Several hundred Transit Workers Union members and their supporters in New York marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall Wednesday to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s refusal to implement a new contract established by arbitrators earlier this year.

• A general strike paralyzed Royal Mail on Thursday, with unions launching a phased walkout involving up to 120,000 workers in a protest against job cuts. The Communication Workers Union said the walk off would last until Saturday.

• At least 50 Iron Cast Pipe Manufacturing workers in Iran were arrested and a number were injured by security guards after refusing to end their four-day long protest against a ten-month delay in wage payments.

• A Guinean activist says the military has arrested 10 demonstrators who were on a hunger strike to protest last month’s massacre.

• In the UK, Iraqi refugees locked up in Brook House and Colnbrook detention centres have been on hunger strike since October 19, to protest against their inhumane treatment and demand their immediate release.

• Human rights activists in Indonesia protested on Thursday over a district-wide ban on women wearing tight pants scheduled to take effect in West Aceh in January, saying it is a violation of women’s rights.

• In India, members of various trade unions in the state of Manipur, employees and workers staged a sit-in-protest on Wednesday against the price hike of commodities, downsizing of employees and irregular release of salaries to employees and workers.

I work in a field where violence is part of daily life. At the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, my day will typically start with a run through the national headlines, where one can readily find gory details about the 30,000+ gun deaths that occur each year in the United States. If that doesn’t sufficiently dampen my spirit, I can easily scroll to the comment threads of these articles and see pro-gun activists minimize this loss of life and argue for even weaker gun laws.

It can be depressing—and also intimidating. Recently, I spoke to gun violence prevention activists in Virginia who were preparing to support their mayor at a city council meeting. You see, this mayor had the temerity to join a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns and that outraged the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), who believe there should be no regulations concerning gun ownership. One other thing about VCDL: their members pack heat 24/7, including at city council meetings. Several well-meaning individuals concerned about gun violence felt compelled to stay home that evening after considering the prospect of facing 60 some-odd armed men at the meeting.

I really can’t blame them. I’m not scared of these guys myself (I’ve been around them long enough to think of them more as weird uncles, or the like), but what am I supposed to tell the mother of two young children who’s trying to be supportive and do the right thing? “Don’t worry about that guy with the Glock 40 and ‘Guns Save Lives’ decal on his jacket”? That would be a tough pitch even for Ricardo Montalban.

If one person can inspire the courage necessary to face such situations, however, it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I find myself repeatedly going back to a passage in his autobiography that is striking—and absolutely inspiring.

As we all know, Dr. King faced constant threats to his life during his time as a prominent civil rights leader in America, and was eventually felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. During his life, he wrestled often with the question of whether or not to carry a gun for self-defense. After his house and the house of a friend were bombed in 1956, Dr. King wrote the following: Read the rest of this article »

In San Francisco, about 200 people rallied in front of the 425 Market Street, where United HealthCare has clandestine offices. They then moved on to Blue Shield of California, where more than 30 people blocked the entrances, delaying workers coming to work and making a clear demand for insurance companies to get out of the way of health care.

• Tens of thousands of workers in Guinea went on strike Wednesday to mark the one-month anniversary of a massacre in which troops fatally shot pro-democracy demonstrators and raped women in broad daylight. Meanwhile, organizers said that dozens of people were going on a five-day hunger strike to protest the Sept. 28 violence in the West African nation.

• In Sri Lanka yesterday, the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) launched a protest campaign demanding an immediate salary increment.

• Normal life was crippled across Kashmir valley for the second consecutive day on Wednesday in response to a strike called by Syed Ali Shah Geelani-led faction of Hurriyat Conference to protest the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

• In Jerusalem, the Civil Association is planning a sit-in on Friday in support of the city and Al Aqsa Mosque

As the debate in Congress continues over health care reform, activists are continuing to put the pressure on. In a new article at The Nation, Peter Dreier writes that momentum for reform is growing, with groups like Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and MoveOn having organized hundreds of protests in front of insurance company offices around the country, at the homes of insurance company CEOs, and at the annual conference for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) in Washington, D.C. over the last month, calling for a robust public option.

Rather than simply providing an alternative to the private insurance, other organizations – like the California Nurses Association, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Mobilization for Health Care for All – have continued to fight for a universal single-payer health care system that would get rid of insurance companies altogether. Over the last month, more than 100 people have risked arrest at sit-ins at the offices of  insurance companies in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

Today, the next wave of “Patients Not Profits” sit-ins – organized by Mobilization for Health Care for All – begins, and will continue until at least November 4. Currently, sit-ins are organized in 21 cities over the next few days. If you’d like to participate, check out their website to see if there is an action near you. And if you’re city isn’t listed and you want to help organize a sit-in, email organize@mobilizeforhealthcare.org with “Local Leader / Your City & State” in the subject and be sure to include your phone number in the email.

In recent weeks, the debate seems to be shifting. Congress appears to be standing up more forcefully for a public option, even though Obama has been missing in action. However, there is every reason in the world to enact a far more serious overhaul of our system than is currently being discussed in the mainstream. If we want to get single-payer we still have a very long way to go. Unless there is a real surge in nonviolent action that seriously disrupts business as usual, it’s hard to imagine single-payer even being put on the negotiating table. But we can’t stop fighting for it.  Joining one of these sit-ins seems like a logical and important place to start.

More than 5,000 people packed the streets of downtown Chicago yesterday morning, chanting, marching and rallying outside the American Bankers Association conference on the third and final day of what was billed as the "Showdown in Chicago."

• For the fifth straight day on Monday, students staged a peaceful sit-in at the University of Vienna to draw attention to overcrowding of lectures and to demand more of a say in how Austria’s higher education institutions are run.

• In Jordan, around 200 people staged a one-hour sit-in on Sunday at the Professional Associations Complex to protest against an assault on veteran opposition leader Leith Shbeilat by anonymous individuals earlier that day.

• Cabin crew for the Spanish airline Iberia went on a two-day strike this week in protest against a four-year wage freeze, which forced the cancellation of more than 400 domestic and international flights.

• Five people were arrested and released, and two were injured — one bleeding from his mouth — after more than 120 people were forcibly removed from the House of Commons in Ottawa on Monday after interrupting question period with a climate-change protest.

• In New Zealand, nearly 2,000 courts and justice department staff staged a one hour strike yesterday morning to protest the Justice Ministry’s refusal to engage in meaningful pay negotiations.

• Catholic schools will close across Queensland today as teachers take to the streets over a pay dispute. Their 24-hour strike follows a rally by state school teachers outside Parliament House yesterday over their pay campaign.

• All local trains of Mumbai on the Central and the Harbour lines were running behind schedule as motormen went on strike in protest against overwork and fatigue.

People in Rio De Janeiro posed as dead bodies at Copacabana beach in a demonstration after a man was found dead in a shopping cart in the city slum.

• An estimated 1,000 protesters, many of them students from Kabul University, marched through the streets of the Afghan capital on Sunday in an anti-US protest stemming from a reported incident in which US soldiers bombed a mosque and burned a copy of the Qu’ran. Police in Kabul opened fire to disperse the crowd. Similar protests took place last week in other Afghan cities.

• Six environmental activists in North Carolina were arrested Saturday in a display of civil disobedience at the Governor’s Mansion. They were protesting Duke Energy’s controversial plan to build the coal-fired Cliffside power unit in Rutherford County.

• Waving signs that declared “Northern Secondary Jail,” around 100 students protested outside Northern Secondary School last Thursday in a bid to teach the Toronto District School Board a lesson about allowing police inside their school.

• On Sunday, a group of Tibetan monks and nuns in Dharamshala staged a protest by holding a 12-hour hunger strike to draw public attention and condemn the alleged execution of four Tibetan activists by the Chinese administration over their role in last year’s riots in Lhasa.

• An estimated 400 students attended and participated last Wednesday in a teachout and walkout on California State University, Fresno’s campus that ended with a sit-in on the fourth floor of the Henry Madden Library. The students’ protest was spurred by the 32 percent fee increase that Fresno State students saw before the semester as well as the implementation of furloughs, cuts of hundreds of courses and loss of nearly 330 employees.

• Eight people were issued citations by Chicago police after sitting in the middle of a Near West Side street during a protest rally in front of the Fisk Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, in Pilsen on Saturday.

• At least six Sri Lankan refugees at a Malaysian detention camp have been on a hunger strike for more than seven days, demanding that they be allowed to meet officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

• Postal workers in the UK staged a second consecutive day of strikes on Friday, with about 78,000 delivery and collection staff absent from work.

• At Dartmouth, more than 30 students held a sit-in outside of College President Jim Yong Kim’s office last Thursday to bring attention to the need for sustainability on campus. The sit-in, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, ended when students spoke with Kim and presented him with a letter suggesting changes to the College’s current approach to sustainability.

• About 150 Yemeni inmates have gone on a hunger strike in protest against their abuse at a Saudi jail.

A libertarian counter-recruitment poster.

The habits one learns in tough economic times can last for a lifetime. Those of us who grew up with family members who lived through the Great Depression know to clean up our plates—starvation still feels to them like more of a threat than obesity. As people struggle today to make ends meet, they’re forming habits that, in turn, will come to be deeply entrenched. And it seems like one of them, especially for the most vulnerable, is going to war.

I’ve written already about how the recession has been dangerously good for the arms business. In Religion Dispatches today, veteran activist and minister Peter Laarman points out how good it has also been for military recruitment:

Earlier this month the Pentagon crowed that it had just completed its best recruiting year in three and a half decades. The announcement made no secret of the fact that a devastatingly bad job market is just terrific news for military recruiters waving hefty signing bonuses. The question of conscience: How do we feel about taking advantage of the economic vulnerability of the majority of American youth in order to make them still more vulnerable: i.e., vulnerable to suicide bombers, IEDs, mortar rounds, and even “friendly fire”?

And, of course, those less vulnerable to the collapse can go on with their lives unperturbed.

Today, obviously, our privileged young people do not have to worry about a military draft: there is absolutely no chance that they will be compelled to serve. But what is far worse than Vietnam-era draft evasion by the young and well-connected is the complete insulation from the consequences of bad policy enjoyed by today’s jeunesse doree. Not only do they not have to go to the burning deserts of Iraq or to the chilly forbidding heights of Afghanistan: they don’t even have to know anything about the lives of those who are going. The idea that they might experience any Fallows-like guilt or have any second thoughts about their degree of insulation is simply not an issue today.

There appears to be no coincidence that, just as General McChrystal calls for a massive additional deployment, the ranks are swelling. Would his dangerous proposal be even thinkable a few years ago, when people still had better opportunities available to them than soldiering?

When we go to war, when we elect to send more troops, questions need to be raised about what injustices permit us to do so. No other country, after all, seems to have the luxury to send tens of thousands of soldiers to a country on the other side of the world to fight a war with no firmly-stated goal and very little hope of success. But when there’s such an incredible disparity between rich and poor as in the United States, it’s not so much skin off the backs of the powerful.

The International Day of Climate Action appears to have gone off as planned, with many journalists calling it the most widespread day of political action in history. The 350.org website is being flooded with photos from around the world and blog updates from the always inspiring Bill McKibben.

Here in New York City, Eric, Nathan and I attended a march across the Brooklyn Bridge with a few hundred others. Many carried homemade signs and burst into spontaneous chants (like “Ain’t no power like renewable power ’cause renewable power don’t stop).

We made our presence known to the traffic on both sides of the pedestrian path, but some of us—including one noted scholar of nonviolence—wondered why we weren’t marching up the street blocking the very traffic that’s contributing to climate change.

Even so, the march was so high-spirited that by the time we gathered for a photo in Brooklyn Bridge Park there was no denying the empowerment we all felt. Knowing we were one of thousands of sizeable actions around the world gave me a tremendous sense of hope that we have the numbers to force the change that’s necessary.

Now, onward to November 30th!

Today is the International Day of Climate Action and likely the largest day of environmental action ever. Over 5,200 events in 181 countries are planned thanks to the organizing efforts of 350.org.

With the make-or-break UN climate meeting coming up in December activists are staging demonstrations around the world to promote the number 350, which most scientists consider to be a safe level of carbon in the atmosphere (as measured in parts per million). We’re already well past that number and fast approaching 400. So it’s crucial that the big polluters of the world agree to a climate treaty that brings us back to the safety zone of 350. But the only chance of that happening is if we use mass action.

So check out 350.org and search for actions in your area. Some parts of the world have already begun. 20,000 school children marched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia yesterday. And 350 activists in New Zealand–shown above–welcomed the rising sun this morning.

As mentioned on this blog before, President Obama’s frequent citation of nonviolent leaders as his heroes is completely inconsistent with, well, just about every aspect of his job. The most obvious, of course, is leading the military. And unfortunately Obama has not approached the task any differently than his predecessors. He is dead set on maintaining our presence in Iraq, bombing Pakistan and increasing troops in Afghanistan. So, to show just how inconsistent this is with the beliefs of his heroes, Rethink Afghanistan compiled a video that combines clips from the movie Gandhi, Dr. King’s Beyond Vietnman speech, and a documentary on Cesar Chavez.

Two climate activists were arrested in Brisbane, Australia yesterday for shackling themselves to a coal conveyor belt and briefly halting the loading of coal onto a Taiwanese vessel. Meanwhile 16 kayakers attempted to block the ship before being escorted away by four police boats.

• Four climate activists chained themselves across a haul road on a strip mining site in Kanawha County, West Virginia yesterday to protest mountaintop removal mining. Four more joined them to unfurl banners. All were arrested.

• Protests took place outside BBC offices in half a dozen cities throughout the UK yesterday over the appearance of white-supremacist leader Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party. In London over a 1,000 people attempted to prevent him from entering BBC headquarters for an interview, but were stopped by police.

• The AIDS Healthcare Foundation and Pink Cross Foundation have organized a boycott of Marriott hotels to protest the chain’s selection of adult films that feature sex without condoms. They’re calling the protest a “Porn In.”

• More than 500 union members and health care activists gathered outside a meeting of the giant health insurance lobby group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), to protest its efforts to kill reform.

• Seven busloads of union members from around New Jersey lined the streets near the entrance to a recently opened Walmart in Raritan on Tuesday to protest anti-worker and anti-community practices by the national discount chain.

• A group of ministers are planning to protest in a church across from a soon-to-be-opened Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club in Lincoln Park, Michigan. They’re aiming to counter the bright lights of the strip club with their own light show when it opens next week.

Former Polish President and Solidarity founding leader Lech Walesa speaks to workers during a strike at the Gdansk shipyard in this August 8, 1980. (REUTERS/Forum/Erazm Ciolek)

In the current issue of Yes! Magazine, Stephen Zunes has a great piece, entitled “Weapons of Mass Democracy,” which strongly makes the case that nonviolent resistance is the most effective tactic against oppressive regimes.

I’ve seen many articles like this before and they are no doubt important, especially for those who are just learning about this alternative history. But lately, my thinking about how we can most honestly discuss many of the success stories that Zunes cites has been evolving.

Whether we’re talking about the nonviolent movements that brought down dictators or repressive governments in the Philippines, South Africa, Poland or probably many others countries, the story is actually far more complicated than we often admit.

Yes, Ferdinand Marcos was driven from power, Nelsen Mandela was elected president, and trade unionist Lech Walesa brought the Communist government in Poland to its knees, but what was the real effect on the ground of these victories? In each of these cases, unfortunately, the economic elite that controlled their respective countries before the nonviolent uprising managed to do so afterwards as well, and the plight of the poor was exacerbated.

As Naomi Klein documents in extensive detail in The Shock Doctrine, as these countries were moving towards democracy, the new leaders – in various ways and for various reasons – effectively sold out.

For example, in Poland the Solidarity movement that Walesa led covertly abandoned their progressive economic program of worker ownership, and enacted economist Jeffrey Sach’s neo-liberal recommendations – a 15-page plan which he drew up in one night. That meant eliminating price controls, slashing subsidies, and selling off state mines, shipyards and factories to the private sector.  The results of the country’s embrace of the free market are grim, but not surprising.

“Most dramatic are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland’s population was living below the poverty line; in 2003, 59 percent of Poles had fallen below the line,” Klein writes.

A very similar and tragic story unfolded in South Africa as well. For 35 years, the African National Congress (ANC) advocated for radical economic change, including the right to work, to decent housing, and the nationalization of much of the country’s wealth and industry. As the exciting transition to democracy was taking place there, however, the ANC effectively caved on their platform. They made concessions when negotiating the new constitution, signed on to the GATT – the precursor to the World Trade Organization – which severely constrained their economic policy, and let the old apartheid bosses keep control of the central bank.  As Klein notes, the results again are telling.

As for the “banks, mines and monopoly industry” that Mandela had pledged to nationalize, they remained firmly in the hands of the same four white-owned megaconglomerates, that also control 80 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In 2005, only 4 percent of the companies listed on the exchange were owned or controlled by blacks. Seventy percent of South Africa’s land, in 2006, was still monopolized by whites, who are just 10 percent of the population… Perhaps the most striking statistic is this one: since 1990, the year Mandela left prison, the average life expectancy for South Africans has dropped by thirteen years.

So while these nonviolent movements were able to nominally gain power, the folks who actually owned and controlled these countries, seemed to only get richer.

Now to be clear: I’m not making the argument that we shouldn’t reference these examples as victories for nonviolence, but that the stories shouldn’t end where we normally end them. There is no doubt something to be celebrated in these movements, but we must also take a very critical look at how democratic the regimes that followed actually were, and most importantly, how the folks at the bottom fared.

Acknowledging that the potential economic gains from these transitions to democracy can and often have been lost at the last moment will only help us stop such scenarios from playing out again in the future.

This ridiculous “illegal alien” Halloween costume was being sold at a bunch of major retail stores recently until the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights took issue last Friday. Since then, companies including Target, Walgreens and eBay have removed the costume from their inventory. According to the Associated Press:

Target has said it sold the costume online only and that it was posted by accident though it did not meet the company’s standards. eBay said it asked sellers to remove the costume because it “does not allow items that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance, or promote organizations with such views.”

This actually seems like a pretty remarkable step for immigration advocates, who have fought to erase the hateful and inhuman term “illegal alien” from our nation’s vocabulary for quite some time and to mostly little success, thanks to xenophobic mainstream talking heads like Lou Dobbs. Unfortunately many local stores are still selling the costume, which also paradoxically comes with a green card. If that doesn’t reveal this country’s hateful ignorance toward immigrants, I don’t know what does.

Some people have argued that the activists can’t take a joke and that if anything this costume is making fun of the antiquated terminology we use for undocumented immigrants. But only someone who has no idea what the undocumented face in this country—such as indefinite imprisonment—would take issue with the outcry over this costume.

It’s not just some effort to make Halloween costumes more PC. If that were the case then activists would be attacking the many other costumes that play on Hispanic stereotypes. And to be honest, they’d probably have a case with something like this donkey riding Mexican.

Hundreds of people protested on Monday in New Zealand, saying proposed changes to the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) that would cut funding for therapy will cause victims even more trauma.

• A sit-in by 240 workers that halted operations at a South African platinum mine owned by African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) and Impala Platinum came to an end after four sacked workers were re-hired.

• Thousands of Indian auto-parts workers went on strike yesterday to protest the death of a colleague, threatening to cripple an industry that has become an engine for the economy.

• A nationwide strike by French railway workers, anxious about the restructuring of freight transport, caused transport delays across the country yesterday morning.

• On Monday, a score of workers of the Split Ironworks (Zeljezara Split) in Croatia began a hunger strike on the premises of the company in the Adriatic city, asking for the urgent resumption of the production in the plant which discontinued in April this year.

• In South Korea, a coalition of 23 groups, including the Migrant Workers Trade Union, protested in front of the Hwaseong Immigration Detention Centre in Gyeonggi Province last Friday. They were demanding the release of Minod Moktan, a 33-year-old Nepali musician and cultural activist who, like other migrant workers, is undocumented and has been the target for a government expulsion order.

At a wild conference at the National Press Club yesterday, the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum – posing as “Hingo Sembra,” a representative of the US Chamber of Commerce – announced that the Chamber was reversing its “troglodytic” stance on climate change and throwing its full support behind the Kerry-Boxer climate bill.

According to the press release for the prank:

The Chamber has recently come under fire for launching multi-million dollar advertising campaigns designed to derail climate negotiations. Their position has been so controversial that Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, PSEG, Levi Strauss & Co, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce have all left the U.S. Chamber, and Nike very publicly stepped down from the board.

[...]

News outlets were quick to jump on the story, including a Reuters story which was reprinted in the New York Times and elsewhere. The Chamber’s “about-face” was also reported on Fox Business Network and CNBC before the anchors were forced to retract in mid-sentence.

At the end of Sembra’s remarks, [Chamber of Commerce spokesman] Eric Wohlschlegel confronted Bichlbaum. In the stand-off, both accused the other of being a fraud. The standoff ended with Wohlschlegel dispensing his business card to reporters in the room, and attempting to field a number of pointed questions about the Chamber’s real stance on climate legislation currently in Congress, which the real Chamber opposes. (Video here.)

[...]

The Yes Men collaborated on this action with activists from BeyondTalk.net, the “Climate Pledge of Resistance,” which calls on citizens to risk arrest in the interest of creating pressure for sane climate legislation, and received tactical support from the DC Climate Action Factory, a semi-autonomous group of climate activists sponsored by Avaaz.org.

To keep the momentum going, earlier today, on the Capitol lawn in DC, the Yes Men were planning on holding a rally “to kick off the 350.org Day of Climate Action by showcasing a fleet of SurvivaBalls, an alternate solution to climate change that protects America’s most valuable citizens from the ravages of climate change.” No word yet on how that went.

What’s amazing is that Bichlbaum said during his Democracy Now! interview today that they were able to pull off this stunt for only $500 (the cost of renting the room). Considering how much media coverage their actions tend to generate, these types of pranks should really be attempted more often by activists of all stripes.