Last week, filmmaker Robert Greenwald sprung into action upon seeing an article in the New York Times about Starbucks’ new multi-million dollar ad campaign involving Twitter. The very same day, Greenwald’s Brave New Films countered by launching the “Stop Starbucks” website, which includes a petition, a new video about the coffee giant’s poor treatment of workers and harsh anti-union stance, and much more. So far, almost 15,000 have signed the petition, and the video has already been viewed nearly 58,000 times on YouTube. On the spur of the moment, the campaign came up with another creative idea for protest. According to a piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times:

The anti-Starbucks onslaught also featured an attempted Twitter “hijacking” designed to undermine a Starbucks promotion in which contestants vied for prizes by submitting photos of themselves at Starbucks cafes. The virtual saboteurs forwarded the required “Twitpics” but hoisted signs blaring seditious mottos such as “I want a union with my latte” or Schultz “makes millions, workers make beans.”

[...]

The campaign against Starbucks was timed to coincide with the titanic congressional battle anticipated for organized labor’s major legislative goal: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for U.S. workers to choose union representation.

Like most big businesses, Starbucks is opposed to the act. The coffee giant, which generates $10 billion a year in revenue, has joined forces with retailers Whole Foods and Costco in forming the so-called Committee for a Level Playing Field, which is backing what it calls a compromise plan.

Last weekend 17 environmental activists were arrested in a series of protests against the coal industry in West Virginia. Most were given trespassing tickets and released, but six were slapped with a $2,000 cash only bail. The organizing groups–Coal River Mountain Watch, Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice–tried to persuade the judge to lower the amount. He refused, so they raised enough money to get two of their members released. The other four were forced to spend the weekend in jail. Afterward, at a press conference, some of the activists spoke about their arrest. Here’s what one of the two who made bail had to say:

“Family was real good for me,” he said. “My wife and grand-kids scraped up enough money to get me out. It’s wrong they charged us a $2,000 cash fine over a trespassing charge. Kind of silly to me but I was real glad to get out. I just feel sorry for the fellas who had to stay in there longer.”

As someone who has spent the better part of a weekend in jail, I can attest to the desire to want out. It’s not something that anyone, with even the purest of motives, can prepare themselves for. The fact that your fate is in the hands of some uncaring bureaucracy is nothing-short of a panic-inducing nightmare. And the thought did cross my mind to find some way of getting bailed out before my hearing. But thankfully I was with a group of civil disobedience veterans, who taught me that jail is as much a part of the process as the action itself. And furthermore, so is going to trial, something I unfortunately avoided by taking a stet agreement, but now regret, having seen the attention my friends were able to draw to their issue in court.

Of course, knowing all this hasn’t made the decision to risk arrest any easier. In fact I’m far more reticent now than before. But, in a way, it’s all for the better because if I do get arrested again sometime, I will be doing it with complete commitment to the cause and practice of nonviolence.

As King once said, “An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.” Similarly, Gandhi warned that punishments may be harsh, but that “wisdom lies in pledging ourselves on the understanding that we shall have to suffer.”

I mention all this not to disparage last week’s urgently necessary and wholly admirable action, but to raise a question all of us interested in nonviolence have to consider, which is: Do we accept everything, the good and the bad, that comes with an action? If the answer is yes, then I think it can only make us and our movements stronger.

• Rallies are being held in more than 50 US cities on or around May 30 to support a single-payer, national health care plan

• Hundreds of warehouse workers, clergy, students and supporters blocked the most important intersection in the Inland Empire’s warehouse district, effectively shutting it down

• Relatives of people who have been disappeared by police or troops in Kashmir hold a sit-in on the 28th of every month to demand their whereabouts be released

• Victims of the atomic bomb and supporters staged a sit-in against North Korea’s nuclear test in Nagasaki, Japan

• Hundreds of community members from San Miguel Ixtahuacan marched through the streets of Guatemala City to protest Canadian mining giant Goldcorp

• Professors at the University and College Union (UCU) in the UK voted for a boycott of Israeli academics but their leadership voided the decision

• A 24-hour vigil is being held outside of Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s office as part of a nationwide week of action to support the Employee Free Choice Act

• Deaf students demonstrated against inaccessibility and inequity at Ontario universities

• Hundreds of Tibetan protesters face off against armed security at site of proposed gold mine

• A Burmese refugee group is walking from Fort Wayne Indiana to the United Nations to honor imprisoned Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The group will demonstrate at the UN for two weeks in September before fasting for nine days, as they plead for the release of political prisoners.

• UC Santa Cruz students are on hunger strike to protest cuts to academic programs that attract minority students.

• A group of nine teachers and two activists in Los Angeles are on hunger strike to protest layoffs and class-size increases.

• Activist shareholders addressed Chevron’s annual shareholders’ meeting to call for an environmental record report, while hundreds gathered outside to protest the company’s notorious environmental practices in Latin America.

• Palo Alto high school students are fasting to raise awareness for global hunger

• Protests halt train to Machu Picchu for the second time in a week as farmers in Peru stage national workers strike

Remember that scene in Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11, where members of a friendly peace group in California discuss being infiltrated by the police as they pass around a plate of cookies? Well it’s happened again, only this time by the feds. Over at The Progressive, Matt Rothschild has just published a disturbing article on the FBI infiltration of a group of activists in Iowa City last year.

As they were planning to protest the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, an FBI informant instantly gained the trust of the group by posing as a soldier who refused to go to Iraq and obtained conscientious objector status. According to FBI documents that the magazine obtained, the agent gave a great deal of personal information about the activists in his reports.

For instance, one is “described as a white female, 5’10″, 140 pounds, blonde hair and glasses.” The informant provided her cell number, and the document says, “She drives a little dark green four door hatchback.”

Perhaps the worst part of the story, however, is the impact that this revelation is having on the activists that knew him.

“There’s been a lot of effect on group unity and group cohesion,” said David Goodner, of the University of Iowa Anti-War Committee. “This guy was with us for a year. A lot of people thought of him as a friend. Issues of trust have been brought up. We’re trying to work through it. But it’s put a lot of people on edge.”

While this reaction is understandable, we simply can’t let the government make us suspicious of each other. Otherwise, it’s a win-win situation for them. If they don’t get caught, they get the information they’re looking for. And if they are exposed they do serious damage to trust within the group.

Maybe I’m naïve about the potential downsides, but if we are nonviolent and honest, what do we have to hide? Gandhi was no fan of secrecy, and it’s not like our actions are not generally public. So rather than getting worried by such news, maybe we should welcome informants from any government agency to sit in on our meetings. Perhaps they would learn something and come to see that we’re not so crazy after all.

Helen Epstein’s new essay in the New York Review of Books begins by stating, clear as day, the disastrous violence of incarceration in the United States:

America’s prison system is in a dire state. Some 2.3 million people in this country are now behind bars, five times more than in 1978. Our incarceration rate is now higher than that of any other country in the world. Many, if not most, inmates probably should not be there. Sixteen percent of the adult prison population suffers from mental illness and should be in treatment; a similar fraction is made up of children under eighteen. Although there is little evidence that blacks are more likely to use drugs than whites, they are six times more likely to be imprisoned on drug-related charges. Of those, most have no history of violence or drug dealing, and were arrested mainly for possession of drugs.

Sexual and other forms of abuse in prison are common, reported by some 20 percent of inmates. These “monster factories,” as the lawyer and author Sunny Schwartz calls them, do little to break the cycle of violence in society and may even accelerate it. Roughly two thirds of those released from US jails and prisons end up back inside within three years. Some studies suggest that the experience of imprisonment can be so brutal and humiliating that it actually makes men, in particular, harder and meaner, so that the crimes they commit the next time around are even worse than what got them incarcerated in the first place.

Sunny Schwartz, says Epstein, developed a program at the San Francisco County Jail in San Bruno, California based on the principles of restorative justice.

Restorative justice, as Schwartz explains it, is based on the concept prevalent in more traditional societies that offenders must also try to repair, as far as possible, the harm they have caused others.

The program has had some success, but Epstein makes abundantly clear that the tragic condition of the prison system cannot simply be resolved from within. They are part of a wider web of racism, policing policy, illegal drug trade, underinvestment in urban education, and so much more.

Restorative justice, it appears, can’t be just a one-way street. Yes, an offender should try to repair the harm done to his or her victims. But so also the society has to bear responsibility for the subtler violence that helped bring about the crime. There must be both personal and collective reparation. Neither can truly happen, I suspect, without the other.

I recently spoke with Jennifer Llewellyn, a leading restorative justice theorist in Canada, who told me about her new—and necessary—effort to extend the concept beyond criminal justice to state-level politics and diplomacy. Keep an eye out for that.

When Irish plowshares activist Damien Moran was denied entry to the U.S. last April, I had hoped that the squelching of dissent would ease after the Bush years. But times have apparently not changed much with the new administration. On her way home from attending a Nobel Womens’ Conference in Guatemala earlier this month, Mairead Maguire, the Irish Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, was detained, questioned, fingerprinted and photographed for two hours at the airport in Houston by the Department of Homeland Security. Upon her release, Maguire stated:

This kind of behaviour and treatment is unacceptable. They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war. They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities. I am not a criminal, my nonviolent acts in USA opposing the war on Afghanistan, and Iraqi, are acts of conscience and together with millions of USA citizens, and world citizens, I refuse to be criminalized for opposing such illegal policies. Every citizen has a right, indeed a moral obligation, to nonviolent civil disobedience in the face of illegal and unjust laws, especially war. If anyone is to be criminalized for these illegal and immoral policies it is the USA Government, who must be held accountable before the International community for these acts of crime against humanity.

Later in her remarks, Maguire said that she still plans on returning to the U.S. this August to participate in the annual Hiroshima Day peace vigil in Los Alamos, New Mexico. For more information, visit Pax Christi New Mexico.

Royal Dutch Shell will stand trial in New York next week for its complicity in the 1995 torture and execution of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of his ethnic Ogoni group for what has been proven to be trumped up charges. Saro-Wiwa’s son, Ken Wiwa Jr., explained the scenario that led to his father’s murder in The Guardian this past Sunday.

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s real “crime” was his audacity to sensitise local and global public opinion to the ecological and human rights abuses perpetrated by Shell and a ruthless military dictatorship against the Ogoni people. The success of his campaign had mobilised our community to say “No to Shell” and to demand compensation for years of oil spills that had polluted our farms, streams and water sources. My father called the world’s attention to the gas flares that had been pumping toxic fumes into the Earth’s atmosphere for up to 24 hours a day since oil was discovered on our lands in 1958. He accused Shell of double standards, of racism and asked why a company that was rightly proud of its efforts to preserve the environment in the west would deny the Ogoni the same.

In response to his campaign, Shell armed, financed and otherwise colluded with the Nigerian military regime to repress the non-violent movement, leading to the torture and shootings of Ogoni people as well as massive raids and the destruction of Ogoni villages.

Shell is also standing trial for conspiring with the military dictatorship to violently shut down the peaceful protests of the Ogoni people, thousands of whom were inspired by Saro-Wiwa. In a powerful segment about the trial on Democracy Now! yesterday, Saro-Wiwa was shown giving the following speech to his followers:

The indigenous people have been cheated through laws such as are operated in Nigeria today. Through political marginalization, they have driven certain people to death. In recovering the money that has been stolen from us, I do not want any blood spilled, not of an Ogoni man, not of any strangers amongst us. We are going to demand our rights peacefully, nonviolently, and we shall win.

Many are expecting this to become a landmark case if Shell is found guilty, as it would pave the way for other transnational companies owned or operated in the US to be held responsible for human rights abuses commited abroad. Although it would be a long-time coming, such an outcome would be precisely what Saro-Wiwa predicted before his execution. Although he was ultimately prevented from speaking it, this is what, according to his son, Saro-Wiwa had prepared:

“I repeat,” he wrote in what would have been his final statement to the military tribunal that was to order his execution, “that I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial… the company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come … there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company has waged in the delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”

For more on the trial, Saro-Wiwa and Shell’s abuses visit The Case Against Shell and the Shell Guilty Campaign.

• Russian flight attendants for KrasAir vow to continue their 12-day hunger strike despite six hospitalizations

• Opposition forces in Mauritania staged a demonstration on Monday against the electoral agenda announced by the military junta

• Warehouse Workers United will stage a “dramatic act of nonviolent civil disobedience” tomorrow in California to protest their low wages

• Four hundred inmates at a prison in Kyrgyzstan went on hunger strike, and three sewed their mouths shut

• Some 200 Iraqi refugees in Syria stage a sit-in outside a UN office to protest delays in their resettlement

• Events held in 117 cities across the U.S. and Canada to protest the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban on same-sex marriage

• More than 150 people were arrested for blocking a street in San Francisco yesterday to protest Prop 8

On Tuesday, the traditional military parade for Independence Day in Tbilisi was canceled over fears of clashes with protesters, who have been blocking the street in mock prison cells for weeks.  In its place, at least 60,000 opposition supporters gathered at Dynamo national stadium to call on President Saakashvili to resign, and then proceeded to march to the parliament building. Thousands also blocked the central train station. According to the Associated Press:

Throngs of demonstrators surrounded one train, sitting on the track and climbing on the engine to prevent it from leaving the station. The engine started and then cut off quickly as protesters banged on its sides, shouted and whistled.

Opposition leaders also warned that they will begin to block highways and the country’s main airport until Saakashvili decides to step down and announce new elections.

Since April 9, Georgians have been rallying and blocking roads nearly every day. The opposition is angry with the pro-Western, U.S.-educated president for starting the disastrous war against Russia last year that led to the loss of territory, temporary occupation by Russian troops and the bombing of their cities. They are also gravely concerned with the erosion of democracy and freedom since Saakashvili came to power in the U.S.-backed, nonviolent “Rose Revolution” in 2003.