"Testimony of Zea Maize," via the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

On April 21, approximately 100 people came to a courtroom in Iowa City to attend a mock trial called the Monsanto Hearings, the second of five such events scheduled nationwide. The trial was modeled after a preliminary hearing, an attempt to collect stories about harm caused by agribusiness giant Monsanto and determine if further public scrutiny is warranted.

The court’s five presiding judges — including a professor, a graduate student and an organic farmer — made no pretense of impartiality. “We are under no obligation to be even-handed,” they announced early on, “because in the court of public opinion, Monsanto is not even-handed. They have money for lobbyists, advertisements, corporate-funded research and media campaigns. The influence of this hearing, by contrast, depends on the power and truth of what is said.” The court, they explained, would not be considering legal violations, but rather violations of nature, ethics and human rights.

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The YourBofA.com landing page.

Last week, a press release was released revealing a new website apparently from Bank of America, YourBofA.com, followed by another, seemingly hastily-written press release imploring readers to ignore the “malicious website (YourBofA.com) that is fraudulently representing itself as a Bank of America re-branding effort.” The second release insisted that “Bank of America is not making plans to enter into federal receivership.”

The malicious website (and both press releases) is another creation of the activist pranksters The Yes Men — the group that has posed as World Trade Organization representatives, George Bush henchmen and many more, all in good, subversive fun. To learn how laughter can be the greatest weapon of all, I sat down with Andy Bichlbaum, one of the founders of The Yes Men last month at Scratcher Bar in the East Village. Now, in addition to The Yes Men, The Yes Lab and teaching at New York University, he has been involved in developing the Plus Brigades, a project of Occupy Wall Street meant to infuse the movement with renewed creativity in the streets.

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By John Bennett, via Flickr.

“What do you do for a living?” — or its shorter (and more annoying) cousin, “So, what do you do?” — is the kind of question I avoid these days.

In my head, I tend to get snotty: “I live for a living, duh!” But out loud I am glib: “I am a woman of leisure”; or vague: “This and that”; or inaccurate: “I’m a housewife”; or an oversharer: “Well, it all started in 2009 when I realized I wanted a radical change in my life…” I can go on in this vein until the listener’s eyes literally fall out of their head with boredom. But on the forms I have to fill out, I am much more succinct. Occupation: unemployed.

In this, I am not alone. The official unemployment rate in the United States — calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is currently 8.3 percent, or about 12 million people.

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Photo by Alex Fradkin.

Sometimes justice requires a little imagination. On Saturday, when much of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York was loudly denouncing police violence against minorities and protesters, a small group of environmentalists dreamed up a way to get the police to focus on the crimes of the 1 percent, to the point of arresting five corporate suits on United Nations property.

Granted, those five were actually members of the OWS affinity group Disrupt Dirty Power, which used Saturday’s action (billed as a “mock’upation”) to launch a month of actions targeting the “corrupt partnership between Wall Street, politicians and the business of pollution.” Police officers seemed thrown for a loop as they tore down tents bearing corporate logos and cuffed people who claimed to be from Bank of America and ExxonMobil. Compared to the rowdy anti-NYPD march earlier that afternoon, this time, the cops had more of a chance to think about what side they’re really on.

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The sound rang out at exactly 4 p.m. last Friday: four measured chimes increasing in pitch. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Standing in concentric circles with clasped hands, protesters held the last note, and it echoed against the New York Stock Exchange. Tourists and workers stopped to stare as the people-powered bell chimed again. Inside, another bell was ringing — a mechanical, computerized sound marking the end of the day’s trading. Six months since the Occupy movement began, it was clear that the bell inside was losing its resonance, and the “people’s gong” outside was getting louder.

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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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An exciting new cross-media project called Everyday Rebellion has launched its Advent Calender of Nonviolent Struggle, in which Srdja Popovic will offer a short tip for activists every day until Christmas.

The video above is about the role of humor in nonviolent action. Others address the importance of having numbers and an appealing vision for the future to success in nonviolent struggle, among many other topics. (To watch and share these tips as they are posted, follow the project’s YouTube channel.)

As we’ve mentioned many times before, Popovic was one of the leaders of Otpor, the nonviolent movement that brought down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and now runs the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in Belgrade.

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As chants of “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam” (“the people want to bring down the regime”) rise, so, too, does the hailstorm of bullets. As people come out into the streets to express themselves, so, too, do the tanks. Syria’s revolution is entering its ninth month, the Assad regime uses familiar tactics in its attempt to crush dissent. There is nothing creative about deploying tanks and snipers to villages. There is nothing creative about using rape as a tool of war, especially against an unarmed population. In contrast, however, the Free Syria movement has responded to these assaults with amazing creativity. Syrians continue to take to the streets in peaceful protest against the Assad regime—every day, in nearly every city, in nearly every village.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

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Protesters dye a fountain red at a main square in Damascus to symbolize the blood of those who have been killed in the nonviolent uprising against Assad.

As the Syrian Revolution enters its ninth month, the Assad regime is finally (after some 4,000 deaths and 50,000 illegally detained) realizing that it cannot kill the Syrian spirit. This defiant spirit is the one that has cried “Silmiyeh, silmiyeh,” or “Peaceful, peaceful,” even while Assad’s tanks enter cities, towns, and villages with one mission: shoot or arrest anyone who calls for freedom. For nearly nine months, Syrians both at home and abroad have espoused creative nonviolence as a means of bringing down one of the most brutal dictatorships of the modern era.

Citizen journalists in Syria—themselves activists—cover the news on a daily, sometimes even hourly basis. It is not uncommon to see the death toll triple between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Syrians living abroad, once helpless to combat Assad’s tyranny, have found in social media and the Internet a new voice: that of creative nonviolence. In the United States, home to more Syrians outside Syria than any other country, they have also found their political voice. They have trained, mobilized and organized themselves into multiple opposition groups, all with one mission: to topple the Assad regime.

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As expected, the right-wing Partido Popular won the general election in Spain on Sunday, as they did in regional elections last May. But what is easy to interpret as a defeat of the May 15 movement, which helped inspire the Occupy movement in the U.S., has a different meaning if we look more closely: the vote has been diversified and two-party rule is in decline.

The center-left party PSOE lost more than 4.2 million votes in this election, out of 34 million voters total. Meanwhile, the PP gained nearly 500,000 more than the last general election in 2008. So where are the other 3.7 million votes? Aside from a small increase of abstention (from 26 to 28 percent), null votes (1.29 percent, double that of the 2008 election) and blank votes (from 1.11 to 1.37 percent), the remaining votes that PSOE lost went to smaller parties. Now in the Congress there are 13 political parties total, more than at any time since 1989. The minor party that had the largest increase in its presence in Congress is Izquierda Unida, which includes in its platform almost all the aspirations of the May 15 movement. Izquierda Unida has swelled from 2 seats to 11.

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