All workers in forests. All workers engaged in logging operations, in saw and shingle mills, and in preparing wood for fuel and manufacturing purposes. Bark and sap collection.
By X344543 - Industrial Worker, May 1988. Dedicated to Franklin Rosemont, Carlos Cortez, and Utah Phillips.
Judi Bari was both an Earth First!er and a Wobbly from 1988 to 1993 and during that time there was a close alliance between the two organizations. Although some assume she brought the two together, the truth is more complex. When Judi Bari joined Earth First! and the IWW in the summer of 1988, Earth First!ers and Wobblies were already discussing the idea of forging an alliance. There are many reasons for this, but the overarching explanation is that Earth First! and the IWW are really different manifestations of thesame revolutionary impulse.
Note: Judi Bari was a dues paying member of the IWW from 1988-94 and active in the IWW when the bombing on May 24, 1990 took place.
By Ben Rosenfeld - April 2, 2012
In an order dated March 31, 2012 and released today, Honorable Claudia Wilken, United States District Judge of the Northern District of California, affirmed a March 21, 2011 Order by Magistrate Judge James Larson, directing the United States, through the FBI, to turn over evidence in the 1990 car bomb assassination attempt of Judi Bari in Oakland, CA to a third party forensic laboratory for independent testing.
"This is a historic and momentous development", said Ben Rosenfeld, attorney for plaintiff Darryl Cherney, Judi Bari's co-organizer in the sustained campaign to preserve California's ancient redwoods, who was also injured when the bomb went off. Cherney went to Court in 2010 to prevent the FBI from destroying the evidence. That evidence includes a mostly intact explosive device built by the same hands as the car bomb, a cardboard sign, and latent fingerprints.
The FBI never subjected this evidence to basic forensic examination. Its lawyers contacted Cherney's lawyers in 2010 announcing plans to destroy the evidence. In 2002, an Oakland federal jury found three FBI agents and three Oakland police officers liable for violating Bari and Cherney's First and Fourth Amendment Rights in trying to frame them by falsely accusing them of transporting the bomb which nearly killed them. The FBI never looked elsewhere.
Cherney alone has continued to pursue the bomber(s). With co-Director Mary Liz Thomson, he just released a new documentary entitled Who Bombed Judi Bari? The evidence, hitherto sealed away in an FBI locker, may finally yield an answer to that question.
Request a copy of the Court order via one of the contacts above, or look it up on PACER under federal Case No. 91-01057 (Document Number 686). For historic information about the case, visit judibari.org.
I knew it was a bomb the second it exploded. I felt it rip through me with a force more powerful and terrible than anything I could imagine. It blew right through my car seat, shattering my pelvis, crushing my lower backbone, and leaving me instantly paralyzed. Slumped over in my seat, unable to move, I couldn’t feel my legs, but desperate pain filled my body. I didn’t know such pain existed. I could feel the life force draining from me, and I knew I was dying. I tried to think of my children’s faces to find a reason to stay alive, but the pain was too great, and I couldn’t picture them. I wanted to die. I begged the paramedics to put me out.
--Judi Bari, 1994
Darryl Cherney's and Mary Liz Thompson's new documentary, Who Bombed Judi Bari? takes a thorough look at the deposition of the late Judi Bari as she testified, under oath, about the car bomb that nearly killed her and fellow organizer Darryl Cherney on May 24, 1990.
Bari was both a radical environmentalist--having been a major figure in the Earth First! movement from 1988 until her death from cancer in 1997--and a class struggle unionist, having been a rank and file dissident in the Retail Clerks and Postal Workers Union in the 1970s. She was also a delegate and organizer in the IWw, having joined the One Big Union just after becoming active in Earth First!
Bari intoduced class analysis and class struggle to the Earth First! movement in a whole new way, making it a point to focus efforts to preserve old growth redwood forests in northwestern California at the point of production, reasoning--rightfully so--that the (capitalist) system that exploits the earth is the very same which threatens the livelihoods of timber workers (it is also the same system that perpetuates racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression--a point that Bari made frequently).
Because of Bari's efforts, Earth First! (and the IWW) in Humboldt and Mendocino COunties were able to somewhat effectively counteract the efforts by timber corporations like Georgia-Pacific, Louisiana-Pacific, and Maxxam to drive wedges between timber workers and environmentalists. At one point, Bari and fellow IWW organizer Anna Marie Stenberg even represented G-P Mill Workers in an Osha case against the company when their business union, IWA Local #3-469, collaborated with management against the workers. She also represented the widow of an L-P mill worker, Fortunado Reyes, who was killed in an accident in the non-union L-P mill in Ukiah. She worked with dissident Pacific-Lumber workers in raising awareness about Maxxam's takeover of that company and why the new regime was bad for both the forest and the workers. Due to her relations with timber workers, she convinced Earth First! in northern California and southern Oregon to renounce the tactic of tree spiking, which was of dubious effectiveness at saving forests and certainly hazardous to mill workers. She even convinced contract logger Ernie Pardini to conduct the very first tree sit by a logger in 1993.
As Fellow IWW member and Earth First!er Darryl Cherney states in the film, "if there was one thing that corporate timber feared more than anything else, it was that radical environmentalists would unite with rank and file timber workers, and because of her effectiveness in doing that, Judi bari was targetted. She did something nobody else (in Earth First!) did, and that was organize rank and file mill workers into the IWW."
The bombing took place in Oakland on May 24, 1990. The Oakland Police and the FBI named Bari and Cherney as the only suspects in the bombing that nearly took their own lives, arguing instead that the two knew they were carrying the bomb and were planning to use it in an act of "eco-terrorism". The evidence for such a plot is nonexistent, however, and in fact suggests that the FBI not new that these charges were false, but in fact deliberately lied about them to frame Bari and Cherney in order to discredit them. Further evidence suggests that the FBI and the timber industry may have collaborated in a COUNTELPRO style operation to manufacture the whole incident from the get go.
It's an infamous case that never seems to go away, even after millions of dollars have been paid out in civil settlements and police say the trail has gone cold.
The case is the 1990 bombing in Oakland of Earth First environmental activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, who were nearly killed when a nail-studded explosive device blew up in their car.
Nobody was ever charged with the attack, and now, two decades later, the FBI wants to destroy the last bits of evidence it has been storing ever since the investigation dribbled dry - remnants of the bomb and one like it that blew up in a North Bay town a few days earlier.
Not so fast, says Cherney, 54, who has never given up trying to solve the case himself.
Saying in court briefs that the evidence "provides the last best hope for learning who bombed Judi Bari," Cherney and his lawyers were in federal court Wednesday in San Francisco to try to force the FBI to turn the evidence over to them so they can run DNA and other tests on it.
Ten people from Pittsburgh traveled to Baltimore on April 18, 2009
for a B’More Fair and a Human Rights March hosted by the United Workers
Association (UWA). The United Workers Association is the Human Rights
Organization that organized the Camden Yards cleaners, part time
workers, “temporary” workers hired through a contractor, by putting
pressure on Maryland’s Stadium Authority and Peter Angelos, owner of
the Baltimore Oriels Baseball Club. They coined the terms “SweatFree
Baseball” in reference to the sweatshop working conditions at Camden
Yards at the same time as the Pittsburgh Anti Sweatshop Community
Alliance (PASCA) coined the term in reference to its demand that the
Pittsburgh Pirates accept the testimony of sweatshop workers sewing
Pirates apparel. The UWA came to Pittsburgh for the All Star Game in
2006 and joined with PASCA to make the demand that our local baseball
teams respect the Human Rights of all workers.
The UWA interviewed 150 workers at three restaurants in Baltimore’s
Inner Harbor development. The interviews demonstrated systemic
violations of workers’ rights such as poverty wages and sexual
harassment. The UWA has begun to process these worker rights violations
by using the International Declaration of Human Rights like a union
contract. By declaring the Inner Harbor a Human Rights Zone, the
restaurant bosses, the developer, the public officials who provided
subsidies to the Inner Harbor developers and the Baltimore community is
made aware that the workers know and intend to exercise their Human
Rights to remedy violations of their rights.
The enforcement of workers’ Human Rights is different from
traditional union organizing in that it emphasizes workers knowing
their rights and exercising them rather than a union contract. The
emphasis is not on achieving a union contract but on the community of
workers that educate one another and provide support to one another on
a daily basis.
Judi Bari was both an Earth First!er and a Wobbly from 1988 to 1993 and during that time there was a close alliance between the two organizations. Although some assume she brought the two together, the truth is more complex. When Judi Bari joined Earth First! and the IWW in the summer of 1988, Earth First!ers and Wobblies were already discussing the idea of forging an alliance. There are many reasons for this, but the overarching explanation is that Earth First! and the IWW are really different manifestations of thesame revolutionary impulse.
In an order dated March 31, 2012 and released today, Honorable Claudia Wilken, United States District Judge of the Northern District of California, affirmed a March 21, 2011 Order by Magistrate Judge James Larson, directing the United States, through the FBI, to turn over evidence in the 1990 car bomb assassination attempt of Judi Bari in Oakland, CA to a third party forensic laboratory for independent testing.
By Fellow Worker x344543, March 11, 2012
It's an infamous case that never seems to go away, even after millions of dollars have been paid out in civil settlements and police say the trail has gone cold.
Ten people from Pittsburgh traveled to Baltimore on April 18, 2009
for a B’More Fair and a Human Rights March hosted by the United Workers
Association (UWA). The United Workers Association is the Human Rights
Organization that organized the Camden Yards cleaners, part time
workers, “temporary” workers hired through a contractor, by putting
pressure on Maryland’s Stadium Authority and Peter Angelos, owner of
the Baltimore Oriels Baseball Club. They coined the terms “SweatFree
Baseball” in reference to the sweatshop working conditions at Camden
Yards at the same time as the Pittsburgh Anti Sweatshop Community
Alliance (PASCA) coined the term in reference to its demand that the
Pittsburgh Pirates accept the testimony of sweatshop workers sewing
Pirates apparel. The UWA came to Pittsburgh for the All Star Game in
2006 and joined with PASCA to make the demand that our local baseball
teams respect the Human Rights of all workers.