Chilean art collective Casagrande brought its “Poetry Rain” project to Berlin last weekend, dropping 100,000 poems over the city as a protest against war. Casagrande has done this several times since 2001, focussing on cities that have been bombed during actual warfare, such as Santiago de Chile, Dubrovnik, Guernica, and Warsaw. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any video of the drop, just the perparation for it. But if it was anything like the one they did in Warsaw, it was no doubt a spectacle to behold.

According to The Guardian:

Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to “break the morale” of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing “‘builds’ a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way”.

The Berlin project, for which Casagrande worked with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin as part of the Long Night of Museums, took place in the city’s Lustgarten, where a crowd of thousands had gathered to hear readings and performances by Latin American artists.

Poems dropped from the helicopter circling the area were by poets including Ann Cotten, Karin Fellner, Nora Gomringer, Andrea Heuser, Orsolya Kalász, Björn Kuhligk, Marion Poschmann, Arne Rautenberg, Monika Rinck, Hendrik Rost, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Tom Schulz, Thien Tran, Anja Utler, Jan Wagner, Ron Winkler and Uljana Wolf, according to Lyrikline.org, one of the organisations supporting the project.

Ode Magazine has a great story about three young filmmakers who made a documentary about the thousands of children abducted and enslaved by a Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The film, Invisible Children, led to the founding of an organization by the same name, which has gone on to raise some $30 million to help survivors and inspire a movement that has successfully pressured Congress to pass legislation giving President Obama authority to put an end to the LRA’s atrocities.

What’s most impressive, as the Ode piece points out, is how much support, both financially and physically has come from young people here in the States. Some 80 percent of the $30 million collected by Invisible Children came from high school students. And back in 2006, 80,000 young people took part in a 126-city country-wide direct action by lying down and sleeping in the streets in order to call attention to the nightly trek of so many Ugandan children.

The founders of Invisible Children are not so surprised at their ability to get young Americans involved in a battle for social justice in Africa. “I think everyone wants to be swept up by an adventure, a story that gives life a meaning or purpose,” says [Jason] Russell. Surprising or not, it is miraculous. After all, so many things compete for young people’s time and attention that good causes seldom win out.

[...]

They attribute the success of Invisible Children—which works closely with organizations like Resolve Uganda and The Enough Project—to a healthy dose of naïveté. If the friends had known that Congress had passed only 3 percent of all the bills presented over the last six years, they probably would have given up before they started. “We don’t want to be ignorant,” Poole says, his eyes shining, “but there’s definitely bliss in it.”

The whole 52-minute film can be watched online at Google Video.

Having attended their week-long Fletcher Summer Institute this year, I can say that their presentations and educational materials are top notch. Here are the details, in case it’d be something you’d like to attend:

The world is witnessing a surge in people powered movements in places such as Iran, the Niger Delta, Honduras, and the West Bank. As a result, the foreign policy community is carefully following the courageous acts of civil disobedience utilized by people fighting against various forms of repression.
This course is designed to provide an in-depth and multi-disciplinary perspective on civilian-based movements and campaigns that defend and obtain basic rights and justice around the world – from Egypt to Burma, from Zimbabwe to West Papua. The course will ex-amine such questions as: What is civil resistance? What determines the success or failure of a civil resistance movement? How can professionals in the field better understand and analyze what elements are at work when civilians use nonviolent tactics? How and when should external agents – governments, NGOs, media, business – act or not act when civil resistance is gaining momentum? How can the dynamics and history of civil resistance better inform the fields of conflict management, development, diplomacy, and peacemak-ing?

• Interactive course: focuses on simulations and case studies
• Experience opportunities to share lessons across sectors
• Hear insight from expert scholars and practitioners

COST: $195. Participants not based in Washington, DC are responsible for their own accommodations and travel, including visas.

CREDIT: Participants will receive certificate upon completion of course.

APPLICATION: Visit the USIP course listing to apply

VENUE: USIP Headquarters, 1200 17th St. NW, Washington DC, 20036

For more information please contact education@usip.org

According to the Missoula Independent, Coronado’s probation officer, Rhonda J. Wallock, reported that the activist violated the terms of his supervision by becoming Roselle’s “friend” and for using an unauthorized computer. “In monitoring Mr. Coronado’s Facebook account,” the court document reads, “this officer found Michael Roselle to be a “friend” of Mr. Coronado.”

Well, yes. But apparently it was Roselle who asked Coronado to be his friend and not Coronado who approached Roselle. Moreover, they had been friends for some time, just not Facebook friends. As Roselle explained, “I sent him a friend request because someone had suggested that I friend him and given that I’ve known Rod for quite a while, I did. I guess he hit the accept button.”

The irony is that a couple of monkeywrenchers, each with a long list of arrests and convictions, have now been nabbed as friends. For Coronado, it is without a doubt the most prosaic charge he has ever faced.

For years, Coronado was the unofficial bad boy of the radical environmental movement. As a teenager he cut his teeth with the now well known Sea Shepherd Society and, in 1986, participated in a risky act of eco-sabotage: taking aim at Iceland’s refusal to conform to an international ban on whaling, Coronado and a partner destroyed the Hvalfjordur whaling station and sank two of the country’s whaling vessels, causing some $2 million in damage. Coronado went on to wage an underground war against the fur industry, targeting research facilities and fur farms across North America. (His story, and the story of the modern American environmental movement, is told in Dean Kuipers recent book, Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness).

Coronado was a divisive figure: his use of arson and increasingly radical stance alienated even those who sympathized with his views. In 1995, Coronado was arrested for his role in an arson attack on research facilities at Michigan State University. Since then he has moved back and forth between prison and some form of house arrest or parole. He has done time for allegedly demonstrating the use of an incendiary device, dismantling mountain lion traps, and destruction of government property.

In 2006, he distanced himself from the direct action tactics of his youth and said, in an open letter that, “No longer do I personally choose to represent the cause of peace and compassion in that way.”

• Four Greenpeace activists breached a 1,650-feet security perimeter around an oil rig off western Greenland  yesterday. They then climbed up the rig and fastened themselves to it, effectively forcing it to stop drilling. As of this morning, they were still suspended 15 meters above the frigid Arctic waters of Baffin Bay.

• Russian police have detained more than 60 people demonstrating at a freedom of assembly rally in Moscow yesterday. The demonstrators chanted “Russia without Putin!” as the police led them away.

• Nearly 100 Afghan asylum seekers broke out of a detention centre in northern Australia on Wednesday to protest the long delay in processing their refugee applications.

• Four tree sitters have created a platform 100 feet up in the redwoods of Jacoby Creek California to prevent loggers from clearcutting the beautiful second growth forest.

• The Mobilization for Climate Justice West turned out 150 people on Monday afternoon in San Francisco’s financial district for a march on the offices of Chevron, the Environmental Protection Agency and BP. Their message was for Big Oil to stop harming our environment and communities and to pay for the damage they’ve caused.

• A small contingent of super heroes and one Sith Lord assembled outside the steps of City Hall Tuesday to protest the arrests made by LAPD of costumed characters along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

• Honduran police arrested some 150 people while using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a demonstration by teachers, students and others in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 27, the 23rd day of a strike by teachers over their pension fund and other issues.

On Sunday, Boston Globe senior assistant business editor Mark Pothier wrote about his feelings regarding a boycott of The Upper Crust, one of his favorite pizzerias in Boston, that has been targeted because of allegations that the company has not paid its employees for overtime.

After a few minutes of “soul-searching” about whether he should join the boycott, he says he decided to follow his taste buds. Pothier then gives a string of standard justifications for his actions:

Sure, it nags at my conscience a little to think I support a company that could be profiting at the expense of these good employees and dozens more like them. But I’m not naive, either – how would I know whether the competing family-owned pizza maker I decided to patronize instead treats its employees any better? Mom and Pop can be greedy capitalists, too.

Nowadays, it seems, the preferred tactic activists use to fight corporate misconduct, whether genuine or perceived, is the boycott. Thanks to social media, they can spread faster than a YouTube video of a cat playing the piano. But what is a boycott supposed to accomplish? Too often, such campaigns are knee-jerk reactions to a company’s blunders. They almost always inflict more harm on front-line workers than corporate culprits in tailored suits. Before the first British Petroleum tar balls fouled the Gulf Coast, for instance, drivers were urged to steer clear of BP gas stations (a “Boycott BP” Facebook page has been “liked” by nearly 850,000 people). Trouble is, most BP stations in the United States are independently owned. If you stop filling up on BP-brand unleaded, departing chief executive Tony Hayward won’t sleep any worse that he already does.

[...]

In the case of Upper Crust, if business at its 17 locations drops sharply because of an ill-advised boycott, you won’t need an economist to figure out the likely consequences: fewer hours for employees, then fewer employees, and, eventually, fewer restaurants. That means more people on unemployment, more dark spaces on Main Streets.

By making this final point, Pothier reveals his true ignorance of the history and power of boycotts. While hypothetically his scenario could play out, an effective boycott could also push Upper Crust to do the right thing and compensate its employees properly.

Almost nine-months later, having been imprisoned in weather-beaten tents at the Ofer military detention camp, prosecutors (failing to provide a single piece of documentary evidence) convinced a military courtroom to convict Abdallah Abu Rahmah for his involvement in coordinating “illegal” weekly marches and “incitement” with the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements. These charges, although unreasonable, are not as ridiculous as the ones he was acquitted on, which were taking Israeli tear gas grenades and canisters (weapons that recently killed activist Basem Abu Rahma and have injured others) to create an artistic peace sign.

Protests against the conviction have already begun with large gatherings outside Bil’in where many waved Palestinian flags and yelled out the injustice in Arabic and Hebrew. Israeli soldiers hiding behind clouds of suffocating smoke and ballistic shields regrouped to drive off the demonstrators.

Since 2004, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has organized and led Bil’in demonstrations with the grassroots movement Bil’in Popular Committee that pushes for nonviolent resistance against the illegal fence/wall and the Israeli occupation. These nonviolent movements have become inviolable and more widespread in the West Bank over the years. Despite human rights violations, Israeli soldiers continue to arrest, kidnap, torture, threaten with deportation or even kill those who demonstrate for self-determination.

Within a country that speaks to Palestinians with firearms, bulldozers, and land encroaching, Abdallah Abu Rahmah has been lauded by many as the “Palestinian Gandhi” for his devotion to maintaining a nonviolent stance as he leads the movement. But now Abdallah Abu Rahmah is facing up to 10 years imprisonment for “legitimately exercising [his] right to freedom of expression in opposing the Israeli fence/wall,” according to Amnesty International.

The first appearance of movements taking up Gandhian tactics in the struggle against Israel’s control was during the 1967 the Six-Day War. After Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Palestinians countered with acts of civil disobedience against biased textbooks that Israel issued for Palestinian schools. Many protested in the streets, others closed down their businesses and teachers stopped showing up for work. Israel then adapted by criminalizing all forms of resistance, which limited Palestinians.

Decades later this remains the same. When Palestinians, Israelis or internationals confront Israeli forces, soldiers are trained to respond with violence by indiscriminate usage of sound bombs, rubber coated bullets (Abdallah Abu Rahmah, like many others, has been intentionally targeted and even shot in the head by these so-called “non-lethal” bullets), live ammunition, tear gas canisters, baton beatings and water cannons. This is done regardless if Palestinian youths instigate with stone-throwing (something that Abdallah Abu Rahmah is unable to control) or keep their demonstrations entirely peaceful.

Nonviolence that’s practiced by Palestinians is met with intensified violent measures from Israeli soldiers. These disproportionate methods of aggression against the Bil’in Popular Committee’s unarmed struggle are an ongoing attempt to stoke fear, intimidation and to break the will of the community resistance group in the West Bank area. Special diligence should be given to the probability that Israel may want to provoke another armed uprising. This would then be used to mislead the public and build support for the use of Israel’s overpowering military against Palestinians.

Unsurprisingly, the American media has let these sufferings go unreported, though it doesn’t go completely ignored elsewhere. Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s imprisonment has garnered outrage from Catherine Ashton, the foreign affairs chief of the European Union (EU), who considers Abdallah Abu Rahmah a “human rights defender committed to non-violent protest against the route of the Israeli separation barrier” and has said that “the EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal.”

Up against growing opposition from international diplomats (some from the US, Germany, Sweden and Spain), the Israeli government is running out of excuses for what it has done. As they repeatedly use violence while masking their crimes with lies, they gradually lose the little creditability they have. The mounting pressure from nonviolent movements in the face of the Israeli government will only garner sympathy from others who renounce the Israeli occupation.

In January 2010, following the New Year, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, awaiting a bleak outcome in the decrepit prison of Ofer, wrote in a heartfelt letter to his friends and supporters:

We are engaged in an international fight against oppression […] Ordinary people enraged by the occupation have made our struggle their own, and joined us in solidarity. We will surely join together to struggle for justice in other places when Palestine is finally free.

• Century City’s business as usual came to a standstill Thursday afternoon as the janitors who lost their jobs cleaning JPMorgan Chase-owned Century Plaza towers were joined by 500 janitors, community activists, and union supporters at a march and protest in Los Angeles. Thirteen people were arrested for blocking an intersection in an act of civil disobedience.

• Some 10,000 people gathered outside historic Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. on Saturday for the “Reclaim the Dream” march commemorating the 47th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I have a Dream Speech.”

• On Sunday, an estimated 80,000 Hong Kongers marched in honor of eight people killed in a bus hijacking in Manila, attacking the Philippine government for botching the rescue operation and demanding justice for the dead.

• Teachers on Thursday staged a 24-hour strike and paralyzed Puerto Rican public education to protest what they say is a general deterioration of the school system.

• On Thursday, two protesters associated with Climate Ground Zero blocked the entrance to the headquarters of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to bring attention to what they believe is the DEP’s failure to enforce the Clean Water Act by permitting mountaintop removal mining.

• A protest of Nigerian women shut down a Shell plant last Wednesday, just one week after a group of Ugborodo women blockaded a Chevron natural gas pipeline.

• Oil workers calling for compensation for recently fired employees maintained a blockade at a storage plant in southern Argentina on Friday.

A long running battle over the construction of a highway through Moscow’s Khimki forest has taken a surprising turn. Earlier this week I wrote about the broad based campaign to save one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and old growth oak forests. Environmentalists and activists have been working since 2007 to halt the construction of a highway through the 2,500-acre forest, which many viewed as inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the organizers, Yevgenia Chirikova, told the Washington Post that, “The next step is probably that they will start building. We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”

For the moment, however, the highway construction has been put on hold. In a video blog posted Thursday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the government to, “halt the implementation” of the highway pending “further civic and expert discussions.” It is a rare victory for environmentalists or opposition activists of any kind in Russia. Perhaps not since Vladimir Putin’s 2006 decision to reroute an oil pipeline that would have come dangerously close to Lake Baikal—a national treasure and a UNESCO world heritage site—has the administration responded so forcefully to public protest.

“This has flabbergasted us. It was completely unexpected,” Sergei Ageyev, a member of the environmental group leading the opposition to the highway, told the New York Times. “It is simply a stunning victory for civil society.”

Some are also speculating that it reveals a deeper split between Russia’s President and Prime Minister. “It’s another step that destroys the myth of the all-powerful Putin,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a founder of the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute, told Bloomberg.

However, Putin is already spinning the Kremlin’s decision as entirely consistent. From the Russian Far East, where the Prime Minister was touting the opening of another roadway, the Chita-Khabarovsk highway, he said, “This is entirely consistent with the logic of our behavior and actions in recent years.”

And in a sense it is. If a local issue threatens to spin out of control and undermine the authority of the state the Kremlin will respond. Last year, in the midst of the financial crisis, Putin flew by helicopter to the beleaguered town of Pikalyovo to scold local politicians and businessmen. He forced them to pay workers back wages and turned the town’s woes into a publicity stunt. It looked good on television but of course did little to change things nation wide. It was damage control.

In the case of Khimki, Reuters summed up the strategy well:

Medvedev’s order looked like carefully orchestrated damage control by Russia’s leaders before a parliamentary election next year and a 2012 presidential ballot.

Referring to suggestions by the leaders that they planned to remain in power for years to come, Ekho Moskvy radio commentator Sergei Buntman said Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin couldn’t let the issue hinder ‘Operation Continuity’.

Nonetheless the decision is a victory for environmentalists. And, in a sense, a political victory too. The question now is whether they can build on their success and turn the Khimki campaign into a broader civic and political movement.

Climate Camp had its own Twitter feed of course, but anyone browsing through the #climatecamp hashtag would probably not have got the impression of the day’s events that the spinsters at Climate Camp wanted. Supportive texts were swamped by tweeters ridiculing the activists or even pretending to be them.

[...]

It is surprising that an organisation that puts so much emphasis on the art of manipulating the media (according to the Climate Camp media pack journalists are “weak and cowardly” and “astoundingly unimaginative”) did not think harder about how to use a medium that cuts out the peaky middlemen altogether.

While Climate Camp should have been a little more savvy about maintaining its Twitter feed, it’s not exactly a big deal that some people made fun of them on a social networking site. Far more important to Climate Camp’s success is the effectiveness of its on-the-ground actions. That’s why this next Guardian criticism, from photojournalist Marc Vallée, is more hard-hitting.

In Monday’s day of action at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Edinburgh headquarters both sides had a plan: a media plan. The strategy from both the Climate Camp protesters and the police was to restrict and control the media with the aim of spinning their narrative.

I spent four days reporting on the environmental blockade of RBS with the aim of providing an independent record of the unfolding events. Instead, my colleague Jonathan Warren and I, spent a huge amount of our time trying – and at times failing – to gain access to both sides of the story.

I have reported on all but one of the Climate Camps over the last four years: Heathrow in 2007, Kingsnorth in 2008 and London 2009. Each time the media was not able to report freely.

Climate Camp has a history of restricting media access as well as handing out free media content to newspapers and media groups – PR worthy of any multinational bank or corporation.

[...]

A huge part of the Climate Camp strategy is about spreading its message and the “battle for the hearts and minds”. The Climate Camp neighbourhood media pack says: “one of the best chances we have of reaching people who haven’t yet heard what we’ve got to say yet is through the media”. I agree.

That is why the camp should open up and stop its attempts to control the media. These only serve to restrict free speech and risk backfiring by alienating journalists – the very people in the best position to help spread that message.

Based on the tone of these two Guardian writers, it’s clear there is serious tension between climate activists and the media. That is not a good thing for the former, especially when the latter is normally sympathetic to such causes.

With the police and RBS not offering much media assistance either, this is a great opportunity for Climate Camp organizers to give voice to their cause. A great example of activists taking advantage of this sort of situation came last year during the Vestas wind-turbine manufacturers sit-in on the Isle of Wight. While Vestas management refused to talk to the media, the workers conducted interviews with all the top papers and subsequently became media darlings.

Maybe it’s impossible for a bunch of rowdy, hippie-looking young people to ever become media darlings, but Climate Campers should try to be at least a little less hostile toward writers who are generally willing to help their cause.