Adding to Kristian Williams' article, which was submitted to ETS! last week, a number of revelations have come to light which cast a disturbing shadow over both the steelworkers' cancellation of the Kaiser demonstration, and the hideous overreaction by Tacoma police to the (cancelled) event.

For starters, Jon Youngdahl is a liar. He emphatically denied, to me and to other media figures ("The Kaiser Meltdown", ETS!, 3-29-00) that fear of disruption, specifically by Eugene anarchists, was the reason for the cancellation. In the last week I've talked to over a half dozen people who vouch Youngdahl has stated, at meetings in Tacoma and Portland, that that was exactly the reason--and that media (and the public) would be misled so as not to air "dirty laundry."

But it gets worse--much worse. Youngdahl's fear of Eugene was in all probabillity--nobody's talking--fueled by two meetings with the Tacoma Police Department, who had been contacted by the Eugene Police Department with the alarming news that EPD monitors the movements of its city's anarchists and that--gasp--they didn't know where some of them were. Ergo, they must be getting ready to, with a well-placed homemade explosive, blow up the Port of Tacoma. (Tacoma News-Tribune, 4-5-00). The sheer stupidity of it would be hilarious if it weren't true.

Media was let into the feeding frenzy with a wholly fictitious Tacoma PD report on Saturday, March 25, that a "known anarchist from the Eugene area" had been arrested--no charge was specified--with two loaded rifles and a loaded shotgun in the back seat. (Seattle P-I, 3-27-00.)

The incident, as it turns out, was a traffic stop (one of many) by the State Patrol in the area. It's not illegal to be an anarchist (how is someone a "known anarchist," anyway? Who is that? Noam Chomsky? Murray Bookchin? John Zerzan, Himself?), or to carry unconcealed weapons. There was no arrest. It was, according to WSP's Trooper Hunter, "a complete non-incident." I asked Dan Eikum of the Pierce County WSP, how troopers could have known that a traffic stop motorist was an anarchist. "I don't know." How could the trooper have known that the person was associated with the Kaiser demo. "I don't know."

We have, then, an alarmist (and fictitious) story, planted in the media, used to help justify an overwhelming police presence, harassment of legal demonstrators, and hundreds of thousands of Tacoma tax dollars in overtime. That same alarmist agenda, banking on the public's fear of "violent anarchists," was used to encourage the USWA to cancel the demonstration.

No matter how much comraderie was developed among the 50 or so activists harasssed by cops in Tacoma's Tideflats on March 25, there remains a serious problem. So long as weeks of exhaustive organizing by labor and community activists can be undone by the simple suggestion that "undesirables" might attend, there will be no alliance between labor leaders and grass roots community groups. And the folks in power, like Charles Hurwitz, must be laughing their asses off.