What do the U.S. cities of Watsonville, Salinas and Berkeley in California and Springfield, Illinois have in league with Chiapas, Mexico and the island of Haiti? I'm not referring to some insipid Sister Cities Project masterminded by economic development honchos, Yahoo civic boosters or public relations flaks, but to a grassroots mutual aid project presently taking shape in the cracks of the New World Order.
It is a story that began ten years ago at the John Hay Homes public housing project in Springfield. Sometimes it seems there is a federal law that each state in the U.S. will have a Springfield. It is that generic All-American city where "The Simpsons" takes place, and before that "Father Knows Best;" so while situation comedy fathers change their stripe, from lovable patriarchs to darker Homeresque bumblers, Springfield the town remains at the center of the action. Springfield, Illinois prides itself on being the final resting place of former resident Abraham Lincoln - the mythical Great Emancipator who contrary to his exalted folklore status in fact considered the "white race" superior and freed the slaves in a calculated military move to disrupt the Southern war effort in the Civil War.
In spite of these facts, readily ascertainable by anyone willing to look for them in a public library, Lincoln has been historically deified as some kind of civil rights champion. In actuality, Lincoln's Springfield today is a barely Northern plantation town where subtlely racist Republican pols ceremoniously make the pilgrimage to the bust at his gravesite to ritually rub his by now very shiny nose for good luck before going into battle each election year, and where the Lincoln Cab Company recently was cited for routinely and unashamedly posting a notice in the dayroom instructing its cabdrivers not to pick up black male passengers. While the latter revelation was cause for public chagrin to the town's tourist industry, it certainly must have come as no surprise to the smug Babbitts, arrogant political insiders, and crass developers who run city politricks, their pretensions to grandeur notwithstanding. As to the cab company, the initial defensiveness of their "so what" reaction was later toned down, but only under pressure from the powers that be to maintain the sanctified Lincoln image unblemished in theory if not in practice. As to the block which is the site of Lincoln's home, it is now primarily known for being the center of the downtown prostitution trade.
Yet out of this sleepy nexus of everyday Midwestern racist hypocrisy and proud xenophobic ignorance, where if you're a liberal you're considered radical and if you're radical you're considered crazy and not suitable for prime time; also come Mbanna and Dia Kantako. Since 1986, they have operated a micropower radio transmitter out of their apartment in open defiance of the FCC. The housing project in which they were originally situated is now demolished. In the guise of "neighborhood revitalization," this now newly available prime real estate will be divided up in what Mbanna calls a "land grab" among such institutional power wielders as: St. John's Hospital, the Illinois Department of Corrections, City Water Light and Power, the University of Illinois at Springfield and, of course, Lincolnland Community College. While this scam is politely labeled economic development by Springfield's State Journal Register newspaper, the image of pigs at a trough comes more readily to mind. Nevertheless, even before the scheduled demolition the Kantakos vowed to continue their culture jamming efforts at whatever new address they found themselves in the future. After several months spent as the last tenants left in the projects - in order to document the dispersal of their community on the radio - they finally moved their eight watt transmitter to a new location in March of 1997. The station was off the air for only 90 minutes before they set it up again upstairs at a new apartment on Springfield's near Northside only a few blocks from its original location in the projects. As the Kantakos see it, the speed of that move clearly demonstrates the simplicity and adaptability of micropower technology.
Over the years, the programming has consisted of direct phone interviews with everyone from local police brutality victims to Noam Chomsky; a nightly grassroots deconstruction of the Six O'clock News; and, in special situations, doing everything from being the only local media voice that opposed the Gulf War to using their police scanner to give out the locations of local cops during the Mayday uprising at the Hay Homes which occurred around the time of the Rodney King verdict - all these spoken words churning in a dynamic mix of conscious hip hop and reggae. It is here in Springfield that the micropower radio movement that has shaken the foundations of the multinational corporate media empire originated, beaming its then "one watt of truth" from the Hay Homes deep within the belly of the beast out to a network of radio rebels who have been inspired by the Kantakos' model of radical community radio.
The station was originally called WTRA (after the Tenants Rights Association which spawned it), then Zoom Black Magic Liberation Radio, then later Black Liberation Radio, African Liberation Radio, and now Human Rights Radio; names which increasingly reflect its combined global consciousness and neighborhood-based reality. As Mbanna Kantako sees it, the FCC doesn't speak to the human rights of Springfield's African American community. He says, "We weren't around when they made those laws about licensing É We were sitting in the back of the bus somewhere. So why should we be responsible to obey laws that oppress us." The emphasis is now on human rather than civil rights. As Kantako puts it, "It's about getting this government to cease waging war against our people so that we can exercise the rights to live and be free given to us at birth by the Creator. You get your human rights by accepting your human responsibilities. Human rights is the basis for understanding why you exist. This country says we exist to serve the corporate state. That's a goddamn lie!"
In the United States, in response to the government carrot of licensing status and the stick of antipiracy crackdowns, many once adventurous community radio stations have toned down their oppositional elements and have consciously or reflexively become engaged in a process of self-censorship. One signpost pointing to a road leading in a different direction is the micropower movement, originating not on a college campus or in a university-based community like many of the National Federation of Community Broadcaster (NFCB) stations, but in the heart of the black ghetto.
During the mid-eighties, the John Hay Tenants Rights Association (TRA) was formed to do issue-based, neighborhood organizing. Focusing first on expressway opposition and related school traffic safety issues, it then moved to the issue of the inadequate representation of the Eastside community under the archaic commission form of government. The TRA called instead for community control, opposed school busing, and even challenged the legitimacy of the local black bourgeoise who claimed to represent them in an historic voting rights lawsuit then pending and which eventually replaced Springfield's commission form of government with an aldermanic one. They then opposed an ordinance sponsored by their newly elected black alderman which involved the purchase of scab coal from a Shell-owned mine which violated an anti-apartheid boycott on Shell in response to its South African holdings, and politically skewered the alderman's plan for a weak-kneed civilian review board for the police, proposing instead a much stronger one modeled, as if in premonition of future solidarity, on that of Berkeley, California.
Angered and dismayed by media coverage of these actions and organizing campaigns, the TRA, in 1986, hit upon the idea of a community-based radio station to represent its point of view directly to its constituency and to communicate more effectively with a community which has an oral tradition and a high rate of functional illiteracy. This idea was not unusual in itself. Nationally, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) had started to think about community radio as an organizing tool around the same time. However, the ACORN vision was more centralized in focus, more closely tied to coordinating national ACORN organizing goals among the local chapters, promoted relatively high wattage for maximum outreach, featured a professionalized model of radio programming, and was strictly legal.
In contrast, WTRA (as the station came to be called) was based on a decentralized model, had a symbiotic relationship to its community with no official membership base and no national ties, was low watt, disdained professional trappings, and was not only illegal in the eyes of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but defiantly so. Yet, because of Springfield's apartheid housing patterns, it was clear that even a station of less than a watt with a radius of between one and two miles could cover 70 percent of the African-American community, the prime audience which the station desired to reach. Since it was not to be a clandestine station, it would, by its very openness, challenge the power of the federal government.
Given the TRA's noncompliance with FCC rules and regs, though it continued to be involved in more mainstream community organizing activities, its primary funding agent, the Campaign for Human Development, canceled its grant. Fortunately, before that cancellation, $600 in grant money had already been spent to purchase the equipment necessary to set up the radio station. All that remained was to find an empty spot on the dial and start broadcasting.
The FCC model for radio broadcasters is based on scarcity. Asserting that the electromagnetic spectrum is finite, in the public interest, the FCC agrees to act as the impartial gatekeeper for access to the airwaves, even though, as is typically the case with community radio, the signal is kept within state boundaries and involves no interstate communication and digital technology is rapidly expanding the points of access available. However, another explanation of federal radio communications policy might start with a question recently posed by Kantako, as founder of the TRA and "deprogramming" director of the radio station since it has been on the air, "Why is it that in this country you cannot buy a radio transmitter fully assembled, but you can buy an AK-47?" It is from the Kantakos' apartment that the station emanates, and their living room is a gathering place for political activists, neighbors and friends to discuss the issues of the day. It is a focal point for community animation in which grievances are aired and aspirations articulated around the radio transmitter.
Just before the original FCC cease and desist order was issued, Kantako had broadcast a series of shows which involved community people calling in and giving personal testimony about police brutality, or as Kantako calls it "official government-sponsored terrorism." Springfield's Police Chief at that time, Mike Walton, quickly complained about the illegality of the station to the FCC, and in April of 1989, the feds knocked on Kantako's door demanding that he stop broadcasting or face a fine of $750 (that's $150 more than the start-up cost of the station's equipment) pursuant to Section 301 of the Communications Act of 1934 for being an unlicensed station. Upon shutting down the station for a little less than two weeks to reflect on the situation, Kantako recalled from history that during slavery there had been laws against the slaves communicating with one another. As he once pointed out, at a conference in Chicago on "Censorship On The Radio," which was put together by Lee Ballinger, associate editor of Rock and Rap Confidential, FCC regulations are selectively enforced. He calls the FCC the "thought patrol." "If you are saying, "Don't give a damn about nobody. Get you a house. Get you a dog. Get you a swimming pool, and the hell with everybody else,' then they will not only leave you on the air, they'll give you a bigger transmitter! But if you start talking about people coming together to fight against the system that's oppressing all of humanity, all across the planet, then they will find you. There is nowhere you can hide."
So, he decided to go back on the air as an open act of civil disobedience, risking having his equipment taken, with fines that could go as high as $10,000 and criminal penalties of as much as $100,000 and one year in prison. By this act, WTRA was not simply resuming operations, but consciously challenging the exclusion of low income people, particularly African-Americans, from the airwaves and offering an affordable alternative. Since 1978, for the FCC to license a station, it requires a minimum of 100 watts (replacing the old minimum standard of 10 watts). Start up costs for such a station are between $50,000-$100,000 (including equipment costs, engineering surveys, legal fees and proving to the FCC that you're solvent.) These requirements effectively silence many potential radio voices due to excessive costs.
As Kantako has put it, "It's kind of like those black tie dinners at $25,000 a plate. You can come, if you've got $25,000. For anything you need to survive, they put a price tag on it, and if you don't have it, you don't survive. They call our broadcasting controversial. We call it survival material." In relation to the police, such survival material began to include broadcasting local police communications live from a police scanner set up in his apartment to monitor the police, and, in a more humorous vein, doing a recording at a Central Illinois barnyard of oinking and squealing pigs to be aired later for a full 90 minutes as a "secretly-recorded meeting at the Springfield police station."
While he likes a good joke at the expense of the police, when he flipped the switch to go back on the air, Kantako was very serious about his historical mission in picking up the torch laid down by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale by patrolling the police guerrilla-radio-style as a sort of "electronic Black Panther" strategy. In his words to the press that day, "Somebody tell the children how WTRA served as an advocate for the people when the police wouldn't police themselves É Somebody tell the people how we fought police brutality by broadcasting the personal testimonies of African American victims." While he was not arrested, the FCC made clear to him that he was in violation of the code. In spite of the fact that the station was well under 10, much less 100, watts, the only exemption to the FCC's licensing requirement seems to be for extremely low power operations - 250 microvolts per meter - that can be heard no more than 25 yards away. So, unless it upped its wattage 100 fold, which would be financially impossible, Kantako's station would not qualify for an FCC license.
Kantako is calling the FCC's bluff by demanding that the government pay more than just lip service to the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and the 14th Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law. In terms of the latter, while blacks compose 12 percent of the nation's population, they only own two percent its radio stations for an exclusion rate of 600 percent, which is even more dramatically high if class and gender are brought into the picture. Providing equal protection by waiving license requirements or by setting up a separate amateur or personal category for low power community broadcasting licenses are political choices which the FCC seems unwilling to offer to the citizenry at the present time. Yet the 1934 Federal Communications Act calls for "fair, efficient and equitable" distribution of radio services.
The types of voices heard on WTRA when it started and those heard on the station today have changed somewhat over the years. This change represents a situation in which equitable access to radio for young people has decreased as a direct result of the government clampdown on the station. While so far the FCC has not invaded Kantako's apartment and stolen his equipment, the local constabulary had upped the ante with a constant barrage of police harassment directed at anyone who had something to do with the station when it was located in the projects. This particularly affected the youth who were once the mainstay of the station and who, like the station, were unlicensed, being essentially teenagers learning radio skills and doing live hip hop mixes on the air, laying down a revolutionary sound track for the Nineties.
At the start there were as many as 16 young people regularly on air. All 16 were expelled from school by the school authorities and their police patrols for, as Kantako puts it "anything from reading books on Malcolm X to not wanting to eat the red meat." Today, the youthful voices in the station are primarily the Kantakos' own home-schooled kids. Moreover, in addition to radio, many youth have been involved in the TRA's Marcus Garvey Freedom Summer School and/or the Malcolm X Children's Library, consigned to the wrecker's ball with the demolition of the projects.
It is because of police retaliation that many stations choose to be clandestine, but the fact that the FCC and the Springfield police have not more directly attempted to shut the station down is probably related to its very visibility, both nationally and internationally. So, as some people have speculated, the destruction of the projects had the added appeal, for the powers that be, of smoking out the radio station without the need to mount a police invasion. They just never expected that it would start up so quickly again elsewhere.
While the FCC and the Housing Authority has sought to discredit the station is by calling it a pirate operation, Kantako has never liked the pirate label. Firstly, for him, the term "pirate" conjures up piracy on the high seas and the connection between that piracy and the slave trade made it an unacceptable name. Secondly, the name has been associated with radio hobbyists, vanity broadcasting and radio hijinx, and Kantako is a serious programmer with a political message. Thirdly, the name "pirate" emphasizes illegality (what it isn't, rather than what it is), leaving out the chance to define itself positively. Finally, pirates are typically clandestine. So in spite of the pirate's romantic outlaw image and the history of clandestine political broadcasting, the micropower term seemed more appropriate to Kantako.
All of the above usages of the term pirate are, of course, a far cry from the original radio pirates of the Twenties that came on the air and usurped the frequencies and call letters of licensed stations in order to pass themselves off as those stations whose credentials they hijacked. In fact, in recent times, this kind of trickery is more frequently done by the government than by privately operated pirate stations. For example, during the Gulf War, Clandestine Confidential (Feb. '91) reported a CIA pirate that probably used the studio of Radio Cairo to wage psychological warfare against the Iraqi troops and to provide disinformation to the Iraqi population by masquerading as Radio Baghdad, complete with the same introductory theme, bridge music and a hired actor impersonating Saddam Hussein. In a similar vein the Voice of Free Iraq was almost certainly a British operation.
As to its politics, a distinguishing feature of the Kantakos' station has always been its oppositional stance. During the recent war in the Middle East, it was the only station in Springfield that was vigorously critical of the U.S. government, with both the commercial stations and the university-based one (then called WSSU) busily involved in collaborating with the process of manufacturing consent. As Kantako has said, "If anything, what people should have got out of the Persian Gulf Massacre is how tightly the media is controlled by the military industrial complex É Your station will get community support if you start telling the people the truth because all over the planet folks are dying to hear the truth and one way this multinational conglomerate has stayed in charge is by purposely making the people ignorant."
In addition to counter-hegemonic news and commentary, the station has had a music policy that offers a "yard-to-yard" mix of hip hop, reggae and African-based music with a political flavor that consciously eschews racist, sexist or materialistic (my Mercedes is bigger than yours) music. As Kantako says, "Our music format is designed to resurrect the mind, not keep the mind asleep." In the past he has played "talking books" on black history, culture and liberation struggles that he received from the audio service for the blind but these days he's more likely to have his family members read directly from those books in a voice that's more familiar to their hoodies while at the same time providing role models for engaged literacy to the community
Aside from content, another way that the micropower radio movement intrinsically challenges cultural hegemony is on the networking level. It is based on a model of organization concerned more with spreading information than with hierarchical control. In the early days of the movement, Kantako even produced a 20 minute video on how to set up your own micropower radio station which he distributed widely around the country to those wanting to get started. This homemade video, in combination with Japan-based Tetsuo Kugowa's series of U.S. micropower radio workshops (one of which was videotaped in part by Paper Tiger TV and combined with Black Liberation Radio footage for widespread distribution under the title "Low Power Empowerment"), and a passel of alternative press articles, sparked the micropower radio movement in its early days. I once asked Kantako what his vision was for the micropower movement, since it is a term he coined himself. He replied, "I would like to see lots of little stations come on the air all over the country so you could drive out of one signal right into another. If you had a gap, you could run a tape until the next one came into range. I'm not interested in big megawatt stations. When you get too big, you get what you got now in America which is basically a homogenized mix of nothing, a bunch of mindless garbage which keeps the people operating in a mindless state. We think that the more community-based these things become, the more the community can put demands on the operators of these stations to serve the needs of that community."
So, in my anarchist visionary mode, I see myself in a car cruising the USA of the future with a map of micropower radio stations lighting my way from coast to coast, reflecting the wide array of cultural diversity that exists beneath the surface gloss - a vision that is the antithesis of the lockstep national unity of the New World Order. I smile broadly as I recall a 1991 radio interview with Kantako by Tobi Vail, the drummer for Bikini Kill, in which he was asked what he would do if the FCC came and took his equipment. "We're prepared," he said, "to be a mobile station until we get some equipment again. We can run our station off of a 10 speed bike if necessary." Then, when asked, "How can our listeners support you in your struggle? Should we write the FCC?" Mbanna's immediate reply was, "Go on the air! Just go on the air!"
At one time Kantako was thinking of hooking up with the "lefty" National Lawyer's Guild whose Committee on Democratic Communications wanted to challenge those FCC regulations on his behalf in a First Amendment case. In the end, he chose to concentrate his activity on the local station and not get involved in what he calls the "sanitized lynching" of the court system. As he once told me, "Anything the government gives you, they can take away É Don't no government give you freedom of speech. Don't no government own the air É How the hell we gonna argue with them about their laws? That is insanity. We've already tried that for 500 years. I don't give a shit about their laws. Now this is what I call real revolution. You're exposing the system so the people can't have faith in it no more."
Moving into the vacuum created by Mbanna's exit from the case has come Berkeley's free radio activist, Stephen Dunifer who began broadcasting in April of 1993 from the Berkeley hills with a homemade 15 watt transmitter which he carried in a backpack. Ultraliberal Berkeley is, of course, on the exact opposite end of the political spectrum from Springfield, and Stephen Dunifer's radio activism is not the kind of explosive issue it would undoubtedly be in the more conservative climes of Illinois' capital city. In fact, Free Radio Berkeley has been joined in the Bay Area by San Francisco Liberation Radio, Radio Libre, and is the base for the Food Not Bombs Radio Network.
As an anarchist, Dunifer is certainly no proponent of government solutions to problems of democratizing communication, but he has been willing to take up the legal struggle as a way of carving out a kind of autonomous island in a sea of media monopoly. The station he created in April of 1993, Free Radio Berkeley, which now has a range of eight-to-ten miles, was once clandestine but is at this point a 30 watt, 24 hours/day, seven days/week volunteer operation of about 50 people. Organized as a collective, Free Radio Berkeley counters the conventional radio model of hierarchical managerial control, playlists and demographics, with workers' self-management. Its efforts have spawned a host of other liberation radio stations around the country and a burgeoning worldwide movement. While he is quick to cite Mbanna Kantako as his inspiration, both for starting his own station and for standing up to the FCC thought police, it was his January 20, 1995 and November 12, 1997 court victories, in the "United States of America versus Stephen Dunifer," that have sparked the current growth of the micropower radio movement. In these decisions Federal Judge Claudia Wilken refused to grant the FCC an injunction against Free Radio Berkeley - the first time they have ever been denied an injunction to shut down an unlicensed station - and the later decision once again raised Dunifer's claims that the FCC had violated his constitutional right to free speech.
When asked in Berkeley about his legal strategy in December of 1995, he told me: "Basically we want to build a movement of solidarity around grassroots democracy, around decentralized communication, around free radio, around micropower broadcasting. We have a window of opportunity here and it's going to remain open for a while. We need to explore it to the fullest while we're still under the protection of the court. Of course, no matter what the system ultimately decides, we intend on going ahead with it in one way or another, with or without legal approval. It's one of the most critical movements to happen in this decade."
In regard to the global dimensions of this movement, Dunifer has twice visited Haiti, where he acted as a technical consultant to the network of Haitian micropower radio stations (such as Radio Timon) presently beginning to flex their muscles with the support of the Lavalas (Cleansing Flood) party, whose logo is of people sitting equally around a table. While treated as an unsavory criminal by the U.S. government, Dunifer has found a supporter for his ideas in former President Aristide (who himself has been the subject of an ugly U.S. government disinformation campaign), and with his help Dunifer seeks to place a transmitter at the center of that Lavalas table.
On the day he left Haiti after his first visit, Dunifer met with Aristide himself to discuss the possibilities for setting up micropower radio stations throughout the island, reserving 50 percent or more of the spectrum for either public or grassroots community radio. Previously, Dunifer had supplied transmitters clandestinely after the rightist military coup against Aristide, and now he was back to openly bring Do It Yourself radio to Haiti. By the use of off-the-shelf technology and common electronic components, Free Radio Berkeley has been able to provide communities with a low power FM station (20-50 watts) at a cost of between $1,000 and $2,500, depending on the audio equipment utilized. Micropower radio makes perfect sense in a country where the predominant language is Creole, but where most of the media, particularly print, is in French, the colonial language of the elite. Given the language barrier and the fact that most Haitians are illiterate, the appeal of a myriad national network of urban and rural micropower radio stations broadcasting in Creole is apparent. It is Dunifer's hope to supply the "people's technology" and the training to realize this vision regardless of the more conservative thrust of U.S. foreign policy. Contrary to the media's version of consensus reality carefully orchestrated by the U.S. government; in Haiti, the democracy movement is not supported by U.S. intervention, but rather is opposed by U.S. financed paramilitary units like FRAPH, the threat of renewed U.S. military intervention, and World Bank/IMF economic pressures toward the "privatization" of state enterprises rather than the Lavalas party's emphasis on their "democratization."
This kind of internationalist radio activism is not new for Dunifer. Since 1994 his transmitters have, via the Free Communications Coalition in Berkeley, been placed in the hands of political activists in the barrios of Mexico City. In one case the downtown station known as Radio TeleVerdad (located on a central traffic island) was raided by Mexican police, but has since gone back on the air. Other transmitters have also found their way to the Zapatista rebels and other insurgent Indian groups in Chiapas, who have used a combination of armed rebellion and nonviolent direct action to push for their own autonomous regions within Mexico.
For his part, Dunifer envisions an exchange program in which some people from peasant communities in Chiapas would visit Haiti and vice versa to promote unity by using community radio as a tool in confronting NAFTA and GATT. He has called GATT, Greed Allowed To Triumph (a new acronym no doubt awaits GATT's successor, the World Trade Organization or WTO; might I suggest Willing To Oppress). As to NAFTA, he'd like to turn it upside down so that it stands for North American Free Transmission of Anarchy. Imbedded in the pointed humor of the above acronyms is Dunifer's recognition of both the global nature of communications media and the need to keep them out of the exclusive control of the multinational corporations.
His new project, International Radio Action in Education (IRATE) will attempt do just that. Its agenda is essentially to pose the cultural policy question of what communications media would be like if they weren't dominated by the global corporate state? For one thing direct lateral connections between embattled ethnic enclaves in the US and those nations from which they originally sprang could be facilitated without the mediation of the megawatt radio dinosaurs, Disney or CNN. For example, take the Chicano farmworker communities of Watsonville and Salinas in California, both of which now have micropower radio stations and are newly finding their voices on the airwaves broadcasting in Spanish and making connections with Chiapas via the free radio movement. The aim is to not only provide transmitters and related equipment, but the technical know-how to manufacture, repair, set up and maintain those transmitters and stations. Recently, technical consulting and support was also provided to ARPAS, a community radio association in El Salvador when in late 1995 the government raided 11 community radio stations and seized their equipment. Equipment and training have also gone to Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Philippines.
And what about using micropower radio as a local community organizing tool with spontaneous impact? Dunifer recounted a story to me about a June 26, 1995 protest march in San Francisco that had been called in support of Mumia Abu Jamal (currently an imprisoned and censored would-be radio radical himself). The torchlight demonstration ended in an unconstitutional mass arrest. Quite a number of the people arrested had shows on Free Radio Berkeley. As they were being hauled off to the big "time out chair" downtown, they shouted out the studio phone line number for the station and phone calls to the studio from sympathizers were put on the air. A lot of folks from the East Bay community, which is covered by the Free Radio Berkeley signal, heard directly within minutes that their friends were being arrested in a random police sweep, as a result both of these calls and arrestee phone calls to the studio made from the jail itself (where the station's phone number had been scrawled onto the wall above the phone). The station in turn orchestrated a phone campaign to deluge the D.A. and the mayor's office with phone calls demanding that people be freed. Moreover, it soon became international in scope, as word went out on the Internet about the bust, and San Francisco quickly became the site of intervention on behalf of free speech by advocates from around the world.
If there is a deja vu feeling to the above scenario, perhaps it best recalls the famous Wobbly free speech fights from the early part of this century. When Wobs were jailed for soapboxing on behalf of the One Big Union, the word would go out through the IWW grapevine and the hobo jungles to head to the latest site of confrontation so as to get arrested and fill the jails with boisterous singing Wobs until the free speech fight there was won because keeping them jailed was more of a nuisance than it was to let them organize. Dunifer, himself a Wobbly, sees the continuity here in terms of an emphasis on direct action tactics; using, in the San Francisco case, the latest technology to successfully combine micropower radio, telecommunications and the Internet in a mass protest situation. His IWW cohorts at the station agree; as do those at Flea Radio Berkeley, an IWW offshoot which broadcasts live every week from the Ashby Flea Market in Berkeley where, weather-permitting, they have a table containing literature on the free radio movement and the Wobs, and, offer face-to-face participatory programming to any shoppers who have songs, poems and commentary to voice. Moreover, they have also begun to broadcast on the spot coverage of public events and demonstrations where mobile micropowered radio is currently used to offer an alternative to corporate media bias in reporting political activism; airing shows which range from first-hand accounts of the anti-union busting picket lines of workers at the Lafayette Park Hotel to the revelry of the People's Park Hemp Day Festival. All in all, as a result of such activity, the accessibility, safety, and practical potential of micropower radio is increasingly being witnessed on a first hand basis.
For years, people have gotten the "I" in IWW mistaken for "International" rather than "Industrial" (Workers of the World); an honest mistake given the union's internationalist perspective. Perhaps Dunifer's efforts on behalf of the micropower radio movement both in Berkeley and abroad, can utilize human scale technology to unite those engaged in struggles for political, economic and cultural autonomy; from Springfield to Berkeley, from Watsonville to Chiapas and onward to Haiti. In so doing, this approach could simultaneously break down the artificial dichotomy between local and international struggles without sacrificing the particular needs of one to the other. And so, as the century turns, we could give new "state of the art" meaning to the old Wob slogan, "direct action gets the goods."
