Alice Walker at Green Festival

The Green Festival is going on Saturday and Sunday at the Concourse Exhibition Center at
8th and Brannan in San Francisco. I had the pleasure of experiencing the many booths
displaying organic cotton and hemp T-shirts as well as Fair Trade Coffee and Chocolate. I
also brought with me some flyers that were basically a snap shot of the home page of my
new business, http://www.pagesincolor.com. The home page is now mostly an
alternative links portal with links to various issues such as Fluoridation, cell towers and
phones, depleted Uranium, the environment, 9-11 controversies and so on. A secondary
purpose of the pagesincolor.com website is to sell merchandise. I was at the Green
Festival mainly to network with vendors to see if any would offer wholesale prices so I
could put some of their stuff on my website, so I could have some alternative merchandise
to sell along with the alternative links. This process went well and many vendors indicated
that they were actually more into wholesaling rather than retailing. Some were only
retailing at the Green Festival and wholesaling the rest of the time. This process went
well until I was done networking with the vendors and decided to hang out near the
entrance inside the building handing out the rest of my flyers. I handed out maybe 20
flyers and then a chief organizer came up to me and said that I was not allowed to do that
inside the Green Festival. He said that “If you get to do that for free then why wouldn’t
everyone else do that too” as if to make me feel guilty for free-loading or something. He
indicated that my standing there was blocking the aisle, potentially creating a fire hazard
(as if I wouldn’t run for the exit along with everyone else if there was a fire.) He also
threatened me by saying that if he caught me handing out the flyers again that he would
“recycle them” for me. He directed me to place some of my flyers on a table near the
entrance so that people could browse them at their leisure. While not quite as repressive
as the Capitola Mall security, this was definitely a step below what I would expect from
groups such as Global Exchange, one of the big promoters of the Green Festival. The
basic message appears to be the same as the Capitola Mall: Ok Shoppers just shut up and
shop! (or listen only to our pre-selected speakers including Jim Hightower, Alice Walker
and Dennis Kucinich.)

I later went out to the public sidewalk to hand out the rest of my flyers. No one bothered
me there. I noticed one gentleman handing out Socialist Newspapers and another was
plying the same line of people with leaflets about a Sunday demo that was going to go on
inside the Green Festival with an exhibit about the wall that the Israelis were constructing
to contain the Palestinians.

As far as free-loading goes I have at recent anti-war protests decided to not pay for a table
(cost $50 for a non-profit org split 50/50 with the Santa Cruz Coalition to Free Mumia -- http://www.angelfire.com/sc2/freemumia) and instead handout my flyers the same as the newspaper
dealers do. At the October 25th anti-war/anti-occupation demo, there were nearly as
many people standing there handing out their wares (flyers, newspapers, paper peace
pigeons) as there were regular paid tablers. The difference between October 25th and the
Green Festival was noticeable. It is fine to stand on the public sidewalk and hand out your
wares. Just as long as it is not raining. I fear that on Sunday it may rain and then the shut
down of Free Speech (in the sense of free, unpaid newspaper dealers) at the Green Festival may be nearly complete.