Some Occupiers just want the banks to act more reasonably; others want to abolish capitalism. Most cruise to meetings on two wheels; others hate bike lanes. In Minneapolis, as in places across the United States, Occupy Our Homes has brought union members, anarchists, lawyers, grassroots organizers, democrats and veterans all under the same roof, united by a common goal of saving homeowners from eviction and full neighborhoods from displacement. They might not all share the same vision of utopia, but housing justice work is demonstrating that, for today’s era of activism, humanity can trump ideology.

Last Saturday, more than 25 community members celebrated with Monique White, a resident of north Minneapolis, who had recently won a new mortgage from US Bank. They were all packed into White’s small kitchen, eating spiced chicken legs barbecued by Bobby Hull, a homeowner and Marines veteran from south Minneapolis who had won back his own home three months earlier.

“If anyone needs to use my bathroom, it’s — ” Monique White began to say, then stopped herself. The crowd laughed; everyone in the room not only knew where her bathroom was, they’d slept on her living room floor, marched with her to US Bank, sat beside her in court and helped water the cabbage in her backyard, which White planted a mere two weeks before her scheduled eviction.

The seven-month campaign brought together activists and community members across entrenched and often irreconcilable political and ideological lines, unifying those pushing for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system with those advocating for reform such as widespread principal reduction. The coalition itself is no small victory. Nationally, various housing campaigns can be divided on strategies and goals, with some groups focusing on home takeovers to radically redefine land control and ownership, while others advocate for mortgage renegotiations as a first step to reigning in the banks.

In Minneapolis, the organizing strategy has thus far fallen into the latter camp, with both Hull and White winning renegotiated mortgages. But the campaigns have relied on the work of people with a diversity of ideological positions.

“I’m not a huge advocate of private property,” said an organizer who asked to be called T.K. He missed the barbeque at Monique White’s house, not because he didn’t support the victory but because he was helping coordinate a 24-hour eviction defense at Occupy our Homes’ newest campaign: Alejandra and David Cruz’s foreclosed house across town.

“If the United Nations says housing is a human right, and people are in need and there are a plethora of homes, then there is a disconnect here,” he said. “At that point, in my mind, private property is invalidated by the human need.”

The Cruz family is asking for a renegotiation with PNC Bank — a demand that, as T.K. said, “doesn’t challenge capitalism.” Yet he and the rest of the eviction defense team are still willing to put their bodies on the line in what many believe to be the first hard-lockdown eviction defense since Occupy began.

As at White’s house, the Cruz family’s home is a space of unity and coalition-building. Direct-action activists defend the house around the clock. Labor groups supply copious brown paper bag lunches. Faith groups like the church across the street are reaching out to their congregations. Neighbors up and down the block display signs demanding an end to foreclosure on their front lawns. Even the house itself speaks of the team’s willingness to pursue multiple paths to win: Directly above a lockdown barrel on the front steps that will physically prevent the police from carrying out the Cruz’s furniture hangs a sign that says, “Negotiations, Not Evictions.”

Occupy our Homes Minneapolis is now looking to spread to tenants and underwater homeowners who are not yet in default in order to break down the stark class divisions of housing and build a unified coalition. Some members, inspired by Take Back the Land, are also looking at the possibility of home takeovers. Even more broadly, Occupy Our Homes has partnered with the city’s large Somali and Latino communities because they all share a common enemy: the big banks.

Last Friday, hundreds marched through the streets to protest Wells Fargo. Women clad in full burqas carried signs declaring that they had closed their accounts because Wells Fargo blocks money transfers to Somalia. Spanish-speakers denounced the bank for investing in private prison corporations whose lobbyists are behind some of the worst anti-immigration laws, such as Arizona’s SB 1070. Union members wearing orange vests screen-printed with the words “Labor’s Back” blocked traffic for the non-permitted march. Alejandra Cruz and other Mexicans led the march after performing a traditional Aztec dance. Behind them was a large Occupy Our Homes banner.

“For me, coalition building around issues is the best way to get shit done,” said Rachel E. B. Lang, the lawyer who worked on Monique White’s case and has been involved in Occupy Minneapolis since the beginning. “Historically, revolutions happen when a series of reforms are won, and it’s not good enough. From that momentum comes total change.”

It was a great action. Three years ago, seven activists went to the Alamance County Detention Center in Graham, North Carolina. Two were dressed like ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a third looked like Lady Liberty. In a bold and creative action aimed at drawing attention to the unjust, unfair and racially biased immigration practices, the activists tried to convince jail officials to take Lady Liberty into custody. The rest of the activists blocked the doors to the jail facility.

Immigration is a hot button issue in this area of North Carolina, which has one of the fastest growing Latino populations in the country, mostly because of labor needed in poultry processing plants and agricultural fields.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has taken a tough stance on undocumented people. Local authorities are part of 287(g), exercising authority as federal immigration agents under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The program is justified by its intent to pursue violent criminals and terrorism suspects. But in North Carolina, it has meant a lot of traffic violations for Latinos.

Deborah Weissman, a law professor at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, testified before the House of Representatives in April 2009 that:

In Alamance County, approximately seventy percent of immigrants detained through 287(g) were arrested on routine traffic offenses; another sixteen percent for driving while impaired charges, and only fifteen percent for felony charges. Furthermore, local law enforcement have set up roadblocks for the purpose of checking licenses outside of Latino markets on the weekends and on Sundays, they have stationed themselves at roads that provide access to Latino churches. Because these roadblock checkpoints are excluded from racial profiling data collection, it is difficult to know the statistics of individuals arrested pursuant to these tactics; however, their location is indicative of an effort to target Latinos as they go about their family shopping and worship.

That testimony is confirmed by a study from Elon University political science Professor Laura Roselle who reviewed Alamance police records and found that sheriff’s deputies stopped and cited 1,344 Hispanics over the same five-year period, or 850 more stops than the sheriff’s office reported to the State Bureau of Investigation. Professor Roselle concluded that “I believe the sheriff’s department is unfairly targeting Hispanics.”

All of this means money for the Sheriff Terry Johnson. It is a perverse engine of economic growth for the region. The federal government paying local authorities $66 per undocumented per night in detention. In February 2008 alone, “bed rentals” to ICE brought in $400,000 in federal money, the sheriff boasted.

But it is not just about dollars, it is also about bias, ignorance and prejudice. In a 2007 local newspaper interview, Sheriff Johnson complained that immigrants just aren’t like us: “Their values are a lot different — their morals — than what we have here. In Mexico, there’s nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old girl… They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico.”

But getting back to Lady Liberty. The police eventually did arrest her and the six others and local courts put them on trial.

But, justice was not swift, because the last two defendants just reported for their jail sentences yesterday. Lady Liberty (aka Audrey Schwankl) has already served her sentence, another was convicted in district court, the cases against two defendants were dropped, and the last defendant — Juan Montes — died following heart surgery in October 2009. He was 44, married with two daughters.

The small drama of two men headed off to jail — Patrick O’Neill and Francisco Risso — is happening against the backdrop of a national furor over immigration as the Supreme Court hears the case of Arizona’s draconian immigration law — SB 1070, which requires that law enforcement personnel question people about their immigration status if they have a reasonable suspicion that person is an illegal immigrant.

Patrick and Francisco refused to pay fines stemming from their cases. They were sentenced to eight months unsupervised probation, ten-day suspended jail sentences, $200 fines, and more than $300 each in court costs. As O’Neill, a Catholic Worker and father of eight from Raleigh, told the court “On moral grounds with all due respect and good conscience, I cannot pay fines and court costs to a system that’s mistreating my Latino brothers and sisters.” We wish them luck as they begin their jail sentence, and say thank you for their nonviolent witness.

The manager of a Hot and Crusty bakery on New York’s Upper East Side watched through the window as a handful of workers speaking broken English passed out fliers to customers inside. Across the street, a private detective in a shiny black SUV surveyed the scene as potential customers and well-dressed women scanned the quarter-sheets detailing the chain restaurant’s abuses: below-minimum-wage paychecks, threats of cutting hours, refusal to negotiate with the workers for safer conditions. (Other violations were left off, including multiple accounts of sexual harassment.) One of the workers exiting the restaurant flashed those flyering a discrete thumbs-up.

The workers were from another branch of the chain bakery 20 blocks south, where they launched a successful organizing campaign with the help of the Laundry Workers Center. Now, as they continued to push for negotiations, the team was expanding to other restaurants to put pressure on the owners.

A coalition including Occupy Wall Street, unions and community groups have called for “a day without the 99%” on May 1. One of the greatest challenges in preparation for that has been organizing precarious workers — those in non-unionized sectors like restaurants, domestic care, retail and freelancing, where jobs turn over fast and some lack U.S. work permits. Yet the Laundry Workers Center, which is part of the May Day coalition, is organizing worker-led campaigns capable of escalating to actions such as walkouts and facility takeovers if wages and conditions don’t improve. Even within unionized sectors, these types of workplace actions are rare in the United States. Yet this is just the kind of radical, unsanctioned organizing that the Occupy movement is trying to help spread through the call for a general strike that many assemblies have issued for May Day.

The Laundry Workers Center (LWC) formed last year to fill the gap between unions and charitable service providers, which help provide workers with additional skills or U.S. work permits but little more. The mission was to organize laundromats — a sector that has never been organized in New York City on a mass scale — and the group plans to launch a 15-laundromat campaign later this year.

Workers from Hot and Crusty approached the young LWC in the fall, after being turned away by a handful of other organizations. Following an eight-week crash course in political consciousness and race and gender equality, the 14 workers launched their first action on January 21, the coldest day of the winter.

Amid the falling snow and bitter temperatures, a crowd of 50 workers, family members and Occupy Wall Street activists gathered a few blocks north of the restaurant at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue, stamping their feet and blowing hot air into cupped hands. The week before, LWC organizer Virgilio Aran had laid out his honest expectations: it was almost a certainty that the workers would all be fired. The group marched toward the restaurant chanting “Jefes, escucha, el pueblo esta de lucha!” (Bosses, listen, the people are in the fight!) Inside the building, the remaining workers walked off their stations and, together, they presented the manager with the list of their demands: improved workplace conditions and wage increases.

“You don’t know what you just did,” the manager hissed at one of the workers. Yet within months, instead of being fired, the workers had been offered keys to the store by corporate higher-ups, the branch manager asked to join the campaign and Aran won the right to organize in the restaurant — an unprecedented victory for a non-unionized workplace. Yet, behind the scenes, management is building its resistance, hiring an anti-union lawyer and threatening every worker and organizer with a lawsuit.

As the campaign builds, the stakes of repression are getting higher, with organizers warning of conspiracy charges and managers using the police and immigration offices to intimidate the workers. At one of the last actions, for example, a manager tried to disperse the protest by calling the cops. Yet the workers stayed put, even ridiculing their boss when the police couldn’t prevent illegal flyering.

“When he saw that, the boss was so nervous,” says one of the workers.

The Hot and Crusty workers are prepared to escalate as well, through walkouts, lock-ins and a possible occupation of the workplace itself — all tactics that might be expected in Buenos Aires a decade ago, but hardly in today’s mid-Manhattan. Today, the workers and their supporters plan to occupy restaurant chain owner Mark Samson’s Park Avenue office.

The workers’ fearlessness in the face of harsh consequences suggests that the campaign has become about much more than negotiating for these particular jobs at this particular chain store. Rather, it’s the beginning of a renewed struggle for precarious workers everywhere to gain power and control in their own workplaces, on their own terms.

Watch a video of a discussion about immigrant worker justice at an Occupy Wall Street planning meeting for May Day:

• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

Detroit Occupiers oppose a house eviction. Photo by Stephen Boyle, via Occupy-Detroit.us.

A truck pulling an enormous construction dumpster came rumbling down Pierson Street in northwest Detroit on January 31. It was a cold Michigan morning, and the whole street was slick with ice. The 20 activists standing on Bertha and William Garrett’s front lawn had been there for over an hour. One Teamster had been waiting since 4:30 a.m. because he was afraid the dumpster would come early; as a driver he knew that his co-workers often worked before the rest of the world woke.

Suddenly, a car screeched to a stop in the middle of the street between the house and the dumpster. A young man ran down the road and jumped onto the driver’s side of the truck, shouting for him to turn around. An older man with Parkinson’s planted himself in front of the bumper and shook his fist. The coalition of neighbors and activists — including People before Banks, Occupy Detroit, Moratorium NOW!, Jobs for Justice and the Local 600 United Auto Workers — all knew that by city ordinance an eviction must occur within 48 hours of the dumpster arriving in front of a foreclosed home, that without a dumpster there would be no eviction. Blocked and confused, the driver left.

That afternoon, 65-year-old Bertha Garrett lay down on the floor in front of the office of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, and refused to leave until the bank agreed to negotiate her eviction. The next day, the Garretts’ lawyer received a call from Mellon Trust’s lawyers asking the family “to call off the dogs.” Less than a month later, Bertha Garrett signed papers to buy back her home for $12,000.

Across the country, homeowners, activist organizations, lawyers, unions and Occupiers are uniting to create a direct-action campaign against foreclosures. In Minneapolis, a former Marine erected an anti-foreclosure fence around his block to win a loan modification. In Nashville, a 78-year-old civil rights activist stopped Chase’s eviction by occupying her home with neighborhood support. In San Diego and L.A., 24-hour front-lawn occupations saved two families’ homes. In Rochester, New York, nearly 1,000 people protested outside Wells Fargo, winning a family an indefinite stay and prompting the bank to fire their foreclosure law firm. In Atlanta, front-lawn occupations have stopped the eviction of two homes, a homeless shelter and a historic church. In New York City, Occupiers stopped home auctions by singing in the courtroom and moved furniture into a Bank of America branch, arguing that the taxpayers’ $230 billion (and counting) bailout bought Americans not only the right to resist eviction, but the right to live inside the bank itself.

As preexisting anti-foreclosure organizations and Occupy merge, the campaign is spreading to nearly every major city, with front-lawn occupations, eviction defense teams or auction blockades currently underway in Boston, Tampa, Maui, Detroit, Nashville, Birmingham, New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Delaware and cities across California.

These successful anti-foreclosure actions are not merely one crack in the armor of a historically unjust global economic system. Because the housing market bubble was responsible for the collapse, foreclosures powerfully represent the hypocrisy of the current system, in which the orchestrators of the bubble receive trillion-dollar bailouts, and the victims of its burst receive eviction notices. It’s no wonder that the most recognizable symbol of Occupy — the tent — is a form of shelter. In this era, housing is the personal made political. Homes are both the symbolic and real site of Wall Street’s injustice, as well as an opportunity for collective intervention.

—

Detroit is arguably the best example of how individual foreclosures create systemic injustice. The city’s infrastructure was built for two million people; today, just over 700,000 remain. Full square miles on the east side are fully abandoned except for the occasional deer or fox. Even in populated neighborhoods, charred houses with twisted metal roofs are remnants of recent Devil’s Nights when residents torched hundreds of abandoned homes. In a country whose national identity has expansion and unchecked growth at its center, Detroit’s depopulation has been such a curious challenge that urban planners have proposed reforesting — literally planting trees — in the middle of city blocks.

The media has been quick to attribute the recent exodus of a quarter million Detroit residents to the decline of the manufacturing industry. But just as important a part of this picture is the banks’ forced removal through foreclosures of more than 100,000 families over the last five years, the majority of whom were African Americans who had been targeted for predatory, subprime loans. In the late-2000s, the rate of eviction was so high that the city hired private “Blackwater bailiffs” to keep pace.

In depleting the city of its residents and tax base, the banks are quietly waging an economic war against the government of Detroit and its people. It’s a war whose weapons are eviction notices, property devaluations and shame, yet whose strategy is classic “shock doctrine”: reduce the city to a compound of building shells, declare it a “blank slate,” then privatize the hell out of it. The state is already threatening to take over the city through Michigan’s emergency financial manager law — a power grab that would remove any budgetary accountability and nullify all the city’s contracts, including union contracts, except one: the city’s annual $600 million debt to the banks.

Against these odds, however, Detroit’s residents are fighting to preserve control and ownership of their city.

“I never saw myself moving anything,” said Bertha Garrett, seated in the living room of the home that, after 22 years, she finally owns. An elegant, deeply religious woman, Ms. Garrett was clad in her Sunday best: a white dress suit, an embroidered muslin shawl and a wide-brimmed hat with delicate tulle and a large flower. In the next room, her husband William practiced navigating the house. Multiple strokes have left him partially blind, forcing him to close his hair salon and making it impossible for the family to meet their ever-increasing mortgage payments.

“People were saying that she needed psychiatric help, because she just didn’t ‘get it,’” said Ms. Garrett’s daughter, Michele Finley. “But it wasn’t that she didn’t understand that the bank has a legal document, it was that the bank didn’t understand that this was our home.”

This loyalty to their homes and their city, this rough pride in the city’s long history and thriving culture is voiced across Detroit. As someone had scrawled on the bathroom wall at a downtown bar:

Detroit Wins
When We Win
And Fucking Live
Here

If the foreclosures continue as expected, Detroit is poised to become the nation’s first major bank-owned city — but others will follow.

“Foreclosures create the same pattern everywhere,” said Jerry Goldberg, one of the most prominent anti-foreclosure lawyers in Detroit. “It’s just more extreme here.”

Historically, the housing movement is among the most constant in our nation’s history of activism — a country where private property is a right but a family’s basic shelter, security and safety is a privilege. Most often led by women and people of color, the block-by-block grassroots movement boasts considerable success: the implementation of rent stabilization laws in the 1920s and ’30s, dozens of state moratoriums during the Great Depression, and hundreds of building and home takeovers in the 1970s and ’80s that led to squatters’ rights and more stringent foreclosure laws in cities like New York.

Today’s anti-foreclosure movement is decentralized and action-based, with hundreds of organizations using a range of tactics, including front-lawn tent occupations, bank protests, furniture move-ins, media scandals, home takeovers and auction blockades. In New York City, Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street are planning to disrupt every home auction during the third week of April with soulful singing in the courtrooms, a tactic that has already stopped a handful of auctions this winter (and, for full disclosure, landed me with disorderly conduct charges earlier this week). In San Francisco, Buffalo, Detroit and other cities, homeowners are moving their furniture and families back into their homes after being evicted. Some actions are more scalable than others. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, an extended eviction defense team has lived in tents on a family’s front lawn for more than two months, weathering freezing weather and a tornado. (“It came within a hundred feet, and it scared the fuck out of me, pardon my language,” said Allyn Hudson, one of the Occupiers.) Many of the anti-foreclosure protests have such widespread support that union members turn out en masse and even the police refuse to intervene. In Murrieta, California, the police tasked with arresting Kristiane Chappell and Occupy San Diego activists for trespassing outside First Mortgage Corp. of Ontario, California, ignored the bank’s complaint and allowed the protest to proceed.

“One of the officers said, ‘If that were my mom, I’d be here too,” recalls Kristiane Chappell, whose mother, a paraplegic schoolteacher, now has secure housing.

—

This coming year, the banks are threatening foreclosure on more than one million families in the United States, which raises the question: Why aren’t more people coming together to resist eviction, especially considering the legacy of this movement? According to organizers across the country, one of the greatest barriers to collective action is the pervasive isolation and shame that surrounds homeownership and foreclosure. Every neighborhood — and in some states, every block — has a story like Eloise Pittman’s.

When Ms. Pittman moved into her family home on Glen Iris Street in Atlanta in 1953, the house represented a great source of pride. The home was a nice house in a historic African American neighborhood. Martin Luther King lived right up the street. The family had owned the house since the 1950s, paid off by Ms. Pittman’s mother who washed dishes for a living. It was a perfect success story of the American dream.

Eloise Pittman hosted every family birthday, Christmas and Thanksgiving, filling the home with meatloaf and oxtails, children and grandchildren. She was a strong, proud schoolteacher who raised her family to belief in the American values of hard work and self-sufficiency. Yet, in 1985, she took out a mortgage loan that she later learned was a predatory loan. She tried to outmaneuver her ballooning payments, taking out another loan to pay the first, then a third to pay the other two. Chase Bank, meanwhile, used loan modifications and double-digit interest rates to strip the house of all its equity.

“The banks preyed on her for so many years. And she never said a word,” said her granddaughter Carmen Pittman.

On November 29, 2011, Ms. Pittman died in the backroom of the house, carrying her secret and more than $400,000 in debt. Less than a week later, the family received an eviction notice.

Over the last 60 years, homeownership has been the embodiment of the American dream — an idea so pervasive that it was sanctioned by the government with the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Our country’s embrace of free-market ideology as a social and cultural value further reinforced the myth that a home represented not only a family’s economic net worth, but its moral worth. Under this twisted logic, well-painted shutters and white picket fences came to signify dedication and hard work, and a foreclosure sign, failure. Even as the government bailed out ever larger corporations against all rules of the game, missed mortgage payments were still being seen as an individual problem rather than a systemic issue.

“People would almost rather lose their home than be seen on TV trying to save their home,” said Matt Smucker, an organizer with Occupy Our Homes in New York City.

Yet people are beginning to realize that inscribing this economic theory into our national narrative has benefited only those individuals and corporations at the top of the economic pyramid. Communities across the country are now coming together to share stories about facing and fighting foreclosure. Led by Eloise Pittman’s granddaughter Carmen, the Glen Iris house’s front lawn has become a tent city where neighbors and Occupiers run 24-hour eviction defense, reach out to other homeowners and organize actions. Occupy Minneapolis hosts weekly homeowner-support gatherings, one of the reasons that the local anti-foreclosure campaign has saved more than five homes this winter alone. In Boston, the neighborhood meetings organized by City Life — one of the most successful anti-foreclosure organizations in the country — have so much cathartic energy that they are compared to religious revivals. As these neighborhood assemblies spread, the anti-foreclosure movement is becoming no less than a deep destabilization of our national narrative, a collective imagining of a world in which a family’s fight for shelter doesn’t divide communities but unites them. Inspired by recent successes in Spain, where hundreds of home takeovers by M-15 activists have won families the legal right to keep their homes, activists see these first targeted actions as building pressure toward structural change.

“When you look at most of the quantum leaps forward for this country for progressive movements — whether it was child labor laws, women’s rights, emancipation, civil rights — you can see that all of these injustices were legal at one point,” said Anthony Newby, an activist with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change in Minneapolis. “Can we create new narratives? That’s been our goal from the beginning: to reframe the way that we’re thinking about this issue.”

To foster this cultural shift, some are focusing on building neighborhood eviction-blockade teams to institute an on-the-ground people’s moratorium on foreclosure. Others are organizing rent and mortgage strikes to show that missed payments are not a personal family’s shortcoming but an act of community resistance. Still more are using home takeovers to demonstrate that — in a country with 24 empty houses for every homeless person — our nation has the resources and wealth to make housing truly a human right.

Over the long term, this movement does not simply demand that the banks and the government address the systemic injustice that they oversee; it demands that we re-imagine our relationship to housing and to each other. What the housing crisis has taught us is that we’ve all been complicit in upholding a false and failed national narrative that property rights are more important than the needs of people. Our challenge, then, is not only to build a new economic system, but to imagine a new national narrative, a new social contract.

—

On the first spring day in Detroit, J.B. gave a tour of his kingdom on Goldengate Street.

“Just look at this floor!” he exclaimed, gesturing at cream-colored tiling mostly obscured by trash and piles of plaster. A 20-year-old man with facial tattoos and a fist-shaped comb rising from his short afro, J.B. sounded more like a real estate agent than what he is: an artist who has lived on his own since he was 12. Now, he’s working with other Occupiers to take over bank-owned houses. “Wait till you see the bathrooms,” he continued. “Matching his and hers sinks. A rose marble tub. I would never have left this house. It makes me so mad.”

The homes in this neighborhood were so thoroughly gutted by strippers after the banks forced out the residents that the whole area is slated for demolition, threatening the precarious stability of all the surrounding homes and families. This block embodies anti-foreclosure activist Bartosz Kumor’s observation that “Detroit is a place where policy is insufficient, where we need people taking over neighborhoods and providing for themselves.”

J.B. has already installed wood-burning stoves, water collection systems, drywall, and new plumbing in many of the seven homes his team has occupied. One is already filled with books, paintings and an artists’ studio where J.B. plans to host free classes; another is to be a martial arts dojo. They want to bring all the houses up to code so that the overcrowded homeless shelter nearby can move people in when the team migrates to the next block. It’s an ad hoc project: In one of the houses, the walls have both knives embedded in the plaster and sharpie-scribbled diagrams for solar-panel roofing.

Like Bertha Garrett, J.B. and his team are fighting for the city piece by piece, using their bodies to preserve a neighborhood that the banks seized for cash, stripped of life and then left to die.

“We don’t own none of these houses,” J.B. said honestly. “But if we stay in them, keep working on them, we can save them.” He leaned off the balcony on one of the houses and staring at his handiwork: half a dozen homes already filled with the clutter, knick-knacks, love and memories that make a four-walled structure one’s own.

Muscovites mount a tank during the protests against the 1991 attempted coup in Russia. Photo by Shepard Sherbell / Corbis, via TIME.

We’re used to it by now: once an invention gets established, people add applications of it to situations the originators never imagined. This seems to be just as true with social inventions, such as nonviolent action.

I’m remembering a workshop that exiled Palestinian Mubarak Awad and I were leading in Washington. Among the activists in the workshop were several of the lead organizers from an eco-justice organization, and they started leaning forward when I described differences between nonviolent action when used for change and when used for defense. I could almost see thought bubbles forming over their heads, the concentration was so intense. The difference was something they’d seen again and again but didn’t know how to name.

“For us, a typical campaign is to stop a company from dumping toxic waste in a poor neighborhood,” one woman explained. “We organizers do our usual thing — contact people on the margin of the community who have an interest in change and persuade them to get active on the issue. Then suddenly we’re surprised when a mainstream leader or two jumps into the campaign, and the next thing you know, they’re out in the street blocking a trash truck, and we’re wondering why are they so ahead of schedule?”

The other organizers with her laughed.

“We’re perceiving the situation as just change, but they aren’t. They’re seeing it as defense — they are defending their community against the bad waste dumpers. And one of the things that’s different about defense is that it’s the responsibility of community leaders to defend their community, or they lose their credibility as leaders!”

Another of the group’s organizers picked up the thread. “So we could save a lot of time as organizers if we saw the difference between change and defense, and sharpened our strategy!”

The change application is the default for many activists. But defense often has more capacity to galvanize. Last year in Wisconsin, for instance, 100,000 people occupied the state capitol to defend the public employees’ unions. In fact, of the approximately 600 cases in the Global Nonviolent Action Database, over 200 are defense cases, altogether involving tens of millions of people.

In 1991, the KGB and hard-line Communist Party leaders arrested Premier Gorbachev and tried to implement a coup d’etat. A tremendous nonviolent resistance movement spontaneously erupted. Crowds stopped tanks without barricades. Troops began to refuse to follow orders. The coup failed; Gorbachev resumed office and sacked the plotters. As that struggle unfolded I was optimistic, remembering a previous large-scale successful nonviolent defense against a coup d’etat, in France, when some army generals tried to impose their rule in the place of de Gaulle in 1962. But 10 million workers joined the noncooperation strategy, and the coup attempt was defeated.

Each day during the Russian defense of ’91, I was getting emails in Philadelphia from Russian friends whom I knew because I had been coaching them in facilitation skills. Naturally, on my next trip to Moscow to work with them I was eager to hear their own stories of what the resistance was like. They changed the subject, and so did other Russians I met on that trip.

I didn’t get why, but there was a lot about Russian culture I didn’t get, so I shut up. Finally, while drinking vodka with my comrades the night before leaving, I asked them why they didn’t want to talk about their participation in a world-class act of nonviolent resistance.

They said they didn’t like to think about it because the outcome was so depressing. “There we were,” they said, “hundreds of thousands of us stopping the hated hard-liners and their tanks. It was so exciting! We thought: ‘This is it! This is the nonviolent revolution come at last!’ But, instead, we’re back to bureaucracy and top-down power games.”

At last I understood. They had done a brilliantly successful defense of the status quo (i.e., the liberalizing Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika), but at the time they thought they were making revolutionary change. Of course they were disappointed. We talked long into the night about how different a revolutionary strategy in Russia would have to be from their anti-coup resistance, and how it’s often the case that defense is easier than change.

Defense shows up more frequently on a smaller scale — for example, neighborhoods defending themselves against the threat of an expressway coming through. Some urban black neighborhoods in the U.S. used nonviolent action to fight the invasion of drug dealers; they marched, prevented drug dealers from using favorite street corners, and even used sledgehammers to beat down the doors of crack (cocaine) houses and chant their way inside while the dealers ran out the back!

Sometimes, actually, a situation can be read either way: either the change app or the defense app could probably succeed. That was true in Philadelphia when some friends of mine decided to organize a campaign against the USA Patriot Act, a repressive law already passed by Congress and President George W. Bush in 2001. My friends wanted the City Council to vote against participation in the act, not only to lay the groundwork for future noncooperation and non-enforcement, but also to help build the national movement against Patriot Act II. My friends knew about the choice of apps and realized they could plausibly frame their campaign as either change or defense. The Patriot Act already existed, so they could proclaim their intention to change or abolish it, starting in Philly. Or they could announce that they were defending Philadelphia against this imposition from Washington. Either way they framed it, they would demand that the City Council come out against the act.

They decided on defense because it might then be easier to claim the legacy of Philadelphia as the place where the U.S. Constitution was written and as the site of the Liberty Bell; the campaign would be defending liberty. Their choice worked well; they got far beyond “the usual suspects” of familiar social activist coalitions. I thoroughly enjoyed going to the City Council chamber for the final vote, surrounded by hundreds of leaders from organizations that didn’t consider themselves “activist” but were proud to come to defend the liberties of their country. The City Council knew which way to vote.

The third app is, as far as I know, new in its organized strategic use. Civilian peacekeeping, also called third party nonviolent intervention (TPNI), began to emerge in the 1960s. Shanti Sena, the Indian Peace Brigade, intervened multiple times in Hindu/Muslim riots to reduce injuries and deaths and end the fighting. In Baroda, Gujarat, for example, its 1965 intervention included going directly into violent streets and risking injury from rioters and the police. Then, in a daring move in the 1970 riot in Bhiwanda, a largely Hindu group of peacekeepers ostentatiously slept as guests in a house in a Muslim neighborhood, surprising local Hindus that the peacekeepers could escape alive from the Muslim “monsters.” Shanti Sena grew to 6,000 volunteers at its peak.

When I taught a group of graduate students recently about such third-party nonviolent intervention, one of the students told us that she earns her way through school by bartending, “I break up fights on a lot of Saturday nights doing exactly what you’re talking about,” she said.

Like other apps of nonviolent action, TPNI draws on human nature and what countless numbers of people do in everyday life. Recreation leaders in community centers tell stories of stepping between upset young people when tension rises during a basketball game. I’ve heard stories of individual members of the clergy and nuns going to picket lines in coal country in order to protect miners from assault by company thugs; they’d found that “stepping in between” minimized the damage. The cases in the Global Nonviolent Action Database include examples of much more organized action. The Movement for a New Society, for one, sent carloads of activists to Wounded Knee in South Dakota to get between the federal troops who were in armed confrontation with the occupation by members of the American Indian Movement. MNS succeeded in stalling the violence for their first few days on the scene but were eventually forced out by the government.

The earliest instance I know about of an international organization adopting TPNI was in the early 1980s. Peace Brigades International (PBI) volunteers became unarmed bodyguards for human rights activists who were threatened with assassination in the police states of El Salvador and Guatemala. PBI’s tactic, formally called protective accompaniment, is different from the kind of third-party work we call mediation. In mediation and other forms of alternate dispute resolution, the third party assists two parties who are ready to talk even if they are still fighting. The mediator sits down with the parties in a room, or shuttles between them to keep communication going.

The extraordinary thing about third party nonviolent intervention is that it is an app to use when the two parties won’t talk or negotiate, and one or both simply wants to keep fighting. In fact, the app is not really for conflict resolution — it’s for increasing the safety in which the conflict can continue to be waged. That’s why I call it “nonviolent action,” rather than a technique for resolving conflict.

I have no doubt that additional applications will be found for nonviolent action, because organizers are always looking for ways to stand up for themselves and others. Distinguishing among the three so far identified — change, defense, and third-party nonviolent intervention — gives us a head start on strategy. We won’t act like social-change activists when defense is what people want. We won’t waste our time “speaking truth to power” when it’s change that we want. And we’ll know how to profile ourselves for maximum leverage when we’re seeking to protect others from victimization. Most of all, we’ll experience ourselves as more powerful in those situations where it’s a judgment call; we can decide for ourselves whether we’ll win more easily by framing our campaign as one app or another.

Being able to strategize this way puts us ahead of previous generations, and it makes victories even more likely in our future.

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

• About 20,000 Russians angry over an election campaign slanted in Putin’s favor and reports of widespread violations in Sunday’s voting rallied in Moscow on Monday. Riot police quickly moved in, dispersing the crowd and detaining hundreds of demonstrators.

• Lakotas on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota were arrested as they blockaded tar sands pipeline trucks from entering their territory on Monday.

• Thousands of students and activists marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento Monday to protest cuts in higher education in an action dubbed “Occupy the Capitol.”

• As U.S. President Barack Obama met with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Monday, over 100 protesters converged at a park in front the White House, urging the United States not to support a potential Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

• A dozen female environmental activists in Ecuador were detained inside the Chinese embassy Monday for protesting Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s decision to sign a deal with a Chinese firm to open a massive copper mine in the Amazon.

• On Saturday, over 100 Bulgarian environmentalist staged a protest rally against looming amendments to the Forestry Act.

• On Friday, thousands of Bahrainis launched what they said would be a week of daily sit-in protests in a Shiite village to commemorate an uprising crushed a year ago.

• On Friday, over twenty-five hundred students protested the possible deportation of 18-year-old student and valedictorian Daniela Pelaez at the North Miami Senior High School.

• Several hundred public school students rallied in support of teachers at the offices of Premier Christy Clark at the World Trade Center in Vancouver on Friday.

Direct Action, by Luke Hauser.

Thirty years ago today a handful of us nonviolently blocked the South Gate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a top-secret nuclear weapons lab in Northern California.  Most of us were sentenced to a week in the local county jail. It was my first arrest.

Though LLNL successfully fended off years of mounting opposition—it continues to operate to this day—a surge of global anti-nuclear resistance in those years created the conditions for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which 157 nations have signed) and a string of arms control agreements. Our little action, organized by the Livermore Action Group (LAG), was a modest contribution to that groundswell.

As the Occupy movement gears up for its second wave—and as people from around the world ready themselves to protest the NATO and G8 summits in Chicago in May—my thoughts turn to that winter morning three decades ago when another movement was beginning to gain traction and when I, who had stood at the water’s edge for some time, gingerly waded in. While civil disobedience is only one of many tools with which to make social change, it was this particular practice that quite rapidly introduced me to a way of being that, to me, was a foreign but increasingly meaningful path with its own language, lineage, set of expectations, and peculiar ability to be taken seriously under the right conditions.

In his novel Direct Action, Luke Hauser captures the heady intensity of Livermore Action Group from 1982 to 1984, when it organized dozens of actions and built a network of nuclear resisters organized in hundreds of affinity groups throughout Northern California.

Livermore Action Group was part of a planetary network in the early 1980s that created a new wave of the global anti-nuclear movement employing nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, including indigenous communities, women’s communities (e.g., Greenham Common Peace Camp maintained for years at the edge of a U.S. air base in Britain), Greenpeace, The Freeze, SANE, CND, American Peace Test, Abolition 2000, Atomic Veterans and the Nevada Desert Experience.

With roots in the women’s movement, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, LAG in turn nourished the U.S. Central America peace movement, the LGBTQ movements, the disability rights movement, the anti-globalization movement and many others.

After the civil disobedience action on March 1, 1982, I joined Spirit Affinity Group.  My life was changed irrevocably by this circle of passionate and wise people—Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, Sandee Yarlott, Ron Stief, Kathy (later, T’Shala) Vahsen, Bruce Turner, Jim Bridges, Bob Russell, Pat Runo and the late Rick Cotten—as most of us, like the characters in Hauser’s book, lived the life of nonviolent resistance full on for those few, intense years.

Against the backdrop of the times—the accelerating arms race, the total war of so-called low intensity conflict and the bitter sting of Reaganomics— we created or participated in a string of actions for change. We joined the flotilla of rowboats that Shelley and Jim Douglass organized to nonviolently confront the first Trident submarine in the waters of Puget Sound in the summer of 1982; we chained ourselves to a 25-foot mockup of the MX missile in the roadway at LLNL; and we repeatedly occupied the offices of the Salvadoran consulate in San Francisco to engage the U.S.-backed wars in Central America.

In June 1983, we joined 1,100 others who were arrested at LLNL as part of the International Day of Resistance. We were held for two weeks in makeshift tents on the grounds of the county jail as most of us stayed put rather than submit to a sentence of two years probation, which likely would have severely undermined the local anti-nuclear movement. The authorities finally relented on this issue, and we were brought to endless rounds of arraignments in groups of fifty.

I will never forget my 3 a.m. arraignment.  As I waited for my name to be called, a young man sitting in the row in front of me was summoned. When he was given a chance to speak, he said, “Your honor, I did this action totally as a lark. My friends were going to get busted, and so I decided to go along for the ride.  I didn’t really know anything about it. But after two weeks of workshops on the national security state by Daniel Ellsberg (who had been arrested with us), practicing consensus and living with hundreds of men in a non-competitive way—thanks to you, judge, now I’m an anti-nuclear activist!”

In her foreword to Direct Action, long-time activist Starhawk wrote:

Hauser’s novel recreates the emotional and political milieu of the anti-nuclear blockades at Livermore Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the San Francisco Financial District. The nonviolent direct actions of the 70s and early 80s against nuclear power and nuclear weapons were the forerunner of a style of organizing that came to fruition in the blockade of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Many of the assumptions about nonhierarchical organizing, and many of the tactics and strategies that inform the global justice movement today were pioneered at that time.

As we take the next step in this global justice system—including the 99% Spring and its call for 100,000 people to be trained in April in nonviolent direct action—we recall a few of the roots of the contemporary emerging worldwide movement, even as we have the opportunity to build something more powerful and enduring.

• In Cambodia, more than 500 employees at a shoe factory in the capital’s Dangkor district went on strike on Wednesday morning after managers failed to respond to a list of workers’ demands.

• Hundreds of protesters blocked streets in eastern Venezuela on Wednesday to demand clean water after a recent oil spill polluted rivers and streams that supply local storage tanks.

• Thousands of supporters of Iran’s opposition Green Movement marched silently through the streets of Tehran on Tuesday to urge the Islamic regime to release political prisoners.

• Outside the White House, hundreds of people rallied on Tuesday to protest China’s treatment of Tibet, ethnic Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong. Alim Seytoff of the Uyghur American Association urged President Obama to pressure Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping on alleged human rights abuses.

• Six Greenpeace protesters were arrested after unfurling a sign in front of the Duke Energy building Wednesday morning, protesting the company’s recently-approved rate hikes.

• In what was billed as a Valentine’s Day message to the state’s lawmakers,  hundreds of activists gathered on Tuesday at Alabama’s Statehouse to protest the state’s  controversial immigration law.

• Flight attendants and ground workers at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport marched in picket lines Tuesday to protest American Airlines’ plans to outsource jobs and cut pay and benefits under a bankruptcy reorganization.

• Thirteen people were arrested inside the lobby of the AT&T building in Atlanta on Monday during a sit-in to stop the company from laying off 740 union workers across the southeastern United States.

• Some 200 Indonesians converged on a Jakarta square on Tuesday to denounce an Islamic vigilante group known for its armed attacks on minorities and moderates.

On Monday, nearly forty people blocked truck traffic from entering “Mount Frac”—the Winona, MN dumping site for silica sand mined in Wisconsin and Minnesota’s beautiful driftless region before being shipped out for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” sites all over the country. In the twenty or so minutes that protesters blocked the site, eleven semi-trucks were held up; it was stark and visceral reminder of how much the frac sand industry has grown since last summer. There were no arrests made, although police warned that any future attempt to block the trucks would result in citations and/or arrest.

The activists—a diverse group of students, scientists, teachers, musicians, parents, farmers and other concerned citizens—issued a statement declaring their opposition to frac sand mining and fracking:

We stand here today because this is our community. We grow our food on this land and drink from these aquifers. We rely on this bridge and these roads. Frac sand mining and processing are not good for our community. We also know that our valuable sand is being used in the hydraulic fracturing process which is responsible for poisoning water and destroying land in countless other communities. We have used our words time and again to express our many concerns. Now, in the spirit of nonviolence, we use our bodies to say stop. Please, stop.

This was the second time in less than a week where frac sand operations were disrupted. Last Thursday, a group of nine—mostly Catholic Workers—blocked truck traffic for more than twenty minutes before leaving the site without any citations or arrests.

Silica sand, formed by pieces of crystalline silica, is idealized by fracking companies for the drilling of natural gas because of its hardiness and shape. A well is drilled and millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals is pumped into it. The sand can withstand intense amounts of pressure as natural gas escapes from the fissures that the sand holds open. There are a whole host of controversial issues surrounding fracking for natural gas as well as silica sand mining. Critics of fracking have noted that the liquid-injection mixtures are deadly compositions of unknown chemicals and carcinogens. Fracking companies have refused to disclose their “recipes” but aquifers, wells, and streams have been polluted at high rates around fracking sites in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Some waters have been poisoned so badly that homeowners can light their faucet taps on fire and are forced to truck in their water. And while there are no natural gas deposits in Wisconsin or Minnesota, where the silica sand is being mined in open pits, both processes have major physical and environmental health concerns.

Issues concerning the mining of frac sand were widely expressed at the Winona City Planning Commission meeting on Monday evening. The Planning Commission is set to give recommendations to the City Council for how to deal with sand processing and transportation facilities that are knocking on Winona’s door. The planning commission prepared a document recommending a conditional use permit but many Winonans felt it did not go far enough. Residents’ concerns included blasting with explosives in the mines, excessive water use, increased truck traffic and more than usual wear and tear on local infrastructure such as roads and bridges, dust pollution, and, most worrisome, health hazards due to environmental exposure to crystalline silica.

Andrew Puetz, General Manager at Chrysler Winona—whose new, two million dollar dealership was relocated to downtown Winona as part of an economic revitalization attempt—spoke about the “economic fallout” his company is experiencing as a result of increased frac sand operations and traffic: “The sand affects the paint, air filters, and underside of the cars. We are regularly asked by customers about what color our cars are and are spending $2,000 a month just to keep them clean. There are serious effects on the exterior of our vehicles [from the sand]; what is that doing to our lungs and everything else?”

Proponents of frac sand mining—in Winona, Wisconsin, and elsewhere—emphasize the important economic development opportunities that it offers to small communities. But who is really benefiting? And at what cost? Out-of-state corporations, like the Houston-based, Fortune 500 EOG Resources, has its hands in townships along the Mississippi River. The frac sand boom is dependent on another exploitative extractive industry and the Energy Information Administration has concluded that there is significantly less natural gas available in the United States than previously though—up to fifty percent less. Are rural communities being hoodwinked by what some state and corporate leaders have dubbed a “gold rush?” Frac sand mining does not seem to be wise long-term or sustainable economic development. The communities along the Mississippi, due to the glacial drift that also created the silica sand deposits, have some of the highest concentrations of organic agriculture and family farms in the country. Tourism also accounts for much of the region’s income with its preponderance of local and state parks for birding, hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, and watersports. As a result local entrepreneurs—restaurateurs, artists, bar and cafe owners, specialty shops—also benefit. Frac sand mining and its related operations threatens the vitality of those industries by driving up the cost of rural real estate and contributing significant amounts of pollution, traffic, and blight. Yet the Winona Chamber of Commerce backs the frac sand industry over the broad economic interests of small business owners and the health and safety of the community.

Dr. Bruno Borsari, professor and biologist at Winona State University, called for a team of experts to be put together who could rigorously and objectively study the impacts of frac sand operations in town and assess the effects it would have on soil, air, water and health. “We are on the brink of collision with an impact upon the environment that is going to change the connotations of the county forever,” said Borsari, “and I am very disturbed because Winona County, whether you know it or not, is the most biodiverse county in the whole state of Minnesota.”

One thing is clear—the City of Winona is unprepared to deal with a powerful industry as well as a mobilizing citizenry. Last spring, frac sand mine owners and operators were able to sneak through plans without public input and with little oversight from regulatory agencies. Now, Winona is inundated with frac sand operations and the city has on its hands, in the words of Winonan Mike Leutgeb-Munson, “a public safety disaster that is perpetuated by the town laying out a welcome mat to industry to destroy our bridge and our town.” His sentiments were met with approving nods by most of the room. The fears of frac sand operations, largely confirmed by what has happened in other towns and counties, like Chippewa County, Wisconsin, are that the floodgates are opening and it is not going to be good for most businesses, homeowners, farmers, residents, and tourists.

“There are thousands of trucks in surrounding counties waiting to get in here” said Mary Ann from Buffalo County, WI—just across the river from Winona. “We need to mitigate the damage because this is just the beginning.” Winona is an attractive transfer point for the sand because of its location on the Mississippi River and its access to freight trains.

Many counties in Minnesota—including Goodhue and Wabasha County—have passed a one year moratorium to study the potential effects and costs of frac sand mining. Winona County passed a three month moratorium and when it expires it will have to face permit applications or extend the moratorium. But that does not resolve the issue of increased truck traffic, including the costs of additional road maintenance estimated to be more than $1 million annually or the dangers of heavy traffic in residential areas. And neither does it address the potential health hazards of silica sand. On both issues, the City of Winona has been slow in responding. The road issue may not seem like a big deal until you realize that in 2008 the bridge on Highway 43—connecting Wisconsin’s sand pits to Minnesota’s trains and roads—was closed because of rusting gusset plates (the same plates cited in the I-35W bridge collapse). Add the extra—and unregulated—heavy truck traffic weighing on the bridge and it creates legitimate concern for public safety.

The Winona protests come just a week after the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources denied a petition by residents seeking to have crystalline silica reviewed as a hazardous air contaminant. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has this to say about crystalline silica:

The seriousness of the health hazards associated with silica exposure is demonstrated by the fatalities and disabling illnesses that continue to occur in sandblasters and rockdrillers. Crystalline silica has been classified as a human lung carcinogen. Additionally, breathing crystalline silica dust can cause silicosis, which in severe cases can be disabling, or even fatal. The respirable silica dust enters the lungs and causes the formation of scar tissue, thus reducing the lungs’ ability to take in oxygen. There is no cure for silicosis. Since silicosis affects lung function, it makes one more susceptible to lung infections like tuberculosis. In addition, smoking causes lung damage and adds to the damage caused by breathing silica dust.

There are no conclusive studies regarding the health effects for the kind of exposure the public has to silica sand. The data on silicosis has been mainly linked to close-quarters exposure over an extended period of time. But research shows that the effects of silicosis, and other airborne illnesses, can take up to twenty years to appear. The risk itself—a risk they didn’t ask for—is what has Winonans up in arms. Alison DeNio, whose home is two blocks from Mount Frac, has already noticed the ill-effects the sand particulates have had on her family’s health. Her passion echoed how, she noted, many of her neighbors feel:

The respiratory issues in my household alone, since this thing has moved into the neighborhood, is out of control. My daughter has asthma now. My son is constantly coughing. I don’t want them to be outside. Even before we knew what this stuff was, we used to go running down that road. We can’t do any of that anymore with the amount of trucks coming through their now. The trucks are out of control. They go flying by us as we are sitting there on the side of the road on our bikes, waiting. It’s aggressive and a really awful environment.

Diane Leutgeb-Munson, who was a part of both truck-blocking actions, made a powerful appeal to the planning commission: “This is a crucial moment for our community and you do have power as an advisory commission. We are all looking to you. That’s why we came here. That’s why we’ve been showing up at city meetings and county meetings. We are asking you to do more than what this document says. These are scary moments for all of us. At the end of this meeting you get a choice and we are asking you to make the right one.” The planning commission tabled their recommendation for further study. While many of the “fracktivists” want frac sand mining gone completely, it is a victory for the emerging movement. It also sends a strong signal to the industry and to town and city governments that people are watching.

It may be coincidence, but at the beginning of the meeting, planning commissioner chair Craig Porter noted that they had never had so many people show up at a meeting. A much more likely explanation is the power people have when they get engaged, show up, and—when necessary—take direct actions. Of the more than forty citizens who packed into Winona City Hall, most of them proved their willingness to fight for what they believe in earlier that afternoon at Mount Frac. And that is a powerful testament to the efficacy of nonviolent action that corporate and government authorities take seriously.

The acrid fumes of tear-gas hung in the air as a young woman, her face swathed in black fabric, readied to heave a newspaper box through the plate-glass window of the Nike Store.

It was the afternoon of November 30, 1999 and the “Battle of Seattle” was on. Tens of thousands of people had traveled from across the globe to the Northwest United States to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which was on track to reinforce the injustice of corporate globalization and the perils it posed to indigenous societies, labor standards, human rights, civil liberties and the environment.

I had been asked by Global Exchange (a San Francisco-based organization that has long been a proponent of fair trade) to join in as a peacekeeper during the multi-day protest. Moving through the increasingly chaotic streets, I spotted the woman with her conscripted newspaper box and, just before she hoisted it through the glass, I trotted over and asked her what she was doing.

For the next half-hour, we had a heart-to-heart.

She shared her anguish at the violence of Indonesian sweatshops that produced Nike shoes. In the light of that injustice, smashing a window counted as nothing. In fact, from her perspective, it was a good thing—it would directly identify the company as a human rights violator and would challenge business as usual. Most of all, it would help panic the powers that be into changing things in the face of this growing unrest.

It has been over a dozen years so I don’t remember verbatim everything I shared with my impromptu conversation partner, but it was something like this.

I let her know that the two of us were in agreement about this injustice and that it must be challenged and stopped. This is why I had traveled to Seattle—and why, for 15 years, I had been part of movements working for justice. To me, though, there was a better way than property destruction to achieve this goal—and the 70,000 people marching that week in Seattle were illustrating it.

Gathered from around the planet, they were dramatizing a growing movement for change using nonviolent people power. These thousands were alerting and educating the public in a way, from my perspective, that violent action would not. Violent action will not panic the power-holders but it will push away the general populace. Power-holders, in fact, love it, because it gives them an excuse to delegitimize and destroy movements. In the end, social change depends not on creating the sense of chaos and social disorder, but on mobilizing the populace to remove its support for such injustice and to exercise people-power for change.

As we talked, she put down the box. She did not hurl it through the window and eventually she melted back into the crowd. Then, when I went off to engage another person poised to hurl a different newspaper box through a window further down the block, someone else scooped up the first one and pitched it through the window.

Bandana-clad activists (estimated at only 100 to 200 people) managed to break enough windows and spray-paint enough buildings to dislodge the primary focus from the police rampage in the morning to the image of marauding anonymous activists wreaking chaos throughout downtown Seattle in the afternoon.

The criminal behavior of the police—in which thousands of peaceful protesters, sitting in the streets outside the convention hall where we engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience, were shot indiscriminately at close range by rubber bullets and blinded for a time by relentless waves of tear-gas (for which the City of Seattle years later paid out financial settlements to some protesters)—exposed the violence that the state will inflict to protect injustice. Now, however, this narrative had to share the stage with a competing one. Hence the frame that ultimately prevailed: “The Battle of Seattle.” After all, it takes two sides to make a skirmish.

In Seattle, an ambiguity was built into the action itself. We were told at a pre-action gathering the night before that the organizers had just decided that the nonviolence guidelines would be in force only until 2:00 p.m., after which they would not apply. And almost to the minute, this is what transpired: the window smashing, the spray-painting, and the clashes with the police began like clockwork in the early afternoon.

The WTO protest was a watershed event, which was immediately noticed by the press. “Protest’s power to alter public awareness,” read the December 3 headline of the San Jose Mercury News, while the December 5 edition of the Los Angeles Times declared, “WTO is Humbled, Changed Forever by Outside Forces.” It definitively put the hazards of globalization on the social radar screen.

This success was due predominantly, from my point of view, to the nonviolent and creative people power of the mobilization and not to the attention-getting property destruction of a handful of activists. In fact, had the police not engaged in their even more media-genic violence (made all the more glaring by the fact that it was launched, not as a reaction to protest violence, but as a first-strike against peaceful demonstrators), the WTO protest would have likely been assessed very differently.

Unfortunately, though, the wrong lessons have often been drawn from the Seattle mobilization. In the anti-globalization and other movements since then, Seattle has often inspired strategies that provide ample wiggle room on property destruction and even what amounts to street-fighting, enshrined in the now famous “diversity of tactics” principle.

Which brings us to the conversation we are having in 2012 about violence and nonviolence in the Occupy movement.

In sorting out the two tendencies at the heart of the present discussion—“nonviolent people power” and “diversity of tactics”—it is helpful to see how they share at least three points of agreement:

• Social change is imperative
• The goal is justice
• Powerful action is key

They diverge, however, on the question of how each of these is achieved. From my perspective, enduring social change does not flow most effectively from violence-generated social disorder. Such action is typically seized on by power-holders to destroy movements and it often frightens or alienates the public. This seems to be borne out by much of the recent work of Erica Chenoweth and others that quantify how violent campaigns are often much less successful than nonviolent ones.

Instead, social change (as social movement activist and theorist Bill Moyer writes in his book Doing Democracy) flows from social movement that builds nonviolent people power. “Social movements,” according to Moyer, “are collective actions in which the populace is alerted, educated, and mobilized, over years and decades, to challenge the power-holders and the whole society to redress social problems or grievances and restore critical social values.” In short, this means removing the pillars of support for injustice, including the direct or indirect support of the populace and often other economic, political, cultural, or media pillars. Nonviolent action is more likely to nurture this process because:

• It maintains a focus on the issue rather than the violence/counter violence cycle (e.g., the Occupy Oakland action on January 28);
• It is more likely to raise the visibility of both the injustice being challenged and the justice that it seeks. Violent action is more likely to obscure the issue and the outcome it is working for; and
• When nonviolent action is met by violence, the focus is likely to remain both on the issue and on the violence of the state (e.g., the police attack on Occupy at UC Davis on November 18), which can increase rather than decrease public support for change.

But the effectiveness of such nonviolent action often depends on the third point of agreement: the need for powerful action.

Those supporting violent tactics often feel that nonviolent action is not powerful—and, truth be told, it is often not as powerful as it could be. Nonviolent action needs to be commensurate with the injustice one is struggling to change—which means that it needs to powerfully accomplish its goals, including dramatizing the fundamental need for change; illuminating a vision of the alternative; inviting the public to re-think this issue; and offering concrete steps for people to withdrawing consent from the status quo and to support a more life-giving alternative.

The good news is that it can be this powerful.

This power depends on creativity, clarity, strategic planning, training, discipline, execution, interpretation, and follow-up. Occupy itself is a good example of this. When it has maintained a nonviolent spirit, it has been an effective and historic force for highlighting the problem of inequality and laying the groundwork for being a force for change. Its scattered violent actions, however, have been less powerful than its nonviolent ones, because they have often muddied the issue and reframed the conversation from inequality to the violence of Occupiers. This has likely cost support for the movement within Occupy and among the larger populace.

For those of us who are committed to nonviolence in challenging massive and structural inequity, the answer (as George Lakey so eloquently stressed on this site) is not to demonize those who are committed to a variety of approaches, including violent ones. We are called to relentless dialogue with those with whom we disagree—as I attempted to do on the streets of Seattle twelve years ago. Most importantly, we are called to build a movement that demonstrates the power and effectiveness of nonviolent people power.

In the end, this will be more effective than all the arguments in the world.

On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

With this easy-to-learn song, O4O hopes these blockades will spread across the country, and effect what Gargamelli called “a people’s moratorium” that would create “real negotiating power between homeowners and lenders.” The next singing auction blockade is planned for February 17th in Queens.

• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Correction: In an earlier version, Henning Mankell was mistakenly referred to by the name of Kurt Wallender, the protagonist in several of his books.