his day to take place.
Another woman complained that she didn’t even work for Bechtel, but for some UCSF project trying to find a way to alleviate osteoporosis.
And in fact 50 Beale Street is home to not just Bechtel’s headquarters, but also other tenants, some quite benign, like the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.
The protesting crowd wasn’t very sympathetic to her complaints, and while she was pleading the case of the osteoporosis sufferers, she was shouted down angrily by someone who accused her, without any evidence, of being complicit in Bechtel’s worst crimes.
Most of the police were just milling about, calmly, occasionally speaking into the radios clipped to their chests, but one cop at the back door is playing off the big, loud, no-nonsense, black woman stereotype for effect.
“This is not your day!”
she shouts, and tells the blockaders to move this way or that.
“I’m in a bad mood today; you do not want to be on my bad side.”
The police at the back door are for the most part very successful at keeping a path open for people to enter and leave the building.
However, their focus necessarily shifts back and forth between two goals: Keeping the paths open so employees can come-and-go, and keeping the paths restricted so that only employees can get in.
Eventually they slip up.
They manage to corral the blockaders enough to open up a path, but it’s too much path for the people who are checking identification, and someone else slips through.
It’s Lacy MacAuley.
She’s the one whom I mentioned as having said that two people shut down Bechtel for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak to the boss (I may have misheard her; she’s reported elsewhere that it was more like eight people).
Now she’s in the lobby, and the cops notice their screw-up, and 50 Beale Street really shuts down.
Standard procedure, apparently.
Until the protester can be hog-tied and hauled off, nobody goes in or out.
What the blockaders were initially unable to successfully accomplish, the building’s own security does.
As far as I can tell, she is an espontánea — she saw an opening and took the initiative, without this being an agreed-upon part of the civil disobedience action, although she was one of the original participants.
It is bold and successful in a way that the regular blockade is not.
For 15–20 minutes the doors are locked, while the police call in reinforcements to haul off MacAuley, who has gone limp by the elevators.
As she is loaded into the police van, a bullhorn from the crowd leads a call-and-response chant of “Tell me what a police state looks like” — “This is what a police state looks like!”
We should be so lucky as to get a police state that looks this way.
By or so, as the protest is winding down, Lacy has been the only arrest.
Correction: there were six other arrests earlier in the day of blockaders of the front doors of the 45 Fremont building that I didn’t witness or know about.
In the aftermath, my impression is that the civil disobedience part of the action was not very successful in its major and more important goals.
It was largely unsuccessful in making more than a token inconvenience to the working day at Bechtel, certainly in proportion to the number of protesters and prepared disobedients involved.
And it did so at the cost of collateral damage to non-Bechtel employees in the area, some of whom were not just inconvenienced but were treated with inappropriate disrespect.
As Lacy MacAuley showed, the 50 Beale Street standard procedure for dealing with lone protesters inside is far more effective in blockading the building than is the efforts of dozens of blockaders outside.
People who want to blockade the building would be better off just showing up in the lobby some day and pulling a banner out of their briefcase than they would be by coordinating their actions with a big protest and linking arms outside.
A handful of people, entering the building on the pretense of having business at the UCSF or Blue Shield offices, and then entering the lobby one after the other as each one in turn gets arrested or thrown out, would shut down the building far more effectively than was done .
I posted my review of the civil disobedience action at Bechtel to San Francisco’s Indymedia site.
The response to my admittedly gruff but sincere criticism has been to accuse me of being a “racist” who sounds “like some kind of pig, infiltraitor, disrupter”, who is “part of the problem” and whose criticism “hurts our movement.”
In addition, I have been informed that the people who took part in the action consider it to have been a grand success (where success is presumably being defined as something other than meeting the stated objectives).
Apparently, my contribution to Indymedia was at the top of the results of Google News searches for things like “Bechtel Protest”.
It’s not too surprising that there weren’t any other news accounts of the protest to compete with it, but my article wasn’t really meant as a news report on the protest as a whole so much as an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness and technique of the civil disobedience action in particular, so that we can learn from our experiences.
In any case, the fact that my report became by default the report about the protest, at least at first, combined with the fact that it was sharply critical of aspects of the civil disobedience action (and assessed it a failure), brought down a bit of a firestorm.
That, and the fact that I completely missed the arrests of six other blockaders in front of the 45 Fremont building, which called the accuracy of my account into question.
And, I shouldn’t kid myself: I was being curmudgeonly and impatient with the many flaws I’ve seen in protests like this one, and I expressed this in the way I wrote about it.
But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: you try to stop a war with the peace movement you have, not the peace movement you wish you had.
My criticism was meant constructively.
The anti-militarist movement is getting its ass kicked over and over again by swaggering hawks and war profiteers, and part of the reason is that it keeps making the same mistakes and doing the same ineffective actions over and over again.
We desperately need to honestly and critically evaluate our actions to improve their effectiveness — giving up on actions that have become habitual but that do no good, and putting more energy into improving actions that actually disrupt the war machine.
There’s a place for congratulatory press-releases and rah-rah encouragement, but there’s also a real need to go beyond that and be honest with ourselves about our actual impact.
This is not the special olympics.
We’ve got no time to hand out medals for participating or to announce that today everyone’s a winner.
If we turn against people who won’t just applaud and congratulate every action, calling them infiltrators or accusing them of working for the opposition, we will fail to learn from our mistakes, we will continue to hit our heads against the wall while the militarists continue to make their wars with impunity, and we will drive away from the movement the very people who could help make it more effective.
The real infiltrators will be the ones cheering the loudest when the movement does ineffective or self-destructive things.
