• The satirical Billionaires for Wealthcare group marched alongside the tens of thousands of conservative activists in Washington DC on Saturday. The self-described “grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, HMO lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off our broken health care system” joined the march to “thank the teabaggers for protecting health-care industry profits.”

• Hundreds gathered at a Philadelphia area shopping mall on Saturday to protest a video arcade run by the military, which also uses it as a recruiting station. Six of the activists were arrested.

• Greenpeace embarked on a 15-day journey with five elephants yesterday in Thailand that it’s calling The Chang(e) caravan. Chang is Thai for Asian Elephant, a species that is facing imminent extinction due to loss of forest cover. The aim of the caravan is to call upon world leaders, Barack Obama in particular, to take immediate action to avert climate chaos.

• Two climate change activists from the Climate Rush group were arrested Sunday after breaching security at Oxford Airport in Britain. They were taking part in a protest picnic against the airport’s expansion, when they decided to jump over a fence to reach the runway area.

• A mostly student-led movement held a series of demonstrations at Egyptian embassies and university campuses in the United States, Canada and Israel yesterday to support a 25-year-old Egyptian blogger, who was jailed in 2007 for criticizing the Egyptian president and “insulting Islam.”

• A group of 300 Malaysians have organized an event called “Fast for the Nation, Peace for Malaysia” that is set to take place tomorrow to commemorate the country’s formation and promote peace among all.

During Saturday’s questionably large “Tea Party” protest in DC, a counter protester marched through the sea of angry conservatives with a sign that read “Public Option Now.” He was greeted with boos, cries of communism, spit and physical violence—most of which can be seen and heard on this video clip.

Now what about the purported tens of thousands gathered to oppose Obama’s health plan? You might be wondering why this site largely ignores such protests waged by “tea-baggers” and “town hallers”. Well, here’s the explanation…

For one, we do not consider their protests to be nonviolent, even the ones that don’t involve the presence of assault rifles or incidences of finger maiming. While there can be very legitimate reasons to protest government spending (e.g. the defense budget) or even Obama’s health plan (on grounds of bowing to the insurance companies), these protests are rooted in selfishness and greed, not empathy, which is a key component of nonviolent resistance.

Secondly, it’s not hard to find coverage of these protests. According the Pew Research Center, an astounding 62 percent of all cable news coverage was on the health care debate.

The folks at Media Matters painted an even clearer picture of this lopsided scale on their blog yesterday:

Behold the media’s glaring double standard. Today, the [Washington] Post puts the “tens of thousands” of Obama-hating tea bagger protesters on A1; makes it the lead story as a matter of fact.

Back in 2002, when more than 100,000 anti-war protesters gathered in the nation’s capitol to protest the Bush administration, the same WashPost… put the story not on the front page, but in the Metro section with, as the paper’s ombudsman later lamented, “a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest’s fringe elements.”

In that light, our mission here at Waging Nonviolence couldn’t be clearer.

A huge police presence, with officers on trail bikes, horses and in helicopters, spent yesterday afternoon defending Australia's Hazelwood power station from about 500 environmentalists, 22 of whom made individual attempts to infiltrate the plant. All were subdued and arrested.

• Austrian dairy farmers are on strike to protest falling milk prices and are planning separate actions such as tractor drives and milk giveaways also planned as well.

• About 30 Foodstuffs distribution center workers in Christchurch, New Zealand went on strike Saturday to protest the company’s refusal to increase their wages and improve working conditions.

• Dozens of fire trucks from the Israeli Fire and Rescue Services in Tel Aviv drove slowly in a convoy yesterday morning toward the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to protest poor working conditions and a lack of equipment.

• A Filipino priest who’s also an environmental/human rights advocate traveled some 117 kilometers by bike with twelve others to protest the 200-megawatt Kamanga Power Plant.

• Journalists in Hong Kong have led a march with scores of people dressed in black to protest the alleged police beatings of three reporters covering recent unrest in western China. Demonstrators held placards reading “respect press freedom” and “reporting the news is not crime”.

Peace monuments can be found in some strange places. During a recent trip to Cardiff, Wales, a statue in the entrance way to the rather lavish Renaissance-styled City Hall caught my eye as I was visiting a collection of official buildings and public spaces.

The doves and the peace symbol there suggested some sort of anti-war message or references. I then noticed the plaque, which reads, “Her soul ignited goodness on our nuclear land; The burning bush of her sacrifice and faith will never be extinguished.” But with no apparent link to historical events, the significance of this particular statue was lost on me at the time.

After seeing the write-up in the Cardiff City Hall Visitor Information Guide, I began to understand how the statue and plaque are linked back to anti-nuclear civil disobedience at a military base in Berkshire, England. The text and the imagery at the monument actually are references to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

As a Canadian visitor, I came to the monument with almost no grasp of the Greenham Common references. Since my trip to Cardiff, I have investigated and reflected on what I saw there.

In a write-up about the monument, the Cardiff City Hall Visitor Information Guide indicates that:

On the 27th of August 1981, a total of 36 women, four babies and six men set off on a march from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. The protest march was against the American ground launched cruise nuclear missiles to be located at the RAF base on Greenham Common. The site then became a world famous icon for protests against nuclear weapons.

The Visitor Information Guide also quotes Thalia Campbell, a Greenham Common protestor who has said that “this statue is of a woman, who is every woman from all over the world who took part in Greenham” and “she was the spark that rekindled the Peace Movement.” Read the rest of this article »

The high walls of prison complexes don’t just keep prisoners in; they keep the public out. That’s nowhere more true than in long-term solitary confinement – prisons within prisons – where people can spend years alone and forgotten.

The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Rights For Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities, have long organized against solitary confinement, often euphemized by administrators as “segregation” or “the special housing unit” but known to prisoners as “the box” or “the hole.” Thanks to one ACLU lawsuit, it is now illegal in Indiana to keep mentally ill prisoners in extreme isolation.

Atul Gawande called long-term solitary confinement nothing short of torture in a powerful New Yorker article, “Hellhole.” I sought to add to Gawande’s account by describing ordinary life in solitary confinement. I interviewed Ohio inmate Sean Swain who’s had “seven or eight” stints in “solitary confinement since 1991, as well as Shirley Pope, director of Ohio’s Correctional Institution Inspection Committee (CIIC), authorized by the state legislature to inspect prisons.

In Ohio in 2007, approximately 1 in 25 prisoners lived in isolation at any one time. It’s not known how many people live in isolation at some point during their sentence. Some 25,000 U.S. prisoners are isolated at “supermax prisons,” with another 50-80,000 at other prisons, according to Gawande’s article.

Swain detailed the conditions: Insects swarmed around lighting fixtures. Tube-lighting was never shut off.  Soap and toilet paper were sometimes lacking. Prisoners used bedsheets as towels. And as the CIIC confirmed, prisons have begun to double-bunk solitary cells due to overcrowding. Prisoners can now spend 23 hours a day with another person, in a cell designed for single occupancy.

The article also looks at why the mentally ill end up in isolation, “in spite of the known mental-health deterioration stemming from long-term isolation.” As one expert explained to me, “Their behavior is destined to deteriorate under those conditions. Then their poor behavior is used to justify why they should be there.”

Read the article at the International Network of Street Newspapers. It appeared in Cincinnati’s Streetvibes, published by the local Coalition for the Homeless.

Image: “Captive” by Todd Tarselli, American Journal of Public Health.

Photos of Obama's hero's include Dr. King (top middle) and Gandhi (lower right)

President Obama’s speech to the nation’s students earlier this week sparked an outcry (as well as some boycotts) from the far right over fears of “socialist indoctrination.” The administration did its best to assuage such fears by making the text of the speech available to schools beforehand. But what they didn’t prepare for was the question asked by a ninth grader named Lily: “If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”

Obama stumbled, forgetting that the correct answer was Ronald Reagan, and instead blurted out the name Mahatma Gandhi and called him, gasp, “a real hero of mine.”

Of course, the real joke here is not that Obama fell into the conservative trap by naming a radical like Gandhi as his hero. Hardly anyone took notice, perhaps because few people regard Gandhi as a radical. What little they know about him they associate with independence from Britain. And we Americans have no trouble embracing that notion.

The real joke, that seems lost on just about everyone, is that the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world looks up to perhaps the most staunch pacifist who ever lived.

Obama then laughed about the imagined situation of having dinner with Gandhi, saying, “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”

Haha. That’s hilarious. What a funny joke about Gandhi’s practice of fasting to the brink of death so that his followers would stop using violence.

But seriously, don’t you think dinner would be strained for a different reason? Oh, say the fact that Obama is waging two wars, using drones to drop bombs on his Pakistani friends and increasing what’s already the world’s largest defense budget?

Obama is clearly familiar with Gandhi’s sayings since he borrowed one for his election campaign. So what doesn’t he understand about the one that goes: “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”?

Of course, I’m being sarcastic. Obama is a smart man and I’m sure he’s well aware that Gandhi devoted his life to nonviolence. He did after all lightly trace Gandhi’s influence on subsequent generations for the students, explaining how “the non-violent movement in India” inspired Dr. King and César Chávez.

But as much as Obama may understand the importance of nonviolence, it doesn’t seem to translate into practice. He’s not exactly the right person to be telling students to learn from “people who are able to bring about change, not through violence, not through money, but through the force of their personality and their ethical and moral stances.”

At least not at this point in his life. The presidency has a way of forcing good men to do terrible things.

Take former President Jimmy Carter, for instance, who called the nuclear arms proliferation “a disgrace to the human race” when he was running for office. Then, as soon as he became president, he built the Trident nuclear submarine base in Georgia. His administration also maintained an enormous military machine and aided right-wing tyrannies abroad.

But in the years after his presidency, Carter has worked hard for peace, particularly through the establishment of his own non-profit organization that promotes nonviolence and social justice. In fact, he is set to receive the Mahatma Gandhi Global Nonviolence Award from James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence later this month.

Perhaps Obama will find himself there too one day. And he will feel greatly honored to receive not just the award, but the accompanying replica of his hero’s shawl. It just won’t be for anything he’s done as president.

Today is the eighth anniversary of “the events” of September 11, 2001. To commemorate it (them?), I took part in a little pool of essays at the New York Times‘s Happy Days blog. My contribution is short, repeated here in its entirety:

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.

12 Iranian exiles on hunger strike for the past 44 days outside the US embassy in London called on America and Britain yesterday to break their silence over an Iraqi attack on a refugee camp that left 11 people dead and 450 others injured.

• Dozens of Duke Energy customers in Charlotte, North Carolina protested a hearing with the NC Utilities Commission Wednesday night, where a 12 percent power bill hike was being proposed.

• 350 Safeway workers in Calgary, Canada started picketing Monday morning after they served strike notice and the company locked them out over contract disputes involving better benefits and less hours.

• India’s Jet Airways pilots have entered their third day on strike protesting the firing of several colleagues. The total number of protesting pilots reached 432 Wednesday, out of 760 at the airline.

• Britain’s postal workers are set to begin a nationwide walkout next week to protest Royal Mail’s plans to change working patterns and modernise the postal service. But strike action has already begun in some parts of the country, meaning as many as 20 million items of post are currently waiting undelivered in sorting offices.

• The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir staged its monthly sit-in at a community park yesterday to demand the whereabouts of their missing relatives and punishment for the forces responsible for the custodial disappearances and killings.

• Parents and children gathered outside Rosemead, California’s City Hall on Tuesday night to protest the closure of an after-school program that leaves at least 120 families without child care.

• Four people protesting Massey Energy’s mountaintop removal mining practices were arrested Wednesday morning after linking their arms together with plastic pipe and duct tape, briefly blocking a private road to the coal company’s office in southern West Virginia. The protesters are affiliated with Climate Ground Zero and ranged in age from 22 to 81 years old.

• A trio of activists from the environmental group Avaaz.org disrupted a press conference yesterday in Washington DC held by city officials from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who were attempting to highlight the city’s role as the venue for the G20 summit later this month. The activists held a sign that read, “Why is the greenest city silencing green voices?”, before being escorted out.

• Hundreds of AT&T workers in Danbury, Connecticut went to work wearing t-shirts saying “prisoner of AT&T” to protest the expiration of their contract. Bosses sent them home without pay, but the workers are threatening to file a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board over arbitrary suspensions.

• Hackers temporarily shut down Australian PM Kevin Rudd’s website last night in an apparent protest of government proposals for a mandatory internet filtering system.

• On their first day back to work, US Senators were greeted by 40 climate activists, who built miniature windmills and made mechanical noises in the middle of the Hart Senate Office building until interrupted by the Capitol Police. At that point, a 50 ft banner dropped demanding that the Senators “Get to Work” for “Green Jobs Now”.

• About 20 frustrated parents at NY Public School 123 in Harlem picketed outside the school yesterday to protest what they said was preferential treatment for Harlem Success Academy 2 charter school, located in the same building.

• More than 270 faculty members from the University of California have signed an online petition in support of a walkout later this month to protest budget cuts.

• Thousands of the mostly female porters from the slums of Ghana’s largest city, Accra, halted their routine job of carrying loads to protest the government’s intention to evict them.

• Union workers for Kaiser Permanente picketed at the Kaiser Roseville Medical Center in Sacramento, California on Wednesday to protest company plans to slash 1,350 jobs statewide to offset enrollment losses and declining margins.

• Teachers from a school district in Kashmir are staging a sit-in to protest discrimination and marginalization by school administration.

In a dramatic act of civil disobedience today, six national education leaders blocked the main entrance of the U.S. Department of Education in an effort to protect the endangered Washington, D.C. school voucher program.

• Protests are being planned for Thursday’s dedication of the new Cheney International Center on the University of Wyoming’s Laramie campus.

• Sudanese police have detained 40 women protesting outside a courthouse in support of a female journalist on trial for wearing trousers in public.

• Hundreds of pilots from India’s Jet Airwaves went on strike yesterday, canceling nearly 120 flights, to protest the dismissal of two senior pilots last month by the airline.

• Between 30 and 50 protesters marched with signs in an area known as Cargo City at Miami International Airport on Monday to support Amerijet workers, who went on strike over a week ago to protest for low wages, poor benefits and unsafe working conditions.

• Up to 5,000 workers at four coal mines in Hunan Province, Central China, have been on strike since the 22nd of August over new contracts.

• Some 50 retired miners in the western Russian city of Zverevo have held a protest near the local highway demanding free utilities from the local government.