“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

Just before Woolson lobbed his medals in the direction of the NATO gathering (the organizers had requested that an official accept them, but this was turned down), he added: “I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!”

This was the largest organized medal return since April 1971, when more than 800 veterans deposited their medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to dramatically repudiate the Vietnam War. Like that event four decades ago, Sunday’s ceremony was moving and powerful. It crystallized in a clear but visceral way the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time it spelled out the critical importance of undertaking deliberate and potentially risky resistance for healing and nonviolent change.

This riveting event could well have become the indelible image of this week’s NATO protest. Even more importantly, it might have prompted a renewed national focus on the realities and costs of the last dozen years of war-making.

So far, neither has happened. Although there was some media coverage of the medal return ceremony (including a piece on local television and extensive reporting on Democracy Now!), it was largely overshadowed by the clash between police and protesters that took place almost immediately after the vets exited the stage. The march permit expired and most of the thousands of marchers drifted away, but a couple of hundred people stayed put in the streets. Hundreds of police in riot gear then flooded into the area. As an Associated Press story reports:

Some of the most enduring images of the event were likely to be from the end — when a small group of demonstrators clashed with a line of police who tried to keep them from the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama was hosting the gathering. The protesters tried to move east toward McCormick Place, with some hurling sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for nearly two hours, with police blocking the protesters’ path and the crowd refusing to leave. Some protesters had blood streaming down their faces.

This description conveys little of the ferocity of the tense confrontation that erupted after the permit expired and a huge police contingent swarmed into the space, intent on pushing people out of the intersection and keeping them from moving toward the convention center. News accounts and video clips from the scene show that the police tactics were hugely confrontational and aggressive; the police attacked and pummeled many protesters. At the same time, video clips show objects being hurled at police officers, including a police barricade, and protesters pushing police. Both sides were confrontational, as this raw video indicates.

My spouse Cynthia and I brought our two-year-old daughter Leah to this march. (The coalition website said that this event would be “family friendly,” and we took it at its word.) We were one block from the stage, but left a couple of minutes before the permit expired because Leah was getting hungry and thirsty; it had been a long, hot day. As we walked north, a long phalanx of police officers in riot gear were trotting single file toward the intersection, where only a few minutes later they would be swinging batons at marchers unwilling to budge. Some would be bloodied; others arrested.

There is no excuse for the actions of the police. At the same time, the lack of nonviolent discipline among the remaining protesters contributed to escalating this confrontation. The media frame on this story shifted almost immediately from “peaceful march” to “street fighting,” and the powerful action of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets was largely lost in the inundating shuffle.

Well before all of this, Suellen Semekoski and I were asked by Iraq Veterans Against the War to co-facilitate the nonviolent action training that would support the vets in preparing for their medal return. We were happy to do so, and on Saturday afternoon and evening we plunged into this process with them.

In our six hours together, we sensed the depth of hope that this public action was generating for them as individuals and as a community. Throughout the day the participants repeatedly stressed that nonviolence was going to be crucial to this event and that they were committed to maintaining this spirit. In addition, we were joined by three members of Afghans for Peace who were collaborating with IVAW on this event. They were also resolute about the importance of nonviolent discipline. The success of this action, they said, depended on it.

These survivors of war — U.S. veterans and Afghan peaceworkers — were creating a rare public space where they sought to call on the nation and the world to reflect deeply on the reality of this past, present and future destructiveness. They were very clear that nonviolent strategies, tactics and atmosphere would be vital to achieving this.

Unfortunately, there was little infrastructure in place to support that possibility. While many of us led numerous nonviolence trainings in the Chicago area in the run-up to the NATO mobilization, there were no agreed-upon nonviolence guidelines to serve as a foundation for nonviolent action. (The “Chicago Principles” did not serve this function.) Nor were there adequate numbers of peacekeepers prepared to intervene in order to maintain this nonviolent atmosphere. (In January, some of us had offered to train 500 peacekeepers, who would be equipped to respond to outbreaks of violence. This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number. We were told that the coalition was already training peace guides.)

There are many reasons such infrastructure was not in place, including a sensitivity to the now classic debate between nonviolence and diversity of tactics. Nevertheless, I suspect that we are at a crossroads as a movement for change and, at some point, we must make a difficult but important choice.

From my perspective, people power depends for its lifeblood on nonviolent discipline.

Nonviolent action is more effective than violent action — including the kind of heated scrum that took place in Chicago this past Sunday — because it keeps us on message (focused on the issue, rather than the tired tit-for-tat narrative), it is more likely to alert, educate and mobilize the population (the lynchpin of successful movements), and it communicates a vision of the kind of society we want (veterans creating the space of transformative healing and social change rather than the push-comes-to-shove dynamics of retaliatory violence).

If these things are true, then we must engage in nonviolent struggle with those for whom nonviolent struggle is dispensable. The challenges our world is facing are too grim to move forward without the strength and effectiveness of disciplined nonviolent people power. There are lessons everywhere — even from what went down in Chicago on Sunday.

Photo by Magharebia, via Wikimedia Commons

You may not have heard of it, but the West African country of Mauritania has what is probably one of the most vibrant and active protest movements in the world today. Protests drawing tens of thousands of people (out of a total population of just three million) take place almost weekly in the capital Nouakchott, with many smaller protests happening on a daily basis around the vast country. The protests are overwhelmingly nonviolent — even in the face of frequent violent suppression — and have been going on since February 2011.

It would be comfortable to file these protests as another part of the Arab Spring: Mauritania is on the southern reaches of the Saharan Arab belt, and large-scale protests here started with the self-immolation and subsequent death of Yacoub Ould Dahoud, an action mirroring the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, which set off the revolt in Tunisia. As in other Arab countries that experienced large-scale protests, Mauritania is governed by an autocratic regime whose leader, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, originally came to power through a coup d’état.

But while these similarities exist and the pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world surely have been a source of great inspiration for local activists, Mauritania merits a second look.

Firstly, the range of participating actors in Mauritania are as diverse as their agendas. While a common concern of all protest movements is the end of the rule of Abdel Aziz, there are a host of other issues that various groups want to have addressed, not all directly related to the country’s ruler.

Saidou Wane, a Movement for Justice and Equality in Mauritania activist speaks during a protest against the government at Fountain Square in April. Photo via Cincinnati.com

Chief among them is the issue of slavery. Some estimates say that up to a third of Mauritania’s population is enslaved (even though the practice has been formally abolished multiple times). Victims are overwhelmingly ethnic black Africans. This creates racial tensions in Mauritania’s multiethnic society, but also religious ones, as certain interpretations of Islam are used to legitimize slavery.

These tensions have forced their way into the open in the context of current protests, with anti-slavery activist Biram Ould Abeid publicly burning Islamic legal manuals discussing the issue. Abeid was subsequently arrested by the authorities, and his case is controversially debated among other activists.

Another very active group, traditionally eyed suspiciously in Western societies, are the Islamists. Organizations like Tawassoul demand a state and society based on principles of Islamic law. While not cooperating a lot with other protest movements, they have been incredibly persistent in their activities against the regime, including protests of Salafist women against democracy (which is seen as not compatible with Islam) and for the release of imprisoned husbands.

More familiar political standpoints are expressed by the traditional political opposition and various youth movements, the biggest of which has followed the modern tradition of naming itself after the date of the first big protest, 25F (February 25, 2011). These groups focus on democratic reform and an end of the reign of President Aziz.

With all these different actors and goals competing for internal support and attention, it is remarkable that protests have almost completely stayed peaceful for well over a year. While protesters frequently face violence from police (including kettling, arbitrary arrests, beatings, water cannons, tear gas and attack dogs), the protesters have employed a wide range of nonviolent tactics.

In addition to traditional rallies, marches, speeches and sit-ins, protesters have occupied public squares with tents and use social media and video live streaming to coordinate protests, document violence and communicate with the outside world.

As the growing momentum of the protests show, these nonviolent tactics have so far fulfilled their goal of mobilizing the general population against the regime. But President Aziz should not be counted out just yet.

While the diversity of the protesters and their goals shows on the one hand that a vibrant civil society and widespread discontent exists in Mauritania, their disunity may still allow Aziz to carry the day. Already, the affair around the Islamic book burning by anti-slavery activist Abeid has allowed Aziz to portray himself as a defender of Islam. Given the incompatibility of demands by pro-democracy activists and Islamists, it is easy to imagine Aziz discovering his inner zealot to rally support from this part of society (a strategy tried and tested on the other side of continent in Sudan).

Another possible development could see Aziz taking advantage of the regional situation. With large parts of neighboring Mali controlled by Islamist groups and the fear of an “African Afghanistan” running high in European, U.S. and African capitals, Aziz could implement some feigned democratic reforms and present himself as a beacon of stability in the region, hoping for (and probably getting) Western military support and closed eyes, ears and mouths in the U.N. Security Council and the African Union.

But given the level of mobilization in Mauritania so far, the pro-democracy movements in Mauritania have a good chance of succeeding against such moves. Looking at successful nonviolent struggles elsewhere, activists in Mauritania could enhance the likelihood of success by working to undermine the foundations of the regime. Actions like strikes and boycotts can be incredibly effective, if well employed. Additionally, the protest movements could reach out to security forces, trying to convince at least elements of them to turn over to their side. After all, police and soldiers need to feel that they will be part of a better future as well, otherwise many of them will go with the devil they know instead of with the change they mistrust.

Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.

It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.

I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.

“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”

Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.

Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the a group broke off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, the “Revolutionary People’s Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.

Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.

Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used “security culture against activists” and “developed patterns of trust to seem legit.” The Cleveland Five, he explains, “were coached by the federal government.”

In a letter Stevens wrote from jail, Schulte told me, he described the feeling of helplessness he experienced right before the bust: “We saw this coming,” Stevens wrote.

“Brought to the edge of the swimming pool”

Andy Stepanian knows a thing or two about state repression of activists. As one of the animal-rights activists known as the SHAC 7, Stepanian has served three and a half years in federal prison after having been prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act for costing animal testing laboratories more than $380 million in lost profits simply by operating a website. While the SHAC 7 case did not involve FBI entrapment or property destruction, the specific targeting of activists because of their anti-capitalist activism was reflective of a new era of post-9/11 state surveillance and repression.

When I talked to him on the phone about the Cleveland Five, Stepanian surmised, “These folks would not have gone out and done this if not brought to the edge of the swimming pool by federal agents and urged to jump in.”

The FBI affidavit — analyzed here by RT — confirms, again, what many have warned about regarding the growing surveillance and security agencies in the United States: To keep themselves employed and justify their budgets, people in agencies like the FBI are orchestrating plots to catch “terrorists” who, otherwise, seem to be quite unable to do anything on their own. Last fall, Mother Jones reported on FBI efforts against Muslim extremists and concluded that many of those were instances of entrapment as well.

In activist circles, there are a series of notorious cases of entrapment by federal authorities. In 2006, for instance, environmental activist Eric McDavid, encouraged by an informant known as “Anna,” was convicted on conspiracy charges. Another more notorious case is that of Brandon Darby — a well-known anarchist and activist-turned-informant — and his entrapment of David McKay and Bradley Cowder. The award winning film, Better This World, tells the story of how McKay and Cowder were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“In most cases,” said Stepanian, “this is not one coordinated crackdown with a puppet-master. It’s a bottom-up [phenomenon] where special investigators are creating things for themselves to do. They go to potential targets to justify their position and create work for themselves.”

Perhaps even more troubling than the manipulation of vulnerable individuals — whether they be political activists or members of mosques — is the way in which law enforcement meanwhile manipulates public discourse about terrorism, Islam or, in this case, a growing social movement.

According to Schulte, the operation in Cleveland appears to have been part of a pre-planned narrative meant to paint Occupiers as a group with terrorist thugs in their midst, discouraging others from joining the movement. The FBI had a media statement prepared for immediate release on May Day after the arrests, and it hosted an unusually high-profile press conference the following day. There have been more than 300 pleas involving FBI informants in six years and such kind of overt media blitz from the feds is rare. Rolling Stone reporter Rick Perlstein observes, comparing two different anti-terrorism operations at the end of April, “that the State is singling out ideological enemies.” He reports that authorities are much less likely, for instance, to use tactics of entrapment against violent white supremacist groups.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is an expert on state-sponsored targeting of radical activist groups who has testified before Congress on FBI entrapment and is the author of a book (and an accompanying blog) titled Green is the New Red. Potter calls the Cleveland Five conspiracy “part of the ongoing focus on demonizing anarchists.” Just a cursory look at the headlines in Chicago and Cleveland confirms a growing association of anarchism with violence and terrorism while alienating radical movements from potential supporters.

Occupy Cleveland responds

Each of the Cleveland Five entered pleas of not guilty in federal court last week. As the trial of these young men plays out, their fates rest in which story is more compelling — their own victimhood, or the cunning of the federal agents. Although they were not taking action in the name of Occupy Cleveland, the future of Occupy and related movements in the United States is at stake in which story the public chooses to believe.

Occupy Cleveland, one of the movement’s longest-lasting encampments, had the remnants of its occupation removed by police in the middle of the night on May 3. There was little public outcry, when the city revoked its permit after the May 1 arrests.

Occupy Cleveland spokesperson Katie Steinmuller stressed that it was only a matter of time before the camp was evicted, and that it wasn’t entirely a result of the bomb scare. “There was a casino planned to be opened in view of the tents,” said Steinmuller referring to Occupy Cleveland’s camp when I spoke with her by phone about the eviction. “This [conspiracy] was just a good excuse to get us out.”

In a media statement following the arrests of the Cleveland Five, Occupy Cleveland affirmed its commitment to “active non-violence.” Individual occupiers have chosen to join the support team for the Five, but Occupy Cleveland as a whole is steering clear of commenting on it further.

“The FBI was successful in … what they set out to do,” said Schulte about the initial negative reaction the Occupy movement and other activists experienced in Cleveland. “People were exploited and trapped.”

“When you take away a space of legitimate protest,” adds Stepanian, “less legitimate forms of protest become more prevalent.” Events like the arrests of the Cleveland Five can create schisms within movements, which the state exploits to create a climate of fear within and about activist groups. The NATO 3 arrests and bond hearing, for instance, just before this weekend’s mass No NATO demonstration, will serve to deter people from participating and obscure the reality of the protest’s message.

In Chicago, the NATO 3 are each being held on $1.5 million bail. More details will emerge in the coming weeks, but Michael E. Deutsch, legal counsel for the NATO 3, has said that two of the 11 arrested during a house raid in Bridgeport were Chicago Police Department informants and have since disappeared. The truth of what really happened in Cleveland and Chicago may or may not emerge in the courtroom. But it is clear regardless that Occupy is now being exposed to a new level of state repression, and that it is taking a toll on what has still remained a nonviolent protest movement.

Correction 5/22: The article originally reported that Azir had been the impetus behind the Revolutionary People’s Army and that Wright appears to have been the first in contact with Azir until the spring of 2012. For information on supporting the Cleveland Five, visit www.Cleveland5justice.org

• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

NNU Midwest Director, Jan Rodolfo, RN, speaking at a press conference last Thursday morning, spoke on the union’s plans to file for injunctive relief in federal court rather than succumb to the city’s demands of either to accept the permit changes to the route or have it rescinded entirely. The city gave the union two days to make a decision. Organizers and counsel decided to pursue legal avenues to assert their right to protest, but would rally in Grant Park if their legal challenge failed.

“The city wants to push us aside to Petrillo Bandshell, [in Grant Park],” said Rodolfo, “rather than have us march into the heart of downtown Chicago to Daley Plaza, clearly a center of symbolic protest. We will not be silent. We did not cancel our event when the G8 decided to hide at Camp David. We are not going to cancel our event now.”

Amidst the widespread outcries and protests on behalf of the NNU, the city reversed its decision earlier this week.

National Nurses United, with more than 170,000 registered nurses, is the largest nursing union in the country and allied with other unions across the globe — many of whom have expressed outrage at the Emanuel administration’s last-minute decision to change the permit conditions. Their event is shaping up to be quite the kick-off event to the NATO Summit as they advocate for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street.

While Occupy Chicago and other groups have a week’s worth of events planned, the National Nurses United march — featuring Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello — promises to be the first mass gathering of protesters against next weekend’s NATO summit.

The city had cited the addition of Morello to the rally line-up as the reason for the change in permit status. But what the city should really be worried about is not the handful of well-known musicians, journalists, activists and other pseudo-celebrities of the left drawing large crowds. Rather, the Emanuel administration should worry about the way many movements are converging under the banner of resisting NATO-G8 policies.

The press conference, hosted by Occupy Chicago, included an impressive lineup of organizers and spokespersons united against the NATO summit, with representatives from the anti-war movement (CANG8, IVAW, and Network for a NATO Free Future) along with supporters from labor, independent media and community groups. This showing of solidarity is a force to be reckoned with, as days of action for education, the environment, immigration reform, economic justice, counter-summits, popular assemblies, concerts, marches and rallies will consume Chicagoans and visitors from across the globe for more than ten days.

Mainstream media is predicting smaller numbers of protesters filling the streets of Chicago than if the G8 summit would have remained in the city. But such an assessment is premature. The Obama Administration’s decision to move the G8 meetings was seen by many as victory for the converging economic justice and anti-war movements made possible by the Occupy movement.

Furthermore, the focus on NATO, in the words of CANG8 organizer Joe Iosbaker, “as the armed wing of the one percent,” combines the 99 percent meme of economic justice and anti-austerity protests with the kind of anti-militarism that made Dr. King’s prophetic condemnation of capitalism, racism, and militarism so volatile for the vital interests of the oligarchy. While such an analysis may have once been relegated to radical cafés and Marxists’ FBI dossiers, it is becoming a commonplace occurrence in occupations and dinner tables across the country as the dots between austerity and militarism are getting connected.

Everyday, more organizations and people are endorsing the NATO protests and planning to join in. Across the country, buses are being booked and church halls and couches filled as people are realizing just how historic of a moment this convergence is going to be. A number of protests have already occurred, including civil disobedience at the Obama campaign headquarters, immigration and foreclosure actions, and a Black Bloc FTP/Anti-Capitalist march on the Southside of Chicago.

NNU’s original plans for their protest was to focus on economic inequality and the G8 meetings. Now, the NNU and others are forced to broaden the scope of their analysis and protest to explain the connection between NATO and the G8 to their large constituencies. NNU’s commitment to protest at the NATO summits, and the allies they’ve found in their fight against the city, reflects the convergence — or spill over — across different movements that made the Seattle 1999 protests so well-attended and successful.

Administrative hurdles and legal challenges to impede the coming together of a real solidarity of interests — labor, environmental, economic, peace — while annoying, questionable, and unjust also reveals the emerging battleground between a movement, powerholders, and the public. So while National Nurses United are at their wits end with the Windy City’s bureaucracy, this is an unfolding drama that is just getting starting.

Do a Google image search for protest symbols and your first page will show a range of raised fists, Guy Fawkes masks and possibly even a few giant inflatable rats. But by far the single most represented image you’ll see is the peace sign. It is probably the most famous protest symbol in the world and has its origins in the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s. The sign represents the semaphore signals for two letters: ‘N’ (the two diagonals pointing down) and ‘D’ (the vertical line that divides the circle), which together represent nuclear disarmament. It has become the symbol of anti-war and social justice movements across the globe.

The aim of a symbol is to communicate as immediately and directly as possible the core of what you represent. It is the shorthand for your values, your aspirations and sometimes your political agenda, if you’ve managed to put one together. Which brings us to an important question: Is it time to consider a new symbol for a new era?

I was at a conference recently with pro-democracy activists from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. They expressed a strong feeling that their aspirations and values were linked despite working in dramatically different contexts and against ostensibly different adversaries. They felt united in their commitment to nonviolence, to sharing strategies, to building and putting up as much as to removing and pulling down — all in an attempt to construct a different vision of the future. They also emphasized the importance of being connected in order to find strength greater than the sum of their individual powers. Near the end of the conference, someone observed that there really is no political symbol that represents that list of values and goals.

The peace sign has a lot of significance, but its origin is very specifically nuclear disarmament, and even its broader connotation is narrowly that of peace. Another symbol handed down from previous generations is that of the clenched upright fist. It immediately conveys an expression of defiance, resistance and solidarity, but is agnostic in what it might resist. Therefore it has been used by a disparate number of groups and movements including the Black Panthers, white supremacists, the Serbian revolutionaries Otpor, Egypt’s April 6th Movement and the Socialist International, to name but a few. And although some of those groups were strategic, networked and nonviolent, some were not.

A more recent symbol is the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask often seen at Indignado and Occupy protests that alludes to a “vendetta” against the 1 percent. It doesn’t quite fit with what much of these movements seem to be about, at least not in terms of the method intimated.

So I approached a long time collaborator, Carl Le Blond, who has created some of the most powerful visual content on issues from Burma to HIV/AIDS to climate change, to see if he could help. We had some lengthy discussions about what a symbol needed to do and represent, as well as the importance of investing it with meaning — which often comes from who’s using it and how.

The existing symbols seemed to emphasize a particular dimension of struggle: nonviolence, defined by not using violence (though it is much more than that), or resistance, defined by what you are against and often neglecting what you are for. Few gave a sense of building something new. If many in the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and Indignados believe they are all connected, what would their symbol look like?

Despite being in the middle of a number of massive deadlines, Carl eventually put pen to café serviette — an old-school medium for great ideas and images. A few days later he had worked up his initial idea and the people’s cube was born.

Carl’s aim was to emphasize that when people come together in an organized way they can build something much stronger and longer lasting than they could on their own. As he put it:

The people’s cube is on first sight solid and immovable from every way that you look at it. It has the simplicity and latent strength of a perfect molecular structure. Though in this case the molecules bonding together are symbolic of people standing together with their arms locked to form a symbol of strength and unity.

It seemed to represent much of what the activists I met had been talking about: being connected, constructive, strategic and networked. I sent it around to them and was glad that it got an enthusiastic reception. It will be interesting to see if and where it might pop up first. Now it may not do it for you. And that’s cool. But it’s worth thinking about, as these are new times and they are worthy of new symbols. Grab your stencils now!

Catholic Workers outside Chicago's Prudential Building, via Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune.

Catholic Workers and friends gathered yesterday morning at the Prudential Building in Chicago — home to President Obama’s campaign headquarters — to say “No to NATO; Yes to Community.”

“We are here today,” said Chantal de Alacuaz from Chicago, “to boldly proclaim our desire to live in a world where we say no to NATO and yes to community. As Catholic Workers, we serve the poor by practicing the works of mercy by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and taking care of the sick. The works of war are directly opposed to that.”

Our intention (disclosure: I am a Catholic Worker myself and helped organize the action) was to invite Obama and other NATO leaders to break bread with us over a symbolic meal to discuss how to transform NATO from an instrument of war and empire into an instrument of peace and love, embodied by the biblical works of mercy. We sang songs, held signs, shared bread with commuters, passed out leaflets and spoke to media before entering the building.

More than 125 of us streamed into the building, through the lobby, up the elevators, past the security check point and into the elevator banks before they were shut down, preventing us from reaching the offices. At that point, we joyfully sang our vision of a world without NATO with modified lyrics to tunes such as “Down by the Riverside,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Oh, Freedom.” Then, as bike police barricaded the entrance to the building and security began warning us to leave, the mic check started, reading a carefully crafted statement declaring our intentions to live “A Week Without Capitalism.”

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO forces — led by U.S. interests and the West’s insatiable appetite for oil and free markets — have been controversially involved in conflicts in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In 2010, NATO countries spent a collective $1.08 trillion on defense and military expenditures, including a resurgence of nuclear weapons. The U.S. and NATO are leading the way for the militarization of the globe at the expense of human and environmental needs. We say no to nuclear weapons, no to the out-of-control defense spending and no to the logic of violence.

The G8 — the Group of Eight, including the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, France and the U.K. — represent the destructive engines of capitalism whose “growth-at-all-costs” mentality has desecrated communities, the environment and human rights all in the name of progress. As people of faith and conscience, we advocate relationships and economics rooted in love: the works of mercy at a personal sacrifice, craft and worker-based cooperatives, gift and barter economies, agrarian communities and a more simple lifestyle. Let love be our guide for our collective future without war and capitalism.

As Catholic Workers, we call for May 18-21 to be a weekend of nonviolent protest against the capitalism and militarism of NATO/G8. Catholic Worker communities around the country are invited to engage in “A Weekend without Capitalism” — a four day act of noncooperation where we refuse to participate in the political and economic structures that oppress our sisters and brothers, harm our communities and destroy our environment. We will take time off work and school and, instead, invest this time into healthy, just and sustainable alternatives for our communities. We will not support the corporate state by using our cars or consuming goods or services from which the state profits. Instead, we will do as Jesus taught us: feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the imprisoned. We will protest injustice and war, host free markets and skills shares, work on community gardens, invest in alternative economics, act as peacemakers and organize our neighborhoods for direct action.

The building manager told us we had to leave and the police echoed his sentiment, warning that arrests would follow if we did not leave. But eight people chose to ignore this warning, demanding to at least be able to deliver their invitation to the Obama campaign. They were arrested and are currently being held in Chicago’s First Precinct. The National Lawyers Guild, which is providing free legal and jail support for all NATO protesters coming to Chicago, is following the arrestees’ status through the system.

Our hope for yesterday morning’s action was to create a narrative of possibility and hope in the power of community over NATO’s continued war-making in Afghanistan and its role of corporate protector. Our protest — nonviolent but assertive, invitational but clear — was intended to counter the dominant myth that our only choices are violence or passivity. It was very clear who had the power in the lobby in the Prudential Building and it was only cooperation that prevented mass arrests from happening, which was never our intention anyway.

The media response has been overwhelmingly positive — thanks in part to hard work, a creative (and fun!) action, boldness, a willingness to risk and a little bit of grace. As a movement, we are succeeding in connecting economic austerity and militarism for a larger public as well as encouraging more resistance, protest and disruption to NATO as legitimate activities for ordinary people. We are grateful for the convergence of movements that are uniting in the Chicago streets this week, culminating with the May 20 CANG8 rally and march against NATO/G8, as well as the May 21 day of action to shut down Boeing. The Catholic Workers will be a part of them.

People all over the world know the struggles and problems their communities are facing and are the ones best poised to solve them. The paradigm shift that we — along with so many others, like the Occupy movement — are calling forth, is that we can live in a world without NATO and the G8 by empowering our own communities to be places of justice, sustainability, peace and hope.

We caught glimpses of that reality yesterday as police officers slipped us quiet words of encouragement and firefighters excitedly honked their horns for us. The systems of violence and capitalism that keep us apart need to be forcefully challenged with attractive alternatives. For us, our alternative is love, community and powerfully confronting violence with creative nonviolence.

Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

The “Stop and Frisk” program instructs officers to stop and question people at random — resulting in apparent racial profiling throughout the largest city in the U.S. According to the NYPD’s own statistics, out of 684,330 people stopped and frisked in 2011, 90 percent of them were black or Latino. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that mostly-black neighborhoods were heavily targeted by police, such as East New York in Brooklyn (50 percent black and 3 percent white), which had the highest number of stops last year with 27, 672. In contrast, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood (57 percent white and 3 percent black) had the fewest stops, with 1,843.

However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that the Stop and Frisk is making the city safer. “[The] stops are a deterrent,” he has said. “They prevent people from carrying guns in the first place. If you think you may be stopped on the street, you are a lot less likely to carry a gun. It’s that simple.”

But Bloomberg’s simple reasoning simply doesn’t add up. Despite the NYPD having its highest number of stops last year since the program officially began, 2011 saw a nearly 3 percent of shootings, according to The New York Times. An analysis by Forbes magazine shows that murder rates during the past decade of Stop and Frisk remained much the same as the previous decade. And although Bloomberg insists gun confiscation is the goal, the NYCLU report found that whites were more likely to be found with a weapon, even though 90 percent of people the NYPD stops are not white.

The harmful and wasteful program also preys on the public’s lack of knowledge regarding their rights, and that is how activists hope to start enacting change. Alfredo Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY — a group that helps people affected by HIV-AIDS, drug use and mass incarceration — and José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk are both helping people in NYPD-targeted communities to learn what rights they have when dealing with police officers in order to fight back with the law.

Police have been accused of tricking people into allowing searches and even incriminating themselves. For example, having under 25 grams of marijuana is not a criminal act — as long as it is not “in public view.” However, the law is broken once a person carrying marijuana takes it out of their pocket and it is “in view.” Therefore, if a police officer stops somebody and forces them to empty their pockets and he or she takes out a joint, that person is now guilty of a misdemeanor — even though they did not legally have to empty their pockets and were not breaking the law by possessing a small amount of marijuana. The tactic takes advantage of the fact that people are intimidated by police power and do not know that they have a choice.

While growing up, Carrasquillo thought police stops were something one had to comply with. “I thought you had no authority to say police can’t search you,” he told me on the phone a day before the rally.

Working with everybody from churches to local high schools, Carrasquillo leads know-your-rights trainings to educate those especially affected by the Stop and Frisk policy: young black and Latino teenagers, as well as adults aged 18 to 25 — the NYPD’s primary profile of discrimination. It’s sometimes a challenge to convince people in those areas that they have recourse under the law. “A good portion of the communities feel they’re not even part of the American dream,” Carrasquillo said.

He has found, however, that education like this leads to further empowerment. “Kids take that new knowledge and they’re able to advocate in their communities,” he added.

At the May 12 rally, José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk told me that he is frustrated with how the NYPD’s program has spun out of control.

“I’ve been a victim of Stop and Frisk all my life,” Lasalle said, referring to the longstanding history of police targeting low-income neighborhoods for drug searches before it became an official NYPD policy. “And then seeing it happen to my son, and then seeing it happen to my nephew, and then seeing it happen to the kids around my neighborhood, little 10-year-old kids getting thrown against the wall — it makes no sense. It’s got to stop.”

Lasalle has helped start new Stop Stop and Frisk chapters in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem that offer know-your-rights education as well as cop-watching programs in which people can learn how to observe, document and report police activity in their communities.

The cop-watching programs that Stop Stop and Frisk have started are not intended to simply document police officer wrongdoing and put videos online. They are also intended to protect residents from inexperienced police officers. According to Lasalle, many of the neighborhoods that the NYPD targets for Stop and Frisk tactics are considered “impact zone areas,” which is where many inexperienced cops are placed. (See AllThingsHarlem.com for several videos of officers “practicing” on Harlem residents.)

“In the impact zone areas, the NYPD sends rookie police officers who don’t know how to deal with the community,” Lasalle said. “So we are there, making sure that they carry out their duties with professionalism and respect. We observe them and we document the things that they do. [The police officers] see us observing and documenting them and they relax and don’t get out of hand when they stop somebody.”

Much like Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY, Lasalle has found that fear of police can be a hindrance to mobilizing people and encouraging them to challenge police authority. But legal organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild have helped quell some of those fears by providing legal help and jail support in case cop-watchers are arrested.

People like Carrasquillo and Lasalle have helped push the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk tactics to the forefront of political debate in New York City, bringing national attention to the department’s policy. While Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD insist that the policy saves lives despite the lack of statistics that prove their claims, activists insist that the bullying, harassment and overzealous actions of police officers are a greater threat.

“That’s what we’re trying to do, too,” Lasalle said. “We’re trying to save lives.”

Protesters in Malaga, Spain, on May 12. By Jon Nazca, via Reuters AlertNet.

Last June, after leaving the encampment in the center of Madrid, people in the 15M movement would say, “We moved from Sol square, but we know the way back.” The day of action on May 12 this year exceeded the expectations of many people who thought the 15M movement was dead, who didn’t recognize that it had only moved to neighborhood assemblies. The one-year anniversary of the movement brought hundreds of thousands people to the streets again in nearly 80 Spanish cities. There were 50,000 in Madrid, 44,000 in Barcelona, 11,000 in Vigo (a northern city with a population of less than 300,000) and many more.

As people from around the country converged on Madrid, various neighborhood assemblies gathered in squares to prepare banners for the demonstration and to share tips for avoiding police repression. At 7 p.m., there were five columns of demonstrators marching toward Sol square, where they planned to arrive at 9 o’clock. But by 8 p.m., the first column had already arrived, filling almost half of the square. Other groups of marchers arrived within minutes, but many people could not enter and had to stay in nearby streets. Sol square was completely full before the meeting time. There, thousands sang “Happy Birthday” to the 15M movement and released balloons.

As Sol square transformed into a party celebrating a year of protest and organizing, the question remained of whether the party could last all night. Some weeks before, the government had announced that it would not allow an encampment in Sol at all, but, last Thursday, it granted the movement a right to stay in the square during “office hours.” When the government’s 10 p.m. curfew came, there were more than 15,000 people in the square, surrounded by about 2,000 police officers.

At 10 p.m., too, the first tent was erected. “Now we have more reason than last year,” said a man named Emilio, the first camper in Sol of the night. “I’m not afraid to be the first one. If the police arrest me, they will have to go through many more people.” A half hour later, above where a dozen police vans were parked, a huge white panel was deployed, on which were projected videos created by the movement.

After midnight, preparations began to hold an assembly. Dozens cleaned the paper and bottles littered across the square, while others placed cardboard on the ground for people to sit on. When the assembly started at 1 a.m., nearly 2,000 participated. “I was worried,” said one of the first people to take the microphone. “This was very much a party, and we have a lot of work to do.” The first question was whether to stay in Sol for the night, and debate continued for more than an hour and a half. Many wanted to remain, but others said that doing so would only be a provocation to the government and that it didn’t make sense.

The assembly ended at 4 a.m., but hundreds of people remained in Sol. An hour later, 30 more police vans arrived, and officers cleared the square. Eighteen people were arrested. Meanwhile, police swept the squares in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and other cities where activists tried to spend the night. Catalunya square in Barcelona is the only place where the movement has been able to remain, thanks to authorization by the Catalan government.

May 12 was just the first day of mobilization, and the most festive. Leading up to May 15, the movement has planned actions across the country focused on housing rights, employment, economy, democracy and other issues. These are busy days for the movement, and they will certainly be instrumental in shaping its goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

Guatemalan women marching in Antigua. Photo by the author.

May Day events in the city of Antigua Guatemala — the regional capital of Sacatepéquez — are traditionally lighthearted and festive. People from Guatemala City, especially the mestizo population, travel to the colonial city to enjoy its historical atmosphere, eat delicious food and enjoy the landscape at the base of the Hunahpú volcano. But on May 1 this year, visitors encountered a very different scene: a march of both commemoration and protest for International Workers’ Day. Never before in recent memory have Antigua’s workers, peasants and unions organized a May Day march like this to demand economic rights and an end to the increasing militarization of the country’s security policy.

Many of the 300 participants were indigenous peasant women, wearing traditional dress. These women marched through the streets of Antigua with posters demanding better work conditions and shouting out worker and campesina slogans: “Only united can women defend their rights!” and “The working woman of Santa María de Jesús is here!“ The Union of Education Workers of Guatemala (STEG), the Council to Protect the City of Antigua, the Municipal Market Workers and the recently-organized Photographers’ Union all participated.

The protesters arrived at Antigua’s Central Plaza and stopped in front of El Palacio de los Capitanes Generales. There, they made public denouncements against the governor of the municipality — as a representative of the Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina — and against two legislators to whom they also presented a document outlining their goals: justice for the assassinations of activists, sufficient budget allocations for the school year, an increase in budget destined to protect Antigua’s historical monuments, and better government control over the consumer baskey, fuel prices and electricity prices in light of unprecedented increases.

Upon presenting their demands, the marchers lamented that the regional governor, Teresa de Jesús Chocoyo Chile, and Congressman Rolando Pérez were not present. In their place, Congresswoman Regina Guzmán, of President Otto Pérez Molina’s right-wing Patriotic Party, received the document. She asked for “patience” given that “when we took power we encountered a difficult situation which we have had to work on fixing, and that takes time.” Also receiving the demands was Congressman Sergio Leonel Celis Navas from the Renewed Democratic Liberty Party (LIDER), who said that the workers’ demands were just and that efforts should be made to address them. Celis also lamented Chocoyo Chile’s absence.

The unions, in particular, called attention to the militarization that the country has been undergoing as a means of improving security. According to Professor Rodrigo Hernández Boche, secretary general of STEG:

A key part of Otto Pérez Molina’s platform was security. In fact, one of the mottos of the current government is that of a “heavy hand against violence.” Ever since his government began, insecurity has increased and our colleagues have been assassinated. Up until now, we haven’t received any clarification of the events, but we don’t doubt that these could be repressive tactics that the military government was accustomed to perpetrating in its day.

The new “heavy hand” remilitarization security policies are already affecting the country, especially in areas like Santa Cruz Barillas, Huehuetenango, where the government declared a state of emergency in April. Hernández expressed fears that the war-torn country might be remilitarized. “The opposition will do everything necessary to avoid this,” he said. “The [1996] peace accords, even though they were never properly implemented, are a reference for international law and a touchstone that will help us to avoid the remilitarization of the country.”

Currently, Otto Pérez Molina’s government is following through with its promise to respond to the often drug-related criminality now sweeping Guatemala with a “heavy hand,” as well as legal reforms that threaten respect for human rights. STEG has declared that it is

a shame on an international stage that Guatemala has chosen a military man as president, bearing in mind the massacres that even he is implicated in, and that have never been investigated. But organized civil society will persist in its opposition. We did so in our call for people not to vote for military officers, because we should not lose our historical memory, just as other countries should not lose theirs.

According to Rodrigo Hernández, “This is about the beginning of strengthening the workers of Sacatepéquez. As we have always said, the teachers also teach by fighting, and today we are teaching that only through organizing ourselves can our labor rights be respected and, above all, only through organizing ourselves can we breathe life into the struggle that we must now undertake out of necessity.”

Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

As activist-historian Lawrence Wittner describes what happened in May of that year: “Protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.” The issue was the eight-hour work day, or as the workers sang, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

In Chicago 80,000 workers stayed off the job, joining massive (and peaceful) marches that wound their way through the Windy City. But, a few days later, with thousands of Chicagoans still on strike and still in pen revolt, locked out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant were fired on by police and workers were killed. Another protest was called for the next day — May 4 — at Haymarket Square. Three thousand people gathered, and into their midst someone threw a bomb. The police blamed anarchists. The protesters pointed at agents provocateur. To this day, the culprit is not known. What is known is what happened next: Into the middle of this chaos, terror and throng, the police opened fire. Police and protesters alike were killed and wounded.

When the smoke cleared, prominent radical labor activists were arrested for the killings. Most were not even at the rally. Four were eventually executed.

Until my Pakistani professor told me, I had never heard of any of this. My parents were activists, but not labor activists. In fact, they were both happily, radically, revolutionarily under-employed throughout my lifetime. They admired Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, and they knew their labor history, but somehow I missed the rocking-chair lectures on Haymarket and the eight-hour day. Professor Ahmad had not. He grew up going to massive May Day marches and demonstrations in his native Lahore and wanted to see the monument to the workers who died in the bombing, to those framed and unjustly executed. He wandered all over Chicago with a bouquet of flowers, looking for the monument, only to eventually find a bronze statue of a Chicago policeman erected in the middle of Haymarket Square in 1889 by the Union League of Chicago.

Eqbal Ahmad told this story at a 1968 demonstration in Chicago. A few days later, he was questioned by the FBI on his own doorstep. The Weathermen had blown up the statue.

Since then, new monuments to the workers have been erected, but it is emblematic of how little labor history is taught in U.S. public schools that I first learned of this sad and shameful episode in American history from a Pakistani college professor, not my sixth grade history teacher.

This just reminds me how ignorant we often are of the struggles of working people in different parts of the globe, even parts of the globe where our country is intimately involved. War Resisters League organizer Ali Issa, for instance, has published a groundbreaking interview with one of the most prominent union organizers in Iraq, Hashmeya Muhsin al–Saadawi. She is the president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq, and the first woman vice-president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra. The interview offers us an all-too-rare opportunity to hear an Iraqi voice speaking on the impact of U.S. war and occupation and now (partial) withdrawal on Iraqi culture, society and politics.

Ms. Al-Saadawi describes the rule of Saddam Hussein as a “repressive, all-encompassing” dictatorship that went on for three decades bringing “great suffering to Iraq and the entire region.” She continues, “We wanted to get rid of this regime, but not through war and occupation. Because all the occupation did was bring new pain.”

Few people in the United States know that before the 1987 imposition of harsh anti-union laws, Iraq had a vibrant and powerful organized labor movement. That labor movement is now rebuilding and reasserting itself in Iraq as it tries to put decades of war and occupation behind it.

Ms. Al-Saadawi relates in the interview how the union suffered under Saddam and under U.S. occupation. “After [the Saddam Hussein] regime fell,” she says, “the workers quickly put together unions in the public sector, worked very hard, but faced many agendas the U.S. occupation brought with it. The occupation launched several consecutive attacks against the union movement.” Not only were union headquarters destroyed by U.S. bombs, but the “occupied” parliament froze union bank accounts and declared that anyone organizing in the public sector could be charged under anti-terrorism laws. Not exactly the so oft and loftily promised Western-style democracy.

In the wake of the withdrawal of most combat forces, the Iraqi labor movement is churning ahead. “The General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq launched a campaign to pass a labor law that is fair for workers and that matches work standards and international agreements,” says Ms. Al-Saadawi. “Most recently, the electrical worker unions in Basra launched a campaign called ‘Social Security is the Right of Every Iraqi’ relying on constitutional rights, which is supported by some international friends, the Federation of Unions in Holland being one of them.”

The interview goes on from there, and I highly recommend a close reading of it.

In the meantime, let us all consider how we can live in deeper and more meaningful solidarity across national borders, language barriers, religious divisions, class caste systems and the other things that keep us from working together for fundamental rights. And let us sing, as the workers in Chicago sang 126 years ago:

We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught. 
But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill; 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

Poster from madrilonia.org.

“We don’t want May 12 to be a celebration of our anniversary, or a one-day demonstration,” one often hears activists in the Spanish 15M movement saying lately. “We want it to be a new milestone.” For months now, many of them have been taking part in local and international meetings to prepare. Through online conference calls using the open-source platform Mumble, organizers from Occupy, 15M and movements all around the world chose May 12 as a day for a global mobilization, leading up to another on May 15.

After its birth with occupations in public squares across Spain last May, 15M has been a model for movements around the world, many of which have reached a critical mass and brought to the fore issues of austerity, wealth inequality and political corruption. Yet, in Spain and elsewhere, governments continue to respond with more budget cuts and increased police repression. Activists hope that this latest round of mobilizations will help turn the tide.

In Madrid, work on mid-May started among the movement’s various collectives in January, and, over the course of weekly meetings, a group was formed to put all their ideas together and coordinate citywide actions. Although the pace was slow during the early months, by April there was a basic outline for the mid-May mobilization. On May 12, Madrid will probably look much like it did last October 15: Four marches will depart from the four cardinal points of the city and join in Sol square at 9 p.m. for a dinner together until midnight. People in cities across Spain will also be in the streets. But, this time, the day of action will be only the beginning.

The night of May 12, or early the next morning, people will move from Sol to 12 nearby squares. Then, until May 15, each square in the center of Madrid will represent a particular issue: education, employment, health care, democracy, economy and so on. The 15M working groups will organize workshops, conferences and assemblies dedicated to sharing ideas and finding solutions related to each issue. The conclusions reached during a given day will be brought to a nighttime general assembly. Other initiatives are being discussed as well, including the formation of a people’s tribunal on May 13 to hear evidence presented by activists who have been collecting data on the practices of the banks. That day, also, housing groups are planning to occupy banks while demanding a collective renegotiation of mortgages.

A big question, however, is whether 15M will be able to camp again in the squares at all. In Madrid, the movement has announced that, from May 12 to 15, Sol square will be the space for a permanent assembly, without using the term “camp.” But news that 15M would be creating another encampment in Sol was quickly announced by the Spanish mass media, and the government responded quickly and firmly that no such thing would be allowed. In Barcelona, the movement secured a permit to camp in Catalunya square from May 12 to May 15, possibly to alleviate the city’s reputation for harsh repression, especially after the police violence of the recent general strike. In Madrid, however, repression against 15M has hardened in the last few weeks, although without physical violence.

After an announcement of further fare increases on public transportation in Madrid, for instance, the collective Yo No Pago organized a new protest in Sol square on April 20. Nearly 200 people marched from Sol, walking through several streets in the city center, until they were surrounded by riot police in Gran Vía. The activists were identified, and all of them may receive a €300 fine. The following week, there were more actions related to public transport, including one in which activists pulled the brake levers of 13 subway trains, causing a halt in service for 10 minutes. Within hours, police had arrested three suspects, who now face five years in prison. Last Friday, hundreds of people went to Sol square to show their support for those who were arrested, and, again, police surrounded the protesters, together with bystanders, identifying them in order to charge them further fines.

These precedents in Madrid are troubling, but if the movement is able to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets as it did on October 15, all the police of the city will be not able to prevent Sol square from being reoccupied and turned once again into the space of public debate and resistance that it was a year ago.

Click to enlarge.

Well, it happened — massive protests around the world, strikes across Europe, tens of thousands in the streets of New York City, student walkouts, radical art, banners hanging everywhere, slogans stickered to walls, occupation attempts, dozens of arrests around the country. This was May Day in a post-Occupy Wall Street world, but May Day was only the beginning. Again. Winter has peeled away, and the streets are getting warm.

Between May 10 and May 15, New Yorkers — in solidarity with global calls to action from around the world  — will carry out Another City is Possible, Another World is Possible, a week of actions connecting the city budget to austerity measures around the world, all culminating on May 15 at 6 p.m. in a mass convergence in Times Square.

Here in New York City, we will confront a budget that has stripped our communities of housing, schools, services, jobs and other human needs for decades. We will fight to keep what we have and demand what’s been taken away from working people in the decade of cuts leading up to this. We will connect the struggle here to struggles against austerity-based policies around the world, which demand that working people sacrifice their salaries for basic services in order to protect the profits of the wealthy. We will use the many weapons we have — from teach-ins and flash mobs to mass marches and civil disobedience — to confront the bankers and politicians perpetuating injustice. We will transcend our small niches to bring together the big, broad movement that encompasses many groups and individuals, different methods of struggle with different levels of risk and multiple points of entry, and an array of demands, visions and goals.

We will fight back, but also look forward toward another city and another world. It will be a week full of different actions anchored by diverse groups to achieve a variety of goals, all in solidarity with one another — a week that looks like the movement we are trying to build.

Briefly Back to Bloombergville

Confronting austerity in New York gives me a feeling of déjà vu. In June of 2011, I was part of Bloombergville, a two-week occupation of a street corner outside of the City Council building near City Hall. The occupation was base camp for our resistance against a New York City budget that would cut funding from schools, hospitals, daycare centers, elderly homes, fire-houses, AIDS clinics, homeless shelters, transportation and other vital services, while the big banks and millionaires made record profits from an economic crisis they had caused.

People were fighting back all over the world, from Athens to Wisconsin. On May 12, 20,000 New Yorkers marched on Wall Street. And then we occupied, taking a last stand against the budget. We demonstrated, taught, learned, disrupted City Council meetings and, finally, in a dramatic culminating moment, delayed the vote by staging a sit-in in the lobby of the City Council building. But as we were hauled off to the Tombs in handcuffs, the budget passed with most of the cuts still intact. Bloombergville packed up a few days later, taking many of us back to the drawing board.

In some ways, Bloombergville was about posing a radical challenge to an economic, social, and political system that strips us of the things we need to survive, all in order to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few. In that sense, it was a struggle against capitalism, which has austerity in its very DNA. But it was also a struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy and authoritarianism — because a fight for real freedom must face all of those systems that work in concert with capitalism against us. Like Occupy Wall Street was later on, it was the beginning of a dual power struggle — an attempt to experiment with the values and institutions of the society we are fighting for, while fighting against the oppressive institutions around us. And, of course, it was a struggle to scrape away at the apathy and cynicism that handicaps us every day, an attempt to contribute to the building of a movement and spark an uprising.

But it was also much simpler than that. It was about the issues. It was about austerity. It was about the budget.

It was about homes, about jobs, about Metrocards, about a safety net for the sick, the elderly, the homeless, and about education for all. It was about recognizing MTA fare hikes and tuition hikes at CUNY as nothing other than a tax on the working people who rely on those services. It was about demanding taxes on the rich and insisting that the wealth they generate by exploiting us should serve the city as a whole. It was about approaching these issues as gateways to radical social transformation, about helping people find their way into transformational movements through the issues that have real effects on their lives.

All in all, though, Bloombergville didn’t get much press, and we never had more than a few hundred people at a time. It didn’t spark the uprising we were hoping for. Yet we built important relationships, learned a lot about occupations of public space and experimented with tactics. When Adbusters magazine called for an occupation of Wall Street last July, Bloombergville organizers were among those who organized the assemblies to begin driving it forward. These days, despite its shortcomings, many Occupiers look back fondly on Bloombergville as one of the predecessors to the spark that finally came at Liberty Square.

Another City is Possible, Another World is Possible

Almost a year later, here we are again. The issues we faced during the Bloombergville occupation are the same ones that people around the world are rising up against still. We will confront the budget and austerity again, but this time as part of a global movement. And there is no other way to go; global problems require global solutions.

The week of actions from May 10 to May 15 will provide the space for different groups and individuals to fight around a wide array of interconnected issues in diverse ways. On May 11, we will see a string of actions dealing with housing, jobs and services — the basic human needs under threat in a society dominated by systems of greed and exploitation. On the 12th, we’ll focus on the things we need to have healthy communities — for a city with healthy food for all, a country with justice for its food workers, an ecologically sustainable world. On the 13th, Mother’s Day, we will resist police brutality and mass incarceration, injustices faced by immigrants and war abroad — things that tear our families apart, that take children from their parents, that inflict violence on the most marginalized people around the country and the world. May 14 will be a day to fight for education — for adequate childcare, access to quality public education for all and a world without student debt. On May 15, we will converge on Times Square — that shiny, neon capital of capitalism — to tie the issues together, to reclaim our city, to stand in solidarity with people doing the same around the world in a global day of action.

On one hand, the goals for the week are simple. It will be a fight to win back public schools so that our kids can stand a chance in this society, to keep shelters open for those people the system impoverishes so ruthlessly, to afford the public transportation we need to get to work and feed our families. It will be a fight over the very basics of a good society. But it will also challenge as a whole a system that allows the captains of capitalism to make record profits while we take pay cuts and cuts to services, a system whose very existence is based on exploitation and domination. The week will be diverse and autonomous, but unified and solidaristic. It will be grounded and real, but fierce and visionary. It will be safe and welcoming, but also daring and radical. We will fight about the issues, about the budget, about real human needs and about winning in the here and now, but those fights will become a way to dream another city, another world.

We will do our dreaming in the same place we do our fighting: together, in the streets.

This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U.S. Bank meeting in Minneapolis, where dozens of homeowners spoke out against foreclosures. A sequence of direct action trainings and spokescouncils will culminate in three marches at 8 a.m. on May 9, which will converge on the doors of the shareholders’ meeting. There, thousands will protest Bank of America’s laundry list of abuses: funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

Organizers are thinking about much more than just the shareholders’ meeting, however. Just as important as the mass action are the homeowners across North Carolina who are building a grassroots resistance network that will keep the pressure on the banks long after the May 9 action.

A month before the shareholders’ meeting, North Carolinian homeowner Nikki Shelton went face-to-face with an armed, 20-person SWAT team during the first home reoccupation in the state’s recent history. The action, organized by Mortgage Fraud North Carolina and bolstered by Occupy activists, is part of a growing wave of home takeovers occurring across the country, one that has spread from major urban centers all the way to enemy territory: the suburbs of North Carolina, mere hours from the international headquarters of Bank of America.

The foreclosure battle is both physical and psychological in North Carolina. People won’t talk about foreclosures outright; they tend to mention it evasively, as if in code. In the conservative suburban and rural regions of the South, housing developments exploded after World War II and homeownership is a way of life, both economically and culturally. For African Americans, homeownership is a particularly powerful symbol of freedom and upward mobility, and many tell stories of grandparents who grew up as slaves and, after emancipation, saved money to purchase a home for their family.

One fall afternoon in 2010, Nikki Shelton’s 17-year-old son broke the cultural gag order on the foreclosure crisis in a moment of unintentional organizing. Their neighbor, Marcella Robinson, was visibly pregnant and gardening in her front lawn, and Shelton’s son stopped to express his surprise at a pregnant woman doing manual labor. Robinson explained that it was soothing and that she was feeling pressure from being under constant threat from Bank of America and its subsidiary, Countrywide Financial. Shelton’s son told her that his mother, who lived only a few doors down, was going through the same thing. After making that connection, Robinson and Shelton started knocking on doors and learned that many of their neighbors were struggling not only with Countrywide’s adjustable-rate mortgages — a loan so dangerous that Countrywide executives revealed it to their staff only in a meeting in an underground bunker — but also outright fraud.

By the following May, Shelton and Robinson had assembled a group of more than 50 homeowners, Mortgage Fraud North Carolina, and held their first meeting in Shelton’s backyard. They had to meet outside because she and her family had been evicted from the home that Easter Sunday. A year later, the group would break the locks and reoccupy the house.

Shelton believes that the fight over foreclosures will require radical reeducation to completely transform how people think about the mortgage crisis. She’s tired, for instance, of reporters asking her how many mortgage payments she missed. (The answer is only one, in April of 2008.) Reporters never ask questions, meanwhile, like whether the bank illegally foreclosed on her through robosigning (it did) or whether crooked local lawyers and court clerks are aiding and abetting its fraud (they are).

Shelton sees all foreclosures as “fictional orchestrations,” a performance of greed and illegality that requires what she calls collective “conservative ignorance” in order to continue. The banks, lawmakers and the media reinforce the shame and silence that perpetuates this ignorance through intimidation (like the bank contractors sneaking around Robinson’s home taking pictures), violence (like the SWAT team that removed Shelton from her house) and the blaming of victims (like debates about whether principal reduction is a “moral hazard” for homeowners when the $7.7 trillion federal bailout doesn’t appear to pose such problems for banks).

As the efforts of Shelton and Robinson demonstrate, community building and education can spark direct action even in corners of the United States without long histories of housing organizing and where home ownership is deeply entrenched. The combination of large-scale protests, such as what is taking place at the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting, and on-the-ground homeowner organizing can turn symbolic actions into meaningful victories. In Minneapolis, for example, Occupy Our Homes combined a six-month grassroots campaign for the house of a woman named Monique White with a highly successful protest and speak-out at the U.S. Bank shareholders’ meeting. The result: Monique White won her home last Thursday — offering hope of similar victories for Shelton and other homeowners in North Carolina.

“Wall Street was not banking on the American citizens getting educated,” Shelton says. “They were not counting on us saying, ‘I know what’s going on.’ And now that they are starting to realize that we’re getting educated, that’s when the chaos starts.”

"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

In an effort to bring the board of Sotheby’s back to the negotiating table, the art handlers and members of Local 814 met on May 2 to protest and picket at Sotheby’s in New York City. Allies from Occupy Wall Street and other unions joined them. That night, also, Sotheby’s auctioned off Edvard Munch’s The Scream for a record-setting price of almost $120 million.

Protesters were kept away from Sotheby’s entrance door on 72nd Street and York Avenue. While attendants filed inside, protesters were directed by police officers to the corner on 71st and York Avenue. This location, and the presence of the officers, kept protesters from engaging directly with those entering the doors of the auction house.

Shop steward David Martinez has worked for Sotheby’s for almost 20 years. Art handlers like him are trained to transport art from homes and archaeological sites to the auction house. “We handle everything from major Southeast Asian stone artifacts that just came out of a temple to tribal artifacts from Native Americans,” Martinez says. “We handle fragile, immovable things. That’s something you just can’t get anyone to do.”

“I’m trying to send a simple message — I want to go back to work,” Martinez adds. “There is no other choice. They want to keep us out like that, I say bring it on.”

The idea for the protest emerged from the “99 Pickets” that were organized by OWS as part of its May Day actions. The intention of the pickets was “to connect May Day with the workers’ struggle,” explains Rose Bookbinder, an organizer with OWS and the United Autoworkers Union. “The pickets started on Tax Day, and we kept going. We organized 99 Pickets to make the people of New York aware of the injustice that’s going on in labor.”

The picket at Sotheby’s occurred on May 2 in order to show New Yorkers that the struggle for workers’ rights would not end after May 1, Bookbinder notes.

People from OWS have participated in actions with the Sotheby’s Teamsters since last September as a way of building stronger relationships between the movement and organized labor. According to Harrison Magee, who is part of OWS and the International Workers of the World, actions against Sotheby’s in recent months have “involved a lot of different formations within the organizing community.” Union organizers wanted to broaden the scope of the Occupiers’ struggle. Artists and labor activists within OWS recognized the importance of targeting the influence of corporate wealth in the art world. According to Magee, getting OWS to support the Sotheby’s struggle is a critical way of developing the movement’s capacity for meaningful organizing.

“The fighting mentality and brand of toughness that the Teamsters have is the kind you only learn as an employee — someone who is in direct, physical confrontation with the 1 percent,” says Magee. “Not a lot of OWS has that at its organizing core, which is made up of people who are dedicated to OWS as if it was a full-time job.”

By uniting with the Sotheby’s Teamsters, OWS not only supports workers who have been wronged by the 1 percent, but also strengthens itself for an ongoing role in labor and arts activism. In the process, OWS is “creating a cross-movement that is more coordinated and able to deal with its future as a strong grassroots movement,” Magee says. “Even though the [Sotheby’s] outcome is hugely important, I think we should realize that the lockout itself is really just the red herring for everything to come.”

The sale of The Scream inspired the picketers to do their own “people’s scream,” raising their arms and screaming for two minutes. One Occupier said that the scream was a way for “all of us to bring creative tactics to the pickets to sustain visibility and express our anger.”

It remains uncertain, however, when or if Sotheby’s will start negotiating again. “[Sotheby’s] needs experienced people, and these are the experienced guys,” Pat Walsh said. “So why do [the board members of Sotheby’s] have to be greedy? Give them their jobs back, give them their retirement, give them their benefits, give them something. They put heart into the place.”