The protest-encampment known as Bainport is in its 51st day today. We took our third trip there last night. We wanted to join the big Halloween theme party. Vultures. The night belonged to vultures.
We prepped some signs for the event: VULTURE IN CHIEF, and VULTURES PICKED MY BONES. We understood that some huge vulture puppets were being shipped in from our new friends at the Backbone Campaign in Seattle. They were joining the Mitt Romney puppet who has been camping with the 47% at the local county fair grounds. Nothing like a campfire to bridge America's wealth divide.
Cries in the night from the livestock barn. Stage lights, lighted letters in procession. Twenty foot tall Romney with cleft chin and great head of hair loomed out of the darkness, marched in company of Vulture Bain and Vulture Sensata. The Vulture In Chief danced around our sparking fire, outsource hell. "To the factory!" shouted a protester. We marched: across drainage ditch, across highway, past the sandbagged barricades intended to keep us out, around the massive parking lot, anaconda drumline of heartbroken women and men in vulture masks. Photos in front of the factory. Scrutiny of security sequestered in a tightly buttoned car. Local cops come, friendly, but very present. We snaked back to the protest village to listen to Leo Gerard, head of the Steelworker's Union. Solidarity. The making of history. The breaking of hearts. The fracture of families.
I caught up with Tom Gaulrapp. His 33 years of work in the factory is over.
Q: Why was Bainport started?
A: Our original thought was to mount a last ditch effort to save our jobs, but it would take a miracle at this point to do that. Now, our intention it is twofold: 1) show what outsourcing does to communities, and 2) try to bring awareness to how devastating it is to people and families. If we're gonna lose our livelihoods, we are at least struggling to getour promised severance. They're trying to take away even that. They destroy peoples' lives for greed, but we can still demand respect.
Q: What is the impact of the loss on Freeport?
A: There aren't any comparable high-paying jobs with good benefits. The payroll of Sensata was $8 million per year. That is ripped from the community. The Kmart is closing because no one can afford to buy anything. A number of small businesses are closing. Younger people might move on, but I'm 54 and have a home. You can't sell a home when there aren't any jobs around. We're stuck.
Q: What are some of the highlights of Bainport?
A: The whole thing just breaks our hearts, but the best thing is community and friendships. We've gotten incredible support from the community, from unions, from activists. Next Tuesday, we're gonna watch the election returns from our big tent. It'll be one wild party when it is announced that Mitt Romney lost the election. That is what we have to look forward to. We'll dance like crazy into the night.
We packed our lighted letters and drove the 200 miles home. What is happening in America just doesn't make sense to me. We are allowing the dismantling of a nation, and seem entirely incapable of analyzing the situation with an eye to the greater good. The bones are picked, the harvests in, and little cities like Freeport are roadkill. The shadows you see are the vultures circling between us and the sun. The shadows you don't see are slave wage conditions in China, the new Republic of Global Extraction. The lies we tell to ourselves, and the lies we allow told, compound our ambivalence that it is just, after all, business in this best of all harvested worlds.