On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

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The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

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Minnesota winters can be brutally cold, full of ice and snow, and drearily bleak come this time of year. And while this year’s winter has been unexpectedly mild and inconsistent, with temperatures fluctuating from well-below freezing to the high 40s—likely due to the instability of climate change—we still look for ways to escape cabin fever. The Frozen River Film Festival (FRFF), on the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, was just the break I needed. But it was also an inspiring weekend full of hopeful films, cinematic social critique, information tables, and workshops on the environment and activism.

The festival, which began in Winona in 2006, shows films from Mountainfilm—a film festival held in Telluride, Colorado in May that takes its films on tour throughout the rest of the year. Mountainfilm “is dedicated to educating and inspiring audiences about issues that matter, cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving and conversations worth sustaining.” Likewise, the FRFF—whose films are a combination of the Mountainfilm Tour and locally or regionally-submitted films—has a similar mission:

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• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

We had a big birthday bash for my step-daughter a few weeks ago. It was great: a big gaggle of kids, music, pancakes, a rainbow cake and lots of balloons. I appointed myself balloon maven and—armed with a how-to guide from the Klutz series and a hand pump—handed out wonderful balloon hats to the youngsters.

They were a hit. But I had not studied my guide very carefully, and once they started clamoring for dog and cat and dragon balloon animals, I was deeply out of my element.

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised with the first little boy who asked for a dog balloon. I whipped it up quick and handed it to him with a Harry Potteresque flourish. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool,” he replied, “a sword!” and he dashed off to engage his little brother.

Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding (politely) swords in all the colors of the rainbows. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork at the top of the wands and swashbuckling their ways across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands.

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who has been dubbed “Mayor 1 Percent,” got mostly what he wanted.  The “Sit Down and Shut Up” ordinance that Emmanuel legislated in November just passed the City Council.

Members of Occupy Chicago and other groups protested the draconian law that further criminalizes dissent by making protest more costly and more restricted for citizens.

Emmanuel, using the upcoming NATO-G8 summit that is set to take place in Chicago this May as an opportunity to foment fear of protesters, used the legislation to limit access to public parks and beaches, increase the costs and requirements for obtaining permits, and give unilateral power to himself and Chicago Police to quickly deputize law enforcement officers and obtain special equipment for dealing with protests.

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I woke up early this morning to cook breakfast for what remains of the Witness Against Torture community. After almost two weeks, it was the first time one of us had cooked for each other, and as I sat down to reflect on our time here in Washington, D.C. for the “Hunger for Justice” campaign that so many have participated in, I find myself looking forward to be able to take a break. Most of my writing, time, organizing and reflection have dealt with some aspect of torture or detention and, to be honest, I have grown weary. I miss the work on the farm. I miss family and community. I miss being able to walk through the woods or enjoy a quite cup of coffee while reading esoteric political philosophy. And then it dawns on me. Those desires I yearn for and enjoy are the reason I am part of Witness Against Torture (WAT).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rules are rules. The law is the law,” said prosecutor Brandon Long in a closing statements as he spoke for the government in the case against Witness Against Torture activists. Frida Berrigan’s recent column relates the details of the anti-torture activists trial and convictions for speaking out in the US House of Representatives as they petitioned their government to oppose the NDAA.

It struck me as odd that the government chose to frame its case in terms of law, order, and decorum so as to protect civil society and Congress from disruption so that business as usual may carry on while the legal black hole that is Guantanamo persists. Of course, it comes as no surprise that a civil disobedience trial is reduced to a mundane evidentiary trial of whether or not activists did or did not do a certain thing, in a certain place, at a certain time with no consideration given to the context or content of their speech/action.

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The defendants file in—some looking neat and upstanding, some in their best approximation of the same. They all look tired. Sleeping on the floor of a church can do that to a person.

The white haired, slightly amused and always alert judge, the white noise machine when the lawyers confer with the judge, the stern and fit marshals, the wall to wall carpet and wood paneling. Yes—we are in a DC court. Take off your hats, gentlemen and ma’am, no knitting allowed in the court.

The matter before the court is unusual. The defendants are representing themselves, with legal advisors on hand. They stakes are high—if convicted, they could face up to a year in jail.

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