Protest Conviction of Aaron Harrison!

“War on Terror” Frame-Up of Black Longshoreman

In a blow against unions, blacks, immigrants and all those targeted by the government’s “war on terror,” Bay Area black longshoreman Aaron Harrison was found guilty on November 16 on frame-up charges of obstructing a police officer. Harrison was sentenced to one year’s probation, slapped with a fine and 30 days of a work project (like highway cleanup), community service or home detention.

In August 2007, Harrison and fellow black longshoreman Jason Ruffin were driving back into work at the Stevedoring Services of America terminal in Sacramento after a lunch break. They were stopped by port security guards demanding to search their car, citing the maritime security regulations that are part of the government’s “anti-terror” laws. They had never been confronted with such a demand before in the Bay Area ports where they normally work. Harrison called the business agent from International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 for advice. Enraged that these young black men had the temerity to call their union, the security guards called in cops from the notoriously racist West Sacramento police. They pepper-sprayed Harrison in the face, forced the two longshoremen from their car, handcuffed them and threw them in jail on charges of resisting or obstructing a police officer and trespassing (the latter charge was later dropped).

The relentless prosecution of Harrison and Ruffin demonstrates the lengths to which the government will go to enforce its “port security” laws, which have massively strengthened the state’s police powers on the docks. When the first trial of the two Local 10 longshoremen ended in a hung jury last January, the court separated their cases. The prosecutors tried to weed out from the jury anyone with pro-union sympathies or anyone with negative experiences with the West Sacramento cops. But the frame-up was so blatant that Jason Ruffin was acquitted at his retrial in October. The cops and prosecution were gunning to convict Harrison.

The racism and union-busting that are integral to the “anti-terror” laws were played out in the courtroom. The one black person in the jury pool for Harrison’s trial was excluded by the prosecutor, who later justified his pre-emptory dismissal on the grounds that the woman was “too emotional” in her description of the humiliating treatment she and her family had received at the hands of the cops. At the sentencing hearing on December 8, the prosecution objected to any statement that race had anything to do with the cops’ assault on Harrison and Ruffin.

To be a young black man in racist America is to be branded as a criminal, a verdict reinforced by the wholesale roundup and imprisonment of young black, and also Latino, men under the racist “war on drugs.” Now, under the provisions of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program, port workers are branded as a “threat to national security” for offenses ranging from drug possession with intent to distribute, to fraud, to being an “illegal immigrant.” With the implementation of TWIC, tens of thousands of port workers have lost their jobs. Disproportionately, these are black and Latino workers as well as the largely immigrant port truckers.

That Harrison and Ruffin stood firm in the face of this relentless and vindictive prosecution is a statement of their commitment to defending their union and themselves against being branded as criminals. They stood on the front lines in defense of the ILWU and other port workers who are lined up in the crosshairs of the “port security” laws. Dripping with venom toward the union, the prosecution tried to argue that Harrison had been pressured by the “militant wing” of the ILWU to fight the frame-up charges. Pointing to the two rallies organized by ILWU Local 10 and other unionists in defense of Harrison and Ruffin during their preliminary hearings, the prosecution all but declared the union’s defense actions as some kind of mafia-style conspiracy to influence the jury. In fact, such mobilizations on behalf of victimized workers are part of the historic traditions of the labor movement.

The only conspiracy here was the standard one of the American “justice” system between the prosecution, the judge and the cops. There was not a shred of evidence that Harrison resisted or obstructed the police. As his lawyer pointed out, Harrison at no time objected, complained or otherwise reacted to being assaulted with pepper spray, which required paramedics being immediately called to treat him, or to having his shoulder so injured by the cops that he was off work for two months. The judge charged that the jury would have to find Harrison guilty if they believed he hadn’t immediately done what the police told him to. During sentencing, the prosecution—echoed by the judge—invented a new “crime,” the “crime of obstinacy.” The ominous message, not a new one in capitalist America, is that a cop’s word is “the law,” giving the thugs in blue free rein to criminalize anyone who doesn’t obey.

This was exactly the line of the cops who arrested black scholar Henry Louis Gates last summer and charged him with disorderly conduct when he refused a cop’s order to get out of his own home! But while the charges against this eminent black professor were eventually dismissed, such was not the case for a black longshore worker.

At the December 6 Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal benefit in Oakland in solidarity with class-war prisoners, the speaker from the Bay Area Labor Black League for Social Defense underlined the importance of the Harrison and Ruffin case:

“The government’s ‘war on terror’ has long had the ILWU in its sights. The prosecution of Harrison and Ruffin demonstrates the bipartisan ‘war on terror’ to be a union-busting war on blacks and labor as well as immigrants. It also exposes the treacherous support by the ILWU tops for the maritime security measures that allow the government to ride roughshod over and fire dock workers. Down with the maritime security measures!”

Echoing the capitalist Democratic Party that they slavishly support, the ILWU misleaders criminally joined in the chorus for increased “port security.” In March, the ILWU International even issued a statement calling for more “staffing and resources to properly administer the TWIC program.” Last summer, after countless longshore workers had already lost their jobs to “port security,” the ILWU Longshore Division Caucus voted to “seek the abandonment of the TWIC program.” But this too came cloaked in “national security” patriotism, with arguments that TWIC “does not actually improve port security” and “improperly inserts the employers (many of them foreign) into a United States government program” (Dispatcher, July/August 2009). For years, the ILWU and Teamsters bureaucrats have pointed to the overwhelmingly immigrant, non-union port truckers as the real “security threat” at the ports. This is not only an outrageous attack on the port truckers but on the very existence of the ILWU, reinforcing its increased isolation as the last bastion of union power on the West Coast docks.

For the ILWU and other longshore unions to wage a real fight against TWIC and the racist, union-busting “war on terror” laws, the starting point must be opposition to the very state that is enforcing these laws, now with Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief. This means championing full citizenship rights for all immigrants and fighting to organize foreign-born workers, like the port truckers, many of whom bring lessons of militant class struggle from their countries of origin. As the persecution of Harrison and Ruffin underlines, this also means championing the fight for black freedom, which is itself directly linked to the fight to sweep away capitalist wage slavery and the state forces and laws that maintain it.

But to wage that kind of struggle means breaking with the class-collaborationist policies of the union misleaders which increasingly subordinate the unions to the capitalist state and forging a new leadership rooted in the program of class struggle. Down with the “war on terror”! Break with the Democrats! For a revolutionary internationalist workers party that fights for a workers government!