I did my best to smell and look expensive, like someone who would normally come out on a Monday night to hear “venture capitalist and turn-around CEO Steven Pease,” author of a 622-page book called The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement. The program began with a complimentary light dinner, then the talk: “Why Jews are Disproportionately High Achievers.” This was the first in a series of Wall Street-oriented events hosted at Birthright Israel’s alumni headquarters, a loft on West 13th Street with exposed brick walls and tasteful track lighting.

Inside my free copy of The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement—Birthright, flush with the cash of Wall Street bajillionaires like Michael Steinhardt, is very big on free—I found tables with statistics: 21% of Ivy League students are Jews, 11% of senators, 40% of NBA team owners, 31% of Forbes’ 400, 24% of Fortune‘s “25 Most Powerful People in Business,” 72% of “25 Real Estate Fortunes Among Forbes 400,” 23% of all Nobel prizes, and on and on. In every arena you could think of, Pease extolled “disproportionate Jewish achievement.”

The last time I’d been in that loft was early 2010, for a pre-trip Birthright orientation. (I wrote about my subsequent trip in The Nation.) But this time, I came with ten young Jews—a minyan—to Occupy Birthright. To liberate Birthright by repurposing its space.

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A photograph on the front page of The Washington Post on October 27 showed Yemeni women burning their veils, a Bedouin tribal expression that appealed for assistance from tribesmen. With this action, the women appear to be saying that the official powers that ought to be safeguarding Yemeni women citizens instead are attacking them. The Associated Press photo, part of a gallery of shots of Yemeni women’s nonviolent actions, is visually stunning. While some onlookers might assume that the veil is a symbol of repression, to these Yemeni women it is part of their means of empowerment.

Yemen’s ongoing struggle is indicative of this year’s larger Arab Awakening in the way that women have assumed responsibility for speaking out politically.

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The media team working at Liberty Plaza.

A lot of what you’ve probably seen or read about the #occupywallstreet action is wrong, especially if you’re getting it on the Internet. The action started as an idea posted online and word about it then spread and is still spreading, online. But what makes it really matter now is precisely that it is happening offline, in a physical, public space, live and in person. That’s where the occupiers are assembling the rudiments of a movement.

At the center of occupied Liberty Plaza, a dozen or so huddle around computers in the media area, managing a makeshift Internet hotspot, a humming generator and the (theoretically) 24-hour livestream. They can edit and post videos of arrests in no time flat, then bombard Twitter until they’re viral. But for those looking to understand even the basic facts about what is actually going on—before September 17 and since—the Internet has been as much a source of confusion as it is anything else.

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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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So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of falling bombs and night raids, or those whose families haven’t been torn apart by deployment after deployment, the wars have been easy enough to ignore. We’ve all seen enough, though, to know better. We should know that this ugliness hasn’t done, and cannot do, any good. Yet the ugliness has, as a whole, left Americans discouraged and irresolute. Maybe it will take beauty to finally show people the courage to pay attention and act.

That’s the idea behind 10 Years and Counting, a new initiative hatched in the Adirondack compound of the Blue Mountain Center, an activist and artist residency community nestled beside a high-country lake. 10YAC’s goal is this: between September 11th and October 7th of this year—marking the 10-year anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan—launch an artistic groundswell by coordinating protest and arts events around the country. Their network includes activist groups, including Code Pink and the War Resisters League, as well as arts organizations and galleries. To see some of the visual art, poetry, music, and performances they’ve been gathering, take a look around the 10YAC blog.

But art, for 10YAC, is not quite an end in itself. “One of the most important visions” of the project, according to Alice Gordon, program director at Blue Mountain, is to see “as many Americans as possible getting onto the streets for peace around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.”

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Even those of us who don’t bother owning stocks will find ourselves shuddering some at the newspaper these days:

But don’t let it discourage you. The next few months are looking to be a busy season for organizing, protest, and nonviolent civil resistance in the United States, against the very corporate powers that have rigged this disastrous game, and that control the politicians whom we elected to serve the common good. At the very least the season will prove a fascinating laboratory of direct action, as each of these efforts adopts somewhat different means toward a more or less common set of goals.

We’ll be discussing each of these in depth at Waging Nonviolence as they develop, so for now, I’ll just keep it to brief mentions.

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The grassroots anti-corporate tax-dodging group US Uncut has been quite busy lately—from organizing a weekend of “dance-ins” at Apple stores across the country to a “sleep-in” at a Brooklyn Bank of America. Even Fox Business News recently ran a favorable profile of US Uncut founder Carl Gibson, describing the 24-year-old as “smart, creative, college-educated — and has nothing better to do than cause trouble for big companies.”

But that trouble has only just begun. After working together back in April on a prank exposing GE’s tax-dodging efforts, US Uncut and The Yes Men are teaming up again—this time, for a trip to the Caymen Islands, which is “home” to some 19,000 registered corporations. As they explain on their Kickstarter fundraising page:

In order to understand why thousands of teachers are losing their jobs across the country, we set out to discover where the leak was in Uncle Sam’s revenue bucket… Could it be that all the money is just a few tropical waves south of Key West? Sitting in off-shore bank accounts, just waiting to be brought back to share with eager shareholders and upstanding citizens alike?

They are looking to raise $10,000 by the end of the month to finance the journey—complete with a video crew that will capture their efforts to “embarrass tax lobbyists and politicians” and “bring the money home.”

In an interview with The Nation, Gibson explained that they will be targeting companies participating in the Win America Campaign

“WAC lobbyists use language soaked in faux patriotism about how the money is ‘trapped overseas’ and the need to ‘bring the money home,’” says Gibson. “Well, we’re doing it for them. If our tax dollars are being held hostage in the Cayman Islands, then there should be a ragtag group of taxpaying citizens ready to swoop in and bring it home. And that’s what we plan to do.”

Our friend Kiera Feldman had an excellent report at AlterNet yesterday about the role of flash mobs in the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She includes, among lots of other helpful basics, a primer on where flash mobs came from:

Flash mobs were the pre-YouTube brainchild of former Harper’s editor Bill Wasik. In June 2003, an email invite brought 200 people to a Manhattan Macy’s, where they converged around a giant carpet, telling clerks they lived together in a commune and were shopping for a “love rug.” Soon, flash mobs were like Starbucks: everywhere. Wasik had set out to make a grand joke of hipster conformity, calling his creation “an empty meditation on emptiness.” While the original flash mob was essentially an apolitical situation comedy, today it is enjoying a revival as a movement builder.

In part thanks to the help of the attention garnered by flash mobs, Feldman shows that the BDS movement has been gaining a lot of momentum lately and how it is coming to represent a very real threat to Israeli militancy. Israel’s Knesset has moved to criminalize the movement inside the country, and even the moderate wing of the Israel lobby in the US, namely J Street, vehemently opposes BDS.

Feldman would be at the very least suspect, though, if she didn’t take some grains of salt with her flash mobs. Like a lot of internet-meme-style ways to “take action” nowadays, she points out that the very power of flash mobs to attract attention is in their ephemerality.

If there is one rule of the digital era it is this: the Internet is a ravenous beast, ever hungry for short intervals of even mildly amusing distraction. Do something absurd in public space, and somebody will click on the video in their Facebook news feed. Kristel de Wit of Holland’s BDS Platform illustrated the timeless truth of a little bit of humor going a long way on YouTube with a story about a recent aerobics class. “My teacher is an absolutely nonpolitical person,” de Witt explained, “and she says to me, ‘I saw you in a funny video! It was something about boycotting Israeli products.’” If the goal of protest is to have one’s message heard and remembered, then: mission accomplished. But I had to wonder if laughter is the wrong register for conveying the suffering of Palestinians. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with singing or dancing about ending the occupation,” replied Banan Ead, the Palestinian-American Motorola flash mobber. A woman after Emma Goldman’s own heart.

The question is always how to turn that dance, dance into an actual revolution.

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According to a decision issued on Monday, a Utah federal court handed a victory to activists who imitate corporate spokespeople and websites in order to make a political point. (See, for instance, the recent Yes Men action against GE’s tax evasion.) The case was between the group Youth for Climate Truth and the infamous Koch Industries. According to analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The case has its origin in a brief action carried out by members of Youth For Climate Truth (YFCT), a group concerned about climate change. The action targeted Koch Industries, a billion dollar company that has publicly challenged the science behind climate change theories. Borrowing “identity correction” techniques pioneered by groups such as the Yes Men, YFCT issued a press release, purportedly from Koch, in which the company promised to stop funding organizations that deny climate change. The release was posted for a few hours on a website (www.koch-inc.com) that partially imitated Koch Industries’ own website. The action received some media coverage, but no press organization thought the release was real. If Koch were sensible, that should have been the end of it.

But Koch was not sensible. It sued YFCT for trademark infringement, cybersquatting, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (for allegedly not complying with the terms of service on the real Koch website) and assorted state claims, then issued subpoenas seeking the identities of the YFCT members. With help from lawyers at Public Citizen, YFCT moved to quash the subpoenas and dismiss the case.

Judge Dale Kimball granted the motion and threw the whole thing out. On the trademark claims, the judge noted that YFCT’s activities were clearly noncommercial and, therefore, governed by the First Amendment, not state or federal trademark law.

YFCT’s lawyer, Deepak Gupta of Public Citizen, told The New York Times that he thought the primary motivation for the lawsuit was to expose the identities of the anonymous perpetrators.

“It’s the tail wagging the dog,” Mr. Gupta said of using such accusations “to unmask your critics.”

And it’s more common than you may think, he said, adding that he was able include more than a dozen cases on the subject in his court filing. And tellingly, he notes that some of these cases were withdrawn once an anonymous critic had been exposed.

I asked Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men about this, and he said the decision didn’t surprise him. But, he added, “it’s always a relief when things happen according to common sense. A decision in Utah is a great place to start—now on to the rest of the world!”

If you were fooled into believing yesterday’s Tax Day announcement that General Electric planned to donate its entire 2010 tax return of $3.2 billion to the US Treasury, don’t feel bad. At least you didn’t publish an article about it on a news service picked up by thousands of media outlets. That ignominious honor belongs to the Associated Press. Thanks to their slip-up—the result of AP “not following its own standards for verifying the authenticity of a news release”—major publications like USA Today ran the story, only to find out they, along with GE had been hoodwinked by those clever Yes Men.

As with any Yes Men prank, the joke wasn’t so much intended to be on the mainstream media. They were just the unwitting accomplice in an attempt to poke GE and other large corporations who have managed to avoid paying taxes despite an economic crisis that’s led to job cuts and slashed services for hard-working people.

Appropriately, the Yes Men—through their Yes Lab project—worked in concert with the the grassroots anti-tax fraud group US Uncut to pull off the prank. Rather ingeniously, after sending out the “GE” press release from an email that was only a couple letters different from the real GE PR-team, US Uncut responded with its own press release, thanking GE for coming clean, but ultimately saying it wasn’t enough.

“This is a good first step,” said, US Uncut spokesman Carl Gibson. “But even if they return their full $3.2 billion 2010 tax benefit as they’re promising, they will still have paid $0 in US taxes since 2006, when they had profits of $26 billion. So while we welcome this gesture by GE, it is only a first step. GE should pay its share, and Congress needs to stop the budget cuts and close the tax loopholes that give the richest corporations a free ride.”

“This just shows the power of the growing backlash to corporate power in America,” said US Uncut spokesman Duncan Meisel. “In just a few short months, regular Americans have put the biggest companies in America on the defensive as a result of bold, direct action in our communities. The billions that GE is returning to the US Treasury will enable us to restore a few of the recent devastating cuts to health, education and infrastructure that so many of us count on. People across America who are hurting and angry will be pleased to read the papers for a change. We hope other corporate tax cheats, like Verizon, Bank of America, FedEx, and ExxonMobil follow GE’s lead.”

“We’re hoping this isn’t a publicity stunt,” said Gibson. “Promises just aren’t enough – we need to see results from GE and then from Congress. We’re still planning to continue with our actions this weekend. We won’t stop until the cuts stop.”

A stunt it most definitely was—but a wholly righteous one. After all, GE was forced to admit that it had no such plans to do the right thing. Of course, as Us Uncut later pointed out, the law doesn’t allow for companies like GE to do the right thing because if it did their stock would plummet. During the period the hoax was believed, GE’s stock actually did drop 0.6 percent—an amount, according to US Uncut, that was far more than the supposed value of the tax return.

Once the prank had run its course, US Uncut gave this summation of the day’s events:

“At a time when working families are being asked to accept massive cuts nationwide, this action showed another way the world could work,” said US Uncut spokesperson Carl Gibson. “For a brief moment people believed that the biggest corporate tax dodger had a change of heart and actually did the right thing. But the only way anything like this is really going to happen is if we change the laws that allow corporate tax avoidance in the first place.”