Democracy stops at the Edge of the Mall… Refuse the Malls of America!
Sure, you may say that our basic freedoms are limited in Malls because they are private property. But in America, where does the Mall end?
On Sunday, the repressive power of the police state was made viscerally real for me and my friends, when we tried to escort our friend Erik to his job at Starbucks in the Mall of America (Bloomington, MN) - as the nation’s largest mall, it is a premier symbol of capitalism. About 100 supporters of the Starbucks Workers Union and the IWW gathered at the Lake St. Light Rail stop for a rally in support of Erik’s winning his job back last week. Starbucks had fired him for union activity, but that’s illegal, so he filed a complaint with the NLRB, which led Starbucks to rehire him and give him a sweet reinstatement deal. We held a big rally for him (see my pictures here), and about 50 of us got on the light rail to ride with him to his first day back at work at the Mall of America.
Cops had been watching our rally, and when we got on the train, about a dozen cops joined us. We had several legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild with us, in order to ensure that the cops respected our rights. They were intimidating, but we thought that they would let us proceed to the Mall, so long as we were orderly. We were wrong. When we reached the stop before the Mall, we were greeted by about thirty members of the Bloomington police department (dressed in scary gear - tazers, plastic cuffs, guns, etc.). After delaying the train for several minutes talking with our spokesperson and the legal observers, they let us proceed (picture). Yet, when we got to the stop for the Mall, which is inside the Mall itself, we were greeted again by another gang of policemen - this time, dressed in full riot gear (picture). They refused to let us disembark, nor would they let anybody else off the train, including women with young children, people trying to get to work in precarious service jobs at the mall, and a woman with diabetes who needed her insulin. They held us there for 20 minutes, and then simply turned the train around, refusing our entry to the Mall. Erik get off on the previous stop, and was escorted by the police to his job, twenty minutes late (but the manager definitely believed his excuse of a riot cop blockade, because the cops and FBI had already been staking out the store). Apparently, keeping Starbucks union-free is a “national security” concern. When we returned to Lake St., ten more cops were waiting for us 
Apparently, the Republicans brought “the Mall” with them when they came to St. Paul for their stupid convention today. My friends and I faced the same sort of restriction on movement, not in some “private property” space like the MoA, but in the very streets that we thought were public. Jecca and I wanted to go to a concert that we had won tickets to (just as we had tickets for the Light Rail to the MoA) - the “Take Back Labor Day” festival with Billy Bragg, Mos Def, Atmosphere, Tom Morello, and others. To get to the show, all we had to do was walk about a mile from one side of the city to the other. Yet, we were prevented from entering the city by hundreds of cops in riot gear who were blockading every bridge across the freeway that cuts across the city (picture1 picture2). They were only letting people out of the city, but not in (unless if you were in cop cars or government vehicles, which were being used to escort the Republican delegates into their stupid convention, and to carry in National Guard members and more cops who were brutalizing and arresting the protesters (pictures from Star Tribune) - over 280 of them are in jail as I write this…).
I’m just floored by the repetition of the same forms police repression preventing the movement of protesters in both of these cases - against both the corporate lords of Starbucks and the RNC’s “rich, white oligarchs” - (reference to the Daily Show’s billboard outside the MSP airport welcoming the delegates). These instances have made viscerally clear to me how tightly and deeply the ties run between capitalism, the repressive state apparatus of the police and military, and the spectator politics of the ‘representative’ parties. I, along with my friends in the Anti-capitalist bloc and the blockades at the protest today, articulated the resounding message that we reject their whole fucking system. We are engaging in revolutionary exodus.
In the words of David Graeber, the state is based on a nexus of violence and ignorance… “violence, particularly structural violence, where all the power is on one side, creates ignorance. If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t.” (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 72).
