On Sunday, the Toronto Star ran an interesting review of Philip Carr-Gomm’s new book, A Brief History of Nakedness, in which he offers “a sustained mediation on the spiritual, cultural and political implications of being naked in public.” The book includes numerous photos, including this image of 50 women posing nude as part of Baring Witness, a group in West Marin County, California, that used nudity to protest the impending Iraq war in November 2002.

As Carr-Gomm argues, “Nakedness makes a human being particularly vulnerable but in certain circumstances strangely powerful, which is why it has become so popular as a vehicle for political protest.” According to Carr-Gomm, by disrobing, protestors demonstrate that they are both fearless and have nothing to hide.At least, that’s the ideal situation. Sometimes the political intentions of being in the buff can get lost, as happened during the recent expressions of G20 activism. “There’s a naked guy at Queen and Peter,” @one_more_night tweeted. “I think he’s protesting clothes.”

Contrary to what you might first think, it is not only hippie types that have used their naked bodies to protest. Carr-Gomm tells the story of one religious group that employed this tactic:

A radical sect of Ukrainian Christians, the Doukhobors (which translates into “spirit wrestlers”) were considered heretics by the Orthodox Church and generally irritated the Russian government. So in 1899 the Doukhobors were encouraged to move their troublemaking to Canada, where they were promised 65 hectares of free land, a bracing climate, equitable laws, peace and prosperity. More than a third of the population (nearly 8,000) said yes, but by 1903 they were unhappy, and an extremist faction called the Sons of Freedom emerged, inspired by the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy. As Carr-Gomm notes, the Sons of Freedom “decided to mount a sustained campaign of protest against the government, whom they believed had reneged on their promises regarding land rights and were enforcing compulsory education in government schools.”

In May of 1903 over 45 Doukhobors protested by marching naked, were charged with “nudism” and sentenced to jail. Naked skirmishes between the Canadian government and the Doukhobors continued into the 1970s.

As I have argued on this site before, I still question the efficacy of nude protests. While taking off your clothes definitely can draw a crowd and the attention of the media, the focus generally seems to be on the fact that the protesters are naked rather than the issue they are campaigning around. And as a rule of thumb, activists want to avoid tactics that deflect attention from the cause they are fighting for.

• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

• Several Greenpeace activists were arrested after rappelling off the Calgary Tower yesterday morning to hang a banner attacking the relationship between the oilsands industry and government.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in the southwestern Helmand province to voice their anger at the killing of a 65-year-old man by US troops. Another demonstration was held in the southern Oruzgan province over the alleged desecration of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, by US forces.

• Two men carrying Mexican flags in protest of Arizona’s immigration law ran onto the outfield during the seventh inning of the New York Mets’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday night at Citi Field. Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”

• Several hundred Red Shirt protesters defied a state of emergency in the Thai capital on Monday to stage a symbolic protest, with hundreds of people sprawling on the ground and chanting, “People died here!”

• An estimated 30,000 people, consisting of tourists and residents, linked hands on the Thai island of Koh Samui on Saturday afternoon to protest oil exploration due to start in the Gulf of Thailand.

• Advocates for New York City’s community gardens delivered fresh produce to the steps of city hall Monday to protest the expiration of the Garden Settlement of 2002, which protected community gardens from real estate developers.

• About half the detainees at the 216-bed Campsfield House immigration centre in Oxfordshire Britain are refusing meals to protest their prolonged detention and treatment, which has caused many to suffer from mental health problems.

• About 600 employees of a Volvo bus plant in India have been on strike for a week to demand better pay and the return to work of four colleagues suspended following a dispute at the plant.

I couldn’t help but be impressed by the students from Northern Secondary School in Toronto who protested the hiring of a police officer for their school, and wonder why there doesn’t seem to be resistance to such efforts in the US.

One student eloquently argues that there is “no community accountability for the decision” to bring police into the school because it was not democratically made and that students were not consulted. It’s hard for me to imagine many American high school students formulating such an argument or even raising a fuss.

Any thoughts as to why this might be? Is this school unique? Perhaps the students have a great teacher who gave them a sense of their political agency. Has there been more opposition to the increased police presence in our schools in the US that I’m not aware of?

When I went in high school – in a small town in central Illinois – we didn’t have to contend with cops or metal detectors to enter the building, and except in the most extreme circumstances, that’s the way it should be.

Last week, Corporate Ethics International launched a multi-year ad campaign – including an online video (above), ads on Google and tourism websites, and billboards in Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis – calling on tourists to boycott Alberta over the province’s oil sands. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Tourism is important for Alberta, which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to its wilderness parks and resorts in Banff and Jasper, and to the annual Stampede rodeo and outdoor show in Calgary.

Alberta officials and members of the oil sands industry were angry at the ad campaign. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said in a press conference Wednesday that the campaign “does, of course, anger me to a large degree because it’s an attack on about a hundred thousand Albertans whose lives depend upon the tourism industry.”

In an interview with CTV News Channel,  executive director of Corporate Ethics International Michael Marx explained the motivation for the “Rethink Alberta” campaign and why the characterization of the the effort as an “attack” isn’t accurate:

“We think the Alberta government has been pretty arrogant in ignoring the concerns of environmental groups in the U.S., in Europe and in Canada, as well as First Nations, and that it’s been deceptive in its public relations in claiming that they’re greening the tarsands,” Marx said.

“We felt like we needed to be more aggressive in calling the government out.”

He added that his group doesn’t wish to harm tourism businesses but hopes they will get involved in oilsands issues.

“Ultimately we think that the tarsands industry, by contributing to global warming, actually endangers the tourist industry,” he said.

Whether that message will resonate with Albertans is yet to be seen. Next week the group is rolling out a similar ad campaign in the UK.

In other tar sands news:

Another campaign has been growing in the U.S. that hopes to block TransCanada from building the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas. Henry Waxman, a prominent congressman, and 50 other legislators stated their opposition to the project.

• About 30 people, including a priest, protesting working conditions in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago were arrested by police Thursday in a staged act of civil disobedience.

• French air travel has suffered significantly since Tuesday morning when some air traffic controllers went on strike to protest the reorganization of European skyways.

• In Las Vegas, eight activists protesting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s inaction on gay rights legislation were arrested for blocking traffic at one of the Strip’s busiest intersections today.

• On Tuesday, about 20 undocumented youths held sit-ins and risked arrest at various congressional offices in Washington D.C., including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, to urge the passage of the DREAM Act.

• Yesterday morning, a group of Barriere Lake Algonquins set up a peaceful blockade on the access road leading to their reserve, about 300 km north of Ottawa. The defensive action was aimed at stopping a government-appointed electoral officer from holding a nomination meeting on the reserve for the government’s highly-controversial imposed Band Council Election.

• The Teamsters Union, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, Clean New York, WEACT for Environmental Justice, concerned parents, students and consumer activists protested toxic PVC plastic used in toys at the Toys R Us flagship store in Times Square yesterday.

• Rainforest Action Network activists disrupted Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s talk at the National Press Club yesterday sending by holding up two large banners that said:“Massey coal – not Clean, Safe or Forever.” They were eventually escorted out by security.

• More than a thousand nurses wearing red scrubs gathered outside California Republican gubernatorial nominee and nurses union foe Meg Whitman last Thursday to protest her vow to cut the state’s nurse-to-patient ratios and fire health workers.

• More than 100 indigenous activists and supporters marched past the Ministry of Forests offices and the Ministry of Environment office in Smithers, British Columbia on Friday to protest plans for a pipeline that will carry tar sands crude to ports off the west coast of Canada.

• Members of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN gathered on the Independence Square in Kiev where they stripped down and bathed in a public fountain to protest hot water cut offs in the capital and rising tariffs for housing and utilities services.

• A fenced-in lot at 7th and R Streets in DC has become home to a tent city as local residents protest the building of high-income apartments, where the city had once promised to build affordable housing.

• A team of seven Washington women and men reached the summit of Mount Rainier on Friday to demand that Governor Chris Gregoire close the largest source of pollution in the state—a coal-fired plan in Centralia—by 2015.

• An estimated 2,000 farmers gathered in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taiwan on Saturday to protest the government expropriation of their land. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.

• Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Egypt ended their sit-in, following last Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment.

• 300 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto ono Saturday to call for a G20 police inquiry and the right to blow bubbles. The latter was in response to an officer caught on tape threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles.

• Strikes spread across eastern India yesterday to protest a rise in fuel prices, shutting down markets, schools, airports and businesses.

• Activists dressed as Founding Fathers stormed the foyer of a powerful downtown Washington lobbying firm last week, demanding that members of Congress stop meeting behind closed doors to raise money from corporate lobbyists and instead spend their time working on laws to help the American public.

• Demonstrators blocked a Vancouver intersection on Sunday to protest the arrest of hundreds of people during the recent G20 summit in Toronto.

• Conservationists in Malaysia protested a plan to build a coal-fired power plant on Borneo island yesterday, alleging authorities and companies ignore the rights of indigenous tribal communities and cause environmental harm by cutting down swaths of jungle.

• About 50 protesters from several Jewish organizations picketed outside the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan on Friday while Israeli Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni spoke inside. They protested Livni’s role in Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon and the winter 2009 attack on Gaza.

• About two dozen members of the Baltimore police and firefighters unions protested the city’s slashing of their pensions last week.

• More than 1,000 Italian journalists gathered in Rome last week to protest a law that curbs police wiretaps and imposes fines on news organizations that publish transcripts.

• US dairy farmers participated in a nationwide protest on Sunday against price drops by dumping a days worth of milk.

• At least 15,000 protesting garment factory workers blocked key roads in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka Wednesday, the latest in a string of protests over poor conditions and low wages, which now average $25 a month to sewing clothes for major Western brands such as Wal-Mart and H & M.

• Clashes erupted at the Puerto Rico Capitol in San Juan on Wednesday after police forcibly prevented protesters from attending a legislative session on the State budget. Officers used batons, physical force and pepper spray to block a large group that included many students seeking a voice in the Puerto Rican budget. Student organizers say over two dozen protesters were treated for injuries.

• Transport chaos again hit Madrid Wednesday as a strike by 7,500 metro workers protesting a wage cut of around 5 percent decided by the right-wing regional government entered a third day with the system totally shut down.

• A Salvadoran-born clergyman has set up a camping tent in a Chicago public park where he intends to continue the hunger strike he began 16 days ago to demand immigration reform. The protest is part of a series of fasts, hunger strikes and acts of civil disobedience organized in Illinois by groups defending undocumented immigrants to pressure Congress to enact immigration reform.

• A protest shutdown has paralysed normal life for a fourth successive day in Indian-administered Kashmir. The strike has been called in protest at the recent killing of unarmed civilians by police and paramilitary troops.

• A strike at Tianjin Mitsumi Electric Co., a Japanese-owned electronics factory in north China, crippled production on Thursday, extending the industrial unrest that has put manufacturers at odds with increasingly assertive workers.

• On Monday, four parents occupied the Dunster Fine Arts Elementary School in British Columbia to protest its impending closure.

• A large number of people in Karachi held a sit-in on the main Abdullah Haroon Road on Sunday in protest against the murder of a brother of a gang-rape victim.

• Three former detainees from Guantanamo Bay who were transferred to Slovakia in January will continue their hunger-strike in protest against the allegedly bad treatment they are receiving from Slovak authorities at a detention facility in Medvedov.

• A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia picketed a party at the Tate Britain on Monday, calling on its bosses to cut their ties with sponsor BP.

• More than 11,000 Egyptians responded to a Facebook call on Friday to protest the death of Egyptian businessman Khalid Said by police brutality.

• Eight people were arrested in San Francisco yesterday for occupying the city’s Human Services Agency in protest of the closing of a homeless shelter and the mistreatment of the people who had used its services.

• A group of US military veterans hung a large banner on an abandoned hotel in Detroit on Saturday to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities. The 10 x 15-foot sign read: “How is the war economy working for you?”

• Greek workers staged walk-offs on Tuesday, as part of the latest in a series of general strikes called to protest pension and labor reforms proposed by the government in an effort to reduce the nation’s soaring deficit.

• More than 1,000 people rallied outside police headquarters in Toronto on Monday to protest the police department’s brutal crackdown and arrest of 900 people, including many journalists, during the G20 summit.

• Some 200 people were arrested in Bangladesh on Monday for violating a ban on processions in thoroughfares during a march that was part of a 24-hour general strike to protest the “failures and excesses” of the government.

• India’s opposition parties have called a nationwide strike on July 5 to protest a rise in fuel prices they say will stoke inflation and hurt poor people.

During Saturday’s nonviolent protest of about 5,000 activists outside the conference center in downtown Toronto, where leaders of the G20 were meeting, several hundred masked figures dressed in black broke away from and started torching police cars and smashing store fronts. Not only did this steal the attention away from the peaceful protesters, but it got a lot of them hurt and arrested. By the end of the day’s events, the police had beat activists and journalists, fired tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested more than 560 people.

Just about anyone following the G20 could have seen this coming. In the weeks before, Canada was busy building what The Guardian called “the toughest security cordon in the history of the summit,” spending an estimated $1 billion dollars and bringing in 19,000 police officers. So, clearly it was ready to use them. But more importantly, why was it so ready to use them?

Some might point to the threat of vandalism promised by a group of Ontario anarchists a month before the summit. In a message to its members, the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR), announced its plan to stage “militant protests” and to “humiliate the security apparatus” by using “a variety of tactics”—a common phrase used by anarchists who perceive nonviolent action as ineffective. But as is so often the case, such dismissal stems from a complete lack of knowledge as to the dynamics of nonviolent action.

In what sounds like a reasonable appeal, SOAR told its members, “Respect for diversity of tactics also means not smashing things while we’re part of the labour child-friendly march, and remembering that although we might think certain tactics are pointless/annoying, we should not needlessly antagonize those people.”

What these anarchists don’t seem to realize is that nonviolent campaigns lose their power and are generally rendered pointless when they are associated with people who act violently.

Read the rest of this article »

• On Friday, a million workers belonging to Italy’s largest union went on strike across the nation to protest proposed austerity cuts by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government.

• Despite some acts of violence, 25,000 peacefully protested the policies of the G20 in Toronto over the weekend amidst a heavy police presence.

• Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Taiwan’s capital Saturday to protest the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, a trade agreement with China opponents said will undermine the island’s self-rule and harm its economy.

• On Saturday, people gathered and held hands to form a symbolic line in the sand for 15 minutes as part of the “Hands Across the Sand” demonstrations organized in the US and abroad to pressure elected officials against any expansion of offshore drilling and to promote “clean” energy. In the U.S. nearly 700 rallies took place in all 50 states.

• Egyptian dissident Mohamed El Baradei led over 4,000 in a protest in Alexandria on Friday demanding an end to police brutality.

• In Michigan, thousands rallied on the state Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to urge lawmakers not to cut funding for public education.

• On Friday, 40 demonstrators greeted Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean at a Melbourne hotel when he arrived at a meeting to approve a deal to export up to 20 million tons of polluting La Trobe Valley brown coal to Vietnam.

I was on CBC Radio in Toronto yesterday morning to talk about how protesters’ messages can be effected by the way they dress. It’s an issue we’ve discussed several times on this blog (here, here, and here) and I was happy to flesh it out a little more, albeit in only a six minute interview.

Click here to go to the CBC Metro Morning show page and listen.

• Anti-BP protesters from Greenpeace disrupted a speech by the company’s chief of staff at a major oil conference in London yesterday, urging the company to change its ways following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

• Members of an indefinite vigil held in front of the Massachusetts State House have reached their 17th day of protest against the anti-immigrant amendments added to the budget bill.

• More than 100 gay rights protesters marched in Toronto on Saturday to demand greater rights for all minority populations marginalized because of their gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status.

• Students and staff at 100 colleges and universities in Great Britain are protesting funding cuts that could keep 200,000 people out of universities next year.

• Students at the University of Puerto Rico voted to end their two-month strike against massive budget cuts on Monday after agreeing to a package with the administration that includes an extension of tuition waivers, the cancellation of a fee that would have drastically raised education costs, a commitment not to arbitrarily punish strike participants, and rejection of school privatization plans.

• Israeli soldiers injured several protesters on Sunday in an attack on a nonviolent demonstration against illegal settlements and the construction of the Israeli separation wall in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem.

• 12,000 Minnesota nurses voted to hold an open-ended strike on Monday following retaliation from employers after a one-day strike on June 10.

• Protests against the Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla continued around the world over the weekend. Several thousand people gathered outside Downing Street in London on Saturday. Thousands of Moroccans marched in the kingdom’s capital of Rabat on Sunday. Hundreds marched to Capitol Hill in Ottawa. And hundreds more marched to the Israeli embassy in Dublin (see above). In other news, the U.S. rock band Pixies has canceled a concert in Tel Aviv and dockworkers in Sweden are enacting a week long boycott of Israeli goods.

• Hundreds gathered outside BP’s DC headquarters on Friday to call for a “Citizens Arrest” of CEO Tony Hayward on the charges of criminal negligence. Meanwhile, several dozen people converged on a BP service station in Pensacola on Sunday to mobilize support for a boycott and a minor league baseball team in Viera, FL is changing the name of “batting practice” or “BP” for short to “hitting rehearsal.”

• A group of New York City immigrant advocates calling on lawmakers to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act or “DREAM” joined high school and college students for a hunger strike in Washington Square Park on Friday. Some of the demonstrators had been fasting since Tuesday.

• About 100 people rallied on the California-Mexico border Thursday to protest the death of a migrant after a U.S. immigration officer shot him with a stun gun.

• Eight people were arrested after chaining themselves together outside the federal building in Santa Ana, CA on Thursday as part of a protest against Arizona’s recent immigration legislation. They were also calling on Santa Ana to declare itself a sanctuary city.

• Alabama fisherman, who’ve been idled by the massive ban on fishing in the oiled waters of the Gulf of Mexico, formed a blockade of the Mississippi Sound to protest BP’s hiring of more recreational boaters than commercial fishermen to aid in the cleanup.

• Around 400 workers from Chicago’s Hyatt Regency hotel staged a brief but pointed walkout last Wednesday to protest poor working conditions.