• Hundreds of people in Pittsburgh and Binghmaton protested plans of gas drilling in Pennsylvania and New York this week.

• On Wednesday a group of Taiwanese writers, musicians and artists protested a controversial plan by Kuokuang Petrochemical Technology Co to build oil refineries on ecologically sensitive wetlands along the coast of Dacheng Township.

• Activists from the Campaign Against Climate Change in England came to the Whitehall office of the Department of Energy and Climate Change on Wednesday to protest government subsidies for agrofuel production, which harms the environment, displaces indigenous peoples and leads to food shortages.

• About 20 people came to California’s Ivanpah Valley, 40 miles south of Las Vegas, on Tuesday to protect a 5.6-square-mile stretch of desert sacred to Native American tribes from plans to build the world’s largest system of energy-generating mirrors.

• Several hundred people went to the Seattle Police West Precinct Thursday afternoon to protest the officer-involved shooting death of a Native American man who family said was deaf in one ear and had struggled with homelessness. The man was a carver and couldn’t hear the officer’s verbal commands to drop his knife.

• More than 50 people gathered on a street corner in Omaha’s historic Dundee neighborhood yesterday to protest the planned construction of a CVS pharmacy.

• Dozens of clerical and administrative workers represented by the Teamsters union waved signs and chanted outside the University of California Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday to protest a plan to increase the share of their paychecks set aside for their pensions.

Prior to this summer, you would have had to explore the darkest corners of the gun rights movement to find anyone openly exclaiming that “gun control is racist.”  This assertion—and the corollary allegation that the civil rights movement succeeded not because of disciplined nonviolence, but because African Americans were willing to take up arms against their oppressors—emanated mostly from obscure right-wing and libertarian websites like LizMichael.com or The Campaign for Liberty.  The most-cited proponent was Clayton Cramer, a software engineer with a not-so-subtle agenda (that paved the way for Rand Paul), who has written that:  “Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should…require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.”

“The Only Black”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 ruling in McDonald v. Chicago, however, the “gun control is racist” argument is all the rage.  The June 28 decision overturned Chicago’s longstanding handgun ban and ruled that the Second Amendment applies to the states.  The lead plaintiff in the case, Otis McDonald, is a 76 year-old African-American who wants a handgun for self-defense.  “I would like to have a handgun so I could keep it right by my bed, just in case somebody might want to come in my house,” McDonald explained.  The problem is that criminals never visit McDonald when he is home—loaded shotguns have been stolen from his home on multiple occasions while he was away.  McDonald might have bought those shotguns to protect himself and his family, but they ended up on the street in criminal hands and might have been used to intimidate, injure or kill innocent people.

McDonald has long been a gun rights activist in Illinois, traveling to rallies in Springfield, Illinois, where he was “probably the only black person.”  When attorney Alan Gura selected him as the lead plaintiff in the case, he inquired, “Why would you name [the case] after me?  Is it just because I’m the only black [plaintiff]?”

Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in McDonald, imagined many other African-Americans in our nation’s history standing with the aged pro-gunner.  Specifically, Alito concluded that Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights.  He found a general right to bear arms within the “Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866,” a law that guaranteed blacks property ownership rights they were denied as slaves and created a federal agency to secure housing, establish schools, and litigate discriminatory policies for freedmen.  Alito also reasoned that the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because the amendment was based on the “Civil Rights Act of 1866,” which used some of the same language as the “Freedmen’s Bureau Act” (but which Alito himself admits did not specifically mention any right to keep and bear arms).  Citing Congressional debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, Alito made reference to the following remark by Republican Senator Samuel Pomeroy from Kansas:

Every man….should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead.  And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, noted that blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs:

The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.  As Eli Cooper, one target of such violence, is said to have explained, ‘[t]he Negro has been run over for 50 years, but it must stop now, and pistols and shotguns are the only weapons to stop a mob.’

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Leading climate activists and organizations are calling on Americans to demonstrate in big ways in the coming months. Bill McKibben of 350.org, along with the heads of Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA, recently published an open letter stating:

We’re going to have to build a movement, a movement much bigger than anything we’ve built before, a movement that can push back against the financial power of Big Oil and Big Coal. That movement is our only real hope, and we need your help to plot its future.

[...]

Time is not on our side, so we’ve concluded that going forward mass direct action must play a bigger role in this movement, as it eventually did in the suffrage movement, the civil-rights movement, and the fight against corporate globalization… History suggests, in other words, that one way to effectively communicate both to the general public and to our leaders the urgency of the crisis is to put our bodies on the line.

The groups are soliciting ideas for direct action that are “infused with the spirit of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and other peaceful protesters.” These ideas must also aim for effective symbolic targets and be able to draw hundreds or thousands of people, while also being inclusive, community rooted, visually appealing, transparant and cost-effective.

These are no doubt lofty ambitions that invariably raise the troubling question: Can Americans really be convinced to take serious action? A recent piece in Adbusters addressed this dilemma head-on with some encouraging insight.

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Last week, CNN.com ran an interesting piece by Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the outreach director of the Dar Al-Hirjah Islamic Center near the Pentagon and the Capitol, in which he draws a connection between the role of the black church in the lives of African-Americans and the present hostility toward Muslims in the United States.

The struggle for equal access, for the right to build mosques in America — not just in lower Manhattan — is reminiscent of the pain and struggle of black Americans for churches, housing, employment and, actually, public acceptance.

By the letter of the law, blacks had the right to live or work anywhere, but they were often segregated to certain areas and specific jobs. Similarly, American Muslims have the right to worship anywhere, but some Americans say we’re not ready yet for mosques being built in certain areas.

Reading this evokes in me the need for a powerful, progressive civil rights movement for Muslims.  If we are not careful, I believe, Muslim-Americans will be fiercely marginalized – more than they already are.

In my community, a large Texan city that is cordial and largely suburban– often called a “big city with a small town feel,” where many people will not be vocal about their feelings – local Muslims are accepted, at least on the surface.

Mosques have sat quietly, without much thought. Often set back behind apartment communities, off main roads, and away from the naked eye’s view, these places are not prominent – nor are they politicized.

That was until the playground of a local mosque and Islamic educational center was vandalized.  The playground was set on fire, a pipe was cut, and a raunchy image of Allah and Uncle Sam appeared.  On the article covering the vandalism in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the following statement now appears:

Editor’s note: Comments have been disabled on this report because of repeated violations of our stated policy.

The imam’s message is, in short, a call to action to those who have endured struggle.  With an anecdote, he describes one way in which we can open our hearts to the Muslim-American community:

In March of this year, a group protested my leading an opening prayer for the Virginia General Assembly.  I called the delegate who was responsible for the official invitation – Adam Ebbin, who is white, Jewish, and gay.  He said he looked at the work I had been doing for almost a decade, and said “I will stand by you.”

As he emphasizes, if we do not stand by the Muslim-American community, we will all lose in the end.

• On Monday, activists with the Rainforest Action Network dumped 1,000 pounds of earth and rubble brought from Appalachia on to the EPA headquarters’  lawn to compel the agency to veto the 2,278-acre Spruce mountaintop mine project in Blair, W.Va. The message: “EPA: don’t let King Coal dump on Appalachia.”

Paul Erlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb helped establish overpopulation as an environmental issue. But the seed of legitimate concern it once raised has blossomed into something far more sinister: an excuse for the high energy consumers of industrialized countries to shift the blame for environmental destruction on to the low energy consumers of the developing world through an anti-immigrant agenda.

According to The Center for New Community (CNC) this is a purposeful trend propagated by anti-immigrant, nativist and white nationalist groups dating back to the 1960s. These groups have tried to influence big environmental organizations like the Sierra Club (so far unsuccessfully), as well as progressives, using targeted ad campaigns and websites.

While their perspective has shown up in some well-regarded venues, such as the pages of Yale research magazine YaleGlobal, they have also been tauted by extremists, such as the Discovery Channel gunman, whose eco-inflected written demands called for programs that “find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that…”

CNC is raising awareness to this phenomenon and in the above video shows how one community organizing group in the Bronx recently held a protest outside the headquarters of the Weeden Foundation—one of the main anti-immigrant culprits trying to co-opt the environmental movement. The Bronx group made clear the irony at the heart of this issue, which is that immigrant groups typically come from cultures that live close to and value nature.

Anti-immigrant proponents actually argue that a reason to keep immigrants from entering the United States is that they pollute four-times less in their home country than they will here. Of course, such a statement is an obvious indictment of our way of living in this country. The job for environmentalists is to show how the problem is rooted in consumption not immigration and that no one group deserves more of the planet’s natural resources than another. They must share them, along with the responsibility of using them sustainably.

In recent months, workers in China have boldly gone on strike and won concessions from their employers. This wave of labor unrest is inspiring other exploited, low-wage workers throughout Asia – many of whom work for major US corporations, like Gap, Nike and Wal-Mart – to take action as well.

In Cambodia, thousands of workers began a five-day strike yesterday to demand higher wages and better benefits. According to Reuters:

The Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union, representing about 40,000 workers, said it expected about 80,000 people to go on strike as they sought a $93 monthly wage — a 50 percent increase from the $61 agreed in July under a four-year pact between the government and several unions.

That was up from a previous monthly wage of $56.

[...]

In Bangladesh, thousands of textile workers demanding an increase in wages to 5,000 taka, or $72, a month from 3,000 taka clashed with the police last month and at least 500 people were wounded. In Vietnam, thousands went on strike in April at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory.

The fact that so many workers in the region are asserting themselves at the same time gives them more power. As the Financial Times explains:

Although garment manufacturing is easy to relocate, there are few under-industrialised Asian nations for manufacturers to move to. With upward pressure on wages in all the lowest-cost production centres, many manufacturers see little option but to accede to at least some union demands.

After striking for 114 days, the union representing workers at the Mott’s apple juice plant in Williamson, N.Y., announced that an agreement was reached with Dr. Pepper Snapple. Workers wages will not be cut and their pensions will not be frozen as the company was demanding, although new hires will have 401k plans instead of pensions. According to the New York Times:

The workers at the plant, 25 miles east of Rochester, walked out on May 23, insisting that Mott’s parent company, Dr Pepper Snapple, was unfair to demand a $1.50-an-hour pay cut when it had reported record profits of $555 million last year.

The company asserted that its wage demands were a justifiable strategy to increase competitiveness, saying the plant’s workers averaged $21 an hour while other food industry workers in the area averaged $14.

Both sides were, in ways, claiming they had won.

“I think that it’s a victory,” said Stuart Appelbaum, national president of the retail, wholesale union. “We secured the wages, we secured the pensions and we secured the workers’ jobs.”

Larry Young, Dr Pepper Snapple’s chief executive, said, “From the beginning of our negotiations, we sought an agreement that supported our business, and we’re very pleased with this resolution.” He added that the deal would “bring our costs in Williamson in line” and help ensure continued growth.

Surveillance video shot by the police shows plainclothes officers confiscating computers from Baikal Environmental Wave, a prominent environmental group that has been organizing protests against Vladimir Putin's decision to reopen a paper plant that is polluting Lake Baikal.

On Saturday, the New York Times published an interesting story and video about a new tactic that Russia is using to go after its critics. As Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow summarizes:

Russian police use the pretense of enforcing Microsoft’s copyrights as an excuse to raid the offices of human rights, environmental and dissident NGOs, and Microsoft has not intervened to stop it, even when the groups are using legitimate, licensed copies of Microsoft software. Police often claim to have discovered pirated software on seized computers even before examining them, and claim that the investigations come at Microsoft’s requests. Microsoft lawyers have cooperated with raids on opposition newspapers, whose editors say that the raids would not have taken place without Microsoft’s complicity. During raids, police have been spotted removing Microsoft “Certificate of Authenticity” stickers on confiscated PCs. Microsoft’s lawyers testified in support of police claims that pirated software was found on PCs, even though the court later found that the PCs were never examined.

• Around 50 opposition activists gathered outside Moscow’s City Hall to protest the government and embattled Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, but were quickly surrounded by several hundred riot police. Thirty were arrested.

• A small group of Moscow-area environmentalists fighting to prevent the destruction of Khimki Forest by road-builders rallied on the Kremlin’s doorstep Thursday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev to honor his pledge to take their concerns into account. Protest leader Yevgenia Chirikova was permitted to deliver a petition urging Medvedev to stop the arrest of activists and the seizure of their newsletter.

• An estimated 20,000 marched through the streets of Salonika as Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou delivered his much-awaited state of the nation speech to protest the government’s unpopular economic austerity policies.

• Thousands of villagers chanting pro-independence slogans demonstrated in Kashmir yesterday after a protester was killed by a police bullet — the 71st death in three months of unrest.

• Despite the cancellation of the Qur’an burning, dozens of people made their voices heard outside Pastor Terry Jones’ Gainesville church Saturday evening, opposing his views toward Muslims and Islam.

• Fifty Spanish miners have been engaged in a sit-in 1650 feet underground for over a week to protest unpaid wages.

• Hundreds gathered at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA on Saturday to protest the airport’s switch to a non-union firm to operate its courtesy shuttles.