“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.

As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.

Just before Woolson lobbed his medals in the direction of the NATO gathering (the organizers had requested that an official accept them, but this was turned down), he added: “I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!”

This was the largest organized medal return since April 1971, when more than 800 veterans deposited their medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to dramatically repudiate the Vietnam War. Like that event four decades ago, Sunday’s ceremony was moving and powerful. It crystallized in a clear but visceral way the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time it spelled out the critical importance of undertaking deliberate and potentially risky resistance for healing and nonviolent change.

This riveting event could well have become the indelible image of this week’s NATO protest. Even more importantly, it might have prompted a renewed national focus on the realities and costs of the last dozen years of war-making.

So far, neither has happened. Although there was some media coverage of the medal return ceremony (including a piece on local television and extensive reporting on Democracy Now!), it was largely overshadowed by the clash between police and protesters that took place almost immediately after the vets exited the stage. The march permit expired and most of the thousands of marchers drifted away, but a couple of hundred people stayed put in the streets. Hundreds of police in riot gear then flooded into the area. As an Associated Press story reports:

Some of the most enduring images of the event were likely to be from the end — when a small group of demonstrators clashed with a line of police who tried to keep them from the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama was hosting the gathering. The protesters tried to move east toward McCormick Place, with some hurling sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for nearly two hours, with police blocking the protesters’ path and the crowd refusing to leave. Some protesters had blood streaming down their faces.

This description conveys little of the ferocity of the tense confrontation that erupted after the permit expired and a huge police contingent swarmed into the space, intent on pushing people out of the intersection and keeping them from moving toward the convention center. News accounts and video clips from the scene show that the police tactics were hugely confrontational and aggressive; the police attacked and pummeled many protesters. At the same time, video clips show objects being hurled at police officers, including a police barricade, and protesters pushing police. Both sides were confrontational, as this raw video indicates.

My spouse Cynthia and I brought our two-year-old daughter Leah to this march. (The coalition website said that this event would be “family friendly,” and we took it at its word.) We were one block from the stage, but left a couple of minutes before the permit expired because Leah was getting hungry and thirsty; it had been a long, hot day. As we walked north, a long phalanx of police officers in riot gear were trotting single file toward the intersection, where only a few minutes later they would be swinging batons at marchers unwilling to budge. Some would be bloodied; others arrested.

There is no excuse for the actions of the police. At the same time, the lack of nonviolent discipline among the remaining protesters contributed to escalating this confrontation. The media frame on this story shifted almost immediately from “peaceful march” to “street fighting,” and the powerful action of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets was largely lost in the inundating shuffle.

Well before all of this, Suellen Semekoski and I were asked by Iraq Veterans Against the War to co-facilitate the nonviolent action training that would support the vets in preparing for their medal return. We were happy to do so, and on Saturday afternoon and evening we plunged into this process with them.

In our six hours together, we sensed the depth of hope that this public action was generating for them as individuals and as a community. Throughout the day the participants repeatedly stressed that nonviolence was going to be crucial to this event and that they were committed to maintaining this spirit. In addition, we were joined by three members of Afghans for Peace who were collaborating with IVAW on this event. They were also resolute about the importance of nonviolent discipline. The success of this action, they said, depended on it.

These survivors of war — U.S. veterans and Afghan peaceworkers — were creating a rare public space where they sought to call on the nation and the world to reflect deeply on the reality of this past, present and future destructiveness. They were very clear that nonviolent strategies, tactics and atmosphere would be vital to achieving this.

Unfortunately, there was little infrastructure in place to support that possibility. While many of us led numerous nonviolence trainings in the Chicago area in the run-up to the NATO mobilization, there were no agreed-upon nonviolence guidelines to serve as a foundation for nonviolent action. (The “Chicago Principles” did not serve this function.) Nor were there adequate numbers of peacekeepers prepared to intervene in order to maintain this nonviolent atmosphere. (In January, some of us had offered to train 500 peacekeepers, who would be equipped to respond to outbreaks of violence. This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number. We were told that the coalition was already training peace guides.)

There are many reasons such infrastructure was not in place, including a sensitivity to the now classic debate between nonviolence and diversity of tactics. Nevertheless, I suspect that we are at a crossroads as a movement for change and, at some point, we must make a difficult but important choice.

From my perspective, people power depends for its lifeblood on nonviolent discipline.

Nonviolent action is more effective than violent action — including the kind of heated scrum that took place in Chicago this past Sunday — because it keeps us on message (focused on the issue, rather than the tired tit-for-tat narrative), it is more likely to alert, educate and mobilize the population (the lynchpin of successful movements), and it communicates a vision of the kind of society we want (veterans creating the space of transformative healing and social change rather than the push-comes-to-shove dynamics of retaliatory violence).

If these things are true, then we must engage in nonviolent struggle with those for whom nonviolent struggle is dispensable. The challenges our world is facing are too grim to move forward without the strength and effectiveness of disciplined nonviolent people power. There are lessons everywhere — even from what went down in Chicago on Sunday.

Sign held up in New York's Bryant Park on May 1. By bdogmac, via Flickr.

The fallout from May Day can be felt in every sector of Occupy Wall Street. Some people say it was one of the greatest days since the movement began and are excited for what comes next. Others left with a sour taste in their mouths, whether by the lack of aggressive actions, or by the police state erected in Lower Manhattan, or by simply being worn down from overwork. In some cases, relationships with one another have strained and frayed. Having helped see the project through from conception to reality, my own feelings are mixed. I’m burnt out, taking a break to get perspective, and scared for what might come next. But I also saw May Day as a project that fulfilled the main objectives we had for it and meanwhile created a model for how to organize long-term projects in the future.

May Day had a few primary purposes. The first goal, to bring out enough numbers to show that Occupy Wall Street is vibrant and thriving, was more than achieved. Following a winter and early spring that saw the General Assembly and Spokes Council disbanded and attendance at actions topping out at around 500, May Day brought as many as 30,000 protesters into the streets, joining New York’s November 17 actions and Oakland’s ”general strike” on November 2 as among the largest actions in Occupy’s short history. It should be considered a more than adequate kick-off for our summer offensive. And, unlike N17 here in New York, the unions did not drive turnout for May Day. There were many union contingents on the march, but none other than the Transportation Workers Union had more than a few dozen marchers each; even TWU fell well short of the 3,000 people they estimated that they could turn out. Occupy mobilized the overwhelming majority of protesters. Nevertheless, the tens of thousands who took part showed that a model is being created in which Occupy assemblies, labor unions, immigrant worker justice organizations and other groups can collaborate and begin to jumpstart the catatonic left.

In the past, large OWS actions with sizeable labor contingents, like those on October 5 and November 17, have left many Occupy activists feeling disempowered. Union marshals would stand between police and protesters, telling activists where to go and making sure they didn’t get “out of line,” ostensibly doing the job of the police for them. Collaborating with the state is against many core principles of the Occupy movement, however, and for May Day great pains were taken to ensure this would not happen again. All unions and community groups specifically directed their marshals to stay with their union contingent and not to marshal anyone else. I marched under a giant blue tarp which read “No Bosses, No Borders, No Bullshit!” and nary a marshal or “peacekeeper” was to be found.

May Day has set a precedent for working with unions and other groups, helping to ensure that our unique methods and comfort levels with various tactics of resistance are respected. In order to reverse decades of decline, the labor movement must begin to adopt the more aggressive resistance Occupy has made commonplace, and not censoring or policing us is a start. Maybe next time we can have marches splinter into “red” and “green” risk levels, pulling off some rank-and-file with us to the more aggressive actions. As David Graeber wrote, by aligning our movement with May Day’s rich history of radical resistance, we may have finally distanced ourselves from the ineffective habits of so many reformist institutions. It’s time for unions to start doing the same, and helping unlock their own revolutionary potential.

Perhaps the most important lesson from May Day, though, is the organizing effort itself. On this project I worked alongside liberals and radicals, reformists and anarchists, labor organizers and hackers — a broad range of voices that represent the diversity of the Occupy movement. Without the GA and Spokes Council, inclusive and open projects like May Day can build solidarity and bring us together. Unlike a lot of other OWS actions, including many that I have worked on, May Day had buy-in from across the Occupy community. It belonged to all of us, and everyone felt it. People did what they could, whether that was organizing their workplace, making stickers, organizing autonomous actions, wheatpasting posters or talking to their church group.

Future long-term organizing efforts should follow this open, inclusive model. By connecting everyone’s unique skill sets and tactics, while being in solidarity with those who may choose to adopt different approaches, we can begin laying the groundwork for establishing alternative institutions. Over time, people will begin to have more faith in the alternatives than in the old order, which will cease to be relevant and fade away. If Occupy Wall Street is to survive as a radical movement, it must strive to produce tangible results, making life better for people across New York, outside of capitalism. This means focusing on tasks like foreclosure defense, successful home occupations, mutual aid and — finally — establishing a new home base for the movement.

We have now spent six months without a central place for our movement to thrive, for us to work and meet one another, for new people to know where to come to get involved, or for us to provide services to the community. Those long, hard months have taught us that the police state will never tolerate public occupations again, having seen the strength of our alternatives. Like the model for an Oakland Commune emerging out of Occupy Oakland, a New York Commune would be a way for the movement to live, grow and thrive. For this, we need to find a way to acquire space, whether it’s by defending a new indoor occupation, or purchasing one through a fundraising campaign, which OWS is more than capable of mounting.

In a New York Commune, we can practice mutual aid by providing a place for a free school, a really really free market, meeting spaces, food-banking, time-banking — the possibilities are endless. Renovating a large building would give us an ongoing community project to which thousands of people can apply their unique skills and talents. We can offer rent-free workspace to a variety of horizontal worker co-ops emerging from the Occupy movement, like the OccuCopy print shop. Our community center can put on display alternatives to the state and capitalism, and give people a way to envision a world without these forces of oppression, as Liberty Square once did.

Alternative institutions and sources of dual-power cannot just exist in one building, however. We must work actively to promote and support community assemblies, encourage the formation of new worker-owned cooperatives, and proliferate similiar community centers and projects all over the city. When communities begin to see that they, themselves, can create alternatives to the state, we may very well see a wave of resistence and mutual aid that makes last fall look like practice.

It’s time to absorb the lessons in the successes and frustrations of May Day, and move on toward new long-term projects and goals. It’s time to begin building real power that challenges the legitimacy of state and capitalist institutions, putting the very reason of their existence into question. Let’s continue the feeling of solidarity we had with each other during the May Day organizing process and use our combined strength to begin challenging the state head-on. I can think of no better way to start than by securing a new home for Occupy Wall Street and working to keep people all across New York inside of theirs.

Brent Betterly, Brian Church and Jared Chase, via The Huffington Post.

The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the three would-be NATO protesters arrested on Wednesday who are now charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism. While the impression that appears in the media is one of remnants of the Occupy movement verging toward violence, the driving forces behind these plots are the very agencies claiming to have foiled them.

The five activists arrested in Cleveland, Ohio, are facing multiple charges for conspiring and attempting to destroy the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge on May Day to protest corporate rule. According to the FBI press statement released shortly after the May 1 arrests, FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said “the individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views.” But that is only one side of the story.

The mainstream media and blog reports, both nationally and in Cleveland, have emphasized that the young activists were part of Occupy Cleveland and self-identified anarchists (here, here, and here). The men — Douglas L. Wright, 26, of Indianapolis; Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of nearby Lakewood; Connor C. Stevens, 20, of suburban Berea; and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, and Anthony Hayne, 35, both of Cleveland — were arrested and remain in jail after they attempted to detonate a false bomb that they had set, in conjunction with the FBI.

It’s an old script: Violence-prone anarchists devise a nefarious plan and, just before they can carry it out, law enforcement swoops in to save the day, catching them red-handed. But there’s another script being acted out here too, one much more sinister, complex, and morally and legally dubious: Agents of the state infiltrate an activist group and, through techniques of psychological manipulation, lead its most vulnerable members into a violent plan — for which explosives, detonators, contacts and case mysteriously become available — until SWAT teams and prosecutors suddenly arrive and haul the accomplices off to jail for the rest of their lives. In both cases, at the end of the story, officials congratulate each other for their bravery and bravado and the public breathes a sigh of relief as more of their civil liberties are stripped away.

I recently spoke with Richard Schulte, a veteran activist who has known the Five from groups like Food Not Bombs and is helping to organize their legal and jail support. Schulte explained that under the influence of undercover federal agents and informants, the activists — particularly the youngest, Baxter and Stevens — found themselves increasingly vulnerable and reliant on their informant. Baxter’s lawyer, a public defender named John Pyle, recently identified the informant working with the group as Shaquille Azir, a 39-year old ex-con.

“[Azir] became something of a role model, stepping in as a father figure, offering guidance on emotional and social stuff,” said Schulte. “Connor and Brandon thought he was a rad dude but getting more and more pushy.”

Collectively, according to accounts from friends and associates, statements from lawyers, and the FBI affidavit, members of the Cleveland Five have backgrounds that include mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness and social marginalization.

Brandon and Connor had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it “passive gradualism” — the a group broke off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, the “Revolutionary People’s Army.” At first it was mostly just a graffiti crew — tagging the phrase “rise up” around the city and putting up stickers, said Schulte.

Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists.

Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used “security culture against activists” and “developed patterns of trust to seem legit.” The Cleveland Five, he explains, “were coached by the federal government.”

In a letter Stevens wrote from jail, Schulte told me, he described the feeling of helplessness he experienced right before the bust: “We saw this coming,” Stevens wrote.

“Brought to the edge of the swimming pool”

Andy Stepanian knows a thing or two about state repression of activists. As one of the animal-rights activists known as the SHAC 7, Stepanian has served three and a half years in federal prison after having been prosecuted under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act for costing animal testing laboratories more than $380 million in lost profits simply by operating a website. While the SHAC 7 case did not involve FBI entrapment or property destruction, the specific targeting of activists because of their anti-capitalist activism was reflective of a new era of post-9/11 state surveillance and repression.

When I talked to him on the phone about the Cleveland Five, Stepanian surmised, “These folks would not have gone out and done this if not brought to the edge of the swimming pool by federal agents and urged to jump in.”

The FBI affidavit — analyzed here by RT — confirms, again, what many have warned about regarding the growing surveillance and security agencies in the United States: To keep themselves employed and justify their budgets, people in agencies like the FBI are orchestrating plots to catch “terrorists” who, otherwise, seem to be quite unable to do anything on their own. Last fall, Mother Jones reported on FBI efforts against Muslim extremists and concluded that many of those were instances of entrapment as well.

In activist circles, there are a series of notorious cases of entrapment by federal authorities. In 2006, for instance, environmental activist Eric McDavid, encouraged by an informant known as “Anna,” was convicted on conspiracy charges. Another more notorious case is that of Brandon Darby — a well-known anarchist and activist-turned-informant — and his entrapment of David McKay and Bradley Cowder. The award winning film, Better This World, tells the story of how McKay and Cowder were convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism.

“In most cases,” said Stepanian, “this is not one coordinated crackdown with a puppet-master. It’s a bottom-up [phenomenon] where special investigators are creating things for themselves to do. They go to potential targets to justify their position and create work for themselves.”

Perhaps even more troubling than the manipulation of vulnerable individuals — whether they be political activists or members of mosques — is the way in which law enforcement meanwhile manipulates public discourse about terrorism, Islam or, in this case, a growing social movement.

According to Schulte, the operation in Cleveland appears to have been part of a pre-planned narrative meant to paint Occupiers as a group with terrorist thugs in their midst, discouraging others from joining the movement. The FBI had a media statement prepared for immediate release on May Day after the arrests, and it hosted an unusually high-profile press conference the following day. There have been more than 300 pleas involving FBI informants in six years and such kind of overt media blitz from the feds is rare. Rolling Stone reporter Rick Perlstein observes, comparing two different anti-terrorism operations at the end of April, “that the State is singling out ideological enemies.” He reports that authorities are much less likely, for instance, to use tactics of entrapment against violent white supremacist groups.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is an expert on state-sponsored targeting of radical activist groups who has testified before Congress on FBI entrapment and is the author of a book (and an accompanying blog) titled Green is the New Red. Potter calls the Cleveland Five conspiracy “part of the ongoing focus on demonizing anarchists.” Just a cursory look at the headlines in Chicago and Cleveland confirms a growing association of anarchism with violence and terrorism while alienating radical movements from potential supporters.

Occupy Cleveland responds

Each of the Cleveland Five entered pleas of not guilty in federal court last week. As the trial of these young men plays out, their fates rest in which story is more compelling — their own victimhood, or the cunning of the federal agents. Although they were not taking action in the name of Occupy Cleveland, the future of Occupy and related movements in the United States is at stake in which story the public chooses to believe.

Occupy Cleveland, one of the movement’s longest-lasting encampments, had the remnants of its occupation removed by police in the middle of the night on May 3. There was little public outcry, when the city revoked its permit after the May 1 arrests.

Occupy Cleveland spokesperson Katie Steinmuller stressed that it was only a matter of time before the camp was evicted, and that it wasn’t entirely a result of the bomb scare. “There was a casino planned to be opened in view of the tents,” said Steinmuller referring to Occupy Cleveland’s camp when I spoke with her by phone about the eviction. “This [conspiracy] was just a good excuse to get us out.”

In a media statement following the arrests of the Cleveland Five, Occupy Cleveland affirmed its commitment to “active non-violence.” Individual occupiers have chosen to join the support team for the Five, but Occupy Cleveland as a whole is steering clear of commenting on it further.

“The FBI was successful in … what they set out to do,” said Schulte about the initial negative reaction the Occupy movement and other activists experienced in Cleveland. “People were exploited and trapped.”

“When you take away a space of legitimate protest,” adds Stepanian, “less legitimate forms of protest become more prevalent.” Events like the arrests of the Cleveland Five can create schisms within movements, which the state exploits to create a climate of fear within and about activist groups. The NATO 3 arrests and bond hearing, for instance, just before this weekend’s mass No NATO demonstration, will serve to deter people from participating and obscure the reality of the protest’s message.

In Chicago, the NATO 3 are each being held on $1.5 million bail. More details will emerge in the coming weeks, but Michael E. Deutsch, legal counsel for the NATO 3, has said that two of the 11 arrested during a house raid in Bridgeport were Chicago Police Department informants and have since disappeared. The truth of what really happened in Cleveland and Chicago may or may not emerge in the courtroom. But it is clear regardless that Occupy is now being exposed to a new level of state repression, and that it is taking a toll on what has still remained a nonviolent protest movement.

Correction 5/22: The article originally reported that Azir had been the impetus behind the Revolutionary People’s Army and that Wright appears to have been the first in contact with Azir until the spring of 2012. For information on supporting the Cleveland Five, visit www.Cleveland5justice.org

Some Occupiers just want the banks to act more reasonably; others want to abolish capitalism. Most cruise to meetings on two wheels; others hate bike lanes. In Minneapolis, as in places across the United States, Occupy Our Homes has brought union members, anarchists, lawyers, grassroots organizers, democrats and veterans all under the same roof, united by a common goal of saving homeowners from eviction and full neighborhoods from displacement. They might not all share the same vision of utopia, but housing justice work is demonstrating that, for today’s era of activism, humanity can trump ideology.

Last Saturday, more than 25 community members celebrated with Monique White, a resident of north Minneapolis, who had recently won a new mortgage from US Bank. They were all packed into White’s small kitchen, eating spiced chicken legs barbecued by Bobby Hull, a homeowner and Marines veteran from south Minneapolis who had won back his own home three months earlier.

“If anyone needs to use my bathroom, it’s — ” Monique White began to say, then stopped herself. The crowd laughed; everyone in the room not only knew where her bathroom was, they’d slept on her living room floor, marched with her to US Bank, sat beside her in court and helped water the cabbage in her backyard, which White planted a mere two weeks before her scheduled eviction.

The seven-month campaign brought together activists and community members across entrenched and often irreconcilable political and ideological lines, unifying those pushing for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system with those advocating for reform such as widespread principal reduction. The coalition itself is no small victory. Nationally, various housing campaigns can be divided on strategies and goals, with some groups focusing on home takeovers to radically redefine land control and ownership, while others advocate for mortgage renegotiations as a first step to reigning in the banks.

In Minneapolis, the organizing strategy has thus far fallen into the latter camp, with both Hull and White winning renegotiated mortgages. But the campaigns have relied on the work of people with a diversity of ideological positions.

“I’m not a huge advocate of private property,” said an organizer who asked to be called T.K. He missed the barbeque at Monique White’s house, not because he didn’t support the victory but because he was helping coordinate a 24-hour eviction defense at Occupy our Homes’ newest campaign: Alejandra and David Cruz’s foreclosed house across town.

“If the United Nations says housing is a human right, and people are in need and there are a plethora of homes, then there is a disconnect here,” he said. “At that point, in my mind, private property is invalidated by the human need.”

The Cruz family is asking for a renegotiation with PNC Bank — a demand that, as T.K. said, “doesn’t challenge capitalism.” Yet he and the rest of the eviction defense team are still willing to put their bodies on the line in what many believe to be the first hard-lockdown eviction defense since Occupy began.

As at White’s house, the Cruz family’s home is a space of unity and coalition-building. Direct-action activists defend the house around the clock. Labor groups supply copious brown paper bag lunches. Faith groups like the church across the street are reaching out to their congregations. Neighbors up and down the block display signs demanding an end to foreclosure on their front lawns. Even the house itself speaks of the team’s willingness to pursue multiple paths to win: Directly above a lockdown barrel on the front steps that will physically prevent the police from carrying out the Cruz’s furniture hangs a sign that says, “Negotiations, Not Evictions.”

Occupy our Homes Minneapolis is now looking to spread to tenants and underwater homeowners who are not yet in default in order to break down the stark class divisions of housing and build a unified coalition. Some members, inspired by Take Back the Land, are also looking at the possibility of home takeovers. Even more broadly, Occupy Our Homes has partnered with the city’s large Somali and Latino communities because they all share a common enemy: the big banks.

Last Friday, hundreds marched through the streets to protest Wells Fargo. Women clad in full burqas carried signs declaring that they had closed their accounts because Wells Fargo blocks money transfers to Somalia. Spanish-speakers denounced the bank for investing in private prison corporations whose lobbyists are behind some of the worst anti-immigration laws, such as Arizona’s SB 1070. Union members wearing orange vests screen-printed with the words “Labor’s Back” blocked traffic for the non-permitted march. Alejandra Cruz and other Mexicans led the march after performing a traditional Aztec dance. Behind them was a large Occupy Our Homes banner.

“For me, coalition building around issues is the best way to get shit done,” said Rachel E. B. Lang, the lawyer who worked on Monique White’s case and has been involved in Occupy Minneapolis since the beginning. “Historically, revolutions happen when a series of reforms are won, and it’s not good enough. From that momentum comes total change.”

• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would not be allowed to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

NNU Midwest Director, Jan Rodolfo, RN, speaking at a press conference last Thursday morning, spoke on the union’s plans to file for injunctive relief in federal court rather than succumb to the city’s demands of either to accept the permit changes to the route or have it rescinded entirely. The city gave the union two days to make a decision. Organizers and counsel decided to pursue legal avenues to assert their right to protest, but would rally in Grant Park if their legal challenge failed.

“The city wants to push us aside to Petrillo Bandshell, [in Grant Park],” said Rodolfo, “rather than have us march into the heart of downtown Chicago to Daley Plaza, clearly a center of symbolic protest. We will not be silent. We did not cancel our event when the G8 decided to hide at Camp David. We are not going to cancel our event now.”

Amidst the widespread outcries and protests on behalf of the NNU, the city reversed its decision earlier this week.

National Nurses United, with more than 170,000 registered nurses, is the largest nursing union in the country and allied with other unions across the globe — many of whom have expressed outrage at the Emanuel administration’s last-minute decision to change the permit conditions. Their event is shaping up to be quite the kick-off event to the NATO Summit as they advocate for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street.

While Occupy Chicago and other groups have a week’s worth of events planned, the National Nurses United march — featuring Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello — promises to be the first mass gathering of protesters against next weekend’s NATO summit.

The city had cited the addition of Morello to the rally line-up as the reason for the change in permit status. But what the city should really be worried about is not the handful of well-known musicians, journalists, activists and other pseudo-celebrities of the left drawing large crowds. Rather, the Emanuel administration should worry about the way many movements are converging under the banner of resisting NATO-G8 policies.

The press conference, hosted by Occupy Chicago, included an impressive lineup of organizers and spokespersons united against the NATO summit, with representatives from the anti-war movement (CANG8, IVAW, and Network for a NATO Free Future) along with supporters from labor, independent media and community groups. This showing of solidarity is a force to be reckoned with, as days of action for education, the environment, immigration reform, economic justice, counter-summits, popular assemblies, concerts, marches and rallies will consume Chicagoans and visitors from across the globe for more than ten days.

Mainstream media is predicting smaller numbers of protesters filling the streets of Chicago than if the G8 summit would have remained in the city. But such an assessment is premature. The Obama Administration’s decision to move the G8 meetings was seen by many as victory for the converging economic justice and anti-war movements made possible by the Occupy movement.

Furthermore, the focus on NATO, in the words of CANG8 organizer Joe Iosbaker, “as the armed wing of the one percent,” combines the 99 percent meme of economic justice and anti-austerity protests with the kind of anti-militarism that made Dr. King’s prophetic condemnation of capitalism, racism, and militarism so volatile for the vital interests of the oligarchy. While such an analysis may have once been relegated to radical cafés and Marxists’ FBI dossiers, it is becoming a commonplace occurrence in occupations and dinner tables across the country as the dots between austerity and militarism are getting connected.

Everyday, more organizations and people are endorsing the NATO protests and planning to join in. Across the country, buses are being booked and church halls and couches filled as people are realizing just how historic of a moment this convergence is going to be. A number of protests have already occurred, including civil disobedience at the Obama campaign headquarters, immigration and foreclosure actions, and a Black Bloc FTP/Anti-Capitalist march on the Southside of Chicago.

NNU’s original plans for their protest was to focus on economic inequality and the G8 meetings. Now, the NNU and others are forced to broaden the scope of their analysis and protest to explain the connection between NATO and the G8 to their large constituencies. NNU’s commitment to protest at the NATO summits, and the allies they’ve found in their fight against the city, reflects the convergence — or spill over — across different movements that made the Seattle 1999 protests so well-attended and successful.

Administrative hurdles and legal challenges to impede the coming together of a real solidarity of interests — labor, environmental, economic, peace — while annoying, questionable, and unjust also reveals the emerging battleground between a movement, powerholders, and the public. So while National Nurses United are at their wits end with the Windy City’s bureaucracy, this is an unfolding drama that is just getting starting.

Catholic Workers outside Chicago's Prudential Building, via Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune.

Catholic Workers and friends gathered yesterday morning at the Prudential Building in Chicago — home to President Obama’s campaign headquarters — to say “No to NATO; Yes to Community.”

“We are here today,” said Chantal de Alacuaz from Chicago, “to boldly proclaim our desire to live in a world where we say no to NATO and yes to community. As Catholic Workers, we serve the poor by practicing the works of mercy by feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and taking care of the sick. The works of war are directly opposed to that.”

Our intention (disclosure: I am a Catholic Worker myself and helped organize the action) was to invite Obama and other NATO leaders to break bread with us over a symbolic meal to discuss how to transform NATO from an instrument of war and empire into an instrument of peace and love, embodied by the biblical works of mercy. We sang songs, held signs, shared bread with commuters, passed out leaflets and spoke to media before entering the building.

More than 125 of us streamed into the building, through the lobby, up the elevators, past the security check point and into the elevator banks before they were shut down, preventing us from reaching the offices. At that point, we joyfully sang our vision of a world without NATO with modified lyrics to tunes such as “Down by the Riverside,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Oh, Freedom.” Then, as bike police barricaded the entrance to the building and security began warning us to leave, the mic check started, reading a carefully crafted statement declaring our intentions to live “A Week Without Capitalism.”

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO forces — led by U.S. interests and the West’s insatiable appetite for oil and free markets — have been controversially involved in conflicts in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In 2010, NATO countries spent a collective $1.08 trillion on defense and military expenditures, including a resurgence of nuclear weapons. The U.S. and NATO are leading the way for the militarization of the globe at the expense of human and environmental needs. We say no to nuclear weapons, no to the out-of-control defense spending and no to the logic of violence.

The G8 — the Group of Eight, including the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan, Italy, Germany, France and the U.K. — represent the destructive engines of capitalism whose “growth-at-all-costs” mentality has desecrated communities, the environment and human rights all in the name of progress. As people of faith and conscience, we advocate relationships and economics rooted in love: the works of mercy at a personal sacrifice, craft and worker-based cooperatives, gift and barter economies, agrarian communities and a more simple lifestyle. Let love be our guide for our collective future without war and capitalism.

As Catholic Workers, we call for May 18-21 to be a weekend of nonviolent protest against the capitalism and militarism of NATO/G8. Catholic Worker communities around the country are invited to engage in “A Weekend without Capitalism” — a four day act of noncooperation where we refuse to participate in the political and economic structures that oppress our sisters and brothers, harm our communities and destroy our environment. We will take time off work and school and, instead, invest this time into healthy, just and sustainable alternatives for our communities. We will not support the corporate state by using our cars or consuming goods or services from which the state profits. Instead, we will do as Jesus taught us: feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the imprisoned. We will protest injustice and war, host free markets and skills shares, work on community gardens, invest in alternative economics, act as peacemakers and organize our neighborhoods for direct action.

The building manager told us we had to leave and the police echoed his sentiment, warning that arrests would follow if we did not leave. But eight people chose to ignore this warning, demanding to at least be able to deliver their invitation to the Obama campaign. They were arrested and are currently being held in Chicago’s First Precinct. The National Lawyers Guild, which is providing free legal and jail support for all NATO protesters coming to Chicago, is following the arrestees’ status through the system.

Our hope for yesterday morning’s action was to create a narrative of possibility and hope in the power of community over NATO’s continued war-making in Afghanistan and its role of corporate protector. Our protest — nonviolent but assertive, invitational but clear — was intended to counter the dominant myth that our only choices are violence or passivity. It was very clear who had the power in the lobby in the Prudential Building and it was only cooperation that prevented mass arrests from happening, which was never our intention anyway.

The media response has been overwhelmingly positive — thanks in part to hard work, a creative (and fun!) action, boldness, a willingness to risk and a little bit of grace. As a movement, we are succeeding in connecting economic austerity and militarism for a larger public as well as encouraging more resistance, protest and disruption to NATO as legitimate activities for ordinary people. We are grateful for the convergence of movements that are uniting in the Chicago streets this week, culminating with the May 20 CANG8 rally and march against NATO/G8, as well as the May 21 day of action to shut down Boeing. The Catholic Workers will be a part of them.

People all over the world know the struggles and problems their communities are facing and are the ones best poised to solve them. The paradigm shift that we — along with so many others, like the Occupy movement — are calling forth, is that we can live in a world without NATO and the G8 by empowering our own communities to be places of justice, sustainability, peace and hope.

We caught glimpses of that reality yesterday as police officers slipped us quiet words of encouragement and firefighters excitedly honked their horns for us. The systems of violence and capitalism that keep us apart need to be forcefully challenged with attractive alternatives. For us, our alternative is love, community and powerfully confronting violence with creative nonviolence.

Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

The “Stop and Frisk” program instructs officers to stop and question people at random — resulting in apparent racial profiling throughout the largest city in the U.S. According to the NYPD’s own statistics, out of 684,330 people stopped and frisked in 2011, 90 percent of them were black or Latino. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that mostly-black neighborhoods were heavily targeted by police, such as East New York in Brooklyn (50 percent black and 3 percent white), which had the highest number of stops last year with 27, 672. In contrast, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood (57 percent white and 3 percent black) had the fewest stops, with 1,843.

However, Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that the Stop and Frisk is making the city safer. “[The] stops are a deterrent,” he has said. “They prevent people from carrying guns in the first place. If you think you may be stopped on the street, you are a lot less likely to carry a gun. It’s that simple.”

But Bloomberg’s simple reasoning simply doesn’t add up. Despite the NYPD having its highest number of stops last year since the program officially began, 2011 saw a nearly 3 percent of shootings, according to The New York Times. An analysis by Forbes magazine shows that murder rates during the past decade of Stop and Frisk remained much the same as the previous decade. And although Bloomberg insists gun confiscation is the goal, the NYCLU report found that whites were more likely to be found with a weapon, even though 90 percent of people the NYPD stops are not white.

The harmful and wasteful program also preys on the public’s lack of knowledge regarding their rights, and that is how activists hope to start enacting change. Alfredo Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY — a group that helps people affected by HIV-AIDS, drug use and mass incarceration — and José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk are both helping people in NYPD-targeted communities to learn what rights they have when dealing with police officers in order to fight back with the law.

Police have been accused of tricking people into allowing searches and even incriminating themselves. For example, having under 25 grams of marijuana is not a criminal act — as long as it is not “in public view.” However, the law is broken once a person carrying marijuana takes it out of their pocket and it is “in view.” Therefore, if a police officer stops somebody and forces them to empty their pockets and he or she takes out a joint, that person is now guilty of a misdemeanor — even though they did not legally have to empty their pockets and were not breaking the law by possessing a small amount of marijuana. The tactic takes advantage of the fact that people are intimidated by police power and do not know that they have a choice.

While growing up, Carrasquillo thought police stops were something one had to comply with. “I thought you had no authority to say police can’t search you,” he told me on the phone a day before the rally.

Working with everybody from churches to local high schools, Carrasquillo leads know-your-rights trainings to educate those especially affected by the Stop and Frisk policy: young black and Latino teenagers, as well as adults aged 18 to 25 — the NYPD’s primary profile of discrimination. It’s sometimes a challenge to convince people in those areas that they have recourse under the law. “A good portion of the communities feel they’re not even part of the American dream,” Carrasquillo said.

He has found, however, that education like this leads to further empowerment. “Kids take that new knowledge and they’re able to advocate in their communities,” he added.

At the May 12 rally, José Lasalle of Stop Stop and Frisk told me that he is frustrated with how the NYPD’s program has spun out of control.

“I’ve been a victim of Stop and Frisk all my life,” Lasalle said, referring to the longstanding history of police targeting low-income neighborhoods for drug searches before it became an official NYPD policy. “And then seeing it happen to my son, and then seeing it happen to my nephew, and then seeing it happen to the kids around my neighborhood, little 10-year-old kids getting thrown against the wall — it makes no sense. It’s got to stop.”

Lasalle has helped start new Stop Stop and Frisk chapters in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem that offer know-your-rights education as well as cop-watching programs in which people can learn how to observe, document and report police activity in their communities.

The cop-watching programs that Stop Stop and Frisk have started are not intended to simply document police officer wrongdoing and put videos online. They are also intended to protect residents from inexperienced police officers. According to Lasalle, many of the neighborhoods that the NYPD targets for Stop and Frisk tactics are considered “impact zone areas,” which is where many inexperienced cops are placed. (See AllThingsHarlem.com for several videos of officers “practicing” on Harlem residents.)

“In the impact zone areas, the NYPD sends rookie police officers who don’t know how to deal with the community,” Lasalle said. “So we are there, making sure that they carry out their duties with professionalism and respect. We observe them and we document the things that they do. [The police officers] see us observing and documenting them and they relax and don’t get out of hand when they stop somebody.”

Much like Carrasquillo of Vocal-NY, Lasalle has found that fear of police can be a hindrance to mobilizing people and encouraging them to challenge police authority. But legal organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild have helped quell some of those fears by providing legal help and jail support in case cop-watchers are arrested.

People like Carrasquillo and Lasalle have helped push the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk tactics to the forefront of political debate in New York City, bringing national attention to the department’s policy. While Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD insist that the policy saves lives despite the lack of statistics that prove their claims, activists insist that the bullying, harassment and overzealous actions of police officers are a greater threat.

“That’s what we’re trying to do, too,” Lasalle said. “We’re trying to save lives.”

Have the Haymarket Martyrs gotten their due?

May Day has now come and gone. The big marches and the spontaneous protests and the insurrections of “Real Labor Day” are more than a week old now. But that does not mean that the struggles of working people are over… not in the least.

What began as a day to remember an American tragedy and travesty morphed into an international day of action largely ignored in the United States. Until recently, May Day was marked mostly by old Marxists. Latino immigrant rights groups took it up in recent years, turning May Day into a rallying day for the Dream Act, an end to repression and deportations, equal treatment under the law, labor rights and recognition, and other causes. This year, Latinos were joined by the Occupy movement and organized labor in a major way around the country. It looks like May Day is back in a real and powerful way.

During my first year at Hampshire College, Professor Eqbal Ahmad told his story of coming from Pakistan to the United States as a young man and searching all over Chicago for the memorial to the people killed at Haymarket Square in 1886.

As activist-historian Lawrence Wittner describes what happened in May of that year: “Protests erupted all across the United States, with some 340,000 workers taking part. An estimated 190,000 went out on strike.” The issue was the eight-hour work day, or as the workers sang, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

In Chicago 80,000 workers stayed off the job, joining massive (and peaceful) marches that wound their way through the Windy City. But, a few days later, with thousands of Chicagoans still on strike and still in pen revolt, locked out workers at the McCormick Harvester plant were fired on by police and workers were killed. Another protest was called for the next day — May 4 — at Haymarket Square. Three thousand people gathered, and into their midst someone threw a bomb. The police blamed anarchists. The protesters pointed at agents provocateur. To this day, the culprit is not known. What is known is what happened next: Into the middle of this chaos, terror and throng, the police opened fire. Police and protesters alike were killed and wounded.

When the smoke cleared, prominent radical labor activists were arrested for the killings. Most were not even at the rally. Four were eventually executed.

Until my Pakistani professor told me, I had never heard of any of this. My parents were activists, but not labor activists. In fact, they were both happily, radically, revolutionarily under-employed throughout my lifetime. They admired Mother Jones, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, and they knew their labor history, but somehow I missed the rocking-chair lectures on Haymarket and the eight-hour day. Professor Ahmad had not. He grew up going to massive May Day marches and demonstrations in his native Lahore and wanted to see the monument to the workers who died in the bombing, to those framed and unjustly executed. He wandered all over Chicago with a bouquet of flowers, looking for the monument, only to eventually find a bronze statue of a Chicago policeman erected in the middle of Haymarket Square in 1889 by the Union League of Chicago.

Eqbal Ahmad told this story at a 1968 demonstration in Chicago. A few days later, he was questioned by the FBI on his own doorstep. The Weathermen had blown up the statue.

Since then, new monuments to the workers have been erected, but it is emblematic of how little labor history is taught in U.S. public schools that I first learned of this sad and shameful episode in American history from a Pakistani college professor, not my sixth grade history teacher.

This just reminds me how ignorant we often are of the struggles of working people in different parts of the globe, even parts of the globe where our country is intimately involved. War Resisters League organizer Ali Issa, for instance, has published a groundbreaking interview with one of the most prominent union organizers in Iraq, Hashmeya Muhsin al–Saadawi. She is the president of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq, and the first woman vice-president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers in Basra. The interview offers us an all-too-rare opportunity to hear an Iraqi voice speaking on the impact of U.S. war and occupation and now (partial) withdrawal on Iraqi culture, society and politics.

Ms. Al-Saadawi describes the rule of Saddam Hussein as a “repressive, all-encompassing” dictatorship that went on for three decades bringing “great suffering to Iraq and the entire region.” She continues, “We wanted to get rid of this regime, but not through war and occupation. Because all the occupation did was bring new pain.”

Few people in the United States know that before the 1987 imposition of harsh anti-union laws, Iraq had a vibrant and powerful organized labor movement. That labor movement is now rebuilding and reasserting itself in Iraq as it tries to put decades of war and occupation behind it.

Ms. Al-Saadawi relates in the interview how the union suffered under Saddam and under U.S. occupation. “After [the Saddam Hussein] regime fell,” she says, “the workers quickly put together unions in the public sector, worked very hard, but faced many agendas the U.S. occupation brought with it. The occupation launched several consecutive attacks against the union movement.” Not only were union headquarters destroyed by U.S. bombs, but the “occupied” parliament froze union bank accounts and declared that anyone organizing in the public sector could be charged under anti-terrorism laws. Not exactly the so oft and loftily promised Western-style democracy.

In the wake of the withdrawal of most combat forces, the Iraqi labor movement is churning ahead. “The General Federation of Trade Unions in Iraq launched a campaign to pass a labor law that is fair for workers and that matches work standards and international agreements,” says Ms. Al-Saadawi. “Most recently, the electrical worker unions in Basra launched a campaign called ‘Social Security is the Right of Every Iraqi’ relying on constitutional rights, which is supported by some international friends, the Federation of Unions in Holland being one of them.”

The interview goes on from there, and I highly recommend a close reading of it.

In the meantime, let us all consider how we can live in deeper and more meaningful solidarity across national borders, language barriers, religious divisions, class caste systems and the other things that keep us from working together for fundamental rights. And let us sing, as the workers in Chicago sang 126 years ago:

We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught. 
But bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. 
We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; 
We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. 
We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill; 
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!

What do you call a law that allows a person to shoot and kill another human being when they could otherwise walk away safely?

I can only call it immoral.

With George Zimmerman soon headed to a pre-trial hearing to evaluate whether he will be protected by the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, it is important to understand exactly how the law has made permissible the use of lethal force and legalized acts of murder that previously never would have been deemed “justifiable homicides.”

In the wake of Zimmerman’s slaying of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, I have frequently heard people claim, “The ‘Stand Your Ground’ law does not allow you follow someone!” Often, the people claiming this are the ones responsible for the law, like the bill’s sponsor, Florida House Representative Dennis Baxley and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who signed it into law.

But, of course, Zimmerman had been carrying a gun and following — some would say stalking — young black men in his community for months before he ever encountered Trayvon Martin. He even notified police when he did so. More important, however, is the fact that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law removes an individual’s duty to retreat from a conflict in public even when he can safely do so:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

Prior to the enactment of these laws, Americans always had a right to “stand their ground” on their property and use lethal force against home invaders. Centuries of English and American common law have long recognized that there is no place to retreat to when cornered in one’s own “castle.”

The law did, however, require individuals to retreat from physical confrontations in public if they could safely do so. If you were cornered in an alley, pinned to the ground or otherwise out of options to retreat, you could defend yourself with lethal force. But if it’s possible to just turn around and walk away, go home and sleep it off, and avoid escalating the conflict, the law required you to do so.

That’s no longer the case in the 25 states that have enacted “Stand Your Ground” laws at the behest of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In those states, if you’ve had a terrible day, if you just don’t like the other guy very much or if you want to try out that new handgun you just bought, you can feel free to escalate the level of violence in a physical altercation by shooting him. Even if you kill him, the law has got your back. You’ll be immune not only from criminal prosecution, but also from any potential civil lawsuits.

Why is the NRA pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws? For the same reason it pushes a number of other laws meant to deregulate the purchase, possession and use of firearms — to sell more guns. Gun ownership has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, to the point that only one in five Americans now owns a firearm (and only one in 10 women). The gun industry’s challenge is to sell to men who already own multiple firearms. Industry marketing is focused on doing this by aggressively promoting military-style firearms (such as semiautomatic AR-15s and AK-47s) and “carry” guns (compact, semiautomatic handguns with “stopping power”).

By pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws, the NRA sends a clear message to the hotrods and wannabe vigilantes that’s it’s okay to buy yourself that new carry gun, bring it out into public and even use it without fear of legal repercussions. Then, when the rest of us realize that we are walking our streets surrounded by armed individuals with questionable backgrounds and terrible judgment (like Zimmerman), the NRA is hoping that we too will feel compelled to arm ourselves in public. It is a strategy that is both cunning and sick.

The NRA has shown us a roadmap to a society that relies solely on private violence — and the threat of private violence — to keep its citizens in line. Such a society absolves people of the responsibility to learn how to manage conflicts nonviolently, without escalating them. It’s not a society I want to see my daughters grow up in.

This morning, in anticipation of Mother’s Day, the Second Chance at Shoot First campaign has released a special video from Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton. Second Chance at Shoot First is a national movement launched by Color of Change, the NAACP, the National Action Network, the Urban League and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In the video, Sybrina Fulton asks viewers to “spare other mothers the pain” she has experienced by “calling upon the governor of your state to reexamine … ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws … to keep our families safe.”

You can heed her call right now by signing and sharing the following online petition from Second Chance at Shoot First.

No one should ever be allowed to walk our streets with a hidden handgun and kill at will. If we don’t start standing up to the NRA and ALEC, however, Zimmerman will be far from the last gun-toting vigilante to spill innocent blood.

Max Rameau, by Miami Workers Center, via Flickr.

In Rochester, New York, activists are fighting to win control of Catherine Lennon-Griffin’s foreclosed, bank-owned home as a community land trust, at her request — making this one of the first examples in the country of a neighborhood winning back a bank-owned residence and designating it for community use.

Lennon-Griffin has been re-occupying her home Avenue since last Mother’s Day, after being forcibly evicted in March by a SWAT team with dozens of officers and police cars. The eviction was so shocking that Lennon-Griffin’s 72-year-old neighbor ran out of her own home in her pajamas shouting, “This is not America when we are removing people from their homes!” until she was arrested along with six others.

This repossession would not only be a victory for Catherine Lennon-Griffin and her grandchildren, who lived in a homeless shelter until the reoccupation, and a major setback to Bank of America, the current leader both in national foreclosures and in settlements for illegal and fraudulent mortgage activity. Winning this house would also be one of the first concrete successes for activists who see the housing crisis as an opportunity to reimagine American society’s use of land on a mass scale.

“We are in a transformative moment,” says Max Rameau of Take Back the Land, the group working with Lennon-Griffin’s neighborhood. “Because this crisis is firmly rooted in the housing crisis, I think we’re going to have significant changes in the way people think about not just housing but land itself.” Since its inception in 2006, Take Back the Land has helped communities take over dozens of abandoned, bank-owned homes in Miami, Madison, Rochester and other cities, both to provide housing for those in need and to challenge entrenched ideas about privatization, control of space and how to de-commodify community needs.

Take Back the Land’s approach overlaps in many ways with the Occupy movement. Rameau is strongly opposed to stating demands, for example, because he doesn’t want to undersell the potential of this moment. (He compares housing groups that demand principal reductions to the early phases of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts, when the demand was not desegregation but merely “segregation with dignity.”) The group is focused on underlying causes and human rights, treating the current wave of foreclosures as one symptom of the larger inequalities in land relations and our nation’s failure to designate a family’s shelter a basic human right. Finally, like Occupy, Take Back the Land sees the solution as mass action — in this case, widespread home and land takeovers.

“If we were to go to Bank of America right now and say, ‘Hand over all your vacant properties!’ they would laugh at us and then call the police,” says Rameau. “But if we went to them and said, ‘We are now in control of 250,000 of your properties,’ I think we’d be in a very different position. At some point it will cost the banks more to evict us from all these homes than the value of the homes. We need to reach that critical mass.”

With a new wave of foreclosures coming this year, people across the country are clamoring for change more drastic than the $26 billion settlement for underwater homeowners approved earlier this month. Nearly 50 percent of Americans supported a moratorium on foreclosures in 2010, a rarely-cited figure that flies in the face of the those who insist that principal reductions pose a moral hazard and that underwater homeowners merely want a free house.

In mid-May, Chicago housing and Occupy groups are planning to take over dozens, if not hundreds, of vacant properties. Even in a conservative city like Raleigh, North Carolina, where those facing foreclosure say that the culture is filled with shame and alienation, Nikki Shelton and the group Mortgage Fraud NC briefly took back Shelton’s foreclosed home two weeks ago. In Philadelphia and Detroit, urban gardeners are turning vacant lots into community gardens. Last weekend, 300 people near Berkeley, Ca., took over a tract of University of California-owned land that had been slated for privatization — ironically, in order to become a high-end grocery store.

However, we are still far from taking over a quarter of a million homes or abandoning the individualistic, “manifest destiny” belief in private land ownership as the crux of society. Rameau is well aware of the other potential outcome of this decisive moment: increased privatization and consolidation of land in the hands of the few.

“I think it is very easy to see — although I don’t think that people in general are thinking about it — that in 10 or 20 years the U.S. could have five landowners,” he warns. “We could have advanced capitalism in terms of the economy but feudalism in the way land relationships work.

“But if we can articulate a map of how land relationships would work, how a society would be organized in which housing is a human right and how community control of land would operate, I think we can win that argument and convince enough people to join the fight and win.”

As we evaluate the successes and errors of past organizations in order to shape more effective movements today, it is vital to be careful and precise about what lessons remain relevant. Certain organizations, such as the Black Panthers, have amassed so much interest and subsequent mythology that it is often particularly difficult to sort through the hype. White nonviolent activists, furthermore, have an added burden; if we are to be valued participants in building successful mass movements for social change we must be extremely careful to provide as much principled solidarity as we do criticism.

George Lakey’s recent essay, “The Black Panthers’ ‘Militarist Error,’” spotlights an important fact, delivered by a person with many years of anti-racist experience: Many leading former Panthers recognize a strategic error in their glorification of the gun. Even amongst those Occupy Cleveland supporters who were recently accused of plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge, the message is clear: If a movement is going to be built for the long haul, “those kinds of tactics just don’t cut it.”

There are other vital insights, however, which must be brought to light if peace advocates are to further engage in drawing lessons from the Panther legacy.

For starters, the Black Panther Party (BPP), though centered in Oakland, Ca., beginning in 1966, always understood their Southern roots, taking their name from a Lowndes County, Ga., electoral organization which had been supported by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC Chairman Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael) had campaigned in Lowndes and worked with Revolutionary Action Movement leader Max Stanford to form the first Northern Panther chapter in New York City, some months before the Oakland branch got its start. They evolved from black nationalism only insofar as they admired the later teachings of Malcolm X, who — in his last years — was much more of an internationalist and pan-Africanist than a narrow nationalist.

The Panthers were always aware of the need for revolutionary coalition-building, forming early alliances with Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American groups, and with colleagues in the predominately white student organizations of the time, including Students for a Democratic Society. Because of critiques of opportunism by whites, including in groups like SNCC and the campaigns led by Martin Luther King, the Panthers were careful to forge principled alliances, working cautiously with only small groups of whites whom they felt they could rely upon. This simple set of cautions did not make them nationalist.

It is also historically misleading, as Lakey does, to call them “an outright alternative to the civil rights movement” at a time when that phrase was already beginning to lose favor amongst many participants. In the years previous to the start of the BPP, many communists, nationalists and other radicals had begun to emphasize the phrase “human rights” over civil rights, as a more tactically useful moniker to frame the movement (which some, from the start, had more simply called “the freedom movement”).

Just a few months after the BPP was birthed, Stokely Carmichael helped popularize the phrase Black Power, which became — along with the idea that “black is beautiful” — the most utilized phrase to describe political self-definition, at least amongst young people of African descent. From “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “Afro-American,” “African American,” “New Afrikan” and just plain “African,” words were in great contest (especially then but also now), and most accounts make it clear that the Panthers saw themselves not as an alternative but rather as an improvement — the next generation taking up what needed to be done where the last had left off. It is striking, in that respect, that Oakland was one of the very few Northern cities which had no riots in the days following the assassination of King. Though the Panthers were only a few years old, their influence in the city of their founding was enough to keep calm; resorting to angry looting and violence, they urged, was no way to honor the martyred King.

It is very true that not enough notice has been taken of the Panther’s most intensive legacies: founding community-based institutions which were borne of the need for survival as well as self-determination. The mix of these two ingredients made the BPP medical, educational and food programs much more than charitable hand-outs. They were based upon people’s empowerment for liberation and revolution. Therefore it is critical that white progressives take note when black radical researchers make essential new contributions to our fields of understanding. One such example is the recent publication of Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Struggle Against Medical Discrimination. Nelson chronicles and details the BPP’s efforts at Sickle Cell anemia testing and treatment, the setting up of free neighborhood clinics and other initiatives.

Similarly, Donna Murch has built on contemporary research about the pedagogical basis for and work of the Panthers in the 2010 book Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of books has come out in the past five to 10 years documenting aspects of Panther history. As far as the community structures they were instrumental in setting up, Panther co-founder David Hilliard helped publish the 2008 retrospective Service to the People Programs, which gives evidence to the long-lasting nature of the those grassroots BPP campaigns. It is hard not to think that these efforts are amongst the closest and most successful U.S. answers to Gandhi’s call for de-colonized constructive programs.

The questions concerning the role of self-defense — including the use of arms — during the black liberation movement (or black-led freedom movement, as historian and close King associate Vincent Harding has suggested we say) have also come under some serious and thoughtful study. Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, a 2005 book by American studies scholar Christopher Strain, breaks down the dichotomies of much of the mainstream history texts on the “civil rights” era, carefully examining the daily realities (and contradictions) faced on the grassroots level, especially in the South. Strain suggests that “in order to grasp the subtleties of this activist approach to self-defense,” we must stop creating false divisions between a “pre-1965 era” and a “post-1965 era,” between rigid definitions of integration and segregation, between Malcolm and Martin and violence and nonviolence. These oversimplifications, Strain suggests, have not served our current movements well — “blurring” the distinctions between the violence of racial animosity and limited acts of self-defense, and equally contributing to the popular misunderstanding of nonviolence as passivity in the face of danger.

An even more difficult argument, on the potential dialectical connections between violence and nonviolence, is made in the well-researched 2007 release by Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. More than a simple, theoretical call for a “diversity of tactics,” Wendt has carefully examined the actions and reactions that led to various positive anti-racist changes in the midst of the 1950s through 1970s. He documents quite candidly the differences, for example, between groups like the armed Deacons for Defense, which helped defend southern civil rights workers, and the Panthers and Black Power advocates, who were often seen as too provocative and militaristic by their Southern counterparts. Wendt readily admits that, even with his own extensive research, “there is too little evidence to argue that actual, as opposed to rhetorical, black violence aided the nonviolent movement on a widespread basis.” He also brings us the important perspective that a non-nuanced, one-sided explanation of social change in the 1960s — emphasizing only nonviolence or armed struggle, with little distinction for the often-tough calls of when a given act of movement “violence” began — “will only obscure our understanding of the civil rights era.”

This obscuring has been a major factor in our movement’s inability to properly assess the lessons of that period.

Amongst those lessons, I would also add, are that solid organizations committed to lasting social change do not leave anyone behind — locked in prison or destitute or forgotten. True reconciliation and peace requires nothing less. That is why most mature movements around the world place a good deal of attention on the political prisoners of previous generations of struggle — so as to maintain continuity, appreciate and learn from history, and show current and future activists that state repression will not be successful in breaking the back of current endeavors. U.S. movements for justice and peace have much to learn in this regard.

It is therefore no coincidence that amongst the longest-held, worst-treated and most obviously political U.S. prisoners are former Black Panthers. Russell Maroon Shoats, at close to 70 years old with most of the past 30 years spent in solitary confinement, is a classic example of the quietly-kept ongoing torture which the U.S. government engages in (and U.S. human rights groups all too often ignore). Still, Shoats remains a beacon of analysis and reflection, providing his own version of the lessons and legacies discussed by scholars far from the front lines. The main contribution of the BPP, in Shoats’ assessment, is that they served as an introduction to radical politics to many youth of the period (both “of color” and others).

Never one to shy away from critical thinking, Shoats acknowledges — by looking at the non-democratic, sometimes sexist and militaristic aspects of Panther practice — that “the methods they chose to use were contradictory to the ends they sought.” Though Shoats is no pacifist, his critiques of Panther “naked terror and violence,” forced on them by an FBI campaign of murderous “counter-intelligence” (COINTELPRO), underscore the importance of just one voice, often unheard but far from muted. His joy at the events of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and other recent developments is reflected in his writings that these new, popular movements have come “to the rescue!”

History suggests that the role of the nonviolent activist has got to include raising militancy without accepting militarism, helping to build and defend people’s movements without ever resorting to violence. Solidarity suggests that the role of the white activist should be to promote self-determination before critiquing what others choose as self-defense. We must attend to some basic requirements of history and solidarity, in part through simple acts (like signing an online petition or joining the new campaign to get Russell Maroon Shoats out of solitary confinement, or checking out the work of the Jericho Movement to free all U.S. political prisoners). But we must also go deeper, building future campaigns that learn from the mistakes of our collective past. The glorification of the gun is surely one of them, but unresponsiveness to past and present repression — whether due to ignorance or apathy or over-work, or to disagreements with the methods used by those being repressed — is surely another, with equally dire consequences for us all. With so much at stake, our inability to look carefully at the lessons of recent movements is truly indefensible.

Click to enlarge.

Well, it happened — massive protests around the world, strikes across Europe, tens of thousands in the streets of New York City, student walkouts, radical art, banners hanging everywhere, slogans stickered to walls, occupation attempts, dozens of arrests around the country. This was May Day in a post-Occupy Wall Street world, but May Day was only the beginning. Again. Winter has peeled away, and the streets are getting warm.

Between May 10 and May 15, New Yorkers — in solidarity with global calls to action from around the world  — will carry out Another City is Possible, Another World is Possible, a week of actions connecting the city budget to austerity measures around the world, all culminating on May 15 at 6 p.m. in a mass convergence in Times Square.

Here in New York City, we will confront a budget that has stripped our communities of housing, schools, services, jobs and other human needs for decades. We will fight to keep what we have and demand what’s been taken away from working people in the decade of cuts leading up to this. We will connect the struggle here to struggles against austerity-based policies around the world, which demand that working people sacrifice their salaries for basic services in order to protect the profits of the wealthy. We will use the many weapons we have — from teach-ins and flash mobs to mass marches and civil disobedience — to confront the bankers and politicians perpetuating injustice. We will transcend our small niches to bring together the big, broad movement that encompasses many groups and individuals, different methods of struggle with different levels of risk and multiple points of entry, and an array of demands, visions and goals.

We will fight back, but also look forward toward another city and another world. It will be a week full of different actions anchored by diverse groups to achieve a variety of goals, all in solidarity with one another — a week that looks like the movement we are trying to build.

Briefly Back to Bloombergville

Confronting austerity in New York gives me a feeling of déjà vu. In June of 2011, I was part of Bloombergville, a two-week occupation of a street corner outside of the City Council building near City Hall. The occupation was base camp for our resistance against a New York City budget that would cut funding from schools, hospitals, daycare centers, elderly homes, fire-houses, AIDS clinics, homeless shelters, transportation and other vital services, while the big banks and millionaires made record profits from an economic crisis they had caused.

People were fighting back all over the world, from Athens to Wisconsin. On May 12, 20,000 New Yorkers marched on Wall Street. And then we occupied, taking a last stand against the budget. We demonstrated, taught, learned, disrupted City Council meetings and, finally, in a dramatic culminating moment, delayed the vote by staging a sit-in in the lobby of the City Council building. But as we were hauled off to the Tombs in handcuffs, the budget passed with most of the cuts still intact. Bloombergville packed up a few days later, taking many of us back to the drawing board.

In some ways, Bloombergville was about posing a radical challenge to an economic, social, and political system that strips us of the things we need to survive, all in order to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few. In that sense, it was a struggle against capitalism, which has austerity in its very DNA. But it was also a struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy and authoritarianism — because a fight for real freedom must face all of those systems that work in concert with capitalism against us. Like Occupy Wall Street was later on, it was the beginning of a dual power struggle — an attempt to experiment with the values and institutions of the society we are fighting for, while fighting against the oppressive institutions around us. And, of course, it was a struggle to scrape away at the apathy and cynicism that handicaps us every day, an attempt to contribute to the building of a movement and spark an uprising.

But it was also much simpler than that. It was about the issues. It was about austerity. It was about the budget.

It was about homes, about jobs, about Metrocards, about a safety net for the sick, the elderly, the homeless, and about education for all. It was about recognizing MTA fare hikes and tuition hikes at CUNY as nothing other than a tax on the working people who rely on those services. It was about demanding taxes on the rich and insisting that the wealth they generate by exploiting us should serve the city as a whole. It was about approaching these issues as gateways to radical social transformation, about helping people find their way into transformational movements through the issues that have real effects on their lives.

All in all, though, Bloombergville didn’t get much press, and we never had more than a few hundred people at a time. It didn’t spark the uprising we were hoping for. Yet we built important relationships, learned a lot about occupations of public space and experimented with tactics. When Adbusters magazine called for an occupation of Wall Street last July, Bloombergville organizers were among those who organized the assemblies to begin driving it forward. These days, despite its shortcomings, many Occupiers look back fondly on Bloombergville as one of the predecessors to the spark that finally came at Liberty Square.

Another City is Possible, Another World is Possible

Almost a year later, here we are again. The issues we faced during the Bloombergville occupation are the same ones that people around the world are rising up against still. We will confront the budget and austerity again, but this time as part of a global movement. And there is no other way to go; global problems require global solutions.

The week of actions from May 10 to May 15 will provide the space for different groups and individuals to fight around a wide array of interconnected issues in diverse ways. On May 11, we will see a string of actions dealing with housing, jobs and services — the basic human needs under threat in a society dominated by systems of greed and exploitation. On the 12th, we’ll focus on the things we need to have healthy communities — for a city with healthy food for all, a country with justice for its food workers, an ecologically sustainable world. On the 13th, Mother’s Day, we will resist police brutality and mass incarceration, injustices faced by immigrants and war abroad — things that tear our families apart, that take children from their parents, that inflict violence on the most marginalized people around the country and the world. May 14 will be a day to fight for education — for adequate childcare, access to quality public education for all and a world without student debt. On May 15, we will converge on Times Square — that shiny, neon capital of capitalism — to tie the issues together, to reclaim our city, to stand in solidarity with people doing the same around the world in a global day of action.

On one hand, the goals for the week are simple. It will be a fight to win back public schools so that our kids can stand a chance in this society, to keep shelters open for those people the system impoverishes so ruthlessly, to afford the public transportation we need to get to work and feed our families. It will be a fight over the very basics of a good society. But it will also challenge as a whole a system that allows the captains of capitalism to make record profits while we take pay cuts and cuts to services, a system whose very existence is based on exploitation and domination. The week will be diverse and autonomous, but unified and solidaristic. It will be grounded and real, but fierce and visionary. It will be safe and welcoming, but also daring and radical. We will fight about the issues, about the budget, about real human needs and about winning in the here and now, but those fights will become a way to dream another city, another world.

We will do our dreaming in the same place we do our fighting: together, in the streets.

This week, thousands are descending on North Carolina for the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting. The protest comes on the heels of the successful Wells Fargo shareholder event in San Francisco, where thousands of protesters shut down the conference, and the U.S. Bank meeting in Minneapolis, where dozens of homeowners spoke out against foreclosures. A sequence of direct action trainings and spokescouncils will culminate in three marches at 8 a.m. on May 9, which will converge on the doors of the shareholders’ meeting. There, thousands will protest Bank of America’s laundry list of abuses: funding mountaintop coal removal, perpetuating student debt that has now surpassed $1 trillion nationally, laying off more than 100,000 workers in the last few years and, of course, foreclosing on millions of homeowners across the country. In anticipation, the Charlotte City Council has already passed laws criminalizing protest, as well as camping and carrying permanent markers.

Organizers are thinking about much more than just the shareholders’ meeting, however. Just as important as the mass action are the homeowners across North Carolina who are building a grassroots resistance network that will keep the pressure on the banks long after the May 9 action.

A month before the shareholders’ meeting, North Carolinian homeowner Nikki Shelton went face-to-face with an armed, 20-person SWAT team during the first home reoccupation in the state’s recent history. The action, organized by Mortgage Fraud North Carolina and bolstered by Occupy activists, is part of a growing wave of home takeovers occurring across the country, one that has spread from major urban centers all the way to enemy territory: the suburbs of North Carolina, mere hours from the international headquarters of Bank of America.

The foreclosure battle is both physical and psychological in North Carolina. People won’t talk about foreclosures outright; they tend to mention it evasively, as if in code. In the conservative suburban and rural regions of the South, housing developments exploded after World War II and homeownership is a way of life, both economically and culturally. For African Americans, homeownership is a particularly powerful symbol of freedom and upward mobility, and many tell stories of grandparents who grew up as slaves and, after emancipation, saved money to purchase a home for their family.

One fall afternoon in 2010, Nikki Shelton’s 17-year-old son broke the cultural gag order on the foreclosure crisis in a moment of unintentional organizing. Their neighbor, Marcella Robinson, was visibly pregnant and gardening in her front lawn, and Shelton’s son stopped to express his surprise at a pregnant woman doing manual labor. Robinson explained that it was soothing and that she was feeling pressure from being under constant threat from Bank of America and its subsidiary, Countrywide Financial. Shelton’s son told her that his mother, who lived only a few doors down, was going through the same thing. After making that connection, Robinson and Shelton started knocking on doors and learned that many of their neighbors were struggling not only with Countrywide’s adjustable-rate mortgages — a loan so dangerous that Countrywide executives revealed it to their staff only in a meeting in an underground bunker — but also outright fraud.

By the following May, Shelton and Robinson had assembled a group of more than 50 homeowners, Mortgage Fraud North Carolina, and held their first meeting in Shelton’s backyard. They had to meet outside because she and her family had been evicted from the home that Easter Sunday. A year later, the group would break the locks and reoccupy the house.

Shelton believes that the fight over foreclosures will require radical reeducation to completely transform how people think about the mortgage crisis. She’s tired, for instance, of reporters asking her how many mortgage payments she missed. (The answer is only one, in April of 2008.) Reporters never ask questions, meanwhile, like whether the bank illegally foreclosed on her through robosigning (it did) or whether crooked local lawyers and court clerks are aiding and abetting its fraud (they are).

Shelton sees all foreclosures as “fictional orchestrations,” a performance of greed and illegality that requires what she calls collective “conservative ignorance” in order to continue. The banks, lawmakers and the media reinforce the shame and silence that perpetuates this ignorance through intimidation (like the bank contractors sneaking around Robinson’s home taking pictures), violence (like the SWAT team that removed Shelton from her house) and the blaming of victims (like debates about whether principal reduction is a “moral hazard” for homeowners when the $7.7 trillion federal bailout doesn’t appear to pose such problems for banks).

As the efforts of Shelton and Robinson demonstrate, community building and education can spark direct action even in corners of the United States without long histories of housing organizing and where home ownership is deeply entrenched. The combination of large-scale protests, such as what is taking place at the Bank of America shareholders’ meeting, and on-the-ground homeowner organizing can turn symbolic actions into meaningful victories. In Minneapolis, for example, Occupy Our Homes combined a six-month grassroots campaign for the house of a woman named Monique White with a highly successful protest and speak-out at the U.S. Bank shareholders’ meeting. The result: Monique White won her home last Thursday — offering hope of similar victories for Shelton and other homeowners in North Carolina.

“Wall Street was not banking on the American citizens getting educated,” Shelton says. “They were not counting on us saying, ‘I know what’s going on.’ And now that they are starting to realize that we’re getting educated, that’s when the chaos starts.”

"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

In an effort to bring the board of Sotheby’s back to the negotiating table, the art handlers and members of Local 814 met on May 2 to protest and picket at Sotheby’s in New York City. Allies from Occupy Wall Street and other unions joined them. That night, also, Sotheby’s auctioned off Edvard Munch’s The Scream for a record-setting price of almost $120 million.

Protesters were kept away from Sotheby’s entrance door on 72nd Street and York Avenue. While attendants filed inside, protesters were directed by police officers to the corner on 71st and York Avenue. This location, and the presence of the officers, kept protesters from engaging directly with those entering the doors of the auction house.

Shop steward David Martinez has worked for Sotheby’s for almost 20 years. Art handlers like him are trained to transport art from homes and archaeological sites to the auction house. “We handle everything from major Southeast Asian stone artifacts that just came out of a temple to tribal artifacts from Native Americans,” Martinez says. “We handle fragile, immovable things. That’s something you just can’t get anyone to do.”

“I’m trying to send a simple message — I want to go back to work,” Martinez adds. “There is no other choice. They want to keep us out like that, I say bring it on.”

The idea for the protest emerged from the “99 Pickets” that were organized by OWS as part of its May Day actions. The intention of the pickets was “to connect May Day with the workers’ struggle,” explains Rose Bookbinder, an organizer with OWS and the United Autoworkers Union. “The pickets started on Tax Day, and we kept going. We organized 99 Pickets to make the people of New York aware of the injustice that’s going on in labor.”

The picket at Sotheby’s occurred on May 2 in order to show New Yorkers that the struggle for workers’ rights would not end after May 1, Bookbinder notes.

People from OWS have participated in actions with the Sotheby’s Teamsters since last September as a way of building stronger relationships between the movement and organized labor. According to Harrison Magee, who is part of OWS and the International Workers of the World, actions against Sotheby’s in recent months have “involved a lot of different formations within the organizing community.” Union organizers wanted to broaden the scope of the Occupiers’ struggle. Artists and labor activists within OWS recognized the importance of targeting the influence of corporate wealth in the art world. According to Magee, getting OWS to support the Sotheby’s struggle is a critical way of developing the movement’s capacity for meaningful organizing.

“The fighting mentality and brand of toughness that the Teamsters have is the kind you only learn as an employee — someone who is in direct, physical confrontation with the 1 percent,” says Magee. “Not a lot of OWS has that at its organizing core, which is made up of people who are dedicated to OWS as if it was a full-time job.”

By uniting with the Sotheby’s Teamsters, OWS not only supports workers who have been wronged by the 1 percent, but also strengthens itself for an ongoing role in labor and arts activism. In the process, OWS is “creating a cross-movement that is more coordinated and able to deal with its future as a strong grassroots movement,” Magee says. “Even though the [Sotheby’s] outcome is hugely important, I think we should realize that the lockout itself is really just the red herring for everything to come.”

The sale of The Scream inspired the picketers to do their own “people’s scream,” raising their arms and screaming for two minutes. One Occupier said that the scream was a way for “all of us to bring creative tactics to the pickets to sustain visibility and express our anger.”

It remains uncertain, however, when or if Sotheby’s will start negotiating again. “[Sotheby’s] needs experienced people, and these are the experienced guys,” Pat Walsh said. “So why do [the board members of Sotheby’s] have to be greedy? Give them their jobs back, give them their retirement, give them their benefits, give them something. They put heart into the place.”