We didn’t shut down APEC, but a lot of APECers had a bad morning

Labor, anti-imperialist and climate justice activists locked down in front of the security fencing to prevent APEC delegates from taking the easy way into the conference.

It’s not often that most of us see the faces of the ruling class up close. When we do catch glimpses in the media, they are usually smiling brilliantly or pondering importantly. What about staring anxiously? Or eyes-wide freaked out? Gesticulating hysterically?

In my role as ‘security’ at the edge of a street protest during the Asian Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) conference in San Francisco on November 15 (which I didn’t know I was going to be doing until five minutes before, when someone handed me a dayglo green vest and told me where to stand) these expressions of capitalist dismay were what I witnessed, up close and personal. 

I had joined a half dozen San Francisco and East Bay DSA members along with a few dozen union siblings at the meetup point for the labor bloc outside the Parc 55 hotel in darkness and a light rain at 6:30 am. Jamie, who had signed up as an arrestable, went off to join others at a nearby parklet. The rest of us (Eric, Luke, Carla, Doc and Yuesen) waited until 7:15, when we moved a few blocks away to our designated intersection, Fifth and Mission. 

No2APEC, a broad coalition of climate justice groups, anti-imperialist organizations and labor,  started meeting several months ago to plan a welcome for the summit, a yearly conclave of elite politicians and corporate leaders who gather to figure out the best pathways for global trade—the best, that is, for their bank accounts and stock portfolios, with scant consideration for the economic damage to the rest of us or the havoc wreaked on the earth and its prospects to reverse climate change.

Big time leaders

This year’s attendees included Joe Biden, Narendra Modi, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Xi Jinping and hundreds of CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. Along with them came their many assistants, minions, and hangers-on, estimated at thirty thousand in all.  We did not imagine that the top tier-type APECer (pronounced “a pecker”) would be dropping in on our street welcome committee. Just twelve entrances in the fences erected around a ten-block square area of the city surrounding Moscone Center allowed access—nine for pedestrians and three for vehicles. The Big Boys and Girls were ushered in via speeding SUV caravans with police escorts. But the B-list luminaries were forced to enter the conference through the limited number of access points.

(This was due to the insane level of security the conference required. The San Francisco mayor’s office—no doubt with all the city’s problems fixed and no other needs to spend local tax dollars on—threw down ten million dollars to help the federal government create the highest official level of security for an event in the United States, comparable to a presidential inauguration.)

The lesser dwellers of the APEC stratosphere were surprised to find that their healthy walks from their hotels to the conference center included a long detour, courtesy of No2APEC, holding down the intersection of Fifth and Mission from 7:15 am until we gently withdrew around noon. Nearby, a few blocks away, Montgomery Street was likewise eerily free of vehicular traffic due to the Climate Justice bloc’s lockdown, preventing APEC guests at the fancy Palace Hotel from leaving in their cars.

Easier and harder

The way that the Secret Service had temporarily redesigned the streets of South of Market made it easier for us to find places to have our demonstrations, while making it harder for us to achieve our goal, which, articulated in the chant bouncing off the buildings, was to “Shut down APEC!” 

Due to the security fencing and massive police presence we were not close to the actual doors of the convention center. But to get to those doors the APECers had to go through the checkpoints, and our intersections were chosen carefully to maximize disruption to their access. The pedestrian entrance at Fifth and Mission was the width of the sidewalk, about ten feet, creating a ready-made choke point for the demonstrators to block. 

Hundreds of demonstrators filled that intersection, buffering about forty locked-down individuals against one of the security fences. A dozen had their arms in six “lockboxes”—reinforced PVC tubes with handles inside for hands inserted from both ends of the tube. The rest of the “red” (arrestable) demonstrators kept arms linked on either side of these. At the very center of the human chain was Brandon Lee, a paraplegic Chinese-American activist (disabled by Philippine army bullets) in a motorized wheelchair, chained to the demonstrators on each side of him. 

A line of cops stood across Fifth Street, a half block away. Police vehicles bunched together a similar distance down Mission Street. It felt good to know that the reason they were there, in otherwise empty streets, was because we had taken over the intersection. To our advantage was the massive presence of global media, in the glare of which it would not have been prudent for police to knock us around and clear us out.

Unsuspecting APECers showed up at this intersection after hoofing a quite lengthy city block. Their foiled attempts to go through the intersection to the conference generated the expressions of consternation, fear, confusion and anger over the realization that their usually privileged ruling class status wasn’t going to help in this situation. 

Social class and clothing

It's been a while since you could tell what social class a person on the street belonged to by their clothing alone, but for a few hours on Fifth and Mission in San Francisco we returned to those simpler days of yesteryear. We wore street gear, prepared for rain and cops. Workers and residents of the area wore normal work clothes of varying types. The APECers, helpfully wearing bright yellow APEC lanyards on top of their expensive duds, stood out from their environment to the crowd of intersection squatters at one hundred paces like lightning against a midsummer storm cloud. 

This gave the mostly female demonstrators on my corner by the pedestrian access point time to prepare their special welcome, which consisted of linked arms in a shoulder-to-shoulder human wall that chanted greetings like “Shut down APEC”, “People over profit”, and “Turn around, go back” as the conferencegoers approached. 

Scenes like this were replicated at the other checkpoints. According to news reports many APECers did not make it to their meetings on time, or at all.  

I enjoyed playing the good cop. Standing in my special green jacket, topped by my gray hair, I appeared to be someone that the well-dressed people might trust a bit more than the unruly ranks of mostly young people ranged against them.  About ten feet in front of the human wall, I would advance to our bewildered international guests and confidentially advise them that it might be best for them to turn around and go another way. 

Some chose to ignore me. These tended to be large angry white men, who would quickly find that crashing the line like a fullback didn’t go well. The two or three who made it through the first row with this method were then confronted with much larger numbers of much larger people. Discretion became the better part of valor and around they turned. 

Most APECers took my advice and beat a retreat. One middle-aged woman, who seemed close to tears, told me she had been walking for over an hour, trying to find her way to a checkpoint that worked. She asked, “Do you think it would be dangerous for me to try to go through there?,”gesturing at the packed, chanting intersection.  I replied, “You probably wouldn’t get hurt, but you will definitely get harassed.” I felt a little bad for her as she wandered slowly and disconsolately away. She was polite, she seemed to understand what was going on, and quite emotionally distressed. Oh well, a relatively harmless bit of class war collateral damage. As Lenin said, probably apocryphally, “To make an omelet you have to break some eggs.”

Less benign was the one violent incident of the day, which occurred when one of the large angry white men, talking to some nearby cops about his bad morning, abruptly turned and bashed a chanting female protester in the jaw. She went down hard on the asphalt with what turned out to be a broken jaw and brain bleed. She was taken to the hospital. The man was arrested.

East Bay DSA artbuild before APEC

Accomplishments

So what did we accomplish with our morning’s work (and the prior work of months of planning)? To have shut down APEC in a Seattle 1999 WTO-style event would have required thousands of protesters. We mustered perhaps seven hundred, and thus had to content ourselves with Plan B: disrupting and slowing down entry to the conference for some indeterminate but substantial number of delegates; and gaining several days of media coverage with our counter message that APEC, far from representing any sort of advance for world civilization, simply meant more of the same for the world economy—profits for the wealthy, union busting for the workers, and continued climate destruction; and how has that been going for most people?

These were real accomplishments, not to be dismissed lightly. Without this work the international elites would have been able to present a seamless picture of the good they were supposedly doing on behalf of humanity. The CEOs and world leaders handing out prizes for the “empowerment” of women and youth through “sustainable” capitalist trade practices would have been the only things the public heard about this global capitalist cabal. 

One more possible benefit: people in movements that travel different paths and often don’t talk with one another forged a coalition around a program of radical direct action against destructive trade practices in the world economy. With some ongoing work these can be continuing relationships.