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.

• 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.

On December 10^th 2009, in a small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, the home of 39-year-old school teacher Abdallah Abu Rahmah was raided by Israeli military forces who blindfolded and tightly fastened his hands together with zip tie cuffs. Frightened and confused, his wife and three children could only watch as he was hauled out of his home into the cold winter night and taken away in one of the seven military jeeps.

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.

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• 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.

The Climate Camp currently set up on the grounds of the Royal Bank of Scotland corporate headquarters in Edinburgh has received some strong criticism from The Guardian in a couple recent pieces. On Tuesday, environment page editor James Randerson documented how Climate Camp organizers let Twitter get the best of them during a day of mass action against RBS and its funding of the fossil fuel industry.

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.

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Earlier this month, New Yorkers won a nine-month moratorium from the state Senate on the dangerous and highly-polluting drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The inspiring story of civic action that led to this decision is told by Maura Stephens in a recently published piece by Yes! Magazine.

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. “The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health,” says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. “Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them.”

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

“Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn’t ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health,” says Dyrszka. “Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas.”

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

“I was hooked,” Dyrszka says. “Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there.”

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

Read the rest of this article »

• More than two dozen Bremerton Coca-Cola Enterprises employees went on strike Monday as part of a walkout that involves nearly 500 employees around Washington state.

• In Kazakhstan, a threatened hunger strike by 48 workers building the Almaty subway has succeeded in getting them three months’ back pay. The workers, all from one shift, went on a general strike for three days last week, refusing to work until they got their salaries.

• On August 23, about 100 steel workers at the Hormozgan Steel Complex in Southern Iran staged a protest gathering. The workers were protesting 300 workers not having received back wages in the last three months.

• Around 160 garment workers in Cambodia continued to strike on Monday outside the gates of a factory in Meanchey district, where they have camped out day and night since Thursday to agitate for improved working conditions.

• Thousands of Honduran workers marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula on Aug. 18 to demand an increase in the minimum wage and to show solidarity with teachers who were in the 14th day of an open-ended strike.

• Last Thursday, the workers at Kian Tire in Iran went on strike closing down the gates of the factory warehouses. The workers were demanding back wages.

• Women bared their breasts to fight for the same right to go topless as men, during protests in Venice Beach, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami Beach and Seattle on Sunday.

The eight-foot-long Norwegian electric car Buddy may not be most people’s idea of a perfectly sized car, but it is the perfect size for blocking train tracks, as the activist group Neptune Network recently proved, when it managed to block shipments from a mine that was polluting a nearby salmon-fjord. According to Sami Grover at Treehugger:

Whether not the blockade was successful remains a little unclear at this stage—my rudimentary understanding of Norwegian tells me that the blockade of Sydvaranger Mines has been called off, and that discussions are ongoing both with the mine owners and the Climate and Pollution Control Directorate (KLIF) to ensure that the company follows the necessary permits.

It’s certainly an innovative method of protest, and one that manages to both draw attention to the specific problem at hand, and also points a finger to one part of the solution to the myriad of environmental crises we face. I’m not sure the tactic would work everywhere—it wouldn’t take many police officers, or mine workers, to move a car that size (read more about the Norwegian-produced Buddy here). But it looks like in this part of Norway at least they manage to handle such matters with civility and restraint from all sides.

While I agree with Grover’s analysis, a highly visible and metaphorical stunt such as this would still be effective (on a PR/awareness-raising level) even if it didn’t block shipments for very long. Unfortuantely, we won’t be able to see this action replicated in America, as the Buddy car is only available in Norway.

This week the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $165,000 to seven protesters to settle a federal lawsuit they filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for lurching down Nicollet Mall dressed as zombies to protest “mindless” consumerism.

According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.”

However, they were never charged with any crime.

Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies’ lawsuit, it was resurrected in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that police lacked probable cause to arrest the seven, a decision setting the stage for a federal trial this fall. The settlement means there will be no trial.

This sounds like the sort of creative protest that should be replicated elsewhere, especially with the seeming explosion of interest in anything zombie related in this country in recent years.

As Russia’s forests go up in flames, a group of activists and environmentalists is struggling to protect one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and stands of old growth oaks. This time the threat isn’t wildfires but rather a 10-lane super highway that would link Moscow and St. Petersburg. The campaign to prevent the road from passing through the 2,500-acre Khimki forest, a long protected reserve just outside of Moscow, began in 2007. Since then journalists and editors investigating the story have been attacked (one nearly beaten to death), environmental activists have been arrested, and European investors—including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB)—have begun to question the viability of the project. Recently efforts to halt the construction of the highway and leveling of the forest have escalated.

In late July, Khimki’s administrative building was attacked by a group of anarchists and anti-fascists, while activists who had set up a camp in the forest were detained and arrested. Then, on Sunday, Moscow police and security forces broke up a rally and concert in defense of Khimki that attracted perhaps as many as 2,000 supporters.

It is difficult to hold rallies in Moscow. Obtaining a permit is a bit like playing the lottery; your chances are slim and subject to the whims of the city’s Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who, over the course of his 18-year rule has come to run the city like a fiefdom. He is particularly non-plussed by gay rights campaigners and has denied them the right to march in Moscow year after year. So getting 2,000 people out onto the streets in defense of a public forest is no small feat. Like Lake Baikal in the 1960s, Khimki has become the symbol of a rejuvenated Russian environmental movement, one that has largely relied on civil disobedience and non-violent protest to achieve its goals.

The face of the new movement is Yevgenia Chirikova, a 33-year-old mother of two with degrees in business and engineering. She and her husband moved to Khimki in 1998 for many of the same reasons that any young family would: It is quiet, clean, and close to a large public green space. (It is worth noting that Moscow is one of the most polluted, congested, dangerous, and expensive cities in the world.)

In 2007, when Chirikova and her husband noticed large swaths of trees marked with red x’s they were naturally concerned and did some digging. They soon found out that the forest had been sold to a Russian company, Avtodor, a spin-off of the Transport Ministry, and would be cleared to build a massive highway. The work had been sub-contracted to a French company, Vinci, and most of the financing was to come from international bodies.

The residents of Khimki were largely unaware of what was happening; the project had been kept completely under wraps. An engineer by trade, Chirikova thought it was odd that the administration had decided to build the road in this particular spot. Why build a highway that has to conform to the irregularities of a forest when there are simpler, more direct, and perhaps even less expensive routes?

“It was totally obvious that it was simply a backroom deal to begin [property] development in our oak forest,” Chirikova recently told Radio Free Europe.

Read the rest of this article »

On November 22-28, Adbusters and its network of activists and culture jammers (now nearly 87,000 strong) are organizing a “Carnivalesque Rebellion,” with the goal of “shutting down consumer capitalism for a week.”

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

One creative action that Adbusters cites as an inspiration is this video (above) of The Love Police stirring things up in the UK.

The first action that the magazine has launched is a worldwide boycott of Starbucks, which should be accompanied by a shift to local indie coffee shops. In their most recent tactical briefing, they announced a similar boycott of Nike.

The next issue of the print magazine will be a “theoretical and practice handbook for the November rebellion,” and they are currently asking that you send along your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org, which they’ll share in future briefings.

Over at Mondoweiss, which I’ve recently discovered has perhaps the most thorough coverage of nonviolent action challenging the occupation of Palestine, there is a post today announcing a big victory for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign:

The Norwegian government has divested its pension fund of two Leviev companies that build settlements in the occupied West Bank on the grounds that the international community regards territory east of the ’67 line as occupied.