• Chicago police arrested 21 people protesting against economic inequality on Tuesday at two rallies. The arrests came a day after thousands of people including teachers, religious leaders and union workers marched in downtown Chicago to voice mounting anger over joblessness and economic woes in protests that snarled rush-hour traffic.

• In New York City, some 500 supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement marched through the neighborhoods of some of the city’s wealthiest residents on Tuesday.

• Police in Boston raided the “Occupy Boston” encampment early yesterday morning, arresting about 100 peaceful protesters in the latest crackdown on protests linked to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

• Approximately 100 protestors, affiliated with October2011  Stop the Machine, and some from the Occupy D.C. movement, showed up at the Hart Senate Office Building yesterday morning for a “flash mob” protest, chanting phrases like “End War Now” and “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” and “We Are the 99 Percent.” Six were arrested.

• New strikes hit Greece on Tuesday as the government finalised talks with its EU-IMF creditors on additional spending cuts to secure payment of a bankruptcy-saving loan.

• Chanting “This has to change,” some 200 Haitians marked World Day for Decent Work on Friday with a march to the National Industrial Parks Company (Sonapi), where most of Port-au-Prince’s low-wage assembly plants are located.

• Strikes disrupted some French trains and schools on Tuesday as unions across France protested government austerity measures.

• Workers for Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) state company “Railway RS” have been on strike for the last two days and are asking management to  fulfill their requirements for improving the collective agreement.

• Palestinian officials said Tuesday that around 2,000 prisoners held by Israel have joined a hunger strike demanding better conditions behind bars.

• Algerian police on Sunday arrested roughly 25 unemployed people as they prepared to rally against joblessness near the presidential compound.

People applaud as they participate in a peaceful protest in Minsk, September 21, 2011. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko

Last week, the parliament of Belarus outlawed silent protests, which had sprung up in the country after the government devalued its currency in May. As Reuters reports:

Amendments to the law approved on Wednesday classify any “mass presence of people in a public place agreed beforehand … aimed at performing actions agreed beforehand or inaction … to express political views or protest,” as picketing which requires official approval.

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is often described as Europe’s last dictator, said that the protests, which took place at least once a week this summer, were part of a plot to overthrow his government.

The timing of this move is interesting. With the silent and clapping protests apparently dying down in recent weeks, it’s hard not to see how this move will only backfire—reinvigorating the opposition.

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• Greeks walked off their jobs across the nation today and as many as 20,000 marched through Athens’ central square to protest Prime Minister George Papandreou’s 6.6 billion-euro ($8.7 billion) austerity plan, challenging a government seeking European bailout funds to stave off default.

• On Monday, hundreds of activists stopped pedestrian traffic at the Perth Cultural Centre with a flash mob dance to raise awareness on climate change and push for the state to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy.

• Madrid secondary school teachers launched a second round of strikes on Tuesday to protest what they say is an attempt by the local centre-right government to use the debt crisis to strangle public schools and benefit private ones.

• In Lebanon, residents of a neighborhood in Baalbek held a sit-in Sunday to protest a lack of  government action on the poor state of roads in the area.

• Advocates for California prison inmates conducting a hunger strike said the number of participants has swelled to 12,000, making it possibly the largest prison strike in recent U.S. history. State corrections officials said the number of striking inmates is far lower than reported by advocates.

• On Monday, over a thousand Palestinians converged on the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Gaza, Palestine, continuing a tent protest that began outside the walled compound on Sunday and bolstering a weekly sit-in by the families of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails have joined a hunger strike to protest against worsening prison conditions.

• Hundreds of Egyptian Copts and supporters organised an angry protest and started a sit-in Tuesday night to voice fury over their renewed feeling of persecution and injustice in the wake of last month’s sectarian tensions in Aswan, Upper Egypt.

• Hundreds of people have gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest against the recent expansion of the Egypt’s emergency law, amid palpable anger over the military’s handling of transition from autocratic rule.

• Eighteen people were killed today in Syria by security forces following Friday prayers, as scores of demonstrators are reported to have gathered in important cities and towns demanding an end to Bashar al-Assad’s rule and chanting “Death rather than humiliation.”

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis held a protest in the  southern city of Taiz on Friday, a day after security  forces opened fire at demonstrators leaving 10 people dead.

• Thousands of workers at Freeport-McMoran’s gold and copper mine in eastern Indonesia kicked off a monthlong strike Thursday to protest low wages, bringing production and shipments to a standstill.

• On Tuesday, about 50 activists protested drones outside the new London offices of General Atomics as part of the Day of Action by the ‘Stop the Arms Fair Coalition’ against DSEi (Defence & Security Equipment International) on its opening day.

• About 50 transit workers and union leaders barged into an MTA office building in downtown  Brooklyn Monday morning for a brief but boisterous protest rally over wages and benefits.

• Oil workers went on strike on Tuesday, halting construction of Colombia’s Bicentennial  Pipeline, which will be the country’s longest once completed.

• In Boulder, Colorado, more than 60 homeless people and activists took part in a protest and flash mob on Wednesday to raise awareness about the issue of homelessness.

• On Monday, locals protested in front of the municipality of Carthage calling for the halt of construction on the archeological site in Tunisia as a reaction to the resumption of activities in the site.

• Prospective homeowners in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk are demanding apartments or their money back — and have gone on hunger strike to push their point.

The signature tactic of this revolutionary year, it would seem, is a mass protest in a large, symbolic public space. We saw it in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout, and then in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square in Athens. Now, in the U.S., the October 6 movement is planning to take over Washington’s Freedom Plaza, while another coalition has been planning to do the same on Wall Street on September 17—tomorrow. (For a basic account of what’s going on with the latter, see my report from earlier this week.) If you want to get something done, apparently, the way to do it is to take the square. And this is exactly what the people at Adbusters had in mind when they made their initial call to occupy Wall Street, observing that “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future”; they continued, “We want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”

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When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for “20,000 people” to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” it never said who those people would be. Now, the question on the minds of everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to the Lower East Side anarchist set is just who and how many will actually show up.

The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it’s true. The large, established, membership groups—unions, lobbies, etc.—have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can’t be counted on en masse. There’s no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there’s no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, though its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor Micah White, solely “philosophical.”) Saturday, among other things, will be a test of the scattered American grassroots—their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty compiled an interesting list of some of the more creative protests around the world, from Russia and Iran to Azerbaijan and Ukraine, over the last couple years. One of my favorites has happened this summer in Belarus:

Sick and tired of crushing economic hardship and political humiliation at the hands of “Europe’s last dictator,” Belarusians countered the latest clampdown over a fraudulent presidential election by utterly transforming an everyday gesture of approval. People came out in the thousands in more than 30 cities around the country to do nothing more than clap their hands, setting off a firestorm of state thuggery. Even as audiences put their hands together to welcome President Alyaksandr Lukashenka at carefully orchestrated official events, questions inevitably arose as to whether or not it was “OK” to applaud.

With Lukashenka’s plainclothed security forces frantically descending on applauders weeks into the “silent demonstrations,” activists turned to another seemingly innocuous act to register their dissatisfaction, with throngs of people setting their mobile phones to ring at exactly 8:00 p.m. on July 13.

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Last Wednesday, more than 100 DC residents and members of the Living Wages, Healthy Communities Coalition sang and danced to a revamped version of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” as part of flash mob at a Walmart in Laurel, Maryland. In a positive piece on the protest, NBC Washington explains:

The group has a serious message — it’s asking the retailer to show respect to the District neighborhoods in which it’s planning to open new stores.

They want Walmart to meet with community leaders and guarantee, in writing, to  improve the quality of life in those neighborhoods, and  pay employees a living wage.

But, you know, they did it with song! Which obviously makes everything cooler… at least when the participants have talent (plus a trombone, a sax, a set of bongos and some wicked vocals).

While this action was only seen in person by a small number of shoppers and employees, as good flash mobs do, the video has already gone viral on the YouTube, being viewed more than 50,ooo times in less than a week.

To learn more about the demands of the community—and, if you live in the area, get involved—visit the Respect DC website here.

The Tate Modern in London—the most-visited art gallery in the world—got a new addition to its collection last week. The performance artist and preacher Reverend Billy, together with his choir and a crowd of supporters, put on an exorcism against all the money that BP funnels into the museum to whitewash its public image. The company is responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 and the Tar Sands extraction effort in Canada. Billy, covered in oily goo, rubbed the stuff on the wall where the museum lists its supporters.

The pre-action publicity flyers read:

Brothers and sisters, a dark beast lurks within the bosom of one of our most cherished arts institutions. While good-hearted, god-fearing, gallery goers glory in the miracle of art, the beast below is encircling the planet with its oily tentacles, destroying righteous communities, poisoning God’s beauteous creations, and bringing us all ever closer to the climate apocalypse.

This is not the first oil spill on the floor of the Tate Modern’s enormous Turbine Hall. Two years ago, as we reported here, activists splurted tubes of oily liquid in a radial pattern. And, last year, at the Tate Britain museum, more “oil” was poured over a performer’s naked body. The group Liberate Tate—one of the several groups that together invited Reverend Billy—was behind both actions. (They actually got their start at a workshop on art and activism sponsored by Tate.) Like Billy’s action, both of the earlier ones were beautifully recorded by You and I Films, an London-based activist production company.

One thing that’s striking to notice, especially when this is compared with a great many Reverend Billy actions in the United States, is that there are no police charging in to break things up and arrest Billy in the middle of it. He does his act and walks right out. I asked him about this, and he replied:

Whereas after our protest at Lincoln Center—against accepting $100 mil from the Koch Brothers and naming the New York State Theatre building after David Koch—got me shoved into a black car by plain clothes cops in front of my wife Savi and 15 month old baby Lena for a night in jail on bizarre trespassing charges, the Tate Modern’s approach was to let the church roar. The Tate doesn’t know how to respond to the rising movement against corporate sponsorship. It has arranged arrests in the past. We snuck in with our robes in backpacks and I had my “gospel whites” under civilian clothing. We advertised our action publicly—witness the number of participants. Amen!

Back in New York, the Rev will be re-opening the weekly Earthalujah Show at Theatre 80 on Sunday evenings at 5:30 pm, starting September 18th.

Student protester arrested at a "strolling" action in Shanghai.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. built movements strong enough to confront hostile, often violent governments. While the world reveres their contributions to peace and justice, however, those working for democracy and human rights in China are envious. Both leaders, compared to their counterparts in China today, had far more political space to gather, strategize, and communicate with the masses. But even under their own difficult circumstances, Chinese activists have devised novel civil-resistance campaigns, both in cyberspace and in the streets, fomenting what has come to be called the “Jasmine Revolution.”

One of the leading figures in this struggle is 28-year-old Gaius Gracchus (as he is known online). After being imprisoned in China for speaking out and seeking asylum in the United States, Gaius studied classics at Columbia University. He’s now president of the Chinese Youth Foundation (CYF), whose members are located both in China and internationally—in Paris, Seoul, Hong Kong, Australia, and the United States. At his apartment in New York, Gaius and I talked about what he’s doing to stay one step ahead of a government determined to stop him.

“I want to promote social justice and community cohesion, and prepare the next generation of intellectuals who can champion human rights in China,” he explains.

The social conditions in China are rapidly deteriorating. “People in my generation cannot find jobs, mortgages, or housing,” says Gaius. “Inflation is very high. Prosecuted people appeal in vain. Very few have access to good quality education and healthcare, and the state security apparatus is violently repressive. A culture of ‘you get it if you can pay for it’ is dominant in China.” People across the country yearn for change and are constantly venting their anger. Gaius has learned that, in 2010 alone, there were over 320,000 incidents of civil unrest across the country. Security forces often subdue such unrest violently.

In the city of Guangzhou this past May, for instance, after three people were killed by local police, three days of mass protest ended when the army killed over 100. Around the same time, in the Inner Mongolia, peaceful protests against the exploitation of natural resources were also brutally suppressed by the army.

Gaius has no confidence that scattered protests like these can deliver real change. “The random incidents exhibit no holistic strategies in tackling with the Chinese government, only a concern for personal and communal welfare,” he believes. “It highlights the fragmented nature of Chinese society across cultural, regional, and class lines, which is a major challenge to any strategic disobedience initiative.”

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