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.

• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

The fact is, for many long-term observers, there are no surprises here; Nigerian society may be crippled by the violence of multinational greed but has long been a staging ground for peaceful resistance to the neocolonialism of oil companies and their foreign profiteers. Nigerian educator Judith Atiri, in our recently published Seeds Bearing Fruit: Pan African Peace Action for the 21st Century, testified to the “fertile soil and inspiring possibilities” deep in the history of Africa’s most populated nation. Early examples of creative anti-colonial challenges included a popular tax resistance campaign in the 1920s, and a series of general strikes throughout the 1940s. After independence in 1960, protests became more localized and region-specific with the discovery of oil and movements for secession taking center stage. It was quickly evident that direct British colonization had been replaced by the all-consuming power of the empire-building multinationals. The 1990 coming together of nine separate associations of the indigenous Ogoni peoples of the southeast set the stage for modern Nigerian resistance.

Ken Saro-Wiwa

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), it should be remembered, was a coalition demanding both control over natural resources as well as general self-determination. Their Ogoni Bill of Rights gave a detailed set of demands for a greater share of the oil revenues amongst all the people of Nigeria, greater national attention to environmental clean-up, and greater political participation and transparency. Though the multinational oil companies and the Nigerian federal government ignored these demands, protests continued with intensified issues raised: that the Ogoni people have a right to refuse further oil production on their land, and that reparations be paid to make up for centuries of colonial theft. By 1995, MOSOP and their supporters were able to successfully shut down several plants, an act now being repeated by the Occupy movement. Nigeria’s infamous response was swift: MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were hanged by the state. Though Ogoni leaders noted that MOSOP and all the peoples of the Niger Delta region were “barricaded by excessive violence” throughout society, and even tempted by violence, they remained a movement committed to nonviolent social change.

Though conflict and violence has been characteristic amongst many competing groupings in the Niger Delta, with disputes over political representation, work contracts, land issues, and personal rivalries, the overall struggle for unity against corruption and greed continues to take peaceful forms. Women have always been active and leading participants in Nigeria’s freedom campaigns, but the initiatives of the past decade have seen more specifically women-led campaigns than ever before. Nigerian legal scholar and conflict resolution practitioner Ifeoma Ngozi Malo wrote poignantly about the 2002 waves of protest against Chevron-Texaco, where women seized control of several oil terminals, with no ensuing violence. “Armed with only food and their voices,” Ngozi Malo explained, “these village women carrying their children on their back occupied the various oil facilities and the terminals for weeks. They barricaded a storage depot, thus blocking docks, helicopter pads and an airstrip, which covered all the entry points to their facility. Their presence prevented well over 700 workers from working or leaving the premises until the company agreed to certain conditions.”

Part of the successes of these campaigns can be explained by the “shaming” aspect of women’s power in Nigerian society. With strong social bonds in a society where cultural traditions are taken very seriously and honored, a simple dance can have greater impact than an apparently militant protest with angry placards. During many occupations of the past several years, dances were specifically developed to ridicule the unjust practices of local, regional and international businessmen. Using embarrassing songs with satirical and sardonic lyrics, these women-led actions have had lasting effects on their communities. Even in cases where corporate promises were quickly broken, the power and possibility of nonviolent direct action and occupation was fused into the consciousness of civil society.

Perhaps the most unique and ingenious tactic of the modern Nigerian women-led movement has been the threat of nakedness. With its roots in traditional protest amongst the peoples of eastern Nigeria, public nudity symbolized a “permanent curse” of political, economic and physical impotence for the men before whom women were provoked to disrobe. Never taken lightly, contemporary instances of the threat are carefully woven into strategic thinking about escalating campaigns. Warnings are always given by the women, and negotiations often take place before a public disrobing is deemed necessary. It could be said that the idea of public nudity and shaming still strikes fear into Nigeria’s body politic. In any case, clothed or not, it is clear that nonviolent tactics are far from new to Nigeria’s large, heterogeneous, neocolonial society.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

• In the largest protests Syria has seen in months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets Friday in a display of defiance to show an Arab League observer mission the strength of the opposition movement. Despite the monitors’ presence, forces loyal to President Bashar Assad still killed at least 22 people.

• Thousands of Hungarians took to the streets yesterday to protest a new constitution which critics say increases the power of the government over previously independent institutions, ranging from the church and media to the courts and even the central bank.

• Russian police arrested at least 60 people in the capital of Moscow on Saturday during anti-government protests.

• Thousands of protesters converged on a train station in central China, angered over collapsing illegal investment schemes that residents said the government had failed to staunch.

• As part of an action called Occupy the Caucus, 12 protesters, including a 14-year-old girl, were arrested for blocking the doors to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters on Thursday. Eighteen more arrests followed on Saturday and one on Sunday.

• A dozen anti-Wall Street protesters who had taken over a foreclosed home in Oakland to house formerly homeless individuals were arrested on Thursday.

• More than a dozen Muslim community leaders boycotted an interfaith breakfast organized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday to protest reported police surveillance of Muslim areas since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Large crowds of Yemenis rallied in major cities Sunday, demanding the outgoing president be put on trial for the deaths of protesters.

• Dozens of activists against gender segregation boarded buses serving Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jews on Sunday to protest the unwritten rule that women sit at the back.

• Thousands of angry Shia protesters staged a sit-in outside the Sindh Governor House in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday night to protest the targeted assassination of their community leader.

The PAH started in February of 2009 from a small group of citizens in Barcelona in order to demand that the Mortgage Law include dación en pago, a measure that would make possible to hand back the keys and the property to the bank, discharging all mortgage debt if the holder fails to pay the mortgage. But as more and more families were evicted from their homes, PAH took to the streets in November, 2010 with the Stop Evictions campaign, which gained even more momentum during this year’s May 15 movement mobilizations. PAH became a meeting point for people in danger of losing their homes, organized locally by citizens and activists to provide legal advice and promote civil resistance actions.

Today, PAH has chapters in more than 40 cities, and it has stopped at least 110 evictions through nonviolent resistance. Since October, hundreds of 15-M activists had been occupying empty buildings to provide living space for evicted families in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Terrassa and Granada; dozens of families have decided to occupy empty houses themselves.

Activists associated with PAH in Elche, a city near Alicante, has advised as many as 50 families and, in many cases, they’ve discovered irregularities bordering on illegality. “There are families that have been paying a default insurance,” explains Gloria Marin, from PAH Elche, for instance. “They didn’t know that and the bank didn’t tell them a thing about it while trying to evict them.” In Elche, as in many other cities, the courts and the police have not moved to intervene against anti-eviction actions.

Barcelona, one of the cities where PAH’s work began, the response of the regional government has been even more positive. In October, thanks in part to PAH, the City Council moved to declare Barcelona “active on the prevention of evictions,” creating a commission to study each case, to ensure the right to housing and to support the inclusion of dación en pago in the Mortgage Law. A hundred other cities have taken similar action as well.

In other places, however, the situation has become a bit more difficult. In Madrid, where PAH has succeeded in stopping 17 of the 20 evictions it fought, police response has been escalating. PAH started its work in Madrid last June, but, after a month of several eviction preventions, the courts decided to increase the police presence. In July, more than 50 riot police prevented over 100 citizens from stopping an eviction.

The police presence since then has increased even more. “In recent weeks, the courts have sent in the police forcefully,” says Chema Ruiz of PAH Madrid. “In the beginning there were just a few police officers, and the evictions were easily stopped, but the situation has changed.” Last week, some people were arrested in an anti-foreclosure action, among them a photographer from the alternative newspaper Diagonal. Facing the increased police presence, PAH Madrid activists have changed their tactics, focusing more on the visit of the judicial commission to an endangered house and attempting to prevent it from approving the foreclosure.

Despite the repression of these actions in the Spanish capital, the message of PAH has been heard and echoed in mainstream Spanish politics. After the two-year campaign for the dación en pago was ignored by the two major parties, some months ago most of the country’s political parties included it in their platforms going into the November 20 election. Even PSOE, which rejected the dación en pago last June in Congress, reversed course and incorporated the proposal in its platform. But the victory of the right-wing Partido Popular in the Congress makes it impossible to know whether the PSOE’s promise would have become a reality.

Political promises aside, PAH’s work has forced the government to relieve some of the sting of eviction felt by those who suffer it. “We have forced the government to make a move,” says a statement on the PAH website. “It’s a ridiculous and insufficient change, but it marks the path.”

Now, the regional government of Catalonia is going further and has announced to enact the dación en pago and to purchase option agreements to let families keep their homes. PAH is also working on a “popular initiative” to petition Congress to reexamine the inclusion of dación en pago in the Mortgage Law. Soon they will begin collecting the 500,000 signatures needed to do so.

Even the banks are starting to react to people’s calls on behalf of the right to housing. In Murcia, PAH has negotiated the dación en pago for 100 families, as it has for thousands throughout Spain. In many cases, after accepting the dación en pago, canceling the debt in exchange of the house, the banks consented to allow a family to stay in their home by paying subsidized rent. “It’s not because they are better now, but because we have forced them to take care of their image,” says a statement from PAH.

Some banks have launched such programs as “Supportive Leasing” in La Caixa, which offers 3,000 houses with a monthly rent between €75 and €150, or the inclusion of dación en pago in their mortgage products—though generally with very high interest rates.

Today in Spain, banks are becoming major real estate holders. Bankia alone—a bank that was recently privatized—began the year with more than €11 billion in property, making it the country’s largest landowner. Other banks, such as CAM (also recently privatized), Santander or BBVA, offer more than 20,000 foreclosed houses with significant discounts. Most of these banks has received thousands of millions euros from the government last year in bailouts. PAH calls on the government to purchase these houses from the banks in order to increase the number of public housing units, but, for now at least, the government has yet to listen.

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

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.)

Juli Parorrongan, a spokesperson for the union, said that pre-strike monthly wages range from $361 to $605 a month. He expressed dissatisfaction with the agreement to the Jakarta Post:

However, we decided to agree on the increase because we have to consider the humanitarian aspect, given that the striking workers have not been paid by Freeport for the last three months. We were forced to agree to end the strike, but this is not the end of our struggle.

Workers had blockaded roads in the area at key points and were accused of cutting the pipeline which carries mining concentrate to the port from where it is loaded and shipped for processing. By the end of the strike, the mine was operating at 5 percent of capacity.

Two striking worker was killed and others were injured on October 10 when police opened fire at a large demonstration in Timika, the town near the mine. Attacks by unknown gunmen on a vehicle carrying police and Freeport personnel led to more deaths and injury to two others. Such attacks along the road to the mine are a relatively common occurrence, and it is not clear if the latest ones were related to the strike. These assaults against security and Freeport personnel are believed to result from conflicts among police, military and Freeport security personnel feuding over the spoils from extortion targeting Freeport, as well as conflict over freelance gold-mining efforts by local people. While these attacks are often blamed on poorly armed guerrillas fighting for independence, local police recently said that the shooters were “well trained.”

The strike by 8,000 employees at the controversial open pit mine halted production costing the Indonesian government $8 million per day in taxes, royalties and dividends, which helped to broker an end to the strike.

In the U.S., Occupy Phoenix, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, the IWW and United Steelworkers (USW) demonstrated in support of the strikers at Freeport’s Phoenix, Arizona headquarters in late October.

The USW, which represents workers at Freeport’s Chino mine in New Mexico, urged the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate reports that the company was making illegal payments to the police in West Papua. In a letter to Justice’s Criminal Division, the union wrote:

The Indonesian police have recently been quoted in the Indonesian media admitting that they accepted millions of dollars from PT Freeport Indonesia to provide security for the miner’s operations in Papua, Indonesia, and the National Police Chief Gen. Timur Pradopo referred to the payments as “lunch money” paid in addition to state allocated security funding, stating “It was operational funding given directly to the police personnel to help them make ends meet.”

Human rights groups estimated that the payments raised salaries of the police near the mine between a quarter and one half. The payments are illegal under Indonesia law, where official corruption is a major problem. They are illegal in the U.S. if not reported. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act also “bans companies from paying foreign officials to do or omit to do an act in violation of his or her lawful duty,” the union wrote. It called the payments bribes:

intended to persuade the personnel to act in defense of Freeport-McMoRan’s interests even when those interests conflict with the police and military personnel’s lawful duty to protect Indonesian people…

Five years ago, the company was investigated for payments allegedly made to the Indonesian military The company reported $1.6 million in payments in 2008 to provide a “monthly allowance” to police and soldiers for security at the mine.

In addition to its labor strike, Freeport faces challenges on a number of other fronts.

The Grasburg mine has been an unmitigated environmental disaster. The disposal of millions of tons of tailings and other mine waste has decimated forests and destroyed an entire river system. Local inhabitants have been marginalized by an influx of outsiders. The company’s human rights and environmental practices have long been criticized by major institutional investors. Norway’s government pension fund, divested its Freeport holdings in February 2006. In 2008, it divested from Rio Tinto, a minority owner of the mine. The deep scars from the mining operation can be seen from space.

Last year, the about 90 Amungme tribe members, who live near the mining complex, filed a lawsuit arguing that Freeport had seized their lands illegally. According to the Jakarta Globe, they are “seeking $32.5 billion in material and non-material damages for the alleged illegal acquisition of its ancestral land” in an Indonesian court.

Despite its poor labor, environmental and human rights record, Freeport sometimes receives high marks from those who monitor “corporate socially responsibility.” Recently, Corporate Responsibility Magazine had named Freeport as the U.S.’s 24th-best corporate citizen. “How is this possible?” asked David Webster, an assistant professor of International Studies at the University of Regina in Canada. “Well, the survey’s methodology seems to pay no heed to human rights performance.  Only human rights rhetoric matters.”

Unsurprisingly, the Freeport mine is a lightening rod for the pro-independence movement in Papua. The company gained its mining permits in 1967, as Indonesia—with U.S. backing—was undermining West Papuan aspirations for self-determination. (While West Papua and Indonesia share a Dutch colonial heritage, West Papua was not included in Indonesia on independence.) At the time, Indonesia was administering the territory under a U.N. mandate brokered by the U.S. in preparation for an act of self-determination (which was a farce when it finally took place two years later). Under these circumstances, many West Papuans view the granting of mining rights by the Suharto dictatorship as illegal and the outflow of mining profits as theft that has left indigenous Papuans impoverished. These grievances have fueled broad sentiment for greater control over these and other resources, and Timika is a hot bed of pro-independence sentiment.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has staunchly defended Freeport since it first arrived in West Papua. In Jakarta, the U.S. embassy:

has conspired with Freeport management to defeat legal challenges as well as media and Congressional inquiries into human rights violations and other illegal acts carried out by security forces under Freeport pay and direction. In 2002, it conspired with Freeport and with the Indonesian government to limit and delay an investigation of an attack that cost the lives of three teachers, including two from the U.S.

The Freeport strike brought renewed attention to the company and to West Papua. It came at a time of increasing unrest and repression in West Papua over its political status. The strike also came at a time of increasing labor unrest throughout Indonesia.

In mid-November, Occupy Jakarta’s general assembly adopted a resolution on Papua. Key points are withdrawal of security forces from the region and an end to violence to against Papuans. It called for Freeport to be brought to “justice for human rights violations, environmental damage and violence towards workers,” and putting the future of the Freeport mine in the hands of its workers and local people.

Occupy Wall Street found a new home today—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house. Just weeks after the eviction from its encampment in the financial district, hundreds of occupiers joined local community members in a foreclosure tour of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn through the rain, which concluded with a celebratory block party as a family reclaimed a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America. It was one of many anti-foreclosure actions taking place in communities across the United States today.

As the march passed, I heard a local woman saying, “This was a long time coming.”

For those of us who have been organizing and reporting on Occupy Wall Street for months, the afternoon was a reunion of familiar faces, of people who used to see each other daily in Liberty Plaza. But more visible than usual at Occupy Wall Street actions were collared clergy and members of the State Assembly and City Council. Together with locals and organizers with the NYC General Assembly’s Direct Action Committee, they were leading the marches and queuing the chants—all through the people’s mic, of course, megaphone-free. Along the way, staffers of groups that were once waiting-and-seeing from afar what Occupy Wall Street would do were now busily coordinating the action; among these are Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream, New York Communities for Change, and Organizing for Occupation. And this, it seems, is our clearest glimpse yet of what Occupy Phase II will look like.

The General Assembly and its related working groups are only able to do so much on their own. Without the focal point of an encampment anymore, the movement’s actions will rely more and more on coordination with institutions more firmly entrenched in neighborhoods where it works—as well as, despite the movement’s own leaderless structure, those institutions’ leaders.

While occupiers have almost always welcomed the support of outside organizations cheerfully, today I heard grumbling among some of the older ones who have had negative experiences with this or that public figure in the past, and who are suspicious of traditional institutions as a whole. A City Council member might stand with the movement one day, but what will he or she expect from it on election day? And how far will a given non-profit organization go with civil disobedience before it starts to scare away its funders? These are new questions that the Occupy movement will be facing more and more.

The answer, though, seemed clear to me when I passed an activist running from the soon-to-be-reclaimed house with a drill in his hand—which presumably had been used to bypass the lock. With the march came a team from Occupy Wall Street’s Sanitation Committee to clean up inside the house. Outside, the occupation’s library and kitchen set up shop, along with teach-ins and a piñata. The answer I had in mind, that is, is direct action. As long as this movement keeps nonviolent direct action at its center, refusing to wait for the powers that be to approve of the undertakings it deems necessary, its momentum will continue to grow. Politicians and non-profits will join the cause not so much because they see an opportunity for themselves but because they can’t afford not to.

That’s exactly what appears to be happening in Phase II, even more than Phase I. As more and more occupations are hardened by the experience of forced eviction, they’re less receptive to the kind of coddling by politicians that took place in some cities early on. The spirit of direct action is spreading. David DeGraw of OWSNews.org tells me that he has been getting text messages from all over the country today like the following:

I just removed a newly changed lock off of a house to let original owner back in. my leatherman rules!

Without the need to focus on encampment sites, furthermore, the attention of Phase II is much more carefully oriented around root causes, around the very means by which the movement’s corporate opponents perpetuate themselves: foreclosed homes, ports, rampant consumerism, and more to come. Foreclosures, as ground zero of the 2008 financial crisis, are a fitting place to start. They’re also where the often-abstract machinations of Wall Street actually hit home for many Americans. By preventing them, or reversing them, the movement will find new allies who were less moved by the earlier talk of ending corporate personhood or imposing a Tobin tax.

This was a foregone conclusion for the May 15 movement in Spain, which was such an inspiration to many Occupy Wall Street organizers in the first place. (See our report on the Spanish squatters from back in September.) At the action today, I talked about this with Monica Lopez, who was part of the Spanish movement and has been at Occupy Wall Street since the beginning:

Twenty more innocent people were pepper-sprayed last week, although not by police cracking down on protesters this time, but by a woman fighting for a discounted Xbox at Walmart.

This was only one of many violent incidents that marred Black Friday last week, as throngs of crazed consumers hit stores across the country to get the best deals of the year, on what turned out to be the biggest day of shopping ever.

In an effort to push back against the frenzy of consumerism that overtakes our country every year at this time, Adbusters used the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to kick off their latest campaign: #OCCUPYXMAS.

As part of Occupy Christmas, Adbusters editor-in-chief Kalle Lasn suggested a few “shenanigans” that participants might pull off to the Toronto Star, including:

— a Santa sit-in, whereby protesters sit outside a store and encourage people to cut up their credit cards;

— a Jesus walk, where people put on a mask in the Holy Son’s likeness and walk through malls, to create an eerie sentiment;

— a “whirly mart,” in which would-be shoppers fill their carts with products but abandon them at the cash register.

Additionally, Abusters has called on readers to continue to move their money from big banks to credit unions or smaller local banks as “one great first step in breaking beyond the encampments and into the new Xmas imagination.”

Indeed, Bank Transfer Day earlier this month was a resounding success. According to a survey by the Credit Union National Association, in just the month preceding Bank Transfer Day, at least 650,000 people moved their money—totaling $4.5 billion in new deposits—to credit unions (as opposed to 80,000 new customers in a normal month), which inevitably underestimates the real impact of the campaign.

Environmental victories are so rare that apparently even environmentalists don’t quite know how to kick back and rejoice. At a rally in Trenton, New Jersey on Monday, discussion veered between joyous celebration of Friday’s announcement by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to indefinitely postpone a vote that would have paved the way for 20,000 natural gas wells in the region and serious preparation to one day block their construction through nonviolent direct action.

These activists can be excused, however, for mixing business with pleasure because even more rare than an environmental victory is one that’s complete and total. Much like the recent announcement by the Obama administration to delay a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, the DRBC vote delay was hardly an indictment of extreme carbon-based extraction that poisons water and the atmosphere. If anything, it’s a temporary roadblock to something government seems all too happy to allow.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie have already promised to vote “yes” for drilling in the Delaware River Basin–a region that provides drinking water to 15 million people. Corbett is no surprise because drilling–or fracking as it’s more commonly called–is already a common practice in Pennsylvania. New Jersey, on the other hand, does not have any natural gas deposits. But it does have Christie, who earned nearly $30,000 last year from selling his shares in a company whose clients include gas drilling operators.

The holdouts as of now are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Delaware Governor Jack Markell–neither of whom are sure bets to stay that way. Both would apparently switch their vote if the right regulatory processes were put in place. Nevertheless, Markell’s decision to vote “no” came as a surprise, since it is believed that the Obama administration–DRBC’s fifth and final voting member–was pushing the Delaware governor to vote “yes” so that it wouldn’t have to and thereby tarnish its environmental image.

Shrewd as that may sound, it’s not hard to believe given Obama’s tar sands pipeline non-decision. He has demonstrated a clear intention to avoid angering either side of the issue, as he enters campaign season. But it was only until recently that Obama realized he had to worry about environmentalists. As actor Marc Ruffalo told the crowd of several hundred gathered in front of Trenton’s Patriots Theater, “There’s no doubt that President Obama chose not to take this vote today because of what we did with the Keystone pipeline action in Washington D.C.”

Fittingly, perhaps, these two issues overlap in ways beyond just the activists and politicians involved. They represent desperate efforts to wring the planet of its remaining fossil fuels, which have until recently been cost prohibitive due to their inaccessibility. Fracking, which is short for hydraulic fracturing, is a process that requires mass amounts of water and chemicals to tap into natural gas reserves. Methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, is usually released as a byproduct, effectively counterbalancing any benefits of switching from coal. In turn, the tar sands industry uses enormous amounts of fracked gas and water to extract the oil from its reserves, which are second only in size to Saudi Arabia. Given that every barrel of tar sands oil emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases as conventional oil, it’s no wonder NASA scientist James Hansen has warned that further development would be “game over” for the climate.

Furthermore, the tar sands and fracking processes are known to contaminate water, poison the air, and, in general, diminish the quality of life. For many, these environmental health factors are the most pressing. Craig Sauter–a resident of Dimock, Pensylvania, which has been called natural gas drilling’s ground zero–spoke of his troubles getting Cabot Oil & Gas, the company that drilled on his land, to pay for poisoning his well water with methane, arsenic, barium, and uranium. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has also refused to help despite Sauter’s exhaustive efforts to engage them. The state capitol police are now threatening to arrest him if he calls the DEP one more time.

Upon hearing this, the crowd chanted, “We will call for you.” Plans are also in the works to for a protest in Dimock at the end of the month, when Cabot takes away the drinking water tank they provided Sauter, before shirking any responsibility.

Another stirring account was rendered by Stephen Cleghorn–an organic farmer from Pennsylvania’s Jefferson County, whose land was leased for natural gas extraction without his knowing. He offered a heartfelt, if not wrenching, story of testifying before an impotent Department of Energy subcommittee on natural gas, while his wife was dying of cancer.

“I have a power in my soul now to enforce a moratorium of one if I have to,” he said. “But I don’t have to, because we are building a mighty movement to stop this.”

Immediately following these testimonials, the crowd marched to the New Jersey State Legislature, demanding they “ban fracking now.” Of course, New Jersey’s legislature was the first of any state in the country to ban fracking. It passed overwhelming, but Governor Christie vetoed it, proposing a one-year moratorium instead. Nevertheless, activists seem hopeful that the legislature might overturn Christie’s ruling. And why not? They’re starting to get the kind of momentum leaders were hoping for years ago.

In his address, Oscar-nominated director Josh Fox, whose 2010 documentary Gasland made fracking a national issue, reminded the crowd of one such leader, the recently imprisoned Tim DeChristopher.

“Three days ago, I got a call from a guy named Tim DeChristopher in a federal penitentiary on his 30th birthday… He says to me, ‘I feel really isolated in here. I feel one step behind everybody.’ And I said, ‘You were five steps ahead to begin with. And he was looking at all the things that have happened, the victory of the KeystoneXL. And his birthday happened to be the day that we won this [the fracking vote delay]. And he was looking at Occupy Wall Street. And he said, ‘I feel like we’re headed toward something much much bigger than this.’ And we are. He said, ‘You know that sound when you walk into the opera house and you hear all the violins and everybody tuning up? And everybody’s starting on a little bit of a different note, but they’re trying to get to the same note. All these strands are coming together. We’re fighting extreme energy. We’re fighting KeystoneXL. We’re fighting mountaintop removal. We’re fighting the banks that finance these things. So we’re tuning up this orchestra and we’re going to be here for a really long time.’”

In keeping with the mood, however, Fox made sure to follow up this feel-good sentiment with a hard-hitting call to action, saying, “When it comes time to blockade the well-sites, we’ll blockade the well-sites.” And before the day was over, the crowd retreated to a nearby Quaker meeting house, where nonviolent direct action trainings began–assuring that this movement, if the time has come to call it that, is not about to let any amount of success go to its head.