Here is what happened at a Bay area anti-WTO event. It was very well thought out in the abstract. We decided to hold the event at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, CA, north of Berkeley and Oakland. This is about the poorest area in the region along with perhaps East Palo Alto, part of San Leandro. The community is working class including some european americans, but there are only 4% whites in the school district. The reason why this is the case is that all the oil refineries and chemical plants have had a decades long record of sending out plumes of chemicals every 10 months or so. The most recent was when someone crashed into a power pole and this caused a release of a large volume of sulfur --something from a chemical plant that was so nasty that anyone who breathed it in suffered damage and had to go to the hospital. There is an alarm system in the region to warn people to go into their houses and shut the windows, and the press hardly covers incidents, and definitely doesn't bill them as top story. I was once at a tiny beach park in a neighboring town Rodeo (there are absolutely no other waterfront parks in the area) and I was walking around on what I first thought was rock, but then I noticed it was a big chunk of solidified petroleum matter, laid down a while before, that even had barnacles growing on it.
So everyone walked a long way through the neighborhoods to the refinery, and there were some speeches, and then it was sort of losing its focus because there was no activity that people were doing, and no one was at the Chevron plant because it's Saturday, and there were 3 bored police. Today was basically the first day of the rainy season, so everyone was wet and wearing dark clothes, and it all looked a lot more like Seattle 2 years ago than LA. But then 2 CHP officers tried to arrest some reprobates for scrawling on the concrete of the freeway overpass (behind a bush where no one can see), so within a crowd of 300 everyone isn't going to quietly accept that. We chanted let them go, and about 20 people sat around the police car. The police weren't so fearful about this, and 5 minutes later backup came. Then these new officers started to get really rough and jerk people off the ground who were sitting there. They arrested two more, then I saw a friend of mine, who is really smart, is I think about the only black one drop rule computer science major at UC Berkeley, and who has this big sound system that he towes with his bike that is his pride and joy... I saw him dash away with a flag, with about 5 police officers chasing him. They pulled his hair, one actually drew a gun, and kneeled on his head, and sharply shoved other people. I can't guess what they're charging him with, but I'm worried that they'll say he poked them with the flag and convert that into a horrible charge - there was a person named Camilo at the RNC (the most peaceful person ever) who fell into a similar situation when he started to get pushed over by some police and threw a bicycle back. 7 people got arrested. I still have to figure out some details. Christine
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