In the newly-renamed Liberty Plaza, the place that hundreds of protesters have come to call home for the last three days, nothing is quite predictable. At around 6:15 in the morning, those of us sleeping on the plaza’s hard, cold surface got the call to wake up, and someone called for a General Assembly meeting at 7. After people groggily packed up their bedding and lined up for dumpster-dived bagels, the meeting began. Its purpose was a run-down of the day’s events. Committees that were meeting the night before had decided to have marches to Wall Street at 9, 11:30, and 3:30. But then somebody came to the front and announced through the “people’s microphone”—those around him echoed one phrase at a time so others could hear—that he was heading off to march now. Wall Street bankers were walking to work as we were sitting there! He ran off and, immediately, one or two hundred others followed. They marched around the plaza, chanting “Occupy Wall Street! / All Day! All Week!” and then set off heading south on Broadway. The first weekday demonstration of the occupation had begun.

Read the rest of this article »

When more than a thousand protesters marched on Saturday from Bowling Green, near the southern tip of Manhattan, toward the backup meeting point marked “2″ on their maps, they thought they were going to a place called Zuccotti Park, several blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. That’s what it said on the map. It’s now a private park, owned by Brookfield Properties, but it hasn’t always been its name. Before being renamed after Brookfield’s chairman, John Zuccotti, it was called Liberty Plaza. Going there was a last-minute decision on the part of the group’s Tactics Committee, and it was one with significance. Tahrir in Arabic, after all, means “liberty.” Though with fewer people than the historic protests in Cairo this winter, Tahrir has come to the United States, at least in name.

Read the rest of this article »

The news cycle may have started shifting away from the News Corporation hacking scandal, but social media activists aren’t about to let Rupert Murdoch off the hook. In the past few weeks, new campaigns have been emerging on the web which are raising awareness about the scandal, advocating a boycott of News Corp holdings, and monitoring its corporate practices.

Before James Murdoch announced the closure of News of the World, a campaign against the paper was launched on Twitter by Melissa Harrison (@The_Z_Factor). It encouraged Twitter users to tweet News of The World advertisers to reconsider their contracts, providing a list of tweets directed at those companies. One example is, “Dear @VirginMedia, will you be reconsidering your advertising spend with #notw given that we now know they hacked Milly Dowler’s [2002 murder victim] phone?” In an article in the Guardian, Harrison recalls that the campaign developed over time, growing from rants against News Corporation to a strategy to target advertisers as more people started exchanging tweets. British corporations like Morrisons, The Co-Operative, and Virgin Holidays pulled their advertising from News of The World before the paper was shut down. It isn’t clear yet what role Harrison’s campaign played in this.

Read the rest of this article »

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” Buckminster Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” In 2007, the Buckminster Fuller Institute began offering an annual $100,000 prize to the individual or team who could present the most practical, efficient, viable way to make a poorly functioning aspect of the existing reality obsolete. Bucky called this kind of solution a “trimtab,” named for the tiny rudder on an enormous ship that is ultimately responsible for steering. I wasn’t ready to enter the competition that year, but from then on, my mind began working around the clock on the riddle of the trimtab. What universally accessible and implementable strategy could bring as many people on board as possible, inspiring contributors to take immediate action using whatever materials may be at hand?

I began to study and implement appropriate technologies and permaculture. I started a Facebook group called USE HALF NOW to explore the notion that more mindful consumption may be an efficient place for many to begin (at least for those of us living in “overdeveloped” countries). I studied the wildly successful conservation and Victory Garden campaigns introduced in the U.S. and Britain during World War II. Leaders called on citizens to “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” and people ably complied. I wondered, what if a similar campaign could be put forth today? What if people were simply invited to have a stake in creating a healthier, more peaceful world? What if the sense of helplessness, disempowerment, and defeat that seems to pervade our culture could be overcome, simply by suggesting that each of us contribute to the solution in whatever ways make the most sense to us? Perhaps the fastest-acting, most accessible trimtab would not appear as some new magic-bullet “green” technology—instead it might come in the form of a radical  mental shift.

The German artist Joseph Beuys practiced social sculpture, a kind of art-activism that called upon audiences to participate. He believed that everyone, by infusing even the most mundane action with a sense of purpose and creativity, could contribute to ones’ own health and the health of society and the environment at large. By so doing, he proposed that “everyone is an artist” of their chosen vocation. Beuys taught that in order for social transformation to be truly constructive and enduring, methods used to achieve it must be as holistic and inclusive as possible.

21st-century advances in internet technology and network accessibility offer extraordinary new tools for the contemporary social sculptor. Interactive initiatives based on the dissemination and sharing of information have far greater potential than during any other age in history. Inspired by the developing power of virtual networks, the spirit of the 1940’s conservation campaigns, and the Buckminster Fuller Challenge itself, after four years of deep consideration, it finally seemed that an opportune moment to present a formal application to the Challenge had arrived.

Read the rest of this article »

• One of the largest demonstrations in the Irish Republic’s history brought more than 100,000 people on to Dublin’s streets in protest over the international bailout and four years of austerity ahead.

• Several thousand demonstrators gathered in Austria’s capital Saturday to protest government cuts in education, heath care and family allowances.

• Tens of thousands Italians marched in Rome on Saturday in a rally organised by Italy’s largest union to protest bleak job prospects and demand more rights for workers.

• Almost 100 people from Idaho, Montana, Washington, Utah, Oregon, California, Oklahoma and different parts of Canada converged outside of Missoula last week for the anti-tar sands resistance summit, which non-violent direct action trainings and network strategy development.

• More than 30 people took part in a march and rally in Thornbury, England on Saturday to protest plans for a new nuclear power plant in South Gloucestershire.

• Reverend Billy Talen of The Church of Life After Shopping was arrested after protesting (and singing) in the lobby of UBS during Black Friday. He and his church members were dressed in white robes to protest the bank’s funding of mountaintop removal.

• Hundreds of truckers staged a slow-moving convoy in British Columbia on Saturday to push for enforcement of minimum pay rates.

• Over a hundred people joined a community sit-in at Melbourne, Australia’s only aboriginal school last week to protest plans for its partial demolition.

About a dozen teen protesters briefly shut down an Abercrombie & Fitch store in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon as part of a day of national protest against the company’s continued practice of perfuming the air of their stores with unregulated toxics. Spearheaded by the advocacy group Teens Turning Green, the protesters entered the store marching around chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, these toxic fumes have got to go.”

According to the Bay Citizen, the perfume in question, Fierce, “contains 11 chemicals not listed on the label because they are considered trade secrets, including eight that can trigger allergic reactions, such as headaches, wheezing and asthma.” It also contains diethyl phthalate, a synthetic solvent that has been linked to “DNA damage in human sperm, changes to male fetuses’ genitals in utero and alternations in baby boys’ sex hormones when exposed via their mothers’ breast milk.”

After police arrived and shut down the store, ejecting protesters and customers alike, the teens regathered outfront with their signs. As the Bay Citizen reported:

The girls chanted: “Why is it toxic?” To which the boys would heartily respond: “Because it kills my sperm!”

A&F has remained rather stand-offish about the whole incident, posting a defense of Fierce on its Facebook page without really acknowledging the protest.

The reaction on Facebook to the statement was split between those continuing to decry the scent and those defending it. “What happened to the customer’s always right?” posted one Kathleen Suits. “You’re just going to ignore this protest about the air pollution in your store? Then we’ll ignore your store and its affiliates!” Happy profits!!”

While unclear where the campaign will go from here, it’s encouraging that teens have been able to take things this far–defying the apathetic youth stereotype.

This week the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $165,000 to seven protesters to settle a federal lawsuit they filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for lurching down Nicollet Mall dressed as zombies to protest “mindless” consumerism.

According to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated “weapons of mass destruction.”

However, they were never charged with any crime.

Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies’ lawsuit, it was resurrected in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that police lacked probable cause to arrest the seven, a decision setting the stage for a federal trial this fall. The settlement means there will be no trial.

This sounds like the sort of creative protest that should be replicated elsewhere, especially with the seeming explosion of interest in anything zombie related in this country in recent years.

On November 22-28, Adbusters and its network of activists and culture jammers (now nearly 87,000 strong) are organizing a “Carnivalesque Rebellion,” with the goal of “shutting down consumer capitalism for a week.”

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

One creative action that Adbusters cites as an inspiration is this video (above) of The Love Police stirring things up in the UK.

The first action that the magazine has launched is a worldwide boycott of Starbucks, which should be accompanied by a shift to local indie coffee shops. In their most recent tactical briefing, they announced a similar boycott of Nike.

The next issue of the print magazine will be a “theoretical and practice handbook for the November rebellion,” and they are currently asking that you send along your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org, which they’ll share in future briefings.