Lindsay Lohan wearing her ankle bracelet.

It’s an eschatological dream: open the prisons. Let at least nonviolent offenders out and give them a chance to build an honest life in society. Free at last, right? Well, yeah—except for the odd beepers strapped onto their ankles and the boxes on their belts, which broadcast their position (and the chemical composition of their sweat) to an office park in Indiana. The contraptions even periodically issue verbal commands at their wearers. Step away from the liquor store.

Atlantic correspondent Graeme Wood, in his new article “Prison without Walls,” is sold. The United States has one of the world’s most brutal, inhumane, and disastrous incarceration industries, with currently around 2.3 million people locked up in prisons and jails—perhaps half of whom, if ever released, will be back again within three years. The answer? A growing (private) regime of total surveillance by electronic monitoring. Emerging technologies now allow contractors to track offenders better than ever, to the point now that, in many cases, walls, bars, and a jumpsuit are becoming obsolete. Wood imagines that

if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

He has a point. American prisons are horrific and utterly counterproductive places, where inmates learn to live in fear of their guards and each other. Those who get out bring that logic with them into society outside. The fewer people we need to keep in prisons, without doubt, the better off we’ll all be. And the process that Wood describes, of course, is hardly radical, as already two-thirds of those being punished in this country are on probation or parole. But, like most dreams, it carries the ingredients of a nightmare.

Read the rest of this article »

• Singing choruses of “we shall not be moved” while scattering sunflower seeds, 14 activists were arrested in Kansas City on Monday after blocking an earth moving vehicle on the site of a proposed nuclear weapons manufacturing facility.

• Last Friday, around 35 Palestinians demonstrated against Hallamish settlement with around 15 Israeli and international peace activists in the village of An Nabi Salih.

• German workers on Tuesday protested against what their union says are plans by the country’s central bank to have euro banknotes printed by foreign companies.

• Some Pakistani flood victims blocked highways to demand government help on Tuesday.

• Three television channels in Ukraine went on strike on Saturday in protest of steadily increasing pressure on media in Ukraine, with hundreds of other journalists declaring readiness to join the action.

• Students from various schools and universities in the Philippines traded the four corners of their classrooms for the streets last Friday to join the National Youth Walkout and appeal for more government support for the education sector.

• On Monday, hundreds of protesters started a sit-in outside the legislature, fueled by mounting anger over the government’s cross-strait policies and the expected passage of a controversial trade agreement with China later this week.

• The 19-day long protest in Bolivia’s Potosi province was finally brought to an end with the protesters lifting the blockade of the airport and major roads after a deal was struck with the government.

• The entire team of Sri Lanka’s government wildlife vets has gone on strike amid mounting controversy over an elephant conservation plan that has led to increased clashes between the animals and villagers.

Check out this great remake of Depeche Mode’s “People are People” by a flash mob in a Target store over the weekend. According to the video, over 250,000 people have pledged to boycott Target over their $150,000 donation to a group paying for ads for Tom Emmer, a conservative candidate for governor in Minnesota who opposes gay marriage.

If that many people follow through on their commitment to boycott, the store will easily lose far more than $150,000 in business for the donation, which will hopefully make other corporations think twice about the potential ramifications of spending money on political candidates.

Activists are not only upset about this particular donation, as their song suggests, but the fact that Target took advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision earlier this year -  which ruled that corporations can spend an unlimited amount of money on political advertisements -  to back Emmer.

This would suggest that Target is just the first target by citizens upset with the now unchecked ability corporations have to influence elections in the US, and that as other donations by other corporations become public, these protests will spread. As one of the protesters mentions at the end of the video, Best Buy is already in the crosshairs for donating $100,000 to the same group supporting Emmer in Minnesota.

If you want to join the growing boycott of Target, click here or here, and sign this petition asking the company to change its ways.

After more than three years of pressuring major banks that fund mountaintop removal coal mining, Rainforest Action Network [RAN] is reporting that the top four US banks have curbed their loans for this destructive practice.

Within the last two years, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo along with Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley have successively passed public policies limiting their financial relationships with coal operators that practice mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. These banks were the lead financiers of the practice prior to their policy shifts. Last month, Wells Fargo became the fourth top US bank to adopt a position limiting MTR financing. These policies signal a sector-wide shift away from a mining practice that has become increasingly controversial and a move toward more environmentally conscious fossil fuels financing.

[...]

One of the major impacts of these mountaintop mining policies is that the banks are no longer financing Massey Energy, the leading MTR coal company in the country that was involved in the April 5 Upper Big Branch mine explosion where 29 miners tragically died. In particular, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, all of which have had substantial financing relationships (underwriting bonds or providing loans) with Massey Energy since January 2005, no longer finance the notorious company.

As examples: Based on Bloomberg data, Bank of America, which was one of the ‘syndication agents’ on a $175 million revolver loan to Massey in March 2008, is no longer on the deal or any others with the company.  JPMorgan, similarly, underwrote $180 million in debt securities in 2008 to Massey and was also the lead manager on a $233 million share deal (joint with UBS) that same year. JPMorgan no longer has any financial ties to the company.

This victory could be of great importance to the larger fight for climate justice because, as RAN co-founder Mike Roselle told me last year, “If we can’t win on mountaintop removal, then there’s very little hope that anything can be done.”

This short video, called Civil Resistance: A First Look, which I first saw at the Fletcher Summer Institute at Tufts in June, is a solid introduction to the concept of civil resistance for anyone unfamiliar with it. The narrator answers a series of basic questions that many people new to the idea might have and briefly goes into some of the strategic and tactical concerns that activists face in developing a movement.

For example, there is a good explanation of the risks involved in public action against repressive regimes and the pros and cons of having a charismatic leader.

My only major issue with the film is with the response to the question, “What if my adversary can’t be persuaded?” The narrator replies definitively that civil resistance is not about persuasion, and that it is not an effort to reach the conscience of the opponents, but to remove their power by using ridicule and humor, imposing economic costs and disrupting business as usual.

While those are all important ways to affect the balance of power, to argue that persuasion is not part of the equation is misleading. It has in fact been a feature of most nonviolent movements. Reaching out to the conscience of the opponent was central to the struggles that Gandhi and Martin Luther King led, and to their understanding of how nonviolence works.

Being able to convert your adversaries – while perhaps rare, especially for those with the most at stake in preserving the status quo – can be a deciding factor in the outcome of the struggle. I would argue, for example, that persuasion of the opponent is an instrumental part of any nonviolent success story where defections by the police or security forces play a central role in the overthrow of a repressive regime. This was the case with the movements that brought down Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah in Iran and Milosevic in Serbia, to name just a few.

The film can be downloaded in several different languages on its accompanying website, which also has a good collection of other resources on the subject.

• About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs set to classic Americana songs.

• Around 1,000 Senegalese opposition supporters took to the streets on Saturday to protest President Abdoulaye Wade’s regime, saying they were fed up with power cuts, floods, and rising food costs.

• In Haiti, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the National Palace Thursday to oppose the forced evictions of thousands of displaced residents from makeshift camps. The Haitian government has been urged to issue a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelter options can be provided.

• Two Korean priests are publicly fasting outside a government building in the latest protest against the highly controversial Four Rivers project, which they believe will be detrimental to the environment.

• Iranian opposition members in Germany are staging a two-day hunger strike to demand a stop executions and an international investigation of prisons in their home country. A group of 20 on Friday chanted slogans such as “Stop stonings” and “Free political prisoners” on Berlin’s most prominent public spot at the Brandenburg Gate, two days after the purported TV confession of an Iranian woman facing death by stoning on adultery charges.

• On Saturday, all the taxi drivers in the provincial city of Dégolan‌ in Iranian Kurdistan went on strike parking their taxi cabs by the Bolbanabad terminal to protest a 20 day interruption in the compressed natural gas supplies.

• Sunday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals was briefly interrupted by protesters urging commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s new immigration legislation.

The history of nonviolent social change is filled with injunctions to refuse compliance with unjust laws and policies. As Gandhi once famously said, “non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” Reflecting on the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. observed that “what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system. … We were simply saying to the white community: We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system. From that moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation.” In Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau mapped out the terrain in ways that would later influence both Gandhi and King:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. … Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

These teachings were alive and well during the demonstrations in Arizona against SB 1070, the state’s anti-immigrant law that was partially struck down by a federal judge two days before it took effect. In recognition of the larger issues raised by the bill, as well as the realization that open persecution of “illegals” would remain official state policy going forward, hundreds of people took to the streets on July 29th under the banner of the movement’s mantra, “We Will Not Comply.” Almost 100 people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience during these protests, and a clear message of the refusal to cooperate with injustice was communicated to both local officials and an international audience alike.

While many of the events of that day have been well-reported, the opening salvo that set the tone of noncompliance and civil resistance seemed to slip by almost without notice. It was, however, a poignant and powerful action that reflected the best qualities of the nonviolence paradigm. Here is my recollection of what transpired that night as SB 1070 was to take effect: Read the rest of this article »

• A group of desperate job-hunters—who’ve been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out—staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street yesterday to demand that the Senate pass the Tier 5 unemployment extension.

• A crowd of approximately 35 gathered at JP Morgan Chase’s offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to demand that banks and private equity firms pay California counties millions in overdue real estate taxes related to corporate acquisitions stemming from the economic crisis.

• Four Greenpeace activists climbed onto the roof of Poland’s environment ministry in Warsaw this week to protest the government’s lackluster defence of the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, one of Europe’s most precious environments.

• Employees at the Mott’s apple processing plant in Williamson, N.Y., have been on strike for at least two months with no end in sight, as the company insists on wage cuts despite posting record profits.

• A crowd of about 300 villagers in Kabul blocked a main road in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday to protest the killing of three innocent villagers by US Forces. In the first six months of this year, 386 civilians were killed by NATO or Afghan government forces.

• Police arrested five of about 100 protesters gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel yesterday, trying to deliver petitions to commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star game out of Arizona because of that state’s new immigration law.

• Expatriate Kashmiris and Pakistanis from different parts of the United Kingdom staged a big demonstration in front of 10-Downing Street on Thursday to protest against British Prime Minister David Cameron’s remarks on issues of Pakistan and Kashmir.

The character attacks, verbal harassment and forced resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod last month is one more example of the ugliness and insidiousness of gotcha journalism and craven political hypocrisy and expediency. By now, it is likely you are familiar with this tragic story of deception and betrayal. While apologies have been doled out like candy since the day Sherrod was fired, the American people have been left without answers to the questions of how and why the events of this injustice unfolded as they did.

On July 19, with the intention of advancing an agenda of hate, fear, intimidation and denigration, far-right zealot and propagandist Andrew Breitbart and his corporate collaborator Fox News Channel (FNC), two notorious smear artists and purveyors of disinformation, invented a story about racial discrimination and dressed it up as factual news. In doing so they successfully duped media organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and top officials in the Obama administration. Breitbart and FNC, both of whom market themselves as paragons of truth, have a history of direct and malicious trickery. You will recall that in 2009 they convinced political leaders that White House green jobs czar Van Jones and the federally funded community-based organization ACORN were engaged in scandalous activities. The fabricated stories led to the firing of Jones and defunding of ACORN.

Shirley Sherrod is the latest victim of Breitbart and FNC and their right-wing propaganda machine. What they generated this time was a selectively excerpted, decontextualized and misleading video of a speech Sherrod gave at a NAACP function last March, effectively vilifying and railroading Sherrod with the charge that the video was not only incontrovertible evidence of reverse racism, but according to Breitbart it was “video proof” that “the NAACP awards racism”, and according to a FNC headline, it was “government discrimination caught on tape.” Seemingly, the targets of Breitbart and FNC were the NAACP and President Obama, not necessarily Sherrod. However, to incriminate and discredit the NAACP and Obama, they used Sherrod as a tool of convenience and as a means to end, utterly without conscience or a sense of responsibility.

In the manipulated video, Shirley Sherrod, daughter of Hosie Miller, a victim of racial murder by a white neighbor in the Jim Crow South, and wife of Charles Sherrod, a 1960s Freedom Rider and leading member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is seen and heard recounting a time twenty-four years earlier when as an employee of a nonprofit land assistance agency she was initially disinclined to afford the “full force” of her job capacity to help a white farmer to save the family farm. The reason Sherrod cited for her pause and reluctance was the discrimination against black farmers she had witnessed during the span of her lifetime and career. In fact, the full anecdote shared by Sherrod that day revealed very clearly that she overcame any thoughts about permitting race to play a part in her decision making about human need. Instead, she summoned the courage and strength to confront her initial thoughts and feelings and, as a result, discovered her capacity for empathy and was guided by an unadulterated appreciation, respect and value for the impoverished, regardless of race.
Read the rest of this article »

From day one of the BP oil spill back in April, locals in southeast Florida feared that a carefree day at the beach might soon be a distant memory, a devastating prospect for a region whose primary industries consist of tourism and retirement. In mid May, satellite images showed oil starting to enter the Gulf Loop, a current that pulls water through the Florida Keys, into the Gulf Stream and up to Palm Beach County. Haunted by the specter of the Gulf Stream bringing spilled oil to the shores of southeast Florida, several organizations here mounted nonviolent responses to the largest oil disaster in U.S. history. With the renegade pipeline in the Gulf apparently capped, this is a good time for a post-mortem wrap-up.

BP Boycott Kickoff – May 12

The Palm Beach County Environmental Coalition was the first responder, calling for a boycott kickoff at a local BP station on a Wednesday evening. The roughly 30 demonstrators on the scene drew mostly positive responses from rush-hour drivers, but the station had customers throughout the 90-minute demonstration. Media coverage of the event, however, was extensive and may have had a greater impact than was at first apparent. A month after the boycott kickoff, a story about local BP station owners being unfairly hurt by the boycott appeared on the front page of the Palm Beach Post, persuading a lot of folks to abandon the boycott.

World Oceans Day – June 8

Three weeks after the boycott kickoff, A World Oceans Day meeting called by a local Greenpeace member attracted a diverse crowd of about 40. Housewives, teenagers, teachers, business owners, and retirees all seemed eager—desperate even—to act, but no unified action was suggested and none materialized. Instead, people were given a list of things they could do on their own, e.g., volunteer for the clean-up effort, sign a petition, make a donation, join a mailing list, etc. People left that meeting as isolated in their efforts as they had been before. In retrospect, World Oceans Day may have failed because it didn’t propose a mass action that directly challenged one or more of the groups responsible for the spill, namely BP, the federal government, and consumers themselves. Read the rest of this article »