Eighteen people were killed today in Syria by security forces following Friday prayers, as scores of demonstrators are reported to have gathered in important cities and towns demanding an end to Bashar al-Assad’s rule and chanting “Death rather than humiliation.”
Thousands of workers at Freeport-McMoran’s gold and copper mine in eastern Indonesia kicked off a monthlong strike Thursday to protest low wages, bringing production and shipments to a standstill.
About 50 transit workers and union leaders barged into an MTA office building in downtown Brooklyn Monday morning for a brief but boisterous protest rally over wages and benefits.
Oil workers went on strike on Tuesday, halting construction of Colombia’s Bicentennial Pipeline, which will be the country’s longest once completed.
In Boulder, Colorado, more than 60 homeless people and activists took part in a protest and flash mob on Wednesday to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness.
Prospective homeowners in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk are demanding apartments or their money back — and have gone on hunger strike to push their point.
The signature tactic of this revolutionary year, it would seem, is a mass protest in a large, symbolic public space. We saw it in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, and then in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square in Athens. Now, in the U.S., the October 6 movement is planning to take over Washington’s Freedom Plaza, while another coalition has been planning to do the same on Wall Street on September 17—tomorrow. (For a basic account of what’s going on with the latter, see my report from earlier this week.) If you want to get something done, apparently, the way to do it is to take the square. And this is exactly what the people at Adbusters had in mind when they made their initial call to occupy Wall Street, observing that “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future”; they continued, “We want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”
This summer, as I was sipping coffee with a friend in downtown Guatemala City, I was introduced to a news reporter who agreed to take me with him as he visited murder sites. The next day I arrived at his office at 6 a.m. and immediately we received our first call: a young man with signs of torture had been shot and thrown down a ravine, his hands and feet tied. In the next thirteen hours, we received twelve such calls.
Guatemala is nowadays one of the most violent countries in Latin America, with an average of 45 murders per 100,000 people each year. (By comparison, the homicide rate in the US stands at about 5 per 100,000 and in Mexico it was 22 per 100,000 last year). Most of these murders are attributed to gang violence, especially males. This notion is supported by continuous reports of the brutality of gang violence and by the fact that 90% of the people murdered were males under the age of 29. Indeed, male youth in Guatemala are committing atrocious acts of violence, but blame now falls indiscriminately upon all youth. Tattoos, piercings and a fashion style that looks very much like US rap artists, are now considered the “markers” of violence. As a result, the youth in Guatemala suffer from a dangerous stigmatization that places them in a vulnerable position when confronted by the police and angry mobs. This prevents many of them from making their way into society and fails to acknowledge that these youth are victims to violence themselves. Moreover, it encourages police to use brutality with impunity and promotes a disregard for the legal process.
For the past 17 years, incoming first-year students at DePaul University in Chicago have launched their college careers with a class named “Discover Chicago.” Taking its identity as an urban university seriously, DePaul encourages its students to plunge into this sprawling and diverse city by offering scores of Discover courses—everything from “Chicago Theatre” to “Labor History of Chicago,” “Bridges of Chicago” to “Immigrant Youth in Chicago,” “Chicago and Jazz” to “Chicago: Urban Farm or Food Desert?”
While Discover Chicago is a class that meets weekly during the fall term, it kicks off with an intensive Immersion Week, where students traverse the city by public transportation and begin to get engaged.
Joyana Jacoby Dvorak, Lorena Shkurti and I are team-teaching “Nonviolent Chicago” this quarter. When I mention the name of this class to most people, they often react with startled laughter: “Chicago… nonviolent?” Violence is pervasive in this city—I recently wrote about a dimension of this reality on this site—but there is a growing web of programs and organizations that is slowly forming a culture of nonviolent options. By some counts, as many as 300 peace and nonviolence organizations are at work in this city.
If you went to the Pentagon’s website a few years ago, you would have come across this description of itself: “We are America’s oldest company, largest company, busiest company, and most successful company.”
This new graphic by the Economist ranks the US Department of Defense as not only America’s “largest company,” but the largest employer in the world. (I would challenge the claim that it is also the country’s “most successful company,” unless you define success by number of people killed or area of land that is destroyed or poisoned.)
While proponents of military spending might cite this fact as evidence that cutting the Pentagon’s budget now would mean a massive loss in jobs, the truth—as I wrote yesterday—is that every dollar spent on war (or preparing for war) actually costs jobs. As William Hartung notes in a helpful fact sheet:
Little Town of Bethlehem shares the life stories of three different people who grew up within the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and who each chose nonviolence as their ways of life. I deliberately selected a Muslim, a Jew and a Christian because the three faiths are seen as reasons for war, and because the three faiths are all commanded to love their neighbors.
I recognize that every story is someone’s perspective and therefore it can be said that every story has some level of bias. At the same time, the art of storytelling is about exploring the human condition. Whatever bias exists the audience is going to see it, and that is going to tell them something as well. It is going to tell them if the protagonists and filmmakers are honest, and if there is anything rewarding to learn from their perspectives. In the end the audience remembers a film or story because they believe they gained something from it, and that the story reveals something worthwhile about our common humanity. In as many words that describes why I wanted to make this film and what I wanted the film to achieve. I believe the voices of nonviolence are an underrepresented perspective and they tell us a great deal about ourselves.
We started filming in Jordan and southern Lebanon just after the 2007 war between Israel and Lebanon. It wasn’t the best time for an American film team to be in southern Beirut. Many of the craters had signs over them saying “Made in America,” in reference to the arms support America provides Israel. I knew that this was going to be a hard film to make and that many of my friends in America would not understand why we were doing this. At the same time I was challenged by what this story said about us—and by us I mean humanity. I knew that whatever the cost this was an important story to know for myself and to share with my friends and the world.
On Monday, the sacked teachers and staff of the National University in Bangladesh held a rally and staged a sit-in demonstration on the campus in Gazipur.
About two-dozen anti-BART protesters marched along San Francisco’s Market Street Monday evening in the fifth consecutive weekly rush-hour demonstration organized by the hacker group “Anonymous.”
In India, around 7,000 residents from coastal areas of Idinthakarai and other villages observed a massive hunger strike on Sunday to protest against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP).
In Pakistan, dozens of squatters staged a sit-in on Sunday in a protest against the demolition of their houses on Saturday by district administration to clear the land for construction of a road.
In the Philippines, eight political prisoners, including a woman, started an eight-day hunger strike in Iloilo on Tuesday as part of a nationwide protest to demand the release of all political detainees in the country.
Almost the entire police force of a small town in southern Spain went on sick leave yesterday in a dispute over payments.
When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for “20,000 people” to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” it never said who those people would be. Now, the question on the minds of everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to the Lower East Side anarchist set is just who and how many will actually show up.
The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it’s true. The large, established, membership groups—unions, lobbies, etc.—have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can’t be counted on en masse. There’s no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there’s no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, though its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor Micah White, solely “philosophical.”) Saturday, among other things, will be a test of the scattered American grassroots—their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.
The debt “super committee”—known officially as the Joint Select Deficit Reduction Committee—which is tasked with finding by Thanksgiving an additional $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in spending cuts or new revenues over the next ten years, had its first meeting at the end of last week.
While most Republicans would like all of those cuts to come from much needed social programs, like education and health care, there are many more humane ways to address the issue of our country’s debt. One option would be to let those Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled at the end of 2012—which would all by itself generate $2.5 trillion over the next ten years. Problem solved! At the Nation, Katrina vanden Huevel offers another possibility, writing that the committee could:
support a modest financial transaction tax that reins in speculation—such as the one called for by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or used in the UK—which could raise up to $175 billion per year. (Hey, combine that with closing the corporate tax havens that cost $100 billion in lost revenues every year and your job is done, super committee.)
With newly retired General David Petraeus sworn in as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency last week, we are reminded, as the New York Times put it back in April when he was appointed to the position, that this is only “the latest evidence of a significant shift over the past decade in how the United States fights its battles — the blurring of lines between soldiers and spies in secret American missions abroad.” This shift of the agency’s function from gathering “intelligence” (we wish) to carrying out murderous operations has been going on steadily, and we all know what it means: torture has been enshrined as a regular feature of our military enterprise. CIA personnel regularly torture prisoners, regularly cover up much, but not all, of the evidence for these heinous crimes against humanity, and have, up to now, been winked at by the public and Congress for the part that comes to light.
Of course, this shift intensified after 9/11, and the tenth anniversary of that horrific day has given us an occasion to really revisit what it means. We should be aware that no people can survive such degradation of their most basic values. When the CIA/US Army shifts more and more to paramilitary operations it shifts more and more out of the few safeguards that were erected around modern militaries to prevent them from carrying out grave abuse. It makes them look more like the death squads of Central America and Colombia than a democratic institution.
While proponents of military spending might cite this fact as evidence that cutting the Pentagon’s budget now would mean a massive loss in jobs, the truth—as I 
When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out 