• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.

In case you haven’t heard, or tried to use some of the most popular websites today, like Wikipedia, Reddit or Boing Boing, there is a unique protest underway by these online giants and many others. For the first time, they have voluntarily gone offline today to register their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), two bills that they see as an existential threat to themselves and the internet as we know it. Instead of just going dark, they wisely decided to post messages that explain their action and provide ways for users to learn more and get involved in the campaign to stop these bills in their tracks.

Right now Wikipedia and Reddit are asking users to call their representatives and sign a petition to make their voices heard. If this initial push doesn’t work, opponents of these bills may benefit from studying a similar struggle, which Ter Garcia reported on for this site, against the SOPA-like Sinde Law in Spain that was being pushed by the U.S. and was recently defeated after a massive mobilization both online and off against it.

Rather than explain the ins and outs of the bills myself, I suggest checking out the Electronic Freedom Foundation for starters and delving deeper from there. And if you have the time and interest, you can read the SOPA and PIPA bills themselves.

Many of the other biggest sites on the internet, including Google (which has blacked out its logo for the day), Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Mozilla, Ebay, Paypal, Tumblr, Kickstarter and AOL have spoken out against the bills and could take similar action should they continue to move forward. Were this “nuclear option” implemented, it would be reminiscent of when Mubarak shut down the internet last year in Egypt in an extremely counterproductive move to thwart the budding revolution. It would also reveal more clearly than ever before the power that these companies have over our lives and how rarely they have flexed their muscle for any issue, good or bad.

Another ingenious way anyone with an Android phone can get involved in the campaign is by downloading and using the “Boycott SOPA” app, which allows you to scan barcodes in stores to see whether products are “either created by or intimately related to SOPA supporting companies.” Created by two computer science students from the University of British Columbia in less than two days, this app is the first of its kind and has the potential to make boycotts of all kinds far more easy to join and effective. (At the Guardian, Dan Gillmor offers several helpful suggestions for how this app or its successors could be improved.)

In response to the growing opposition to these bills, the Obama administration came out on Saturday against SOPA, at least as it currently stands, which many believe has shelved it for the time being. PIPA, on the other hand, is still moving forward and is scheduled for a vote next Tuesday in the Senate. How today’s blackout will impact this timeline or the bills themselves is yet to be seen.

• To mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, nearly 40 people were arrested outside the White House on Thursday and detainees at the prison launched a hunger strike.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

Last month, TLC debuted a new reality show called All-American Muslim that follows the daily lives of five families in Dearborn, Michigan–home to the largest mosque in the United States. According to the show’s website, “Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”

Within weeks of its premiere, TLC got a taste for itself of such misconceptions and conflicts, as a right-wing attack, led by a Christian group in Florida, pressured 65 of the 67 companies they targeted to pull ads from the show. One of these companies is the home-improvement giant Lowe’s, which is now being petitioned by a coalition of activist and faith-based groups–including Faithful America, Change.org, CREDO, Sum of Us and Groundswell–to apologize and reinstate advertisements. The national chain has also been facing the prospect of store protests and a boycott.

Yet Lowe’s seems unswayed. After a meeting today with a group of interfaith clergy–who hand-delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the company’s headquarters in Mooresville, North Carolina–Lowe’s stated that the decision to pull its ads was internally-based and not influenced by the Christian group. “We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the company maintained, adding, “and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment.”

While the future of the show remains uncertain, cast members have spoken up about the controversy to say how much it has actually helped their community. In a Youtube video posted by USA Today, Nawal Aoude says, “Honestly, I just want to thank this Florida Family Association for doing this because I think what they were trying to do has totally backfired big-time.”

Methane is bubbling up from the bottom of Alaskan lakes–the result of ancient organic matter thawing and decomposing from its once icy chamber in an ever warming climate. This is just one of several ways the melting of Arctic permafrost could create a precipitous increase in greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and speed up global warming. As the New York Times noted in a recent feature on this foreboding phenomenon, “researchers are worried that the changes in the region may already be outrunning their ability to understand them, or to predict what will happen.”

As complex as this unraveling chain of events may seem, it’s not nature, but politicians–particularly those in Washington–who have made it so. Although they exhale the same amount of carbon dioxide as the average human being, theirs is just as potent and polluting as the gas bubbling out of that lake. The latest example of this can be seen in the Senate’s passage of a bill that requires the president to make a decision within 60 days on the Keystone XL pipeline–which would link Canada’s tar sands to Texas’s oil refineries or, more accurately, the dangerous melting of Arctic permafrost.

The bill is a rather duplicitous effort by Republicans to link an issue the president would prefer not to deal with (Keystone XL) to one that’s close to his heart: payroll tax breaks. As Grist explained, “They have nothing to do with tar sands. But the president wants them, so the House [and now the Senate] is taking them hostage and using them to bargain for the pipeline.”

What does this mean for Tar Sands Action, the campaign that raised the pipeline issue to a national level and pushed the president to initially delay a decision until after the election? It means the gears are churning among the organizers. They’ve been on a week-long retreat to figure out the next moves for this campaign–after a month of local and regional brainstorming–but were no doubt caught by surprise with the quick emergence and passage of this bill.

In an email to Tar Sands Action campaigners yesterday, Bill McKibben did his best to outline immediate steps to be taken:

Our hope — and what you should ask the President for when you write him — is that when he signs the bill he will say the obvious thing:

“Two months is not long enough to review the pipeline. The Canadians themselves have just delayed review of their tar sands pipelines over safety concerns, and we’ve just come through a year that set a record for billion-dollar climate-related disasters; I’m not going to do a rush job just to please the oil industry lobbyists. So this pipeline is dead.”

Since the State Department has already, in essence, said two months is not enough time, this should be straightforward.

We should know how it’s going to play out within 48 hours or so. We’re of course ready to fight like heck.

But for this weekend? If you haven’t gotten through to the White House, or you think you can round up some friends, you can send them a message here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments (the switchboard is now closed for the weekend) – and click here to spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.

Even if the president says the right thing, it seems inevitable that TSA will have to get back out on the streets. If discussions over the past month from the local level on up are any indication of what’s to come, possible courses of action include targeting Obama campaign centers as sites for protest and civil disobedience, starting divestment campaigns against the banks that finance the pipeline project, and occupying the pipeline’s endpoints in Texas and Alberta.

Washington may be far removed from the chain of events it’s facilitating up in the Arctic, but climate activists and the broad range of other folks opposed to this pipeline–including Nebraska farmers and Texas ranchers–are already catalyzing another chain of events that politicians will have a much harder time ignoring.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Arab and Bedouin Israelis held a state-wide general strike on Sunday as several thousand demonstrators gathered at the Prime Ministry to express their outrage at a government plan that would relocate Negev Bedouins out of their homes into impoverished townships.

• In cities all across Russia, unauthorized demonstrations were ongoing Sunday after anti-Putin protesters escalated their dissent in Moscow at a massive rally on Saturday as tens of thousands marched for free elections.

• On Sunday, Syrians in some regions observed the opposition’s call for a general strike, despite reports that police in the capital forced shop owners to reopen.

• After leading scores of protesters inside of Durban climate talks on Friday, Greenpeace activists posed as representatives of wealthy corporations on Sunday to call attention to the beneficiaries of failed action at the ICC.

• Bangkok, Thailand saw a rare second rally in two days Saturday as a throng of marchers engaged in a ‘fearlessness walk’ reiterated their objections to laws that punish those who speak out against the monarchy.

• A flash mob erupted in a Pittsburgh Target on Saturday as Occupy organizers briefly flooded the store in protest of the company’s hiring policies.

• For the second day in a row, hundreds of Indian teachers in Bangalore boycotted classes on Friday in protest of low wages.

• Demonstrations condemning the NATO airstrike in Pakistan have been ongoing for two weeks across the country, and were sparked anew after prayers Friday.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets again Friday chanting ‘no partnership with the murderers’ after a new Cabinet—half filled with pro-regime politicians—was announced.

• In the Dominican Republic on Thursday, hundreds of activists rallied against the government’s practice of confiscating or annulling birth certificates for those of Haitian descent.

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

One of the most extraordinary nonviolent, transnational movements of the modern age was the women’s suffrage movement of the first two decades of the 20th century. New Zealand first extended the franchise in the late 19th century—after two decades of organizing efforts. As the new century began, women’s suffrage movements gained strength in China, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Vietnam. Another 20 years and women were enfranchised in countries around the world, from Uruguay to Austria, the Netherlands to Turkey, and Germany to the United States. Few if any of those leading the campaigns for the ballot for women would have identified their approach as one of nonviolent action, nor would they have known its philosophical underpinnings or strategic wisdom. Like most who have turned to civil resistance, they did so because it was a direct method not reliant on representatives or agencies and a practical way to oppose an intolerable situation.

What exactly is the link between the rights of women, gender, nonviolent action, and building peace?

The word gender originates with Old French and until recently pertained mainly to linguistic and grammatical practices of classifying words as either masculine, feminine or (in some languages) neuter. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest English usage in 1384. Chaucer used the French spelling gendre in 1398. UNESCO’s Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language note that a person’s sex is a matter of chromosomes, whereas a person’s gender is a social and historical construction—the result of conditioning. I would further define the “feminist” project as the struggle for women’s emancipation, the insistence that women should be free as human beings to make fundamental choices in their lives.

Gender is not women’s lib by another name. Nor is it to say, with respect to nonviolent action, that women exude maternal attributes or possess a reflexive interest in peacemaking. Notions that women have a “natural” inclination toward conciliation and peace delegitimize the voices of women in policy and international relations. Rather, as Susan Moller Okin shows, the “social institutionalization of sexual differences” goes to the heart of politics, and therefore, peace.

At the University for Peace (UPEACE), where I teach, the gender and peace building department has persistently recognized the importance for young peace builders of studying nonviolent action. This recognition is partly related to an insight explained by Pam McAllister, who argues that “most of what we commonly call ‘women’s history’ is actually the history of women’s role in the development of nonviolent action.”

Programs and procedures for the empowerment of women have increasingly been recognized as fundamental to achieving durable peace. Data gathered over the past three decades show that improvements in the education and status of women stabilize and elevate the whole of societies. The uplift of women and their participation in public policy is now widely understood to be essential to economic growth, health status, reducing poverty, sustaining the environment, and consolidating democracy in all societies, including those long bent by authoritarianism and despotism.

Essential to the building of peace is an understanding that the ideologies and structures of patriarchy are among the most resilient systems of domination in human history, and are explicitly related to the socialization of men as warriors and exclusion of women from policy. The longevity and entrenchment of this social system has benefited from justifications of itself as “natural” and divinely sanctioned. Patriarchy has permeated structures and assumptions of power and economics, including forms of labor, presumptions of representative parliamentary bodies, religious dogma and the orthodoxies of faith traditions and leadership, military services, and concepts of the meanings of security.

In Africa, the exclusion of women is now being inferentially linked to the root causes of acute violent conflicts. For example, their customary invisibility in Rwanda is part of the background to 100 days in 1994 in which nearly one million unarmed persons were slaughtered. Crimes went unhalted. The international powers remained silent. (It should be noted that women participated in the genocide as well, killing other women or inciting men to rape and kill Tutsi women—as in the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, now on trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.) In 2002, Rwanda’s secretary general for the ministry of gender, M. Claire Mukasine, now an elected senator, told a visiting UPEACE delegation of which I was part that Rwandan governance had traditionally excluded women from public affairs. “Rwanda had no tradition whatsoever of women being able to speak in public,” she said of the colonial period and onward.

It was assumed that the father, brother, or husband speaks for the women; in the past, women never took a stand in public. They were not permitted to speak out at community meetings or the elders’ sessions. We think the exclusion of women is connected to the sad events in Rwanda.

The results of this recognition are striking. Today, Rwanda has more women on an absolute and proportional basis of its parliamentarians than any other such legislative body worldwide.

The awarding of a 2011 joint Nobel Peace Prize to a Liberian woman, Leymah Gbowee, embodies the links between gender, war, peace, and nonviolent struggle. Miriam O’Reilly’s interview of her for the BBC World Service illustrates the connection. In the midst of civil war led by the warlord Charles Taylor, Gbowee’s Women and Peace Network in 2000 brought together thousands of Christian and Muslim women to sit-in in a football stadium, exerting their popular defiance against “all the violence around us.” They had to protest, she maintains, because “there were no other possibilities. We had no option of being invited to the peace talks. We put ourselves out there as a symbol.” The women called for an immediate ceasefire. When it was violated, the network turned to another nonviolent method: Lysistratic nonaction, refusing sex with their husbands.

This method is named for Aristophanes’ farce of 411 B.C.E., first performed in an Athens exhausted by the Peloponnesian War. His hit play, Lysistrata, featured a sex strike by the war-weary women of both sides to end hostilities. Gbowee told the BBC that the idea of a sex strike came from frustration, as a means of pushing Liberian men, who had been silent and thus complicit with the war and violence. Maintaining that they would be fasting as an act of denial, the Liberian women held that as long as they were protesting and fasting, they could not be intimate with their men.

“We said let’s place our already battered bodies into the streets,” Gbowee remembers. “Let’s show the world that with our broken selves we can heal the nation.”

In 2006, the newly elected President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, another of the 2011 Nobel Peace laureates, formally requested Taylor’s extradition. Upon arrival in Monrovia, he was transferred to the custody of the United Nations. He is still held in the U.N. Detention Unit in The Hague, where he is on trial for his role in the civil war.

Taking gender seriously in the process of building peace, finally, is the job of everyone, not just of women. A former student of mine is the gender officer for the Nigerian parliament, and he, along with several other male, West African former students of mine, are doing important and strategic work. A Pakistani woman student, having completed her doctorate in gender at the London School of Economics, soon returns home to teach with these multiple areas of strength. An Israeli former student completed her doctoral studies, works for a civil-society organization, and is active in the peace movement. Each in different ways recognizes that building lasting peace must include taking questions of gender seriously.

As expected, the right-wing Partido Popular won the general election in Spain on Sunday, as they did in regional elections last May. But what is easy to interpret as a defeat of the May 15 movement, which helped inspire the Occupy movement in the U.S., has a different meaning if we look more closely: the vote has been diversified and two-party rule is in decline.

The center-left party PSOE lost more than 4.2 million votes in this election, out of 34 million voters total. Meanwhile, the PP gained nearly 500,000 more than the last general election in 2008. So where are the other 3.7 million votes? Aside from a small increase of abstention (from 26 to 28 percent), null votes (1.29 percent, double that of the 2008 election) and blank votes (from 1.11 to 1.37 percent), the remaining votes that PSOE lost went to smaller parties. Now in the Congress there are 13 political parties total, more than at any time since 1989. The minor party that had the largest increase in its presence in Congress is Izquierda Unida, which includes in its platform almost all the aspirations of the May 15 movement. Izquierda Unida has swelled from 2 seats to 11.

Other parties whose presence has grown markedly in Congress include the CIU (from Catalonia, from 10 to 16 seats), the UPyD (from 1 to 5 seats) and Amaiur (7 seats). This last party was born at the same time as the terrorist organization ETA announced it would renounce violence last month.

The May 15 movement, therefore, is tasting a bitter victory. Although a significant number of citizens has chosen to turn their back on one of the major parties and two-party system may be starting to disintegrate, the disproportionate nature of the Spanish electoral system has helped slow this trend, and the PP has been the major beneficiary. In the wake of a vibrant, left-leaning popular movement, the right gained an upper hand.

The reform of the Spanish electoral system, in fact, was one of the first and most important demands of the leading May 15 organization Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now), and it has often been discussed in the movement as a whole. A few days before the elections, some groups mounted a campaign that presented complaints in the electoral colleges about the lack of popular representation in Spanish democracy. The Facebook event for the campaign, DoRiYakitu, which was launched in the beginning of last week by Democracia Real Ya, had more than 2,500 followers the day before the election. But the reaction from the Central Electoral Board was immediate. It sent a circular to the town halls and the electoral colleges announcing a prohibition against any complaints at the electoral colleges, even though such complaint is legal. Many of the electoral colleges, nevertheless, accepted the complaints of the citizens, and thanks to Democracia Real Ya thousands of them were presented.

The presence of the May 15 movement was also felt in the Senate, a body that the movement considers pointless because it has no real power. Abstentions, blank votes and null votes combined totaled nearly 40 percent.

Now, after this election’s results, the movement’s attention is turning more toward a fight for a reform of the Electoral Law, which would allow the further erosion of bipartisanship in the Spanish political mainstream.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

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

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

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

Daily Finance, an AOL blog, reports that these small credit unions are offering big incentives to attract disgruntled and fee-weary customers from the mega-banks.

November 5 is Art Garfunkel’s birthday, too. He’ll be 70. The great activist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva will be 59. And Kevin Jonas will be 24. November 5 was not chosen to celebrate any of these luminaries (or even my sister) but because that is when the big banks announced they would start collecting new fees from customers. The movement already seems to be working, because The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that a number of the banks have backed away from the new fees after seeing the outcry from Bank of America customers and politicians.

But the “Move Your Money” campaign has become about a lot more than avoiding new fees. It is about supporting the local and the small and the community minded; it is about opting for conscience over convenience. It is about not putting money into corrupt and unaccountable institutions, about not letting your money make more money for corporate interests.

Remember that scene in Mary Poppins? When Mr. Banks and the other bankers sing to Michael Banks about investing his money in Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, how his tuppence will help make “railways through Africa, dams across the Nile, majestic self-amortizing canals, plantations of ripening tea”? No child watching that excellent movie understood what the bankers were singing about. All of the strange-sounding fruits of rapacious British imperialism just got sort of stuck in your head as you watched the black-hatted bankers dance.

Our money in CitiBank or Chase doesn’t make many dams or canals or plantations anymore, but it finances maquiladoras and builds weapons factories and underwrites mountaintop removal and funds construction on new nuclear power plants—“all for tuppence, prudently, fruitfully, frugally invested.”

I am not moving my money on November 5. I already have a small bank. It is called Liberty Bank, and it is so local that it closes at 4 p.m. most days—a fact that I cannot seem to get into my head. To make it extra inconvenient, there isn’t even an ATM outside the bank building. But they make up for it by being really nice and paying you back for the ATM fees you incur using other banks’ ATMs.

“Okay! Okay!” you say. “I get it. I am down. I am with it. Bank Transfer Day. Solid. Now tell me what to do!’

For that I turn to the experts from Yes! magazine. Those peace-y promoters of all things positive have pulled together “A Field Guide to Closing Your Bank Account” which is both inspiring and practical. For example, after extolling this grassroots campaign in stirring rhetoric, they point out that because November 5 is a Saturday, it is important to get your proverbial ducks in a row before that day, as lots of banks (and almost all credit unions) are closed on Saturdays. (I have that bumper sticker on my car, “Labor Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.”) They walk you through it step by step.

The last step? “Stand in front of a full-length mirror. Admire yourself. You’ve earned it.” Oh yeah, and tell my sister (or Art, Kevin or Vandana or someone else you know), “Happy Birthday!”

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

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

When I asked Mara what he would tell Fiji Water drinkers who may know Fiji only as the paradise it’s portrayed to be by the bottle, Mara said that “people in the States who drink Fiji Water should be aware that every bottle that they buy pours more money into the coffers of the illegal military junta.” He called Fiji Water, along with tourism, “revenue streams that are keeping the current military junta afloat. If they are avenues and ways that we should look at to try to bring down the military junta, to force it to go to democratic elections as quickly as possible, we should look at all means that keep it afloat. That includes tourism as well as Fiji Water.” (Fiji Water has described the post-coup turbulence in one of its newsletters as “an unfortunate crime wave as a result of political instability and building tensions,” in explaining why the company has “been making more of an effort to support our local police.”)

On Fiji Water’s hiring of the junta-run security operation, Homelink, to protect its facilities across the island, Mara noted that “Homelink is a security company that’s run by the military. Serving military officers serve on the board. It employs reserve and territorial force soldiers. So one would question the link there.” He adds that “the original concept was to maintain a vigilant security company within Fiji, but also to employ reserve soldiers. I doubt that there’s been a public audit that’s been done. Those are all questions that should be asked.”

Fiji’s other prized natural resource is mahogany, which the country grew into the largest mature plantation in the world. A power grab around this mahogany wealth was behind Fiji’s 2000 coup, while today a joint venture of foreign timber companies operates one of the world’s biggest mahogany factories off of the island. “Fiji Pure Mahogany” is the trademark name for Fiji’s value-added mahogany products, such as those turned into guitar parts and yacht components.

Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama receiving a gift of appreciation from Pacific Western Timbers Incorporated

One of the biggest customers and currently most awkward suitors for this wood wealth has been Gibson Guitar, the rock superstar brand now embraced by the Tea Party and conservative figures such as Michelle Malkin after US Fish and Wildlife Service agents raided its factory in an ongoing dispute over the company’s imported wood. Gibson Guitar spent months courting the Fijian junta over a potential deal to become the exclusive buyer of Fiji’s mahogany for its high end guitars — reportedly giving Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama a $5000 sample last year — but then abruptly cancelled a press conference that was supposed to announce the deal in late September.

Gibson’s CEO explained the delay in a statement: “No absolute commitment will be made until we conduct an extensive review of the situation. The Prime Minister has expressed his desire to have Gibson make a long term commitment to this emerging industry on the island nation. We are very hopeful.”

Whether the rumblings of discontent now coming out of Fiji, perhaps combined with international pressure, can coalesce into a movement coherent enough to force a return to democracy remains an open question. Any pressure western democracies can put on the junta is at risk of being eclipsed by China, which has started to lavish military and financial aid on a country facing increasing poverty and social stagnation. And then there is the unpredictability of Bainimarama — “a psychiatrist would have a field day with Bainimarama,” as the U.S. Ambassador to Fiji wrote in a 2006 cable recently released by Wikileaks. The Commodore has “lost all sense of reality,” Mara said. “At the moment it’s for his own survival. He knows that in the end he will face prosecution. As soon as you bring an elected government back in, he will be charged and prosecuted for what he’s done.”

As complicit as he was during the past five years of dictatorship — the U.S. Embassy refers to him as one of the “senior officers most visibly involved in post-coup human-rights violations” in Wikileaks cables, which also cite human rights activists who named him as being present for or aware of detainee abuse at military barracks — Mara now hopes that his willingness to return to Fiji and stand trial once democracy is restored will inspire other military officers to follow suit, and to start the truth and reconciliation process. “I apologize to the people of Fiji for my part in 2006,” he told Fijians via his website after he left. “When this hateful dictatorship has been eradicated, all of us who once served it shall answer to the Fijian people for the part we played, and I will gladly submit to their verdict.”

As he put it to me, “at the end of all this we are accountable to the people of Fiji for our actions.” In the meantime, though, Mara can be found praising Gandhi’s model of “passive resistance” and calling on the people of Fiji to “stand up against the evil being perpetrated by the vicious and brutal illegal military junta. Enough is enough.”

The Park Slope Food Coop is probably the only grocery store in America where non-members must: a) accompany a legit member and b) sign in with a photo ID, pledging not to buy any products. There’s just something about exclusivity that makes the kale chips taste better.

“You’re on alert,” the woman at the Coop entrance told me, not unkindly, when I swiped my membership card. Having missed my previous work shift bagging dried nuts and fruit, I am a member in poor standing (which is to say I am basically your average Cooper). Still I was able to bring my friend Jesse Bacon as my non-shopping guest.

Jesse had a cameo in my first Waging Nonviolence installment (“Co-oping BDS, part I: Progressive except Palestine”), which covered the campaign to have the Coop join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He’s a longtime justice-in-Palestine activist who is involved in Jewish Voice for Peace’s campaign to get the pension fund TIAA-CREF to divest from Motorola and other companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories. For this second installment, Jesse was a natural choice to help push the Israeli boycart through the aisles of the Park Slope Food Coop. Here’s some of what we found on the shelves.

Item #1: SodaStream, a home seltzer machine made in the West Bank settlement of Mishor Edomim. Situated atop land confiscated from Palestinians, Mishor Edomim is an industrial park where manufacturers receive tax breaks and other incentives from the Israeli government. Like most settlement goods, SodaStream is mislabeled as a product of “Israel,” although Mishor Edomim is beyond Israel’s internationally recognized boundaries. Generally speaking, in addition to violating international law, settlements splice up the West Bank with a system of settler-only roads that cage Palestinians into ever-shrinking areas; create a two-tiered legal system of military rule for the occupied and civilian rule for the occupiers; and appropriate scarce Palestinian water resources.

“Earth friendly,” reads the SodaStream packaging. “Show you care about the environment.”

Item #2: Osem is an Israeli company that uses packaging and machinery that are made in a West Bank settlement. Osem also donates part of their proceeds to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli semi-governmental organization that was and is a key player in Palestinian dispossession and legal discrimination against Palestinian-Israelis. Briefly: As detailed by political geographer Oren Yiftachel (and others), before 1948 Jews owned about 8.5% of British mandatory Palestine; afterward, with the forced flight of 700,000 Palestinians, Israel (in partnership with the JNF) simply nationalized refugee land and expropriated Palestinian-Israeli land. (Non-Jews are now effectively barred from owning or renting land in 80% of Israel.) The JNF also planted forests over destroyed Palestinian villages to prevent refugees from returning to their land. Today, teaming up with the Israeli army, the JNF repeatedly razes Bedouin villages in the Negev in southern Israel, officially termed “Judaization”: the project of forcing Bedouins into state-constructed ghettos.

Be sure to watch the video of ultra Orthodox anti-Zionists Jews in Williamsburg denouncing the JNF while little boys with peyos (ear curls) gleefully toss Osem crackers into a flaming trashcan.

Inside the Israeli boycart: settlement-made SodaStream; made-in-Israel Wylde pretzels (although the back of the package doesn’t say so); and Sabra hummus, co-owned by the Strauss Group, an Israeli company that is a popular boycott campaign target. For decades, the Strauss Group has adopted Israeli soldiers in the Golani brigade, notorious for their human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially during the 2008–2009 assault on Gaza in which 1389 Palestinians were killed, including 318 children. The Strauss Group provides the Golani brigade with care packages.

Who knows what else might go inside the Israeli boycart? There are rumors of Israeli paprika, perhaps persimmons and bathsalts. Yet, Coop organizers stressed that they don’t want to focus their campaign on de-shelving specific Israeli products (which, by the way, take a significant amount of research to identify due to mislabeling). Their strategy is to focus on the need for democratic process, and so their immediate goal is to bring about a Coop-wide vote.

Coop BDS organizer Nat Pinkerton, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit worker, lamented that much of the coverage of the Park Slope campaign has focused on organizers’ uncertainty about which Israeli products the Coop carries. “It feels important, but it also feels irrelevant,” Pinkerton told me, emphasizing the symbolic over the material. “Boycotting means being part of a movement at large.”

Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.

This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal promise of New York, home of the strange. (That and crazycheap organic food.) Founded in 1973, the Coop is a Brooklyn institution with enough character to have spawned its own genre of trend piece. Some examples: the Coop has Byzantine rules and work requirements (debatable); the Coop has nannies covering their employers’ shifts (dubious); and, most recently, the Coop is becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism (downright wrong).

The New York Observer has contributed the latest addition to the genre, with a smug piece earlier this month devoted to Coop members’ efforts to initiate a boycott of Israeli products and divest from whatever Israeli holdings the Coop might have. At the historically progressive Coop, the Observer procured a chorus of sources declaring the campaign anti- Semitic and intolerable in “the heart of Chaimtown,” as one man put it, referring to Park Slope’s high Jewish population. For the full sensationalist effect, Alan Dershowitz—the de facto representative of the hawkish Israel-right-or-wrong Jewish establishment—denounced the campaign’s “bigotry” and threatened to shut the joint down, an ambitious goal for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident who is not a member of the democratically-governed Coop.

The Coop campaign is part of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), a global movement launched with a 2005 call by 170 Palestinian civil-society groups. Shorthand demands: end the occupation of the Palestinian Territories; end the legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and allow the 700,000 Palestinians expelled in the 1948 creation of the state to return—along with their descendants—to what is now Israel. Until the country complies with international law, the movement vows economic and cultural boycotts, institutional divestments, and governmental sanctions of Israel. Perhaps the strongest indicator of BDS’s power is the Boycott Law passed in the Knesset in July, making it illegal for groups like Boycott from Within to advocate BDS in Israel, a state that bills itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Leading the charge against BDS at the Coop is Barbara Mazor, who told the Observer, “I think [BDS supporters are] latching onto it like slogans. Like true believers, it’s the cool thing to do. You know, ‘I’m a progressive, and it’s a progressive cause,’ so I think that’s how it’s coming through, very thoughtlessly.” (Mazor also alluded to her otherwise liberal politics with a dig at “a certain president [who] spent eight years in office.”) The political alignment of the Coop’s BDS opponents is made clear on their website, which links to the reactionary pro-Israel group Stand With Us, known for having once pepper sprayed anti-occupation activists from the group Jewish Voice for Peace, along with having published an anti-BDS comic book that depicted Palestinians as vermin, in a throwback to Nazi propaganda.

“People here are always thinking about the implications of everything,” Mazor was quoted as saying in a 2001 academic article about the Coop. “That’s really nifty. I find that stam people [Yiddish for “ordinary people”] think about less and less.”

Those who argue that the Coop boycott campaign is anti-Semitic believe that BDS “singles out” Israel among all the other nations of the world that commit grave human rights violations; the only reason anyone would focus on Israel, the logic goes, is because they harbor prejudice against Jews. “Israel has a lot of problems, but so does China, so does America, so does a lot of the world,” Coop member Andrew Sepulveda told the Observer, voicing a common BDS counterargument. But must we rank wrongdoing nations before taking a stand? And is it not logical to single out Israel, given that U.S. foreign policy has already singled out Israel with over $3 billion in annual military aid? “Whenever we take a political action, we open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards,” BDS supporter Naomi Klein reminds us, “since the truth is that we can never do enough in the face of pervasive global injustice.”

“The reason we’re boycotting Israel and not Atilla the Hun is because there is an international call for boycott on Israel, and we should be honoring boycotts,” according to one Coop boycott supporter, who asked not to be named. “We shouldn’t be crossing picket lines. End of story. The reason we aren’t boycotting Atilla the Hun is because there is no international campaign to boycott Atilla the Hun. If the victims of Atilla the Hun ask for a boycott, then we should take that seriously.”

In a letter published in the Coop’s house organ, the Linewaiters’ Gazette, boycott organizers noted that the Coop has a long tradition of boycotts—of both individual companies and entire nations. A 20-year boycott of South African products began in 1973, the year of the Coop’s founding. There have been eleven Coop boycotts since 1989, including Coca-Cola, Domino Sugar, non-United Farm Worker grapes, and tuna.

Until recently, the matter of boycotting and divesting from Israel had only been raised in letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette, where the debate has ebbed and flowed for over two years. But at a July 26th general meeting—a monthly gathering held at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim—the grinding wheels of Coop democratic process began turning with the first face-to-face discussion of BDS. The question at hand was not whether or not the Coop should join BDS, but rather whether they should even hold a membership-wide vote. “Why not boycott Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain?” said Susan Tauber, one of the members advocating against the referendum, according to the Linewaiters’ Gazette’s recap of the general meeting.

Coop BDS organizers told me that almost all of the supporters who spoke at the meeting were Jewish and identified themselves as such. Still, Jewish opponents of BDS at the Coop show that the “progressive except Palestine” phenomenon in the American Jewish community has not gone away. While open to hosting the debate in his synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim’s Rabbi Andy Bachman—generally considered a progressive rabbi—condemned the boycott efforts in a statement, writing, “BDS rhetoric reveals that the ultimate goal of the majority of its supporters is a dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state. This is simply untenable and unjust.” (Bachman was referring to BDS’ demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to what is now the state of Israel in accordance with UN Resolution 194.) In the Linewaiters’ Gazette, BDS opponent Ruth Bollettino made the same argument, but in starker language. “The ‘right’ of Palestinian refugees to return means dismantling the Jewish state demographically, flooding it with Palestinian Arabs,” Bollettino wrote, revealing the racial fears underpinning the drive to maintain Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Her letter joined seven others against BDS, one in support of BDS, and an unrelated letter thanking a stranger for having returned $90 that had fallen out of the writer’s pocket at the Coop entrance.

Boycott supporters at the Coop would seem to be in the minority, if one were to judge by the letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette or the Observer, which admitted its nonscientific methods while noting, “Finding pro-boycott members outside the co-op Monday night was no easy task.” But Melissa, a Brooklynite Coop member of eight years, had a different impression of the membership’s stand. “The silent majority of Coop members are probably uncertain about the issue of BDS,” she said, adding, “The challenge that we have is not to change the minds of people like Barbara Mazor.” Rather, it is to educate their fellow Coop members as to the need to honor the Palestinian BDS call.

Retired lawyer Dennis James, a Coop BDS organizer, noted the generational divide he sees in conversations about BDS—who shuts off, and who’s willing to engage. “Some of the older people, you can’t raise the subject. It’s verboten,” James said. “Whereas younger people might argue with you but they will talk about it.”

The other day, I met up with my friend Jesse Bacon at Tealounge, a coffeeshop across the street from the Coop. Despite having once seen a mouse scamper through the glass dessert case there, I ate part of Jesse’s cookie as we talked BDS shop. He’s an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, working on their campaign to get the pension fund TIAA-CREF to divest from Motorola and other companies profiting from the occupation of the West Bank. Many TIAA-CREF holders are teachers and other professionals who tend to skew liberal in their politics. Working on the campaign has helped Jesse see how important it is to have a sympathetic population when advocating BDS in an institution. Jesse weighed in:

In a certain sense, the Coop campaign is dealing with liberal people who just want to get their crunchy, hippie food and be left alone. But the best things that movements critical of Israel can do is to push people to be consistent. Consistency is a great thing to offer people. It requires some explanation and education as to why this is part of your other values–why boycotting or divesting from Israel is an extension of them.

The cringe factor was high for both of us while reading the Observer’s anonymous source decry the Coop BDS campaign reaching into the heavily Jewish populated Park Slope, “the heart of Chaimtown.” At the same time, Jesse pointed out, “The fact that a BDS campaign is even going on in ‘Chaimtown’—the heart of the Jewish crunchy liberal establishment—whether or not this wins, it shows that this issue is everywhere now.”

Read on to my next installment, in which Jesse and I go shopping at the Coop to see what products could go inside the Israeli boycart.

The news cycle may have started shifting away from the News Corporation hacking scandal, but social media activists aren’t about to let Rupert Murdoch off the hook. In the past few weeks, new campaigns have been emerging on the web which are raising awareness about the scandal, advocating a boycott of News Corp holdings, and monitoring its corporate practices.

Before James Murdoch announced the closure of News of the World, a campaign against the paper was launched on Twitter by Melissa Harrison (@The_Z_Factor). It encouraged Twitter users to tweet News of The World advertisers to reconsider their contracts, providing a list of tweets directed at those companies. One example is, “Dear @VirginMedia, will you be reconsidering your advertising spend with #notw given that we now know they hacked Milly Dowler’s [2002 murder victim] phone?” In an article in the Guardian, Harrison recalls that the campaign developed over time, growing from rants against News Corporation to a strategy to target advertisers as more people started exchanging tweets. British corporations like Morrisons, The Co-Operative, and Virgin Holidays pulled their advertising from News of The World before the paper was shut down. It isn’t clear yet what role Harrison’s campaign played in this.

A Facebook page titled “Boycott News International (@BoycottMurdoch on Twitter), currently has almost 9,700 members. It calls for people to boycott Murdoch properties like The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, and Sky television. Of course, it’s easier said than done to avoid Murdoch’s media, especially the websites associated to his papers and channels. Yet the web itself can offer some help. The Google Chrome web store now has an add-on called Murdoch Block, which blocks websites owned and operated by News Corporation. Similarly, there is a MurdochAlert add-on for Firefox, which displays a warning box whenever the browser accesses a Murdoch-controlled site: “MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking.”

Some Web activists are going the extra mile, resorting to online sabotage. The hacker group LulzSec hacked The Sun’s website on the 19th of July and set up a fake news article announcing the death of Rupert Murdoch. The article was titled “Media moguls body discovered” and elaborates that Murdoch “ingested a large quantity of palladium” before “passing out in the early hours of the morning.” The article adds, “Authorities would not comment on whether this was a planned suicide, though the general consensus among locals and unnamed sources is that this is the case.”

Britain’s netizens also launched a campaign through the online activist portal Avaaz.org against Rupert Murdoch’s bid to gain 100% ownership of BSkyB, the parent company of the Sky news channels in the UK. For years, News Corp has been criticized for undermining media plurality in the United Kingdom, and the phone hacking scandal has heightened sentiments against the bid.

Active online participation with these campaigns depends on a high level of public knowledge of the scandal. YouTube has become a repository of knowledge, where the channel NOTWPhoneHacking, has uploaded hundreds videos of news and panel shows, chronologically showing the progress of the investigation and developments in the media debates and discussions.

Thanks to campaigns like these, public and political pressure has resulted in important arrests, resignations, and the announcement by the British Trinity Mirror media group to review its editorial controls and standards. But as mainstream media focus fluctuates, the new media is playing a key role in the campaign against illegal corporate journalism, and for a reassessment of the democratic duties of the British media.