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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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With the scandal around Rupert Murdoch growing by the day, a full-fledged boycott of News Corp. has been launched on the internet. According to the Washington Post:

Boycottmurdoch.com was registered Sunday, with a plan to convince readers “that Murdoch’s tabloid news media … propagate a false image of the world, exaggerate news stories, and spin an agenda which fits Murdoch’s business interests and highly conservative political outlook.”

Boycott Murdoch Facebook and Twitter pages sprung up, garnering hundreds of followers within days.

While the boycott has recieved coverage on many mainstream news outlets, it has yet to gain much traction. The Facebook page has less than 700 fans and the Twitter page is approaching only 1,000 followers. To make even a small dent in Murdoch’s bottom line, the boycott will need to metastasize and quickly.

One thing that makes a complete boycott of all things Murdoch difficult, is the breadth of his holdings. As NPR explains, if you don’t want any of your money going to Murdoch, here are a few things that would be off limits:

• You couldn’t go see Brad Pitt and Terence Malick’s new, critically acclaimed art house film The Tree of Life. It’s distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, a subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment and NewsCorp. (That means you couldn’t watch Natalie Portman in Black Swan either.)

• You couldn’t watch any of your favorite sitcoms on the online video site Hulu.com, which is a NewsCorp joint venture with NBC Universal and Disney.

• You couldn’t watch Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic Channel. (Fox owns a majority share of the network.)

• You couldn’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post.

• You couldn’t attend a Los Angeles Lakers or New York Rangers game, since Murdoch has partial ownership in both of those major league sports teams. (He also owns parts of the Staples Center and Madison Square Garden; so no Lady Gaga concerts in the Big Apple either.)

• You couldn’t watch American Idol on Fox or buy any albums or singles by the winners and contestants of the show. That means you, Crystal Bowersox fans.

• You couldn’t buy any book published by HarperCollins since NewsCorp owns that company as well. So forget picking up an extra copy of a J.R.R. Tolkien book.

• If you’re Australian, you couldn’t attend a National Rugby League game, or read GQ Australia.

While this list is only partial, boycotting Murdoch’s empire is far from impossible. It simply would mean making some sacrifices, which is necessary for all nonviolent action, and choosing more carefully which news, entertainment and sports to watch or read.

The Israeli government passed a law yesterday that allows for any Israeli person or organization calling for the boycott of Israel or the settlements to be sued by the boycott’s target without having to prove any damage was sustained. While members of the opposition party Kadima have rightfully slammed the law as outrageous and shameful, the greater point seems to be that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is having an effect. Palestinian BDS National Committee Coordinator Hind Awwad explained just that in a press release today:

This new legislation, which violates international law, is testament to the success of the rapidly growing global BDS movement and a realisation within political elites inside Israel that the state is becoming a world pariah in the way that South Africa once was.

In addition to proving the effectiveness of the movement, the law itself seems rather impotent. Since it can’t physically prevent people from not buying things, the law can only target people calling for it. And since the only people who can be subjected to the law are Israelis, there’s likely only a handful of organizers who could actually be sued. And those people are probably the type of principled activists who would be only too happy to challenge the law as a form of civil disobedience. In the end, the law may just backfire and only serve to underscore the poor state of democracy and free speech in Israel.

It seems the law has already inspired greater support for the boycott. As Haaretz reported:

Peace Now movement announced Monday it opened a Facebook page calling for a boycott of products that come from the settlements. On Tuesday it plans to launch a national campaign, with the aim of convincing tens of thousands of people to support the boycott.

It appears as though Israel has thwarted the “flytilla” campaign by preventing hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists from boarding planes to Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. This is the second “failed” campaign by foreign activists to enter the Palestinian territories in recent weeks (the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza being the other).

As I explained yesterday, however, this sort of failure can actually become a success for the activists, as it only serves to underscore the brutal grip Israel has over Palestine and anyone who seeks to help it. Nevertheless, the long-term effectiveness of a foreign activist campaign such as this has yet to really be proven.

There aren’t many historical antecedants to draw upon. The international boycott of South Africa during the apartheid era is one example of foreign involvement in a people’s struggle, but it’s not nearly as direct as the type of action many pro-Palestinian activists have engaged in. Also, there actually is a boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, which is only one part of a much larger movement.

Another historical parallel might be the dozens of humanitarian aid trips Kathy Kelly’s Voices in the Wilderness took to Iraq during the sanctions era of the 1990′s. They were an illegal defiance of an unjust US policy. So, rather than challenging a foreign government, Voices was really going after its own.

With that in mind, the historical precedent being set by these ’tilla campaigns becomes more clear. What isn’t clear, however, is whether they will be remembered as a game-changer or just a great media campaign. In that light, it’s important that we not overlook the other work being done in support of the Palestinian cause.

One upcoming action actually has a great chance at becoming a game-changer. It’s a solidarity march planned for July 15 in Israel. While marches take place all over Palestine as part of the independence movement, the one comprised of Jews in Israel stands to draw the most attention if not make the biggest difference.

As Yael Sternhell explained in a great piece for Haaretz, “Taking part in a solidarity march is a similar choice to the one of the whites who joined the march from Selma. It is the choice to take a stand, in real time, on the right side of history.”

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If you haven’t noticed, Glenn Beck – Fox News’ vitriolic voice of “reason” and “values” – is gone.  Thursday, June 30 marked the end of Beck’s controversial career with Fox but his pandering continues on The Glenn Beck Program that is broadcast nation-wide.  While talk-radio remains a favorite medium for right-wing ideology – and quite successfully at that, considering top three talk syndicates are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, respectively – what is more significant is what the ousting of Beck may mean for Fox News.

The 24/7 news channel has enjoyed extraordinary ratings since 9/11, promoting a concoction of unwavering patriotism, “fair and balanced” reporting, and disdain for dissent.  But Beck’s departure and recent rating reports suggest that Fox News’ hold on the American psyche is loosening.  The Fox News network ratings have been in a steady decline while viewership, particularly in the 25-54 demographic, of CNN and MSNBC has been on the rise.  There is no disputing that Fox still dominates the cable news sphere, but the drop in its ratings, the rise in its competitors and the increased attention to its modus operandi could signal a new era of sanity for grassroots organizers seeking media reform and progressive change.

A recent piece in Dissent by Mark Engler argues that Beck’s signing off is the result of a successful boycott campaign by Color of Change that targeted corporate advertisers on the program:

I think we need to take time to recognize the innovative and relentless boycott that set out to strip Glenn Beck of his sponsors. The boycott was amazingly effective at doing just that—ultimately convincing several hundred corporations (including major names such as Wal-Mart, GEICO, and Procter & Gamble) to agree not to advertise on his show.

Engler explicates the success of the boycott in light of other ruminations regarding Beck’s signing off.  What is of importance for activists – particularly those engaged in media reform – is the point Engler makes about how the organizers framed the boycott by not going the traditional route of targeting consumers. Engler writes:

[It] wasn’t about getting the average American not to watch the show….The Beck boycott was far more strategic. Its organizers identified wary advertisers as their point of leverage, targeted specific corporations that were buying ads, and used the announcement of each new company that agreed to withdraw as a way to build momentum.

Surely the Color of Change campaign played a role in bringing increased scrutiny of Beck’s paranoia-laden “journalism.”  Identifying a weak point in Beck’s armor – that his network is a for-profit venture reliant on advertisers and viewers – allowed Color of Change to employ a time-proven tactic of people-power through the use of petitions to signify widespread support of getting Beck off the air and taking it not to Fox but to the corporate advertisers it relies upon for revenue.

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James Lawson (right) and Nathan Schneider. Photo by Cynthia Boaz.

Over lunch last week, during the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s Fletcher Summer Institute, I had the chance to talk with civil-rights movement leader James Lawson with a recorder on. It wasn’t hard to get him going; he had been talking about these things the whole week. Lawson, who organized the decisive Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins, is above all a strategist. He insists on the need to develop long-range strategies, not just short-term tactics. But, as he showed during the ceremony for the first James Lawson Awards, he is also a theologian.

NS: For activists trying to reclaim people’s power among all the powerful corporations at work today, what do you think can be learned from the civil-rights movement? What are the lessons from your experience?

JL: Well, I think that the main thing that activists must learn is nonviolent philosophy, methodology, techniques, and strategy. They need to work from an investigation and assessment of their local base, determining thereby the skills and techniques that will organize and mobilize people in that local scene. No social movement is going to take place if it doesn’t have roots in what’s going on in Cleveland, Ohio, or Washington, DC, or way across Georgia. That’s how movements take place, and that’s how movements have taken place in the United States—not by national policy, but by local groups assessing their own scene and trying to be real about how to start working.

At the local level, people need to get some processes going that will cut down the sales of certain companies and corporations and begin to send a mighty message. It may not be possible to do that in the first year, but I’d be willing to wager that steady organizing around something specific would begin to have an impact. That’s the first task.

I maintain that we have more than enough activists and activism in our country. What we do not have is a unity of understanding about how you go about putting that activism to work. We’re all over the ballpark. Very few people are playing the nine positions of the ball team that you’re going to need to defend, or have an offense.

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