• Residents of cities in southern Yemen on Sunday staged a general strike to protest what they termed government oppression as well as action taken against a daily newspaper, activists and witnesses said. The strike was almost total in the southern provinces of Dhale, Lahaj, Shabwa and Abyan as all shops were shut and transportation ground to a halt,

• In Iran, more than 100 police and plainclothes officers broke up a gathering of the Mourning Mothers in Laleh Park Saturday afternoon. The group — formed by women whose children have been killed in recent anti-government protests — gathers every weekend at the park to call attention to the deaths.

• Hundreds in Hong Kong ringed the city’s legislature on Friday as public frustration mounted over government attempts to bulldoze through a high speed railway, an issue that has also catalyzed a fresh push for full democracy.

• Unionized workers of South Korea’s third-largest carmaker Kia Motors Crop. will hold a partial strike for four hours a day this week in a protest against wages.

• Ground staff striking at Geneva International Airport have voted to continue their week-long protest action over salary and work conditions.

• About 300 Egyptian workers at the fishing boats of Nea Michaniona (a village near Thessaloniki, Northern Greece) continue their strike, which began on Christmas, after blockading the small port of the village last week to protest a severe decrease in their income over recent months.

• Climate justice activists will converge outside the 2nd Annual Carbon Trading Summit in New York on January 12-13 to oppose market-based trading of greenhouse gas emissions credits and call for real solutions to the climate crisis.

• The mediamen in Indian administered Kashmir on Friday staged a sit-in to protest against the shooting of a photo-journalist by a police officer in Srinagar on Thursday.

• Waving signs reading: “We All Deserve the Freedom to Marry,” more than 200 gay-rights activists and union members representing hotel employees rallied outside the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego on Saturday in the latest protest over the owner’s support for a ban on gay marriage.

Last week, Ariana Huffington and Rob Johnson announced a new campaign to challenge the big four banks – JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo – which took hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money during the bailout while cutting lending and paying millions to defeat any substantial reform of the system. When Huffington and Johnson contrasted the behavior of these mammoth institutions over dinner with friends before Christmas:

…with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don’t we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse — what if we used it to make the system better?

In response, they launched a website, Move Your Money, that includes an extremely helpful tool where everyone can “plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.” In addition, Eugene Jarecki, the award-winning filmmaker behind Why We Fight, a great film about militarism in America, made a video (above) to go along with the campaign.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. It’s neither Left nor Right — it’s populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It’s time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths.

It could also just as easily be described as a boycott of these big financial institutions.

While some have argued that the math for this campaign simply doesn’t add up, others have come to Huffington’s defense. Reuters’ blogger Felix Salmon wrote an interesting response to critics, in which he pointed out that even though many who would likely participate in this boycott wouldn’t have huge bank accounts to close, they could still have a serious impact. Banks earn tens of billions a year simply from overdraft fees and the like, which are primarily paid by their poorest customers. Therefore, as Salmon notes:

If the people with modest-sized checking accounts started leaving the big four banks for community banks and credit unions, that fee income would fall much faster than the banks’ deposit bases. That’s where the pressure from this campaign would really be felt.

It was 3am when they came barreling into town – Israeli jeeps and tanks preempting the dawn and hollering menacing messages over their loudspeakers. ‘Wake up you Arab dogs’ they would exclaim as our team gathered to prepare our nonviolent direct response to the impending threat of violence.  What do we do?  Planning a course of action as a member of the International Solidarity Movement entails its own process, one that not always dovetails with the ethos of being a member of the body of Christ.  For those of us who have been led to Palestine by our love for Jesus, for God and for humanity, we inexorably find ourselves asking, like Christoper Dickey in his article in Newsweek, what would Jesus do in Palestine?  As followers of Jesus, our answer is crafted from the loving words and actions of the Good Shepherd who is both Jewish and Palestinian.

Side by side with self-proclaimed atheist anarchists, I found myself at times unnerved by the cavalier attitude of tank-chasers and the hostility of those who sought to provoke violence for the sake of their own aggrandizement.  This is not to devalue or dismiss the legitimacy of others’ motivations for being there but to honestly convey my own perception of existing ranks within the organization.  In fact, it was on this day that despite the disparity in our spiritual and political motivations we were able to act in concert for the betterment of the Palestinian people.  Why? Because we let love be our guide.  We assessed the situation and determined that our highest priority were the humanitarian concerns of those Palestinians who were unable to access food and essential provisions because of the curfew.  The team member in charge of facilitating communication was an Israeli-Jew fluent in Hebrew and English.  In all humility, he put himself in harm’s way on behalf of people he never met because he believed that those who shared his religion and ethnicity were perpetuating a grave injustice.  To me, this is what Jesus did during His time, and this is what Jesus would do today.

A nonviolent revolution is well underway in Palestine, one in which native Palestinians protest,  boycott and divest alongside Israeli and international partners.  We strive for the end of military occupation, to end the appropriation and destruction of Palestinian land, an end to the bloodshed and adherence to international law.  Yet for all this to happen one very important thing must happen.  Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians must come to love and respect each other.  I heard Palestinians tell me that the conflict will only end when the Jews were pushed into the sea and obliterated.  I saw first hand how ruthless Israeli Jews and settlers could be towards Palestinians.  This is why I believe that recent efforts like those of B’Tselem are on target to address the conflict at its roots and are aimed at creating understanding, respect and tolerance amongst those at war with each other.  The conflict must be transformed by building bridges that showcase culture, through dialogue, by sharing hopes, dreams, tears and aspirations.

In short, Jews and Arabs must fall in love with each other.  Barriers and walls, rockets and arbitrary detentions only dash the hopes of a lasting peace built on a foundation of respect for mutual sanctity.  Palestinians must continue to tell their stories, for the very right to tell their own history is under threat.  In the midst of such an asymmetrical conflict, we must stand in solidarity with those who are in jeopardy of losing it all.  And, like Jesus, one who perfectly embodies a Jewish-Palestinian identity, we must call into unity and awareness all who are blinded by hate, power and greed.  We can and will do this with the simplicity of our impartial loving concern.

• About 500 striking Algerian workers blocked a main road near the capital on Thursday—the latest in a series of outbreaks of unrest over price inflation and living conditions. They were confronted with lines of riot police equipped with water cannons and armored vehicles.
  

• When the Olympic torch passed through Manitoba yesterday it was trailed by seven horses carrying leaders from native communities, who were drawing attention to the plight of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.

• Over 800 members of UNITE HERE Local 2 and 400 supporters blocked the San Francisco Hilton’s main entrance for several hours to protest the hotel chain’s proposal to cut starting wages for new hires by 25 percent.  140 were arrested.

• About 5,000 demonstrators gathered yesterday in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan to protest the deaths of children in an explosion on Wednesday that they blamed on U.S. forces.

• Five activists in Homestead Florida are fasting to protest the deportation of immigrants with families.

• Several thousand DeKalb County school employees dressed in black yesterday to protest the superintendent’s $15,000 raise, which comes after the board slashed their pay increases and implemented a one-day furlough.

• Fujitsu workers in east Manchester, Warrington, Bolton and Crewe are taking part in a 48-hour walkout as part of the UK’s first ever national IT sector strike to protest redundancies, pay and pensions.

A HAPPY Canadian emigre in Costa Rica. Photo by author.

Nicholas Kristof has a happy-go-lucky column today in the Times about Costa Rica that reads as part tourism advertisement, part political common sense. He goes on and on about how the country is consistently ranked high in “happiness” surveys. This is true. How, then, did they get that way?

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Wow, wait, there’s more. Not only do they bother to educate each other, but they make efforts not to destroy the environment—a turn that came only after decades of incredibly destructive government policies, often financed by American business interests.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

This is an understatement. Certain areas of Costa Rica are crawling with Americans. In addition to high happiness rankings, the country is also #1 in the world for lost or stolen US passports, an embassy official there told me.

A poster in a Costa Rican beach town. Prostitution is legal there, just not with children. Note that the sign is in English.

A pressing question, then, is what effect this influx of Americans is having there. When I spent a month last summer with the photographer Lucas Foglia traveling around Costa Rica meeting American expats, there were two main patterns we found: a leisure class intent on exploiting the locals as much as possible in search of a low-cost paradise, and an idealistic frenzy of folks Going Back to the Land in search of a better, more sustainable way of life—and it wasn’t always easy to separate the one from the other. Often the “English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast” that Kristof looks forward to are the least sustainable things going, and they charge prices beyond what the locals can afford. (He also neglects to mention the flourishing sex trade, which is what brings so many aging American men down there in the first place.)

Costa Rica’s example is an incredibly instructive one, but we should be careful not to let it turn into another prime opportunity for careless exploitation. Rather than migrating en masse to benefit from that tiny country’s good decisions—and possibly ruining their effects in the process—Americans should work to follow its example ourselves, at home.

Next week, on January 11, the 8th anniversary of the first prisoner arriving at Guantanamo, our friends at Witness Against Torture have organized a 12-day fast in DC to call on the Obama administration to uphold its promise to close the notorious prison and declare their opposition to the inmates continued indefinite detention (without charges or trial) in the US.

According to their press release:

Members of Witness Against Torture will rally in front of the White House at 11:45 a.m. to protest the lack of progress toward justice for detainees since Obama took office and demand from the administration true change. Speakers will announce a 12-Day Fast for Justice in Washington DC, ending on January 22– the Obama administration’s self-declared, and now-voided, deadline for closing Guantanamo.

[...]

After the demonstration, activists will stage a Guantanamo prisoner procession to the National Press Club. There, they will join the Center for Constitutional Rights for a press briefing featuring detainee lawyers and human rights activists. The briefing, led by CCR Executive Director Vince Warren, will include the reading of letters from released and exonerated Guantanamo detainees calling for the prison’s closure and justice for all detainees.

Many of us here at Waging Nonviolence have been involved in past actions organized by Witness Against Torture. They are a phenomenal group of activists, including many from the Catholic Worker movement, who know this issue inside and out. If you can make it to DC, I’m sure it will be a moving experience.

Here is the latest webcomic from our friend Jason Laning, who wrote the post on anarchism earlier this week. As always, visit his site to see it in its original size or check out his other work.

A pro-Kurdish demonstrator flashes a victory sign during a sit-in protest in central Istanbul on January 3. Hundreds of Kurdish women gathered in central Istanbul to protest against a ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.

• More than 100 demonstrators were detained Tuesday evening at a rally in downtown San Francisco held by hotel workers who have been without new contracts since August, police and rally organizers said. Unite Here Local 2 President Mike Casey estimated 1,300 demonstrators took part in yesterday’s action.

• More than 2,800 Chuquicamata and Mina Sur miners in Chile did not report to work on Monday to protest the wage and bonus package offered by Codelco, which is the world’s largest copper producer.

• In Manhattan yesterday, about 100 people protested the detention of Jean Montrevil, a Haitian who has had a green card since 1986 but, owing to a drug conviction for which he served time in the 1990s, has been subject to supervision and was detained by U.S. Immigration authorities on December 30. Ten protesters were arrested after failing to heed a police order to disperse as they blocked traffic.

• Angry farmers wearing broad-brimmed hats and cracking kangaroo-hide whips rallied outside Parliament in Canberra on Monday as one of their colleagues, sheep farmer Peter Spencer, entered his 43rd day on a hunger strike to demand compensation for Australian climate change policy.

• A two-day strike by Kenya’s matatu minibus taxis, which had stranded thousands of commuters, has been called off after government intervention. Matatu operators agreed to go back to work after the government promised to deal with their grievances.

• Virgin Trains booking office staff have gone on a 24-hour strike on one of Britain’s busiest rail lines, in protest of the company’s planned cutbacks.

• San Diego City College students were escorted out of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Front Street office Monday afternoon after they staged a sit-in during the morning to protest recent budget cuts in higher education.

• Anti-wall activists demonstrated outside Israel’s Ofer Prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday to demand the release of detained activist Jamal Juma to concide with the convening of his military court hearing.

Before it fades too far into the past, I wanted to note a few things about the commentary that President Obama’s Oslo speech elicited because it reveals certain problems that will undoubtedly have bearing on events in the New Year. Obama’s speech was organized around the assertion that he, as a head of state, and we, as human beings, must grapple with two truths: a “hard truth” that governments “will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified” and another truth that “no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy” and “is an expression of human folly.”

This paradox has troubled thoughtful people through the ages, but it is not the paradox of our time. The puzzle of our time is just as weighty but more practical and, in a sense, has begun to dissolve or transform this older paradox. The puzzle of our time is that military might has sometimes spectacularly succeeded and sometimes spectacularly failed in achieving political objectives in the twentieth century and yet most people, certainly most Americans, and every American President, persist in assuming that physical violence is generally more effective than other means in times of emergency. The President spoke of just wars in his speech, inviting a critique on moral grounds. But most commentators sidestepped the issue of the morality of war and focused on the related but fundamentally different claim that violence is necessary because sometimes only force can stop the violence and evil of others.

Conservatives like Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly were quick to praise the speech because to their great relief it seemed to finally acknowledge the truth that American military might is the most important factor in the security and stability of the world. The President asserted that we have “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms” and for conservatives this seemed like a surprising sea-change, which they hoped was a result of him maturing into his role as commander-in-chief. (Though his axing of F-22 fighter jet development and billions for other weapons systems leaves them skeptical that he really adequately values our military power.)

Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks both wrote approvingly of the Christian brand of realism that Obama seemed to offer, which they understood as reflecting the proper balance between embracing the necessity of the use of the force and the idea that we should feel sad and dirty about it when we do. But realist commentators like Stephen Walt pointed out that the President was either disingenuous in his claim that American military power should underwrite international law or, as secular realists would expect, simply exempting the United States from the notion that international law should be enforced. After all, he clearly did not mean that the United States should be held accountable by the rest of the world for breaking international law or violating existing rules of conduct.

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A post over at the NYC gossip blog Gawker posed a rather strange question in regards to the recent student protests against the University of California budget cuts:

Why are college student protesters so annoying these days? (Were they always annoying, no matter what generation?) Seriously, I’m asking. I know I should feel good about youthful idealism and bright naive hopes that total overhaul is possible, but I don’t.

The author acknowledged that they are “fighting for something good” but found “the tactics and the attitude so irksome, so stubbornly pop-political and self-concerned.” He cited the disappointment of a group of students when they weren’t arrested for occupying a campus building as an example.

They wanted the outrage and the belligerence and the fighting. So they could get a louder point across? Yes, probably. But also, maybe, so they could have war stories and battle scars, so they could feel the selfish swell of having done something monumental and risky and public. “Weren’t you one of those kids,” awed anti-Zionist freshmen will whisper to these now wizened and graying seniors. “Yeah, you know” they’ll say, propping a ratty black utility soldier boot up on the dumpster dived coffee table. “It just needed to be done.”

This characterization of what might have been going through the students’ minds is a bit unfair, if not unrealistic. It seems highly unlikely that someone motivated entirely by a selfish desire for glory would commit themselves to an action that could result in being pepper sprayed and beaten by police, which is exactly what happened to student protesters at UCLA. The UC Berkeley students who occupied Wheeler Hall faced even worse in the form of rubber bullets. So if there were a few students upset about not being arrested, perhaps they can be forgiven. It’s not hard to imagine how preparing oneself for a harsh potential outcome might be a bit of a let down when it doesn’t come to pass.

Certainly there were faults with some of the student protests—vandalism, for one, which only ever works against the overall message. But, by and large, I think the students who took action against a 32 percent tuition raise and the loss of quality professors and programs should be commended for their efforts. I see nothing “irksome” or “stubbornly pop-political” with thousands of students risking personal welfare (and over 200 getting arrested) to oppose budget cuts caused by reckless spending and growth. Shouldn’t education be one of the last institutions to suffer from such stupidity?

It wouldn’t be wise to discount any student protest of this magnitude. History shows that they have been vital and necessary. Just look at the Free Speech Movement that took place at Berkeley 45 years ago. The last thing anyone would call it or its charasmatic leader, Mario Savio, is annoying. As he famously said, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”