Activists Win BIG Against the FBI 

KAREN PICKETT / Green Worker v.3, n.2, Sep02

Karen Pickett is an ASJE board member

Twelve years after the explosion of a motion-triggered bomb planted in Judi Bari's car in 1990, a jury in Oakland, California returned a verdict in favor of Bari and fellow activist Darryl Cherney in a historic civil rights case against the FBI and Oakland Police. The lawsuit charged false arrest, illegal searches and First Amendment violations stemming from a smear campaign reminiscent of the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against political radicals, dating back to J. Edgar Hoover's attacks on labor and the Left decades ago.

At the time of the bomb attack that nearly took Bari's life (she later died of breast cancer in 1997 at the age of 47), she and other Earth First! activists were organizing Redwood Summer, a campaign invoking the spirit and tactics of the civil rights campaigns of the 60s. Judi's background was in labor organizing. The alliances she built with California's timber workers laid the groundwork for groups such as ASJE. Not only was she organizing millworkers in a non-union shop and investigating plant safety issues, she educated the forest activist movement, shifting focus onto the CEO policy makers rather than the workers.

Judi and Darryl were blamed for the bomb, dealing a devastating blow to their political organizing, but charges were never pursued -for lack of evidence. Because the FBI and police chose to focus on EF!, the bomber has never been found. Bari's colleagues continue to pursue the case. The jury delivered an award of $4.4 million in damages. This verdict is a indictment of the FBI's gross interference with people's right to dissent at a time when Attorney General Ashcroft, FBI Director Mueller and the Bush administration are aggregating huge power to themselves and the FBI to spy on legitimate groups and organizers and infringe on the Constitutional rights of the public. 

• Further info can be found at www.judibari.org 

FAT CATS TO REAP BENEFITS?

The genesis of ASJE was the struggle of 3,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America against their employer, Kaiser Aluminum. Steelworkers from Washington, Ohio and Louisiana joined with Northern California forest activists battling Pacific Lumber because both companies are owned and mismanaged by the Maxxam Corporation. After an illegal 20-month-long lockout, an NLRB judge ruled Kaiser was liable for over $100 million in back wages, the largest award in NLRB history. After filing for bankruptcy, Kaiser then had the audacity to request of the U.S. bankruptcy court a $56.8 million "retention program" for what they call their "key" employees. Translation: bonus plans, severance programs and supplemental retirement programs for many of its top executives, skimming $60 million off the top of bankruptcy settlements. The USWA has appealed. Meanwhile, Pacific Lumber has filed another lawsuit against protesters in California's Northcoast.

• Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment
  1125 SE Madison, Suite 100-D
  Portland, Oregon 97214
  Phone: (503) 736-9777
  Fax: (503) 736-9776
  admin@asje.org
  www.asie.org