Activism: The next generation

Mainers of all ages come together in protest

By Lance Tapley

GENERATION GAP: the old guard and the new guard discuss strategy.

It was Thursday night. Across the street Brian Boru’s pub was already jumping in anticipation of the weekend. Here, however, a dozen “anti-globalization”activists at Portland’s Peace and Justice Center discussed Fast Track federal legislation, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and how to lobby Tom Allen, their congressman. This was a meeting of the Maine Global Action Network (MEGAN). The state’s anticorporate protesters were turning to grass-roots organizing.

The meeting’s beginning had not been auspicious. As people straggled in, they complained that the building door downstairs had been locked.

Matt Schlobohm, 23, a MEGAN (pronounced “me-gan”) organizer, was into global strategy. “If we can stop Fast Track, we can have an effect on the WTO [World Trade Organization] meeting in Qatar in September,” he said.

“But why are we meeting tomorrow night in Bath, too?” Selma Sternlieb, 65, a long-time left-wing activist from Brunswick, wanted to know.

“The idea tonight is to get a Portland group going,” Schlobohm responded. A recent Bates College graduate, he is a veteran of the Quebec City protests and a recent walk across the northern forest from New York’s Adirondacks mountains to northern Maine.

But the Portland group seemed to bog down before it got going. There was a lot of discussion, not many decisions. Unlike Brian Boru, this joint was not jumping.

Then the legendary Will Neils, arrived, an hour and a half late

Immediately — this is the God’s truth — two young college women present started taking off their clothes, stripping down to camisoles and bare bellies. Pudgy but devilishly handsome with black goatee, mustache, and ponytail, Neils, 24, who affects hip-hop attire, is famous in these circles for his participation in the Seattle, Boston, D.C., Philadelphia, and Quebec City protests; for his several headline-making arrests; for his leadership of Maine’s Green Party at age 20; and — according to the rumors — for Black Bloc street-fighting in Quebec. He is Maine’s most notorious radical. Like other celebrities, Will had his own driver, Daniel Johnstone, 22, tall, skinny, and in the granny-glasses-thoughtful mold of John Lennon.

In other words, the atmosphere got sexier. And the conversation picked up.

“There’s no democracy. There’s capitalism. You can’t have both,” declared Chelsea Sharon, an impossibly articulate 17-year-old senior at Portland’s private Waynflete School.

His dark eyes flashing, Neils talked of going to an Earth First! meeting this summer in the West. “A meeting with no info packets,” he remarked.

Let’s face it: The impact of Will’s arrival demonstrated that street fighters and protests are a lot sexier than lobbying campaigns on trade legislation. Of course, part of the sluggishness of the meeting might have been because the participants were divided between people who were on average about 20 years old and those who were on average 70. There was nobody between 25 and 60. Where were all the thirty- and forty-somethings? They seemed to be across the street partying loudly at Brian Boru.

From protesting to leafleting

Global corporate-power enforcer or guarantor of the right to protest? Several thousand people cheered when, “in the name of the United States,” Senator Olympia Snowe broke a bottle of champagne across the bow of the USS Mason at the Bath Iron Works on Saturday, June 23, and the $1 billion, 510-foot, Tomahawk-cruise-missile-firing destroyer slid onto the high tide of the Kennebec River. They had all laughed a moment earlier when she literally missed the boat with her first swing. The cheers came not just from the Maine congressional delegation, the General Dynamics executives — representing the giant corporation that owns BIW — with their chauffeurs nearby, and the white-suited Navy brass. They came not just from the hundreds of invited guests in pretty summer dresses and neat lightweight suits. They came especially from the multitudes of T-shirted, working-class Maine folks — shipbuilders, their families, and people from all over who had come for the festive spirit, the free food, and to see the last BIW ship to slide down inclined ways. In Bath, technology has ended a tradition of over 100 years at the yard and of thousands of years in world history. Henceforth, ships will be floated into the river from a dry dock. Across the street from the gate that the working people had used (the VIPS had their own gate), roughly 50 protesters held up signs such as one reading “General Dynamics Profits from War.” A few protesters called themselves the Raging Grannies. Older women, they dressed in weird costumes and sang songs. The leaflet they passed out stated that “a humorous approach can help people . . . to see that violence is not a useful approach to solving problems.” Other protesters had a more serious approach. Scott Miller, 33, of Portland, Wells Staley, 53, of Old Orchard beach, and Sally Breem, 65, of Windham, were arrested for criminal trespass when, in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience orchestrated with the police, they attempted to enter the gate with a banner. Their ritual sacrifice testified to the depth of their commitment to try to turn away the people inside and people everywhere from celebrating anything to do with the enormous violence that the USS Mason is capable of. Their act got a paragraph in the Associated Press story that ran in the next day’s papers. It didn’t make the TV coverage. Miller, head of Maine Peace Now, recently wrote an article for his group’s newsletter quoting a military planning document, “Vision for 2020,” that proclaims the armed forces need to dominate “the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment.” The document notes that “the globalization of the world economy will continue with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ ü and that military forces have always protected commercial interests. (The document can be Internet-accessed at www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace/visbook.pdf.) Maine Global Action Network member Victor Skorapa, who grimly held up a sign in Bath, expressed the peace community’s latest analysis of the US military: “The ship that they’re launching is going to be enforcing the Free Trade Area of the Americas” (see “Activism: the next generation,” page one). But irony of ironies: Inside the yard, the rhetoric was such that you’d have thought you were at a liberal rally — maybe a joint meeting of the Portland NAACP and the Maine Civil Liberties Union. The Mason was named after a World War II destroyer manned by an all-black crew — except for the white officers. Senator Snowe decried that the sailors on the earlier Mason “couldn’t even drink from the same water fountain” as their white counterparts when they returned from the war. The main speaker, Rear Admiral David L. Brewer III, who is African American, spoke eloquently against “the rocks of racism and the shoals of sexism” in our society. And he maintained “it is the soldier and not the press that gives us the right to the press. It is the soldier and not the campus organizer that gives us the right to protest.” So which is it? Is this billion-dollar destroyer a global corporate power enforcer or a guarantor of the right to protest? Could it be both? —LT

The international protests of the past year and a half against global corporate power have arrested the attention of the world. The hundreds of people who mooned President George W. Bush several weeks ago at the European Union meeting in Goteborg, Sweden — now there’s a sexy protest — got as much attention as all of Bush’s pronouncements at it. The Quebec City Summit of the Americas demonstrations in April, when thousands of marching, chanting protesters were pushed back with tear gas and water cannons by riot police, brought the new Movement close to Maine in big headlines and dramatic TV news clips. The protests disrupted and eclipsed the summit.

Several hundred Maine activists traveled to Quebec to participate. They had been carried there by their concerns that corporate elites were using the cause of free trade — often called “globalization” — as a Trojan horse to plunder the world’s resources, pollute the environment, privatize public services, prioritize corporate rights over labor and human rights, and make governments their abject handmaidens. However one might feel about the validity of these concerns, there is no doubt that the protests, beginning with Seattle in late 1999, have gotten the world debating them.

Now some of these Quebec activists — a few dozen of the most committed — have undertaken the much more prosaic, unsexy activity of bringing the free trade-corporate power-global politics battle back home.

Financed in May by a couple of tiny grants from Resist, a progressive national funder, and the liberal, Washington-D.C.-based lobby Public Citizen, MEGAN has hired Schlobohm and Ethan Miller, also 23 and a recent Bates grad. They each are being paid $500 a month to raise Maine’s public consciousness on corporate and trade issues.

“What’s happening in Maine is happening all over the country,” said Mike Prokosch, 52, of Boston’s United for a Fair Economy, the group that routed the Public Citizen money to MEGAN. “We’re deliberately changing tactics. We can’t have just the stereotyped masked and pierced protesters.”

Prokosch hired Schlobohm and Miller because “beyond the usual suspects, these are two people with the vision, drive, and the smarts to drive this vision home.”

By “the usual suspects” was he perhaps referring to such a masked and pierced protester as Will Neils? Yes, he was, he acknowledged. But Schlobohm and Miller “protest, too. They go to Quebec and put themselves at the barricades. Then they come back and do ‘the work of ants,’ ” he said, translating a Spanish phrase, trabajo de hormigas.

Specifically, their work is to organize a lobbying campaign to get US Representative Allen, the First District Democrat, to vote against legislation in Congress, HR 2149, informally dubbed “Fast Track.” This is a Republican-pushed bill (the GOP calls it “trade promotion authority”) that would require Congress to consider future trade legislation in only 20 hours of debate with an up-or-down, yes-or-no vote, no amendments permitted, within 60 days of its introduction. The Fast Track bill, according to the National Journal, has pleasantly surprised some Republicans by the number of Democrats it has attracted. Thus they want to move on it swiftly.

Fast Track could come up in the House of Representatives as early as several weeks from now or as late as the fall. The theory is that if Fast Track can be defeated, as it was in 1997 and 1998, Bush’s expected push to get the Free Trade Area of the Americas treaty approved by Congress will be nearly impossible. A major trade bill is so contentious and Congress so politically divided, many commentators believe, that Fast Track is essential for it to pass.

The FTAA trade agreement, still being negotiated secretly, was the subject of the Quebec summit and its protests. It would expand the 1995 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — which created a liberalized trading zone incorporating Canada, the US, and Mexico — to cover the 34 countries and 800 million people of the entire western hemisphere except communist Cuba. It is “NAFTA on steroids,” its critics say.

MEGAN’s argument is that NAFTA has been disastrous for Maine because of the steady loss of manufacturing and logging jobs and that FTAA would only make this situation worse. It “would continue the race to the bottom in which multi-national corporations roam the planet looking for the lowest wages and weakest labor, environmental, and public health regulations,” the group’s basic flier states. “Maine workers and businesses cannot compete against sweatshop conditions overseas.”

MEGAN has other objections to FTAA: for example, the pushing of American culture onto other countries by the giant corporations and the overpowering of governmental sovereignty by corporate-controlled, secret, unelected international trade tribunals. The corporations and their political allies respond that the free-trade movement, including FTAA, NAFTA, and the WTO — the target of the Seattle protests — will distribute American-style economic prosperity to large regions of the world.

This is dense, complex stuff, unlikely to be on the plate at dinner-table conversations in Gorham and Sanford. But Schlobohm and Miller have been traveling Maine conducting teach-ins with small groups, most recently in Blue Hill, where 25 people turned up, and close to 20 showed up at a meeting in nearby Harborside. These are Second Congressional District communities, but the two have given most attention to the southern part of the state, the First District, because John Baldacci, the Second District Democratic congressman, “is 100 percent against Fast Track,” Schlobohm asserted at the Portland meeting. (Baldacci’s office confirmed this.)

Schlobohm has talked with Allen’s trade expert, but not yet with Allen, who “supports Fast Track in principle,” he said. Allen says he wants environmental and labor protections in the legislation, Schlobohm admitted, but these pronouncements seemed wishy-washy to him.

“It really bothers me that Tom Allen needs to be convinced,” commented Victor Skorapa, 77, a retired doctor from Brunswick, at the Portland meeting. “At Oxford he must have been in the section of Rhodes Scholars for Slow Learners.”

By the end of Thursday’s discussions, the group decided to go ahead with previously made plans to leaflet Portland- and Biddeford-area businesses and homes the next day in a general education about Fast Track, FTAA, and corporate power. It was going to be “Visibility Day.” There had been mention on the meeting’s e-mailed agenda of a noontime “quasi-rally,” including street theater in Tommy’s Park on Exchange Street, but the prospects for that, based on the number of people at the meeting and the lack of planning for it, dimmed.

By Schlobohm’s report, Saturday’s activities, conducted by around ten young people, were successful, although no rally took place. With long sideburns and tousled hair, Schlobohm is a relaxed, articulate, relentlessly cheerful fellow, though the rising intonation in his speech makes each sentence sound like a question.

He said 200 vehicles were fliered at Sebago Inc., a shoe shop in Westbrook, and American Tool, a tool-and-die operation in Gorham. Plus, 400 fliers were given out on the street in Portland. Three more Portland small businesses were corralled into signing a letter against Fast Track — Amadeus Music, Silly’s restaurant, and Boxer Shoe.

The businesses were “overwhelmingly receptive,” said Ela Twigg, 23, who has just graduated from the University of Maine. Schlobohm has a list of about 70 organizations and businesses that oppose Fast Track. The organizations tend to be the predictable progressive ones, like the Maine Green Independent Party, the Maine People’s Alliance, Peace Action Maine, and Let Cuba Live! The Maine AFL-CIO and several other union organizations are represented. There are only 13 businesses so far, all of them tiny.

In contrast to Schlobohm’s optimistic report, Phoenix photographer Liz Bernstein, who followed Will Neils and another activist around in Portland, said that when they tried to leaflet residences, no one was home. Then, on the street, they had “three short blow-offs and two good conversations.” Nobody had heard of NAFTA, let alone Fast Track or FTAA, she said. So two good conversations were the sole result of one and a half hour’s labor times two activists.

Bernstein reported, however, that Neils seemed charged up by his two conversations, which he later confirmed: “I had great interactions on the street.” And Twigg said of her reception: “Today got me geared up.”

There is no question this movement runs on youthful enthusiasm. Perhaps instead of fliering cars in parking lots, as if they were advertising a new pizza joint, the group would have had a more visible Visibility Day if they had conducted a small, solid demonstration in Tommy’s Park with enough yelling and chanting to attract the TV news. And, hmmm, corporate Starbucks is right across the street . . . Groups like Peace Action Maine (see “Protector. . . ”, page 11) seem to believe this works.

That evening, many of the Portland group gathered at a statewide MEGAN meeting in a Bath church after a vegetarian potluck supper. It drew 20 people. The age gap continued to be visible, although now present were several 1960s’ (and Quebec City) protest veterans in their fifties. There was a lengthy discussion of buying an ad in a newspaper to increase public pressure on Allen. Speaker possibilities were discussed for the WERU Full Circle Fair in Union in July and the Common Ground Fair in Unity in September. Going to these progressive-cause-oriented events could be considered preaching to the choir, but Selma Sternlieb made a pitch for someone to speak to the Brunswick Rotary Club.

As in Portland, there was a lot of discussion but few decisions. The older people seemed a little frustrated at the disorder and lack of hierarchy favored by the young people. MEGAN has no officers, for example. This meeting, like the Portland one, was decidedly non-sexy. It wasn’t at all that the older people slowed down the meeting, as perhaps one might expect. In fact, if there were more order it might have speeded it up. The problem seemed to be that efficient meetings were not the younger people’s element. The protesters had come a long way from Quebec City, but where were they?

WILL NEILS: spreading the anti-corporate message door to door.

Just “pissing in the wind”

“This is just pissing in the wind,” said Craig Brown of MEGAN’s leafleting strategy and meager budget. Brown, 48, is one of the most experienced progressive organizers in the state. In 1999, he ran the successful medical marijuana initiative referendum campaign. Years ago, he was one of the founders of the anti-nuclear-power Clamshell Alliance. At present, he operates commondreams.org, a progressive-news web site that gets 125,000 hits daily. In critiquing the anti-globalization lobbying of MEGAN, Brown drew on his experience as chief of staff for former First District US Rep. Tom Andrews, who was possibly the most left-wing Democrat in Congress.

In the four years his boss was in Washington (before being defeated by Republican Olympia Snowe in 1994 for the U.S. Senate), “there was no other issue we were lobbied on so heavily as NAFTA,” Brown recalled. In that epic political battle he saw the pressure that corporate America could exert: “Even labor was small potatoes compared to the corporate lobbying campaign. It’s so much more sophisticated than it used to be. They have Astroturf — fake grass roots.”

For the Fast Track and FTAA fights, Brown predicted, “they’ll have phone banks and call every small business owner in the state and then directly connect them to the congressman’s switchboard.” There is no way a small, poorly funded citizen’s group can compete with such tactics by leafleting, he said, especially when the citizenry is not paying attention to this “complex issue.” He took note that corporate America recently announced the creation of USTrade, a lobbying group that will specifically push Fast Track.

Rather than wasting limited resources by randomly throwing out leaflets, Brown suggested, MEGAN should use targeting strategies — “organizing their base,” for example, by getting labor unions and environmental organizations more involved — and use “creative free media campaigns” — that is, calling attention to the issue through publicity.

Brown also saw a more fundamental problem with the vocabulary MEGAN and similar groups use to describe the issue. “ ‘Anti-globalization’ is not what the movement against corporate dominance should call itself,” he said.

This complaint is echoed by many others, such as Dave Kubiak of Kennebunkport. He is organizing an anti-corporate, “pro-democracy” festival to accompany the alternatives-oriented, annual Common Ground Country Fair. In an email message to “Fellow Corporate Coup Quellers,” Kubiak observed that “ ‘globalization’ has become a nearly useless term at best and a self-destructive one at worst. Many students and citizens still equate it more with cultural intercourse and diversity (Thai restaurants, world music, internet propagation, global travel, borderless media horizons, etc.) than corporate global dominion.

“And many ordinary folk whose plates are full with domestic and neighborhood disasters consider the global perspective — even the relatively local expanse of the FTAA — pretty unfathomable and irrelevant to their over-stressed lives.” In his view, the use of “free trade” and “globalization” language just encourages the press and the public to be confused about what really is at stake. It leaves this new movement open to the frequently heard charge in the news media that it is expressing an incoherent “laundry list” of protests. He suggested that the protests could be all easily tied together, however, because everyone recognizes “the import, threat, and grim implications of the term ‘corporate power’ — it is so potent and obvious in their everyday lives.”

Kubiak felt the corporations have the activists fighting on their turf, “in their arena,” not just linguistically, but in the very nature of the struggles against them: “The FTAA, WTO, IMF [International Monetary Fund], etc. are, after all, only the means that corporations use to consolidate and project their power . . . if we do not address the power that preceded and produced them, our children will have to fight this war all over again.”

Consequently, Kubiak has joined with Maine novelist Carolyn Chute and New Hampshire organizer and author Richard Grossman to promote a fight against the legal powers of corporations, citing it as the fundamental reform necessary to curb corporate excess. State legislatures have granted corporations many of their powers, including freedom from much legal liability and, at the same time, many of the freedoms in the Bill of Rights originally guaranteed only to living, breathing individuals.

Matt Schlobohm has a disarming way of agreeing with the MEGAN critics, yet at the end of the conversation he still seems to be maintaining the position that the critics are criticizing.

“I would agree that in some ways we are pissing in the wind,” he said at the Bath meeting about some of the group’s tactics. But he saw door-to-door work and fliering as “just one tool in a whole toolbox. It’s not going to change the world in itself. It’s not our major thrust.” He thought the fundamental thrust of MEGAN was to build a coalition, and he pointed to his list of 70 organizations and businesses. Still, he didn’t seem to want to abandon the leafleting.

As for the vocabulary question, Schlobohm agreed “it’s a mistake to be playing on the business elite’s linguistic turf. It’s a mistake to say this is an anti-globalization movement.” Still, the word “globalization” crops up continually in the group’s conversations, emails, and literature.

How Tom Allen sees it

MEGAN very specifically wants to get Tom Allen to sign onto a letter being circulated in Congress by Representatives Martin Frost (D-Texas) and Earl Pomeroy (D-North Dakota) that demands strong, enforceable environmental and labor standards for future trade agreements made under Fast Track. Such standards, the letter says, should be on “an equal footing with commercial concerns” in the “core text” of the agreement. Although most congressional Democrats would say that they want environmental and labor standards written into trade-liberalization bills, the Frost-Pomeroy letter demands that such protections “be strongly enforced and include the prospect of trade sanctions,” and not be mere “fig leaves” of rhetoric.

Although MEGAN and other Fast Track opponents do not want the bill passed at all because it could lead to passage of the FTAA, they believe if they can get enough Democrats like Allen signed onto this letter, it will effectively kill Fast Tract because the Republicans will not accept a bill with strong labor and environmental standards including sanctions. Baldacci has already signed it.

Allen himself, interviewed at the recent Bath Iron Works launch of the destroyer USS Mason, said he “voted against Fast Track in the past and I will again unless there are environmental and labor provisions in the core agreement and it has sanctions.” He added: “I am sure I have the same position as the Frost letter.” However, he said he hadn’t signed it yet because “it doesn’t quite address what I want,” and he may sign a similar letter circulated by another member of Congress. As for MEGAN, he said he didn’t even know the group wanted to meet with him.

Considering the seemingly strong pro-labor and pro-environment position expressed by Allen, it is perhaps ironic that MEGAN’s problem, as it starts its unsexy grass-roots activity, is that its campaign focus on him is unnecessary. He hasn’t signed onto the Frost-Pomeroy letter, but he seems to be at the same place.

Although the public may not know much about Fast Track, the union movement has been lobbying successfully against it for years. Allen may have been influenced by their arguments. Undoubtedly, he has seen in the newspapers and on the TV news during the past year and a half the vigorous protests against free trade agreements and may have been affected by them — protests the MEGAN activists have participated in. Maybe their protesting has already done the job for them.

Nevertheless, the MEGAN activists believe there is much to do on many anti-globalization — rather, anti-corporate — fronts.

“Hey, leafleting is direct action,” says Will Neils. “MEGAN is approaching working people and poor people. Mass demonstrations are sexy events, but alone they’ll never change the world. Going door to door is complementary. We need a strong base in the communities. We build respect by going to them.”

Still, his personal date book seems set by the upcoming national schedule of protests, including the next World Bank-IMF meeting in Washington, D.C., in late September and early October.

“The last time we were in that city they beat us out of it,” he said, referring to the police. “This time we won’t go so nicely.”

Now there’s a sexy statement.

Lance Tapley can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.