As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

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Throughout history, South American nations have had their futures decided by a small number of people. It began with the Spaniards, who, as soon as they touched ground, let two or three religious and political authorities rule from 5,000 miles away. Sadly, little has changed since then, except now the ruling few are the corporate elites, empowered through government deals like the recently ratified free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States, NAFTA, and thousands of illicit licenses given to multinational companies. But this trend is beginning to change, as protests in Peru over the last month have challenged the country’s largest mining project.

The story of this ambitious and dangerously exploitative project dates back to 1993, when the US company Newmont Mining Corp. arrived in Peru to open the Yanacocha gold mine in Cajamarca, a region located in the North of the country. Using a process called “micro-mining,” which requires large quantities of a dilute cyanide solution to capture minuscule pieces of gold, Yanacocha ended up contaminating the region’s water sources–a fact overloked by then-president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence strongman Vladimiro Montesinos.

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This week the union and the U.S.-based mining corporation Freeport-McMoRan announced a settlement to a three-month long strike at its Grasburg mine in West Papua. Workers are expected to be back at work within days. Although the strike has been settled, Freeport and its activities remain controversial in West Papua and Indonesia.

The workers’ union settled for a 40 percent wage increase over two years, as well as additional housing and other benefits. The workers will also receive wages lost during the strike in the guise of a one-time three month “signing bonus.” Prior to the strike, which began on September 15, workers at Grasburg were the lowest paid at any Freeport facility. The company also has mines in the U.S., South America and the Congo. (A two-month strike at Freeport’s Cerro Verde mine in Peru was suspended at the end of November pending government mediation.)

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In her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 32-year Yemeni Tawakkul Karman—the youngest and first Arab woman recipient—offered a vision for her country’s revolution:

These revolutions were ignited by young men and women who are yearning for freedom and dignity. They know that their revolutions pass through four stages which can’t be bypassed: toppling the dictator and his family, toppling his security and military services and his nepotism networks, establishing the institutions of the transitional state, and moving towards constitutional legitimacy and establishing the modern civil and democratic state.

But despite such lofty and inspiring words—even as a unity government is being formed—unrest remains in Yemen. On November 23, President Saleh of Yemen promised to step down within 90 days, ceding power to Vice President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi as the country geared up for presidential elections in February 2012. But the protests continue as some opposition groups have rejected the deal because of the immunity it contained for the president. Saleh has backed out of similar deals before and the current deal is criticized by protesters as as being “a game.”

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[Editor's. note: This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim.]

Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for the guidance and wisdom that you have consistently given through your teaching and speeches in many places. We want to start off with a question from Faiz.

Faiz: In an article by Ahmed Rashid in the New York Times recently, he said that “after 10 years, it should be clear that the war in this region cannot be won purely by military force…. Pakistanis desperately need a new narrative… but where is the leadership to tell this story as it should be told? The military gets away with its antiquated thinking because nobody is offering an alternative, and without an alternative, nothing will improve for a long time.” Do you think there is any leadership in the world today that can propose an alternative non-military solution for Afghanistan, and if not, where or from whom would this leadership for an alternative non-military solution come from?

Noam Chomsky: I think it is well understood among the military leadership and also the political leadership in the United States and its allies, that they cannot achieve a military solution of the kind that they want. This is putting aside the question of whether that goal was ever justified; now, put that aside. Just in their terms, they know perfectly well they cannot achieve a military solution.

Is there an alternative political force that could work towards some sort of political settlement? Well, you know, that actually the major force that would be effective in bringing about that aim is popular opinion. The public is already very strongly opposed to the war and has been for a long time, but that has not translated itself into an active, committed, dedicated popular movement that is seeking to change policy. And that’s what has to be done here.

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President Barack Obama's reaction to being "mic checked" by Occupy protesters on November 22.

Politicians of both major parties are increasingly addressing—or having to cope with—Occupy Wall Street. So far this has been mainly limited to rhetoric, though perhaps more tangible actions will follow in the weeks and months ahead. Meanwhile, as politicians discuss the movement and add their perspective on OWS’ goals, we’ll also be watching how the movement will respond to the political class in turn.

Last Tuesday, President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas that framed what is likely to be the central platform of his campaign in 2012. In language that echoed the some of the messaging of the Occupy movement, Obama contrasted the vast wealth of the “1 percent” with the plummeting incomes of the rest. Calling it “wrong” and “the height of inequality” Obama blasted the entrenched government systems and loopholes that shelter the wealthy while crushing the poor. He said “inequality” six different times.

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“Building a Rainbow” is the title of an old poster I picked up somewhere along the way. The rainbow’s swath of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet layers is dazzling—and only half finished. In the picture, this symbol of peace is not an idealistic dream but something real. It is under construction, with a troupe of cranes carefully maneuvering sections into place, countless trucks and overworked paint wagons, scaffolding everywhere, and a flotilla of helicopters lumbering across the sky, each with its own precarious splotch of color dangling below.

We live in a violent world. But we also live in a world where a growing number of people everywhere are determined to confound the assumption that there is nothing we can do about this. They gamble that violence need not have the final word. They wager that there are options. They assert that we needn’t be victims of a cycle of violent history; rather, we can dare to be active subjects of a more nonviolent history that engages and transforms the violence around us. For them, violent history isn’t a given, it is made. So, too, is a nonviolent one.

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• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

It’s that TIME of the year again—ha!—when TIME magazine announces the Person of the Year, a tradition generally meant to remind us which depressing white men in suits happen to rule the world. (U.S. presidents tend to receive it when elected. George W. Bush, for instance, won the distinction in both 2000 and 2004.) TIME’s editors made a slightly more whimsical choice this year, following in the pattern of non-election years like 2006 (“You”), 2003 (“The American Soldier”), 1998 (“The Endangered Earth”). While those might seem pretty depressing too, this year’s choice represents something that, for millions of people around the world, is a source of enormous hope. That’s because it is them—though not so much in the narcissistic style of 2006. It’s official, at least according to this particular dinosaur-like, mega-corporate newsmagazine: the 2011 Person of the Year is “The Protester.”

As I first saw this announcement percolating on Twitter, being spread around proudly every which way by Occupy Wall Street-allied accounts, all I could think was: what took you so long? Where were you?

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The news has been filled with contention over Egypt’s November elections, but far less attention is being paid to the voting in Tunisia—also recently liberated from the rule of a dictator. More than 100 political parties participated. Tunisia’s October balloting was designed to elect members of the 217-member assembly that will deliberate and draft a new constitution and form a parliament. On the scene as an international observer, former U.S. First Lady Rosalynn Carter noted, “It appears that everybody wants a good election—the politicians, the military (who are not political), the powerful trade unions, the police, the people—and everything is being done with compromise to make this happen.” Many in the Arab countries now view these elections as a prototype, and they prominently displayed the characteristics celebrated in modern political thought. Clean elections, of course, do not occur spontaneously. So how did this happen?

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