• More than two dozen Bremerton Coca-Cola Enterprises employees went on strike Monday as part of a walkout that involves nearly 500 employees around Washington state.

• In Kazakhstan, a threatened hunger strike by 48 workers building the Almaty subway has succeeded in getting them three months’ back pay. The workers, all from one shift, went on a general strike for three days last week, refusing to work until they got their salaries.

• On August 23, about 100 steel workers at the Hormozgan Steel Complex in Southern Iran staged a protest gathering. The workers were protesting 300 workers not having received back wages in the last three months.

• Around 160 garment workers in Cambodia continued to strike on Monday outside the gates of a factory in Meanchey district, where they have camped out day and night since Thursday to agitate for improved working conditions.

• Thousands of Honduran workers marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula on Aug. 18 to demand an increase in the minimum wage and to show solidarity with teachers who were in the 14th day of an open-ended strike.

• Last Thursday, the workers at Kian Tire in Iran went on strike closing down the gates of the factory warehouses. The workers were demanding back wages.

• Women bared their breasts to fight for the same right to go topless as men, during protests in Venice Beach, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Denver, Miami Beach and Seattle on Sunday.

• About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs set to classic Americana songs.

• Around 1,000 Senegalese opposition supporters took to the streets on Saturday to protest President Abdoulaye Wade’s regime, saying they were fed up with power cuts, floods, and rising food costs.

• In Haiti, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the National Palace Thursday to oppose the forced evictions of thousands of displaced residents from makeshift camps. The Haitian government has been urged to issue a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelter options can be provided.

• Two Korean priests are publicly fasting outside a government building in the latest protest against the highly controversial Four Rivers project, which they believe will be detrimental to the environment.

• Iranian opposition members in Germany are staging a two-day hunger strike to demand a stop executions and an international investigation of prisons in their home country. A group of 20 on Friday chanted slogans such as “Stop stonings” and “Free political prisoners” on Berlin’s most prominent public spot at the Brandenburg Gate, two days after the purported TV confession of an Iranian woman facing death by stoning on adultery charges.

• On Saturday, all the taxi drivers in the provincial city of Dégolan‌ in Iranian Kurdistan went on strike parking their taxi cabs by the Bolbanabad terminal to protest a 20 day interruption in the compressed natural gas supplies.

• Sunday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals was briefly interrupted by protesters urging commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s new immigration legislation.

• This past Friday, in Bryant Park  in New York, Medicare celebrated it’s 45th birthday with a flash mob of over one hundred singing and dancing protesters that warned President Obama’s newly created Deficit Commission to keep their hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

• South African government ministers met with public sector workers’ unions to try to end an open-ended wage strike by 210,000 teachers, nurses and other state employees that began last Thursday and prevent it from spreading.

• Greek truck drivers’ associations say they will continue a protest that has halted fuel supplies across the country and is hurting tourism, despite an emergency order by the government to force them back to work.

• Hundreds of hotel and restaurant employees and supporters were arrested around the US Thursday in coordinated civil disobedience against the Hyatt Corporation. Fifteen cities saw protests.

• A group of families of political prisoners gathered in front of the office of the General Prosecutor to protest the lack of information about the situation of their loved ones, especially those political prisoners who went on hunger strike in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison last week. Meanwhile, it was reported yesterday that anti-riot units and Special Forces barged into the facility  after learning of prisoners’ mass hunger strike.

• More than 200 Afghans participated in a rally in the capital Kabul on Sunday to protest the alleged NATO killing of 52 civilians on July 23, in the Sangin district of Helmand province.

• Some 800 dockers and activists staged a rally in Indonesia on Saturday to demand that a major port operator honor a negotiated agreement.

• Police arrested 37 people for entering a Tennessee nuclear weapons plant on Monday during a demonstration marking the anniversary of the landmark Plowshares protest in 1980 at a missile plant in Pennsylvania, where Dan and Phil Berrigan were able to get inside the General Electric facility, damage a missile nose cone and pour blood on various documents. Four of the original “Plowshares Eight,” each of whom served time in jails or prisons for their actions participated in the protest: John Schuchardt, Molly Rush, Anne Montgomery and Carl Kabat – as well as Liz McAlister, Phil Berrigan’s widow.

• Merchants in Tehran’s main bazaar gathered in protest on Tuesday to protest a government plan to dramatically increase taxes on their businesses. With threats of a general strike looming, authorities were forced to back down.

• Hundreds of people staged a demonstration in Rome on Wednesday to demand help from the government for the reconstruction of places damaged by the April 2009 quake.

• About 1,000 ex-militants in Nigeria, who last year laid down their arms under a government amnesty, drove a convoy of buses towards the Nigerian capital yesterday and blocked the highway for several hours to protest their exclusion from the on-going post-amnesty retraining program.

• Religious and immigrant rights activists gathered outside the White House yesterday to urge the Obama administration to approach immigration reform and voice support for the Justice Department’s recent challenge of Arizona’s hardline immigration policy.

• Four Earth First! protesters were arrested today after they temporarily stopped a semi-truck carrying a 140-foot wind turbine blade to Kibby Mountain in Maine. The protesters oppose alternative energy projects that profit corporations at the expense of sensitive ecosystems.

• The wife of a quadriplegic in Britain has gone on hunger strike to protest the lack of National Health Service care for her husband. She has vowed to starve to death to win the support he needs.

• Thousands of Italian farmers took part in a demonstration on the Austrian border to protest the importation of food with Italian-sounding branding that they feel harms Italy’s reputation for quality food.

Since the Iranian authorities have cracked down on the demonstrations that rocked the country after a disputed election a year ago, a flood of protest music has rushed in to comfort and inspire the opposition. If anything, as the street protests have been silenced, the music has grown louder and angrier.

The authorities have also tried their hardest to crack down on the spread of this music, shutting down sites where music can be downloaded and arresting musicians, but, as the Times puts it, “clamping down on music in the digital age is like squeezing a wet sponge.”

Protest songs are downloaded on the Internet, sold in the black market or shared via Bluetooth, a wireless technology that Iranians have adapted to share files on cellphones, bypassing the Internet altogether. Fans have also made dozens of homemade videos, setting montages of protest images to music and posting them online.

Since there are no functioning music charts in Iran, it’s hard to know how huge this phenomenon has become, but according to the Times:

An opposition Web site has posted about 100 protest songs recorded since the election. About two dozen of them honor Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old teacher shot at a protest in Tehran in June who became an icon of the opposition after her last moments were captured on a video that has since been widely circulated.

Two of the leading voices are folk singer Mohsen Namjoo (pictured above) and rapper Shahin Najafi. Although both are in exile, the former in California and the ladder in Germany, they’ve managed to connect strongly with different segments of the Iranian population.

If Mohsen Namjoo, the folk troubadour whose poetic lyrics and tuneful melodies appeal to older listeners, is, as he has been called, the Persian Bob Dylan, Mr. Najafi may be the Rage Against the Islamic Revolutionary Machine, whose harsh lyrics and hip-hop beats have captivated Iranian youth.

The implication is that for right now this might be the strongest form of protest Iranians have to offer.

Street vendors in Tehran sell bootleg CDs and MP3s at traffic lights for $2 or $3. Protest music plays on stereos at parties and from cars on the streets, Tehran residents say. Music blasting from car speakers at a stoplight has become one of the more public ways still available to signal to others that the spirit of struggle still lives.

And it will continue to live as long as the demands of the Green Movement remain outstanding.

The Week in Green with Hamid Dabashi, a weekly broadcast supporting the civil rights movement in Iran, recently conducted an interview with Cornel West. Using his characteristic soulful intellectualism, West called the Green Movement, “the most significant and exemplary movement for justice in the world today” and encouraged its leaders to “try to make some connection to those on the inside of the system.” He also addressed the importance of economics and involving the poor and working people of Iran.

• Tens of thousands of people are gathering for a sit-in in Bangkok as anti-government protests continue.  The red-shirted Thais, whose action is seriously affecting the city’s economy, show no sign of retreat after they returned to peaceful methods this week.

• Bail Out the People Movement activists and the mostly Haitian-origin staff of Steelworkers Local 8751 unfurled a banner as Sarah Palin took the stage at Boston’s Tax Day Tea Party gathering at Boston Common. The banner read: “Union jobs & healthcare for all! Stop the pro-war, racist, sexist, anti-LGBT Palin/Tea Party attack!”

• Survivors of the Bhopal, India gas tragedy protested in New Delhi on Thursday, 26 years  after the accident, still asking for medical care from the government.

• Residents outside the San Cristobal mine in Bolivia have been blocking rail access to the silver/lead/zinc mine all week, demanding that the government provide electricity, among other things, to the area.

• Strikes and marches occurred throughout the United States in the last few days, as hundreds of workers, students, and community members rallied against labor rights violations committed by national food service company Sodexo.

• A hundred people, including Aboriginal elders, marched on Mumbulla State Forest in Australia on Wednesday to protest logging.  Logging continued, however, throughout the day, on land that is home to a koala colony.

• Food and poverty activists are staging a sit-in in India in response to a Food Security Bill currently facing Parliament.  The activists say the bill does not go far enough to protect poor families.

• Russian air traffic controllers are on hunger strike this week in protest of company violations of union agreements.

• Argentine meat-industry workers marched to the labor ministry in Buenos Aires yesterday, protesting anticipated lay-offs.

• American Airlines employees picketed at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport on Thursday in protest of high executive compensation.  Rallying against corporate greed has become an April tradition for the airline workers.

• A New Zealand man locked himself to a silo for a day this weekend in protest of factory farming.  Police cut him down from the silo at a pig farm while animal-rights supporters watched.

• In Togo’s capital on Saturday, people gathered, as they have nearly every week since the March 4 election, to protest the re-election of Faure Gnassingbe, who took office fraudulently and whose father was a dictator.

• In Hollywood on Sunday, protesters marched for Social Security benefits for gay couples.  700 people marched and were ultimately told that legislation would be introduced to equalize benefits.

• At least two hundred people gathered at a San Francisco BART station on Saturday to engage in various forms of protest against police violence, in response to the killing of Oscar Grant last year by a police officer. People chanted “no justice, no rush!” and peacefully confronted BART law enforcement.

• Thirty to fifty Sri Lankan and Afghan men seeking asylum began a hunger strike in their camp in Sydney yesterday, in protest of Australia’s suspension on new asylum claims from those countries.  They seek to meet with officials to discuss their cases and the policy.

• Workers and people with physical disabilities continued protesting outside of Cairo’s parliament yesterday.  The sit-ins, which have lasted between 4 and 58 days so far, are in response to the closing of factories and Egypt’s lack of provision of handicapped housing.

• Dock workers in Iran protested after their company was privatized and their jobs were jeopardized.  Several hundred people gathered in front of a central building and in prayer spot to protest the change.

• About 25 people gathered in Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday to protest racial profiling done by immigration officials against Latinos.  They said they want their city to become a “sanctuary,” where people who work and pay taxes are in no danger of deportation.

The goal is to erode the pillars of support for the regime until loyalties shift, practical power begins to drain away, and the regime starts crumbling from within. Civil disobedience is thus not primarily aimed at demonstrating the moral superiority of the opposition movement — though that is admittedly one objective — but rather to disrupt the “normal” flow of commerce, politics, and everyday life. Clearly, a violent struggle against a much stronger foe has little chance of disrupting “normal” conditions except for fleeting moments, since violence gives the state license to stamp out its opponents with the full range of instruments at its disposal.

Moreover, violence he argues would only cede the religious “center,” which includes most clergy and millions of everyday citizens, to the hardliners. He then enumerates several critical strategic principles, including:

2. Co-optation: One of the most important goals must always be to co-opt elements of the regime’s forces to the movement’s side. We will NOT win unless this happens. The strategy of co-optation requires maximum attentiveness to the nature of our message and the language we employ. Any gestures that reduce the ability of those not currently part of the movement to shift their loyalties must be avoided. For example, “death to the Islamic Republic” chants, openly atheistic acts, and threats of violence are all deeply counterproductive.

3. Neutralization: Clearly, not all, and perhaps not even most, of the regime’s supporters can be won over. But that doesn’t mean they should all be counted as perennial enemies. We must convince some of them that this regime has no future, that they are much better off by disassociating themselves from it, and that they may continue to work and live as normal citizens as long as they do not try to dominate the rest of society again.

4. Persistence: Civil disobedience is a drawn-out process. The movement should prepare for the long haul and not expect the regime’s sudden, precipitous collapse. Of course, if such an event did occur, we would all be very happy, but we cannot build our strategy on such a model. To do so would be to court disaster. We should prepare for a drawn-out fight. Whichever side — the Green Movement or the regime — designs a strategy better adapted to a prolonged struggle will win in the end. The wave of demoralization that followed the events of February 11 would not have occurred had there been a more sober assessment of the situation and a clearer understanding of the nature of the struggle.

With regards to this final point, I’ve made a similar argument on this blog with regards to the antiwar movement here in the US, and how deflated many felt after the massive protests on February 15, 2003, failed to stop the invasion of Iraq.

The rest of this strategic think piece is worth a read, so check it out if you have the time.