Post Script: Late 80s, Early 90s

THE ELDER BUSH AT WAR

Whoa, Nellie! Reel that one back! We forgot to mention about George H.W. Bush as warmonger. He had two wars to his credit, whereas his predecessor tough-talking Ronald Reagan only had one: “Operation Urgent Fury,” where he sent the troops into the tiny island country of Grenada to button it up more tightly in the Empire’s grip on the Western Hemisphere in October, 1963. He found the enemy to be a bunch of Cuban construction workers with shovels, engaged by the island’s short-lived leftist government to excavate some ground to create a safe space for commercial aircraft to land. But Bush upped the ante with his first one with the invasion of Panama on Oct. 20, 1989 in “Operation Just Cause.” His stooge dictator General Manuel Noriega had been on the CIA payroll since as a young right wing thug his chore was to waste Panamanian labor activists who posed an obstacle to imperial corporate interests on the Isthmus. But now the Empire’s favorite son as enforcer was making signs of getting chummy with the leftist Sandinistas in nearby Nicaragua. So it was time for Manny to go! So 27,000 troops were sent in for the operation to easily overcome Panama’s armed forces on the ground. But Noriega had eluded them and was in hiding. So combat helicopters bombed military bases and the poorest neighborhoods of Panama City to either kill him or flush him out. They murdered perhaps hundreds of Panama’s poorest and destroyed their homes in its slums to no avail. Finally he was found hiding in a Catholic church. Since it was seen as slightly unseemly to open fire on houses of worship, the army set up amplifiers blasting loud music incessantly into the church until Manny’s ears could stand it no longer and he came out to surrender. His last words overheard by reporters as the soldiers trucked him away were: “I’ve got Bush by the balls!” Nothing more has ever been heard from him again as this once useful CIA “asset” rots away in the bowels of some U.S. prison.

OPERATION DESERT SHIELD

But Bush’s involvement in the game of deadly martial arts increased manifold in the Middle East as time advanced. We can recall the CIA-inspired overthrow of the constitutional government of Muhammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 to preserve Western capitalist domination of Mid-Eastern oil resources and in a fiat imposed the royal house of the Shah Pahlevi as its obedient plenipotentiary in that country. But both secular and religious revolutionaries arose to the task of removing the Shah dynasty from power in a popular uprising in 1979, although the secular democrats soon vanished into obscurity as the doctrinaire religious forces of conservative mullahs led by the Ayatollah Khomeni took the reins of absolute power in Iran. Though a Muslim, the secularist regime of the dictatorial Saddam Hussein in Iraq challenged his old Iranian rivals by invading that country in 1980 and was initially successful until driven out by the Iranian forces. What ensued was an indecisive bloody war that lasted until 1988. A half-million soldiers and the same number of civilians died in that conflict. Here US capital decided to side with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in that gory adventure by furnishing him arms from 1983 through 1988. We were apparently unmindful during that stretch of Saddam using chemical warfare against his neighbors on a considerable scale. He was now our pal though closer to our time he became the world’s greatest scourge on humanity alongside Osama Bin Laden. Then our main purpose was to side with Iraq to hopefully depose of the Ayatollah Khomeni from power, and to see a more conservative force come on the scene which would play our game of Big Oil hegemony. But a new joker was pulled out of the deck in these sinister sweepstakes when Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. It seemed that Kuwait had done some oil excavation procedures that had caused the flow of underground oil into its own territory away from Iraqi control. This Saddam would not countenance. But he did consult the U.S. envoy April Glaspie on what America would do in case he invaded his smaller, weaker neighbor. Gillespie indicated nothing as it would be seen as an internal affair between Middle Eastern countries. Hoo Boy, the feces hit the fan on this one as soon as Iraq made its walk-in-the-park takeover of Kuwait! Washington pushed the alarm button now that Iraq was at the border of our great “free world ally,” the autocratic dictatorship of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which had a formidable army of its own. It’s doubtful that Saddam would want to take on such a impossible task as taking on the Saudis militarily.) But Bush saw “war as the answer.” But he was not quite ready to unleash the dogs of war without building up some military alliances sufficient to launch a successful attack to see that the oil resources of the Middle East would continue to stay in our imperial domain. Hence, Operation Desert Shield to build up a force to guarantee a military overkill potential for overwhelming success in an attack. So he gained the support of the United Nations Security Council by November 29 for such an attack as it continued its buildup for it in alliance with Saudi Arabia and other allies. So by the end of the year a coalition force of 40,000 troops was ready to take the plunge with overwhelming air power to lead the attack against Iraq.

JESS GRANT ELECTED GST OF IWW

But before we witness the bloodbath of “Operation Desert Storm,” let’s catch our breath a mite and return to our own scene in Northern California as the IWW was enjoying a revival of activity we hadn’t seen for years. With the arrival of a young energetic organizer Jess Grant, a musician and activist in our San Francisco General Membership Branch, recruitment of fresh younger elements began to make a significant appearance as well as stirring up the activist juices of some of us old dogs of the Wobbly community. Also, in the late 1980s a charismatic young labor and environmental activist Judi Bari (1949–1997) and her husband Mike Sweeney had moved from Maryland to Santa Rosa, CA in 1980 where their two daughters Lisa (1981) and Jessie (1985) were born. In 1985 the family moved to Redwood Valley in Mendocino County where she and other enviros she recruited took on the lumber barons to challenge their profligate cutting of this precious natural resource, the worst of whom was Charles Hurwitz who in 1986 bought the Pacific Lumber Company and immediately doubled the cutting rate to pay off some enormous indebtedness he had incurred in the process. So Judi and her fellow activists sparked a resistance which became the popular Earth First! Movement comparable to the creative energy of the Civil Rights militance of the South in the Sixties. Judi broke up with Sweeney and soon teamed up with Darryl Cherney, a talented musician as well as organizer, both as lovers and as activists in Big Timber to control the excessive plunder of the logging bosses. The growth of the IWW in the Bay Area and of Earth First had a synergetic effect on both as Earth First teamed up with us to become Earth First-IWW Local Number One in Mendocino County. These successes also impacted Santa Cruz where a young gay punk-anarchist who called himself Deke Nihilson (nee Daniel Frontino Elash) partnered with a young woman radical Tai Miller (who had a Finnish IWW grandfather) and other young activists to organize a hippy-ish IWW branch. (More on these later.)

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

Melissa Roberts

Shortly before all this, the IWW had been bequeathed large sums of money in the wills of two old Swedish-American lumberjacks named Nelson and Anderson who had died earlier. IWW Headquarters was then in Chicago with Jeff Ditz as our General Secretary-Treasurer. Jeff was a young giant of a man who had all kinds of ideas on how to spend the money. Fortunately, we did have wiser heads in the Union who managed to keep the spending from excess. One was our old East Bay delegate Richard Ellington, the disabled typesetter who freelanced his skills from home. He and Ditz carried on long distance phone conversations where Dick was somewhat successful in reigning in our Windy City GST. FW Ditz was also answerable to the IWW General Executive Board which was chaired at the time by San Francisco attorney Mark Janowitz who with his GEB majority also kept the GST within bounds. Whatever his reasons, Jeff Ditz, who had served two terms, declined to run for reelection for another annual stint for the year 1991 in the November Union elections. Jess Grant offered to run for the GST post on the condition that General Headquarters is moved from Chicago to San Francisco. as he did not want to move to the city where the IWW was born in 1905 and which had served as the GHQ site ever since. He felt with our Bay Area growth we’d be able to well accommodate such a change. No other candidate offered to challenge him for the office, so outside of the usual scattering of write-in votes in the membership referendum he was easily elected for the historic move. All the office equipment, records, and supplies were moved during November and December where Jess had rented a two-room office suite in the Grant Building at 7th and Market Streets in downtown San Francisco at an affordable rent then. Our newspaper Industrial Worker would also make the move to be administered by a Bay Area collective of IWW members. The only Union asset to remain in Chicago at that time was our book inventory and mail order service to be administered there by FW Miles Mendenhall. So on January 1, 1991, Jess Grant’s term of as GST officially began. But Jess needed an office worker to help him in the General Administration, and a committee of three in our SF branch including me was elected to do the hiring for that post. Catch was that the GEB budgeting rules limited our whole GHQ payroll to 40 hours a week total at $10 an hour. So both GST and office worker were limited to 20 hours a week apiece. An unenviable standard of living, hardly a lucrative career move for anyone involved in these jobs. Jess made a few bucks extra on the rock music circuit with his band in which he played sax and did the vocals. But luck was with us on the office worker. We had two young competent female applicants, both IWW members. The most impressive resume submitted was by Melissa Roberts, a Kentucky native and a graduate of Evergreen State University in Olympia, WA from where she had recently moved to SF. It was a beautifully designed professional job qualifier in which she showed skills and experience which could have gained her top dollar in the most posh downtown office in San Francisco. But it showed her dedication to the IWW and the working class that she chose us. She proved herself a whizbang operator on the job with a radiant personality, marvelous sense of humor and she could also blow some mean notes on the sax!

REDWOOD SUMMER IN MENDO

Thousands of young activists came to join Bari and Cherney in Mendocino county to prevent the destruction of the Redwoods from being clear-cut and campaign for rational tree farming in what was dubbed “Redwood Summer.” The campaign also excited the young hippy denizens of the forest groves who pitched in. Celebrity status was achieved by Julia Butterfly Hill who camped out high up in a redwood tree for months on end to dramatize the cause. Judi herself had a contagious sense of humor which kept up the spirits of the enviros. Being musicians Judi and Darryl lightened up the atmosphere with their songs at rallies, many of them originals arranged by Darryl. It was a nonviolent campaign in practice and principle, marred only by the near-death of a logger, struck by a tree spike flying off a saw blade. Judi and Earth First! immediately declared their oppsition to tree spiking as a means of sabotage against the logging interests. Judi and Darryl made more than their share of enemies among working loggers who feared loss of their jobs by Earth First! tactics. They received their share of death threats over their campaign and somebody even tried to kill Judi by trying to ram her car by a larger vehicle. But they did gain some sympathy from the workers who witnessed Earth First as being on their side. I recall Judi providing practical grievance assistance to a timber worker whose AFL-CIO do-nothing union bureaucrats who supposedly represented him failed him completely. It was Judi and Earth First!-IWW Local 1 who resolved it for him. The son of a smaller landowner who had title to some forest land, upon inheriting the acreage joined with Judi and Earth First! to try to set up a sustainable tree cutting cooperative with Local One Wobblies as its work force. Then disaster struck that almost killed Judi and Darryl in an attempted murder.

MURDER ATTEMPT IN OAKLAND CAR BOMBING

In late May, 1990, Judi and Darryl left the battlefield in Mendocino County to drive to Santa Cruz to drum up support for Redwood Summer with their musical and singing talents. On the way, they overnighted at the Seeds of Life Commune in Oakland. Just before noon on May 24 they commenced their journey to Santa Cruz with Judi driving and Darryl on the passenger side next to her in their Subaru station wagon. They were driving along Park Bl. near McArthur in Oakland when one helluva blast and fire destroyed the car severely injuring Judi by shattering her pelvis and Darryl to a lesser extent. Somebody had planted a pipe bomb filled with builders’ nails right under Judi’s seat which would trigger off by the motion of the car. The Oakland cops and FBI were on the scene immediately and arrested Judi and Darryl, who were totally incapacitated, for being the cause of. The Feds had told the Oakland cops that the victims were part of a terrorist gang in the Redwood forests up North. Lying was name of the game for both the Feds and Oakland’s constabulary in executing the frame up. Both landed in the hospital with Judi fortunate to survive at all from the blast which took a long time for recovery although she was in pain for the rest of her life. In July the courts dismissed all the ludicrous charges against the bombing victims. The perpertrators of this crime were never found although the basic cause of the violence could be traced back to the logging companies and their brutish attacks generally against the nonviolent heroes of Redwood Summer. As soon as they were physically able both Judi and Darryl returned to their on-the-ground resistance movement in the logging country. Further, they engaged a brilliant attorney, Dennis Cunningham and filed a Federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland police for their gross attack on the victims’ civil rights and civil liberties that took years to resolve. To make a long story short, they won their case and in 2002 were awarded $4.4 million dollars by the Federal jury. Sadly, Judi had died of breast cancer in 1997 so her share of the award was given to a trust which managed the affairs of her young daughters. (During her remaining years she continued her work in the environmental movement with all her organizing and speaking talents. She also took an increasing part in the affairs on the IWW in which she was seen as a true movement heroine. Do read Judi Bari’s book, “Timber Wars,” Common Cause Press, published posthumously in 1994. It includes her essays, interviews, and speeches.)

This concludes this important phase of our narrative. We continue into 1991 with Memoir #31, picking up again with Bush’s commencement of “Operation Desert Storm” against Iraq, and the protest movements at home it engendered on the streets, in which we Wobs were proud of doing our part.

End of Installment 30