On September 17, the first day of Occupy Wall Street, one of the many scattershot ideas proposed in the first General Assembly meeting was a call for a general strike. It struck me at the time as one of the most important, but also least feasible, things anybody had suggested—most important, because a civil resistance movement won’t really work unless it manages to mobilize millions of people in ways that would truly undermine the bases of the U.S. economy; least feasible, because at the time Occupy Wall Street was still just a few hundred people hanging around precariously in a park, surrounded by police and unnoticed by the mainstream media. The latter has changed. The first has not.

Last Wednesday, in the wake of the previous day’s violent police crackdown, Occupy Oakland voted to call a general strike in the city for this Wednesday, November 2. According to the approved proposal, “All banks and corporations should close down for the day or we will march on them.” Plans have also been announced to march to Oakland’s port on the 2nd to close it before the night shift begins. This comes amidst an outpouring of sympathy for Occupy Oakland from around the country, especially after former Marine and Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen’s skull was fractured by a police projectile.

Even so, a general strike, even in just one city, is a very ambitious goal. Few have ever been accomplished in the United States, and not one has in recent memory. Are the occupiers really up to it?

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Local community-based immigrant advocacy groups, including VOZ, Oregon New Sanctuary Movement (ONSM), and the Partnership for Safety and Justice, converged in a peaceful demonstration this past Saturday outside of the Wells Fargo building in Portland, Oregon as part of a nationally coordinated effort in support of the National Prison Industry Divestment Campaign. Demonstrations, workshops and other actions were held by partner organizations across the country in the cities of Wichita, New York and Seattle.

Protestors called for the immediate divestment of investments made by Wells Fargo and other major shareholders in private prison corporations such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group Inc., whose business models actively pursue harsher immigrant incarceration policies such as those seen in Arizona, Georgia and more recently Alabama.  The detention centers and prisons that these and other corporations bank on are often plagued with instances of sexual and physical abuse against immigrants who do not have access to legitimate legal recourse due to their status.

Peter Cervantes-Gautshi, (check out his highly censored story, Wall Street and Our Campaign to Decriminalize Immigrants), who was present at the Portland action, stated that “we wanted to show Wells Fargo that this movement is growing and that more and more people are becoming aware of their involvement in using tax dollars to put people in cages. They need to instead invest in creating good jobs for people.”

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Written on the hand of this young protester, “Leave” - a message to Syria's President Bashar Assad

Bits and pieces of information about the growing uprising in Syria are coming our way through mainstream media sources like Al Jazeera. But dig down deep, and you’ll find a revolution with women forging the way, and with a news gap that’s being filled by Syrian expatriate females.

Let’s begin with a little known fact: The youngest known convicted prisoner of conscience in the world is a Syrian citizen. Her name is Tal al-Mallouhi, a young blogger who has been in prison since 2009, when she was 17 years old. Tal’s poetry and political interests and activism chaffed with the authorities. After being held in jail for more than two years, in February 2011, Mallouhi was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of spying for the U.S. The case of Tal became part of Syrian consciousness, particularly among women. The idea that young people were increasingly disappearing, often later found tortured or killed, sounded an alarm in villages across Syria.

During a recent conversation with Rafif, a female Syrian expatriate activist living in Northern Virginia, I learned some of the deep grievances that were at the core of decades of citizen activism in Syria. “There is a kind of gang mentality in Syria that goes beyond politics. You either support the government-supported mafias, or you are excluded from ‘inner circles’ that allow you some economic leverage. All major industries, like tourism, mobile communications, and petroleum industries are regime-controlled. In any business, you have to strike a deal with the regime in order to operate without too much government interference,” she explains. “It is a culture of bakhsheesh, meaning tip or bribe. Those who cannot afford to pay off every level of government or businesses are excluded, and therefore don’t benefit economically.”

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• A dozen men in suits, including the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum (middle-left) and Mike Bonanno (middle-right), marched with hidden placards last week after announcing at Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly that they were about to take part in a highly arrestable action. As the police, who overheard the announcement, prepared to make arrests, the suits lifted their hidden placards, revealing the message: “Brokers and Police for the Occupation.”

• While Occupy Wall Street protesters braved snow, sleet and rain in New York this weekend, scores of protesters in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas were arrested after refusing police orders to disperse.

• Hundreds of students staged an anti-government rally in eastern Sudan on Sunday, protesting against poverty and rising food prices, witnesses said.

• Workers at the world’s third-largest copper deposit, Chile’s Collahuasi mine, ended a partial strike begun early on Saturday after reaching an agreement with management over bonus payments.

• Air France cancelled one in five flights on Sunday after cabin crew stopped work for a second consecutive day to protest against employment conditions.

• More than 30 farmers who staged a sit-in Thursday in front of the Myanmar government housing department in Yangon to protest the unfair confiscation of their land. Seven people were arrested, despite the government’s stated commitment to democratic reforms.

• Activists say Syrian security forces have killed at least 44 people, as large protests calling for a no-fly zone to protect civilians and soldiers deserting the army were held across the country on Friday.

• More than 30,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv Saturday night to express anger over the high cost of living. Thousands more protested in Jerusalem.

My sister will be 30 on November 5! Happy Birthday, Gal! I remember the day she was born. The school secretary paged the classroom my brother and I were in and said, “Mrs. So and So, please send Frida and Jerry Berrigan to the main office with their belongings. They will not be returning to class today.”

When we got home, there she was, still covered in slime and yellow stuff. She was born at home. She was perfect. Our lives were never the same. Before my brother and I knew it, she was kicking our butts at checkers, running circles around us academically, and then climbing tall cranes and rappelling down others, holding corporations accountable to people.

All of this is an overly long introduction to Bank Transfer Day, which also happens to be November 5. Since it was called for by 27-year-old Kristen Christian, a coalition of groups is now encouraging people to take their money out of Wachovia and Chase and Well Fargo and TD Bank and CitiBank and Bank of America and move to smaller operations like the Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union or the Bethpage Federal Credit Union (which told The Wall Street Journal that it had signed up 1,500 new customers—twice its usual rate—this week) or the Credit Union of Ohio or Amalgamated Bank, where Occupy Wall Street puts its money.

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Fiji may seem like a distant and exotic land known primarily to Americans for its pristine beaches and ubiquitous Fiji Water bottles. “Brand Fiji” is the junta’s name for its multimillion dollar campaign to market Fiji as little more than a land of crystalline perfection. Lieutenant Colonel Ratu Tevita Mara — profiled in parts one and two of this series as Fiji’s highest-ranking defector — believes the outside world should consider targeting Brand Fiji’s most visible lifelines, such as tourism and water, that continue to provide the bulk of the cash that the regime is burning through.

“Tourists just keep feeding the regime,” Mara was widely quoted as warning Australians after his escape in May. Throughout the five years of dictatorship, Fiji has managed to retain its global reputation as a paradise — an American tourism industry survey this year found that Fiji was still the third most popular honeymoon destination in the world (behind Hawaii and French Polynesia), and the reality TV show The Bachelorette was even set there this summer. “If that is a way that the illegal junta can be brought to its knees, for tourists to be stopped from going to Fiji so the illegal junta doesn’t get the money that it’s illegally getting from tourists, then we should pursue that. Obviously it will mean hardship for us if it means hotels are closing down, but currently people are facing severe hardship,” Mara told me.

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On October 3rd, protesters at Occupy Wall Street failed to march. Instead they clumsily lurched. With white painted faces, glazed looks and dollar bills hanging out of some mouths, protesters chanted “I smell money, I smell money…” It was Corporate Zombie Day. Scenes like this and the sight of Guy Fawkes masks, clown suits, drumming circles and surrealistic posters all over the country have left many commentators scratching their heads. Is this protest or carnival? Maybe we should tell them. There’s been a sea change in the protest industry.

“A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future,” proclaims Adbusters, the initiators of Occupy Wall Street. A key part of this re-channeling of tactics has been a move away from both angry protests or passive waiting-to-be-clubbed-by-police-batons to age old carnival-style antics. A festive atmosphere has reigned supreme in all of the successful pro-democracy uprisings of the past two decades. In Poland, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tunisia and Egypt, music and humor were everywhere. Why?

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• Hundreds of Yemeni women on Wednesday set fire to traditional female veils to protest the government’s brutal crackdown against the country’s popular uprising, as overnight clashes in the capital and another city killed 25 people.

• People in the city of Homs and nearby areas of northwest Syria staged a general strike on Wednesday over President Bashar al-Assad’s intensifying military crackdown on protesters, and two were killed in one town.

• In Georgia, Atlanta police have arrested more than 50 protesters who had been camping out in Woodruff Park for the past two weeks.

• About 4,000 jobless graduates staged a second day of peaceful demonstrations on Tuesday in Morocco’s business hub Casablanca to demand public sector jobs.

• In New York City, more than 100 students, teachers and educational activists occupied the city’s Board of Education meeting Tuesday night to protest the city’s education policies, including budget cutbacks, layoffs, large class sizes and an overemphasis on standardized testing.

• At least seven protesters were killed in the capital city of Sana’a Tuesday, as Saleh told the U.S. ambassador that he would sign a deal to step down—an offer he has made several times before.

• Lawyers in Algeria went on strike Tuesday to protest against proposed changes in the organisation of the profession which they say will limit their independence and powers in court.

• Police in Myanmar halted a demonstration on Thursday by about 60 landless farmers, a rare protest that tests the new civilian government’s commitment to reforms after decades of brutal suppression of dissent.

• In San Francisco, more than 1,000 protesters rallied outside a President Obama fundraiser at the W Hotel on Tuesday to call on Obama to block the proposed Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

It’s the first time since 1990, when Colombians took to the streets demanding a new constitution, that the country’s students share a common cause. This time, they’re determined to defeat a bill that would further privatize the educational system. The movement has spread across Colombia, with tactics including the composition of new songs, hugging police officers instead of confronting them, and kissing each other while blocking principal city streets—known as besatón. These kinds of actions are similar to those used by this year’s Chilean student movement, which forced Chile’s government to negotiate and managed to paralyze the country for weeks at a time.

Last March, Colombian Minister of Education Maria Fernanda Campo proudly announced the need to reform higher education. Public and private universities took part in roundtable negotiations with the government in order to draft a bill that would integrate the different proposals. The bill eventually presented to the Chamber of Representatives in the National Congress the last October 4, however, seemed to many only to reflect the government’s interests, ignoring the previous deliberative process.

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When Fiji’s brutally repressive military tried to detain an 80-year-old reverend with the Methodist Church this summer due to his involvement with politics, it caused quite a stir — not only because of his age or his former position as the military’s head chaplain, but also because he refused to let the soldiers take him to the barracks. “I told them, the only way to take me to camp now is bundle up my legs, tied up, and my hands, I will not go with you,” was how he described the incident to New Zealand press. “That is the only way, you carry me to the camp or you bring your gun and shoot me and you carry my dead body to the camp to show to the commander,” he said.

This kind of dissension from a former military official is not typical of the one group of Fijians that actually receives special treatment. Fiji’s strongman Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama goes out of his way not to antagonize the military, which has intentionally trained more soldiers than it could handle in order to supply thousands of them to the British Army, American mercenary companies, and the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations in places like Iraq, Sinai, Lebanon, Sudan, and Somalia.

Lieutenant Colonel Ratu Tevita Mara — profiled in part one of this series as Fiji’s highest-ranking defector — has asked for the use of Fijian soldiers overseas to be stopped until democracy is restored, since he sees the practice as helping to keep Bainimarama in the military’s good graces. “He certainly rewards the military by sending them on peacekeeping duties overseas, and yes of course they get extra allowance, extra money for that,” Mara told me in a recent interview.

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