On November 17, the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 will come before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in a private hearing. It’s a bill that’s long overdue, as was its (rejected) precursor, the Safe Chemicals Act of 2010, also proposed by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. If enacted, the bill would drastically reform the country’s current chemical safety legislation—the Toxic Substances Control Act—which, as it stands, is more loophole than not: a system so inefficient that in its 35 years, fewer than 10 chemicals out of 82,000 have ever been restricted or banned.

As researchers continue to investigate the breadth of the harm linked to chemicals exposure—from infertility and obesity to learning disabilities and autism—a range of organizations and activist groups are creating a movement for reform. The Safe Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign (SCHF), a national alliance representing over 11 million individuals, includes organizations ranging from Agent Orange Legacy (children of Vietnam War veterans), to Black Women for Wellness, to Consumers Union. But some of the biggest players, the front-line activists from Maine to California and everywhere in between, are moms.

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• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

I am a lousy singer. Lots of enthusiasm, but little talent. That’s why I like singing in groups. I can participate with enthusiasm and the people listening don’t need to don ear muffs.

Recently, I have had a little video on auto replay on my computer. The production values are not prime time ready. In fact the images are literally shot from the hip on a tiny hidden camera (I know I should not sound so awed, but at a time when most people have little cameras on their cellphones or smart devices—I am so behind the times that my spellchecker still wants to turn the word cellphone into cellophane). The action opens at the beginning of a foreclosure auction in a typical courtroom—this one at the State Supreme Court in downtown Brooklyn. People are sitting in the benches and up front a woman sits behind a low bench and begins the process of selling someone’s home—a building on Fulton Street being foreclosed by a company with a money-dream name of Instant Capital.

And then a rupture in business as usual—voices; not of auctioneers or buyers or gavel-whackers, but of people. They implore, they entreat, they demand, they sing:

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• Thousands of Malaysian protesters rallied on Sunday against plans by an Australian mining company to open a rare earth processing plant in an eastern resort town, saying they fear it will harm the environment.

• In one of the largest rallies in years in Mogadishu, thousands of Somalis packed into a stadium on Sunday to denounce the Shabab Islamist group for the suicide bombing last week that killed scores of people, many of them students.

• More than 2,000 people protesting potential cuts to the national health care system staged a sit-in on Westminster Bridge in London on Sunday afternoon, blocking traffic on one of the city’s busiest bridges.

• Dozens of preachers from mosques across Morocco protested Monday in the capital over tight controls on their preaching, the first time such a demonstration has been allowed to go forward.

• Bulgarian protesters marched on the nation’s capital, Sofia, on Sunday, chanting slogans against the government’s plans to start exploiting shale natural gas deposits.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and socialite Jemima Khan led a protest in London Saturday against the start of the 10th year of war in Afghanistan. Organizers of the Stop The War Coalition claimed 5,000 people attended the protest in central London’s historic Trafalgar Square.

• Thousands of women gathered in the southern Yemeni city to celebrate Tawakkol Karman, the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Demonstrators also called on the international community to support a revolution in Yemen. At least 38 women were injured by rocks and batons when pro-government gangs attacked Sunday’s march.

In addition to halting more than 65 foreclosures in Spain, which Ter Garcia has written about for this site, the May 15 movement is having an impact on many other political, social and economic issues throughout the country. As Inés Benítez writes for Inter Press Service:

15-M has not only blocked evictions but has also successfully lobbied Congress to adopt protective measures for mortgage holders, such as raising the proportion of wages that cannot be garnished to pay off debts.

The movement has also pressed for legal reforms to approve “dacion en pago” – which basically means handing back the keys and the property in exchange for the bank discharging all mortgage debt. This solution, however, was rejected by all of the major parties.

But the protesters have managed to get some banks, like Bankinter, to adopt “dación en pago” on all mortgage loans, while Banco Santander has offered a three-year mortgage payment suspension for clients who have lost their jobs, or families that have seen a 25 percent drop in monthly income.

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In a certain sense, retired politicians have it easy. If they’ve found a way to keep a relatively clear conscience, they have the benefit of tremendous insider experience—and all the ironclad authority that comes with it—and little actual responsibility. They can say what they want about what should be done, and make it sound real good, and all we can say is, Well, why didn’t you do that when you could have? But good-enough excuses always seem to be on hand. Easy-peasy.

It’s fitting, therefore, that Harper’s lent former senator, congressman, and presidential candidate George McGovern their “Easy Chair” column this month (subscription required). He put it to use with “A Letter to Barack Obama,” which lists a bunch of really decent ideas about what could be done to fix the country and, in particular, its economy. It dwells mostly with what’s probably the most obvious idea of them all—with the possible exception of campaign finance reform: cutting military spending. He cites his efforts, following Eisenhower’s famous warning, to hold back the military-industrial complex. Obviously that didn’t work. What we need now, says, McGovern, is

a new definition of “defense” that takes into account the quality of our education, the health of our people, the preservation of the environment, the strength of our transportation, the development of alternative fuels, the vigor of our democracy. These were the concerns expressed by the people who stood in Cairo’s Tahrir Square holding up their signs for more than two weeks this winter. Without guns, knives, or the use of their fists, they brought down the dictator who had exploited them for nearly thirty years.

He goes on to recommend the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the closure of US military bases in the Middle East (and probably in Europe and South Korea), a $500 billion cut in our $700 billion military expenditures, and taxation for the richest Americans (as Warren Buffett recently called for). Then he goes on to describe all that could be done with this money: high-speed rail, a new GI Bill, and the expansion of Medicare to all Americans.

Easy-peasy.

• Ten people were arrested Monday after blocking the road to the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort near Flagstaff in an attempt to prevent construction on a new snowmaking system out of sewage that they say will defile a mountain held sacred by all the region’s indigenous people.

• Anti-fracking activists wearing gas masks and lab coats gathered in Cape Town city center on Tuesday to protest Shell’s plans for shale gas exploration in South Africa’s Karoo region.

• Tribal groups in the Philippines marked International Day of Indigenous Peoples on Tuesday with protests calling for an end to human rights violations, land grabbing and environmental destruction.

• About 125 people gathered outside Speaker of the House John Boehner’s office in West Chester, Ohio on Tuesday to demand more jobs for people in his district.

• Some 1,000 people took part in a protest in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland last weekend over plans by the Health Service Executive to replace the town ambulance service with a first responder paramedic car.

• Dozens of Togolese journalists marched in the capital, Lomé, on Saturday to call attention to reported allegations that government security agents planned to retaliate against critical reporters.

• Miners at Anglo American’s Moranbah North coal mine in Australia are protesting what they describe as a “dangerous practice” of sharing camp rooms, which would require workers to drive home after 12-hour shifts.

People are rarely swayed by information alone. If they were, the cigarette industry would have collapsed when the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking came out in 1964, and fossil fuels would have been phased out in 1989, when Congress was first alerted to the threat of global warming. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg writes in her recently released book Join the Club, “No amount of information can budge us when we refuse to be budged. The catalog of justifications for destructive behaviors is a tribute to human ingenuity.”

So what does move us? According to Rosenberg, it’s peer pressure. You know—the same thing that drives teenagers to wear certain clothes, smoke cigarettes, and engage in all sorts of risky behavior that drives parents crazy—except it’s much bigger than that. Peer pressure is also responsible for some astounding instances of social change, which Rosenberg highlights in her book—from a campaign that lowered the incidence of HIV among South African youths, to the organization of a previously passive and fatalistic citizenry into the nonviolent army that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

I recently met up with Rosenberg to discuss her book and the implications of what she calls “the social cure”—the process that changes people’s behavior through joining a new peer group—on the world of activism. The conversation touched on the relevance of social media, the success and fear of failure in Egypt, peer pressure as a means to combat climate change, and Rosenberg’s formative years spent living under two dictatorships.

Waging Nonviolence: How did the idea for this book come about?

Tina Rosenberg: I was doing a story for the New York Times Magazine on psychological and social and cultural barriers to fighting AIDS. I had gone to South Africa and the story was in part about loveLife, which is the teenage prevention program there, and it threw out old strategies of giving people information or scaring them and instead decided to make a really fun group to belong to—one that kids would want to join and was very positive and was about them. It’s been quite successful. Then I met Ivan Marovic [one of the founders of the student movement that led to the ouster of Milosevic] and I learned about Otpor [the name of that movement, which means "Resistance"] from him and realized this group was using a very similar strategy. I was working at the time on writing an article about Otpor and CANVAS [the group that formed out of Otpor and has trained many activists around the world] for the Times magazine, which ended up running in Foreign Policy. Since they were both using the same strategy and techniques of trying to mobilize people for a social cause—not by giving them information or scaring them, but by forming this really cool, hip, positive movement that allowed people to think of themselves as daring and heroic instead of passive victims in Serbia—I decided that I needed to write a book looking at how this strategy can be employed in other ways.

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• Eight young illegal immigrants were arrested Tuesday for sitting in the middle of a busy street in front of the Georgia Capitol, protesting their lack of access to higher education in a scene reminiscent of civil rights demonstrations decades ago.

• In the wake of the March 11 earthquake in Japan and the havoc it caused to coastal nuclear reactors, people in Tokyo are protesting at the headquarters of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, calling for “No More Nukes, No More Lives.”

• Residents of the southern town of Daraa, one of the focal points of the protests in Syria, held a general strike on Tuesday as part of “Martyrs Week”—a series of demonstrations to honor those killed in security crackdowns on anti-regime demonstrations.

• Dozens of Omani protesters staged a sit-in on Saturday at the capital in Muscat to demand probes into alleged state abuses after clashes with security forces left at least one person dead on Friday.

• The village of Hempstead on Long Island is pulling its money from JPMorgan Chase and severing its ties with the bank to protest lending and foreclosure policies.

• Students from across Pennsylvania headed to Harrisburg on Tuesday to protest proposed higher education cuts. After the rally, Penn State University students and alumni paid personal visits to more than 90 lawmakers, offering them some of their famous Creamery ice cream.

• Activists in 10 US states converged on 30 Rite Aid stores last Friday to protest the company’s unfair labor practices and management’s efforts to impose unaffordable healthcare costs on employees.

• Thousands of people across India have joined hunger strikes and candlelit vigils to demand that government enact a tough anti-corruption law that would lead to prosecution of officials and lawmakers.

• Thousands of teachers took to the streets in the German capital on Tuesday to protest working seven hours more per week than teachers in other German states.

• Students at Ewha Womans University in South Korea are taking part in a five-day-long sit-in protest this week calling for a reduction in tuition for freshmen.

I was taken aback to find the Emergency Surgical Centre for War Victims an unexpected place to find some peace and healing in Kabul – a desolate urban landscape battling pollution, abandonment, and entrenched human suffering. Inside the walls of the hospital, some of the few in Afghanistan that are not laced with barbed wire or maintained by armed guards, budding trees and green grass offer a glimpse of what Afghan life must have been like before thirty years of war.  Unfortunately – and this is the way things seem to be in Afghanistan -  to enjoy this peace of mind and serene oasis you must be a victim of war.

Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier, following their June 2010 visit to Afghanistan and stay with Emergency, wrote an excellent piece on the Italian NGO’s work and the people they met.  In “Unarmed and Courageous,” Kelly and Brollier write:

Emergency is treating war victims as patients, and won’t allow police or military to enter the hospital, carrying weapons. Circumstances that occasion an injury or a wound never determine whether or not the patient will be admitted. While neutral as regards offering medical treatment, Emergency has been clearly partisan in it’s rejection of all wars. Their literature and outreach clarifies that the most important preventive measure to safeguard against war related wounds and injuries is the abolition of weapons.

This was my first exposure to Emergency and its inspiring work that seems deeply-rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence.  Consider Emergency’s mission statement:

EMERGENCY is an independent and neutral Italian organisation.

EMERGENCY provides free, high quality medical and surgical treatment to the civilian victims of war, landmines, and poverty.

EMERGENCY promotes a culture of peace, solidarity, and respect for human rights.

Emergency’s philosophy and, more importantly, consistent commitment to provide medical care to victims of war and poverty without distinction provide both an urgent, life-saving resource in the immediacy and a moral compass orientating us toward a future without war.  Emergency, at least in its 12 years in Afghanistan, has been able to treat Afghans from all sides of the multi-faceted conflict and its untold numbers of innocent bystanders – 90% of the victims of conflict are civilians – without being the target of any attack or kidnapping.  This speaks volumes of the power of nonviolence and the commitment to recognize the humanity of all people.  For Emergency, its best protection to continue their work for themselves and their patients is found in its universal commitment to care for the human person and community.

Gandhi’s contention that “all men (sic) are brothers” is the kind of framework that undergirds his nonviolence.  It is also the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Emergency quotes on the back of its activity report:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
The acknowledgment of this principle
“is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”

If only all the organizations in Afghanistan – non-governmental and governmental – shared a similar philosophy and commitment for care and peace, the endeavors for a world without war would make much more progress.