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.

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.”

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.”

This Saturday, April 14, Occupy Wall Street groups and assemblies from neighborhoods around New York City will join with allies in labor unions and community-based organizations for a “Spring Awakening.” Discussions about this citywide assembly began in December. Now, it is being billed as the kickoff for upcoming actions — especially May Day — and an opportunity for collaboration between Occupiers, older organizations and the public.

“We hope to pull new people in,” says Colby Hopkins, one of the organizers, “by creating a welcoming environment for families and interested people who have not yet taken up activism as a lifestyle.” The second half of the day, Hopkins adds, will be a facilitated assembly that helps organizers and activists “foster and strengthen networks.”

Far from just a day in the park, planners hope to plant the seeds of something new — a democratic mechanism through which disparate organizations can come together to strategize about how to combine their campaigns to attack the root causes of shared problems, including corruption and the unchecked political influence of the 1 percent.

In preparation for this event, Occupiers are also thinking about how to grow the grassroots. At the request of Spring Awakening organizer and eviction-defense activist Michael Premo, on March 27 and April 3, Paul Getsos led two trainings on “how to build a participatory, base-building and effective work group/organizing committee.” About 60 people attended the first training, and about 40 attended the second.

Getsos joined Occupy Wall Street last fall. He is a veteran of ACT UP and the gay rights movement, and a co-founder of Community Voices Heard, which is primarily made up of women on welfare. In the trainings, Getsos praised Occupy for changing the national narrative. Quickly and cheaply, it did something that unions and community organizations have failed to do for decades. However, since the fall, Getsos has been pressing his younger, less-experienced colleagues to answer some tough questions.

How will Occupy be able to get 100,000 people in the streets and shut down the New York Stock Exchange? How will it become an outward-looking movement that draws in new people, instead of one with ever-shrinking numbers? How can it build transparent accountability structures and organize people to meet their own needs?

Premo says that he asked Getsos to lead the trainings because “so many people in Occupy have talked about the need to create structures that can do movement work.” Community Voices Heard has able to grow and serve its base by constantly bringing in new people. As one of its documents explains:

An organization or a campaign builds a large base in order to have enough power to win. Numbers matter! The more people we can mobilize to show our power, the more people we will have to make policy changes to improve our members’ lives.

Even if OWS is not exactly an organization or a single campaign, it too must draw more people into its orbit and enable them reach meaningful goals if it is to continue to shape public conversation, deliver policy changes and compellingly model alternative cultures.

It’s difficult to know if Gestos’ trainings (or the Spring Awakening) will affect the direction of the movement. Yet, in the midst of the one-on-one exercises and other tool-sharing sessions, several participants reflected on Occupy meetings and expressed frustration. Some talked about the need for new kinds of structures. Many seemed enthusiastic about the idea getting “directly affected” people into campaigns with “intentionality.” And everyone appreciated the importance of interlinking the efforts of different groups — in theory, at least.

If there were, say, 20 committees with a committed core of 50 organizers each, and if these could mobilize thousands for campaigns, perhaps these committees could get 100,000 people into the streets for one shared action. Moreover, under the banner of the 99 percent, these committees could do base-building — be it by neighborhood or by issue — in a way that would enable the committees to be simultaneously local and global, focusing their attention on the ways in which key issues, like housing, relate to corporate power.

It also remains unclear what the movement’s current capacity is for mobilizing in the first place. The overriding focus right now is May Day — which includes calls for both a general strike and a more modest “day without the 99%” — and that will be an important test of OWS’ strength and its ability to support those who join with it in turn. If the base isn’t strong enough, however, a major call to action like May Day could also present serious dangers.

One of the most significant general strikes in South Africa, for instance, suggests that protests organized by people who are not accountable to one another — people who have not planned their campaign together or agreed in advance about goals and tactics — can leave participants vulnerable to the unexpected and the ugly.

When approximately 2,000 coal miners struck in northern Natal, a prominent Indian politician rushed to the scene and convinced the men to use civil disobedience by marching across the Transvaal border and breaking their contracts. The government would then have to arrest them all or negotiate. In the meantime, indentured sugar workers on southern Natal plantations spontaneously stopped working as well. Railway workers, domestic servants and hotel staff joined the strike — making it “general,” at least among Indians.

The strike’s leader, M. K. Gandhi, was blamed for the violence that occurred during the weeks-long action. According to Joseph Lelyveld’s biography, Durban newspapers frothed about “coolies run amuck” and mobs of men brandishing sticks, wielding cane knives and urging fellow indentured workers to join them. Cane fields were set on fire. One murderously angry planter said he wanted to “teach the whole tribe a lesson.” Workers were sentenced to hard labor without pay for six months. Mine owners imprisoned workers underground. Protesters were whipped. Indians won relief from a tax on ex-indentured workers who wanted to remain in the country (as well as legal recognition of traditional marriages), but the indentured workers won nothing.

When Gandhi’s 20-year sojourn in South Africa ended, he did not forget these experiences. In fact, he would later call off some satyagraha campaigns after months of hard work out of fear of similar disruptions.

One must be exceedingly careful when comparing the United States in 2012 to South Africa in 1911. Some basic points can be made, however. In order to avoid a situation in which OWS organizers find themselves at the helm of actions that turn into a lot of mayhem with little rewards, they need to focus not just on calling people to protests, but on organizing structures through which people can work toward self-interested goals — structures that can withstand disruptions and provocations and give the protesters lasting power.

Events in French West Africa offer a related lesson about base-building. African leaders took advantage of new opportunities to reframe their relationship with France and their employers after the Second World War. Ex-servicemen spoke of “equal sacrifices, equal rights.” African unions, which had been repressed under Vichy rule, resurfaced and found ways to transcend tactics used in the past. They remembered one poorly-planned strike by temporary railway workers in 1938 that led to violent confrontations, eight deaths and few gains.

African unions grew after a general strike in the port city of Dakar in late 1945. Dockworkers shut down the port for 12 days and were joined by civil servants, literate clerks and market sellers. Railway workers did not join the protest in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty (which they were not).

The Dakar general strike showed that workers were willing to band together as “workers,” despite French attempts to divorce a few relatively wealthy “citizens” from millions of “subjects.” Unskilled workers won large pay raises and civil servants won family allowances, although the protesters did not secure equality with the French. But the commonplace colonial argument, heard in South Africa as well, that African families were too traditional (and too large) for men to receive European-style breadwinner wages had to be scrapped.

The Dakar port shutdown was followed by a much larger strike two years later. During the 1947–48 railway workers’ strike from Dakar to Bamako, 20,000 train workers participated. The action lasted five months in some areas and relied on longstanding relationships and trans-regional networks. The movement’s leader, Ibrahim Sarr, had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. According to interviews, Muslim leaders supported the strikers in private, as did women, who provided food, composed songs praising the union and made life difficult for strike-breakers.

The strikers were able to hold out for so long, ultimately, because they weren’t isolated. Rather, the railway men had networks that enabled them to grow their own food or return to rural villages.

After two years of negotiations, the railway workers won the right to unionize and to strike, along with a universal labor code complete with family allowances. They were not transported into a new world of freedom, however. Paradoxically, their victory brought them deeper into French legal structures and the politics of nationalism by allowing a few of the union’s supporters to become successful politicians. The protesters built a movement based on rural-urban, trans-class and trans-cultural networks of solidarity, but soon found themselves vulnerable to being divided once again, now by nationalist politicians oriented towards their own short-term goals.

It doesn’t just matter that there is an organized base, therefore, but what kind of organization, and what kind of leadership structures, unites that base.

The lessons here are simple. First, protests organized by people who are not in two-way relationships, and are not accountable to each other, are protests with a high degree of uncertainty. Who knows who’s coming? Who knows what they will do? This is a problem that many Occupiers know well.

Second, campaigns that pursue only short-term goals can be easily exploited by opportunistic politicians in the long term. This is why the base must have its own forms of decision making.

Third, organizing that does not look at the roots of problems is particularly brittle. Once an immediate solution to an urgent problem is won, the thread between the present and the possible can get cut. Solidarity only for the sake of a short-term goal can leave people vulnerable to co-option and unable to see how immediate problems are part of larger systems.

How can Occupy win recognizable victories against foreclosure, debt, crony-capitalism, militarism, mass incarceration and climate change while also drawing people into transparent structures that serve their interests and enable them to amass lasting power? How can the movement increase and strengthen its base? As Occupiers look toward May Day and a busy summer, they have an opportunity before them now to answer these questions for themselves, in their own ways. The Spring Awakening and Paul Gestos’ trainings are signs that people in some sectors of the movement are already thinking very much in these terms.

To plant to the seed of people-power, organizers need to look honestly at the obstacles before them, including the challenges involved in building a base of support. The words of one historian and war-theorist seem pertinent here. Said Thucydides, “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet not withstanding, go out to meet it.”

Detroit Occupiers oppose a house eviction. Photo by Stephen Boyle, via Occupy-Detroit.us.

A truck pulling an enormous construction dumpster came rumbling down Pierson Street in northwest Detroit on January 31. It was a cold Michigan morning, and the whole street was slick with ice. The 20 activists standing on Bertha and William Garrett’s front lawn had been there for over an hour. One Teamster had been waiting since 4:30 a.m. because he was afraid the dumpster would come early; as a driver he knew that his co-workers often worked before the rest of the world woke.

Suddenly, a car screeched to a stop in the middle of the street between the house and the dumpster. A young man ran down the road and jumped onto the driver’s side of the truck, shouting for him to turn around. An older man with Parkinson’s planted himself in front of the bumper and shook his fist. The coalition of neighbors and activists — including People before Banks, Occupy Detroit, Moratorium NOW!, Jobs for Justice and the Local 600 United Auto Workers — all knew that by city ordinance an eviction must occur within 48 hours of the dumpster arriving in front of a foreclosed home, that without a dumpster there would be no eviction. Blocked and confused, the driver left.

That afternoon, 65-year-old Bertha Garrett lay down on the floor in front of the office of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, and refused to leave until the bank agreed to negotiate her eviction. The next day, the Garretts’ lawyer received a call from Mellon Trust’s lawyers asking the family “to call off the dogs.” Less than a month later, Bertha Garrett signed papers to buy back her home for $12,000.

Across the country, homeowners, activist organizations, lawyers, unions and Occupiers are uniting to create a direct-action campaign against foreclosures. In Minneapolis, a former Marine erected an anti-foreclosure fence around his block to win a loan modification. In Nashville, a 78-year-old civil rights activist stopped Chase’s eviction by occupying her home with neighborhood support. In San Diego and L.A., 24-hour front-lawn occupations saved two families’ homes. In Rochester, New York, nearly 1,000 people protested outside Wells Fargo, winning a family an indefinite stay and prompting the bank to fire their foreclosure law firm. In Atlanta, front-lawn occupations have stopped the eviction of two homes, a homeless shelter and a historic church. In New York City, Occupiers stopped home auctions by singing in the courtroom and moved furniture into a Bank of America branch, arguing that the taxpayers’ $230 billion (and counting) bailout bought Americans not only the right to resist eviction, but the right to live inside the bank itself.

As preexisting anti-foreclosure organizations and Occupy merge, the campaign is spreading to nearly every major city, with front-lawn occupations, eviction defense teams or auction blockades currently underway in Boston, Tampa, Maui, Detroit, Nashville, Birmingham, New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Delaware and cities across California.

These successful anti-foreclosure actions are not merely one crack in the armor of a historically unjust global economic system. Because the housing market bubble was responsible for the collapse, foreclosures powerfully represent the hypocrisy of the current system, in which the orchestrators of the bubble receive trillion-dollar bailouts, and the victims of its burst receive eviction notices. It’s no wonder that the most recognizable symbol of Occupy — the tent — is a form of shelter. In this era, housing is the personal made political. Homes are both the symbolic and real site of Wall Street’s injustice, as well as an opportunity for collective intervention.

—

Detroit is arguably the best example of how individual foreclosures create systemic injustice. The city’s infrastructure was built for two million people; today, just over 700,000 remain. Full square miles on the east side are fully abandoned except for the occasional deer or fox. Even in populated neighborhoods, charred houses with twisted metal roofs are remnants of recent Devil’s Nights when residents torched hundreds of abandoned homes. In a country whose national identity has expansion and unchecked growth at its center, Detroit’s depopulation has been such a curious challenge that urban planners have proposed reforesting — literally planting trees — in the middle of city blocks.

The media has been quick to attribute the recent exodus of a quarter million Detroit residents to the decline of the manufacturing industry. But just as important a part of this picture is the banks’ forced removal through foreclosures of more than 100,000 families over the last five years, the majority of whom were African Americans who had been targeted for predatory, subprime loans. In the late-2000s, the rate of eviction was so high that the city hired private “Blackwater bailiffs” to keep pace.

In depleting the city of its residents and tax base, the banks are quietly waging an economic war against the government of Detroit and its people. It’s a war whose weapons are eviction notices, property devaluations and shame, yet whose strategy is classic “shock doctrine”: reduce the city to a compound of building shells, declare it a “blank slate,” then privatize the hell out of it. The state is already threatening to take over the city through Michigan’s emergency financial manager law — a power grab that would remove any budgetary accountability and nullify all the city’s contracts, including union contracts, except one: the city’s annual $600 million debt to the banks.

Against these odds, however, Detroit’s residents are fighting to preserve control and ownership of their city.

“I never saw myself moving anything,” said Bertha Garrett, seated in the living room of the home that, after 22 years, she finally owns. An elegant, deeply religious woman, Ms. Garrett was clad in her Sunday best: a white dress suit, an embroidered muslin shawl and a wide-brimmed hat with delicate tulle and a large flower. In the next room, her husband William practiced navigating the house. Multiple strokes have left him partially blind, forcing him to close his hair salon and making it impossible for the family to meet their ever-increasing mortgage payments.

“People were saying that she needed psychiatric help, because she just didn’t ‘get it,’” said Ms. Garrett’s daughter, Michele Finley. “But it wasn’t that she didn’t understand that the bank has a legal document, it was that the bank didn’t understand that this was our home.”

This loyalty to their homes and their city, this rough pride in the city’s long history and thriving culture is voiced across Detroit. As someone had scrawled on the bathroom wall at a downtown bar:

Detroit Wins
When We Win
And Fucking Live
Here

If the foreclosures continue as expected, Detroit is poised to become the nation’s first major bank-owned city — but others will follow.

“Foreclosures create the same pattern everywhere,” said Jerry Goldberg, one of the most prominent anti-foreclosure lawyers in Detroit. “It’s just more extreme here.”

Historically, the housing movement is among the most constant in our nation’s history of activism — a country where private property is a right but a family’s basic shelter, security and safety is a privilege. Most often led by women and people of color, the block-by-block grassroots movement boasts considerable success: the implementation of rent stabilization laws in the 1920s and ’30s, dozens of state moratoriums during the Great Depression, and hundreds of building and home takeovers in the 1970s and ’80s that led to squatters’ rights and more stringent foreclosure laws in cities like New York.

Today’s anti-foreclosure movement is decentralized and action-based, with hundreds of organizations using a range of tactics, including front-lawn tent occupations, bank protests, furniture move-ins, media scandals, home takeovers and auction blockades. In New York City, Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street are planning to disrupt every home auction during the third week of April with soulful singing in the courtrooms, a tactic that has already stopped a handful of auctions this winter (and, for full disclosure, landed me with disorderly conduct charges earlier this week). In San Francisco, Buffalo, Detroit and other cities, homeowners are moving their furniture and families back into their homes after being evicted. Some actions are more scalable than others. In Birmingham, Alabama, for example, an extended eviction defense team has lived in tents on a family’s front lawn for more than two months, weathering freezing weather and a tornado. (“It came within a hundred feet, and it scared the fuck out of me, pardon my language,” said Allyn Hudson, one of the Occupiers.) Many of the anti-foreclosure protests have such widespread support that union members turn out en masse and even the police refuse to intervene. In Murrieta, California, the police tasked with arresting Kristiane Chappell and Occupy San Diego activists for trespassing outside First Mortgage Corp. of Ontario, California, ignored the bank’s complaint and allowed the protest to proceed.

“One of the officers said, ‘If that were my mom, I’d be here too,” recalls Kristiane Chappell, whose mother, a paraplegic schoolteacher, now has secure housing.

—

This coming year, the banks are threatening foreclosure on more than one million families in the United States, which raises the question: Why aren’t more people coming together to resist eviction, especially considering the legacy of this movement? According to organizers across the country, one of the greatest barriers to collective action is the pervasive isolation and shame that surrounds homeownership and foreclosure. Every neighborhood — and in some states, every block — has a story like Eloise Pittman’s.

When Ms. Pittman moved into her family home on Glen Iris Street in Atlanta in 1953, the house represented a great source of pride. The home was a nice house in a historic African American neighborhood. Martin Luther King lived right up the street. The family had owned the house since the 1950s, paid off by Ms. Pittman’s mother who washed dishes for a living. It was a perfect success story of the American dream.

Eloise Pittman hosted every family birthday, Christmas and Thanksgiving, filling the home with meatloaf and oxtails, children and grandchildren. She was a strong, proud schoolteacher who raised her family to belief in the American values of hard work and self-sufficiency. Yet, in 1985, she took out a mortgage loan that she later learned was a predatory loan. She tried to outmaneuver her ballooning payments, taking out another loan to pay the first, then a third to pay the other two. Chase Bank, meanwhile, used loan modifications and double-digit interest rates to strip the house of all its equity.

“The banks preyed on her for so many years. And she never said a word,” said her granddaughter Carmen Pittman.

On November 29, 2011, Ms. Pittman died in the backroom of the house, carrying her secret and more than $400,000 in debt. Less than a week later, the family received an eviction notice.

Over the last 60 years, homeownership has been the embodiment of the American dream — an idea so pervasive that it was sanctioned by the government with the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Our country’s embrace of free-market ideology as a social and cultural value further reinforced the myth that a home represented not only a family’s economic net worth, but its moral worth. Under this twisted logic, well-painted shutters and white picket fences came to signify dedication and hard work, and a foreclosure sign, failure. Even as the government bailed out ever larger corporations against all rules of the game, missed mortgage payments were still being seen as an individual problem rather than a systemic issue.

“People would almost rather lose their home than be seen on TV trying to save their home,” said Matt Smucker, an organizer with Occupy Our Homes in New York City.

Yet people are beginning to realize that inscribing this economic theory into our national narrative has benefited only those individuals and corporations at the top of the economic pyramid. Communities across the country are now coming together to share stories about facing and fighting foreclosure. Led by Eloise Pittman’s granddaughter Carmen, the Glen Iris house’s front lawn has become a tent city where neighbors and Occupiers run 24-hour eviction defense, reach out to other homeowners and organize actions. Occupy Minneapolis hosts weekly homeowner-support gatherings, one of the reasons that the local anti-foreclosure campaign has saved more than five homes this winter alone. In Boston, the neighborhood meetings organized by City Life — one of the most successful anti-foreclosure organizations in the country — have so much cathartic energy that they are compared to religious revivals. As these neighborhood assemblies spread, the anti-foreclosure movement is becoming no less than a deep destabilization of our national narrative, a collective imagining of a world in which a family’s fight for shelter doesn’t divide communities but unites them. Inspired by recent successes in Spain, where hundreds of home takeovers by M-15 activists have won families the legal right to keep their homes, activists see these first targeted actions as building pressure toward structural change.

“When you look at most of the quantum leaps forward for this country for progressive movements — whether it was child labor laws, women’s rights, emancipation, civil rights — you can see that all of these injustices were legal at one point,” said Anthony Newby, an activist with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change in Minneapolis. “Can we create new narratives? That’s been our goal from the beginning: to reframe the way that we’re thinking about this issue.”

To foster this cultural shift, some are focusing on building neighborhood eviction-blockade teams to institute an on-the-ground people’s moratorium on foreclosure. Others are organizing rent and mortgage strikes to show that missed payments are not a personal family’s shortcoming but an act of community resistance. Still more are using home takeovers to demonstrate that — in a country with 24 empty houses for every homeless person — our nation has the resources and wealth to make housing truly a human right.

Over the long term, this movement does not simply demand that the banks and the government address the systemic injustice that they oversee; it demands that we re-imagine our relationship to housing and to each other. What the housing crisis has taught us is that we’ve all been complicit in upholding a false and failed national narrative that property rights are more important than the needs of people. Our challenge, then, is not only to build a new economic system, but to imagine a new national narrative, a new social contract.

—

On the first spring day in Detroit, J.B. gave a tour of his kingdom on Goldengate Street.

“Just look at this floor!” he exclaimed, gesturing at cream-colored tiling mostly obscured by trash and piles of plaster. A 20-year-old man with facial tattoos and a fist-shaped comb rising from his short afro, J.B. sounded more like a real estate agent than what he is: an artist who has lived on his own since he was 12. Now, he’s working with other Occupiers to take over bank-owned houses. “Wait till you see the bathrooms,” he continued. “Matching his and hers sinks. A rose marble tub. I would never have left this house. It makes me so mad.”

The homes in this neighborhood were so thoroughly gutted by strippers after the banks forced out the residents that the whole area is slated for demolition, threatening the precarious stability of all the surrounding homes and families. This block embodies anti-foreclosure activist Bartosz Kumor’s observation that “Detroit is a place where policy is insufficient, where we need people taking over neighborhoods and providing for themselves.”

J.B. has already installed wood-burning stoves, water collection systems, drywall, and new plumbing in many of the seven homes his team has occupied. One is already filled with books, paintings and an artists’ studio where J.B. plans to host free classes; another is to be a martial arts dojo. They want to bring all the houses up to code so that the overcrowded homeless shelter nearby can move people in when the team migrates to the next block. It’s an ad hoc project: In one of the houses, the walls have both knives embedded in the plaster and sharpie-scribbled diagrams for solar-panel roofing.

Like Bertha Garrett, J.B. and his team are fighting for the city piece by piece, using their bodies to preserve a neighborhood that the banks seized for cash, stripped of life and then left to die.

“We don’t own none of these houses,” J.B. said honestly. “But if we stay in them, keep working on them, we can save them.” He leaned off the balcony on one of the houses and staring at his handiwork: half a dozen homes already filled with the clutter, knick-knacks, love and memories that make a four-walled structure one’s own.

On January 26, a group of activists with Organizing for Occupation (O4O), Housing is a Human Right and Occupy Wall Street interrupted another foreclosure action in Brooklyn with their singing. (Frida Berrigan reported on the first of these actions back in October.) As you can see from the above video, after selling only one house out of four, the auction was aborted and 39 people were arrested.

In an email interview with Karen Gargamelli, an attorney with Common Law who is involved with O4O, she explains why they have chosen this melodic tactic:

We sing because it is non-violent and because it is beautiful. We hope to confound the systems that evict New Yorkers (the courts) and the elected officials that refuse to regulate the big banks with loveliness.

With this easy-to-learn song, O4O hopes these blockades will spread across the country, and effect what Gargamelli called “a people’s moratorium” that would create “real negotiating power between homeowners and lenders.” The next singing auction blockade is planned for February 17th in Queens.

• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

• Egyptian activist groups on Thursday launched an open-ended strike in Cairo to pressure the country’s military rulers  to expedite the transfer of power to an elected civilian  administration, a day after 100,000 Egyptians came out to Tahrir Square to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak.

• Activists linked to the global ‘Occupy’ movement used giant red weather balloons to stage a flying protest over the venue of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.

• Nearly 7,000 prisoners were on a hunger strike Wednesday in Kyrgyzstan with more  than 1,000 sewing shut their lips with staples and thread to protest jail  conditions

• On Tuesday, demonstrators with ACTA stickers on their mouths protested against Poland’s government plans to sign international copyright agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), in front of the European Union office in Warsaw.

• Dozens of teachers turned out at six events across Seattle on Tuesday to protest and rally against budget cuts that are hurting education.

• Nepalese students chanted anti government slogans during a torch rally to protest against Nepal Oil Corporation’s decision to hike prices on major petroleum products, including petrol, diesel, kerosene and LPG in Kathmandu on Tuesday.

• On Tuesday, Cambodian victims held a demonstration to mark the third anniversary of a forced eviction in the Dey Krahorm community.

• Hundreds of Tibetans carried out day-long protests and candle light vigils in Ngaba on Monday calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from exile and demanding freedom in Tibet.

• In the largest protests Syria has seen in months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets Friday in a display of defiance to show an Arab League observer mission the strength of the opposition movement. Despite the monitors’ presence, forces loyal to President Bashar Assad still killed at least 22 people.

• Thousands of Hungarians took to the streets yesterday to protest a new constitution which critics say increases the power of the government over previously independent institutions, ranging from the church and media to the courts and even the central bank.

• Russian police arrested at least 60 people in the capital of Moscow on Saturday during anti-government protests.

• Thousands of protesters converged on a train station in central China, angered over collapsing illegal investment schemes that residents said the government had failed to staunch.

• As part of an action called Occupy the Caucus, 12 protesters, including a 14-year-old girl, were arrested for blocking the doors to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters on Thursday. Eighteen more arrests followed on Saturday and one on Sunday.

• A dozen anti-Wall Street protesters who had taken over a foreclosed home in Oakland to house formerly homeless individuals were arrested on Thursday.

• More than a dozen Muslim community leaders boycotted an interfaith breakfast organized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday to protest reported police surveillance of Muslim areas since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Large crowds of Yemenis rallied in major cities Sunday, demanding the outgoing president be put on trial for the deaths of protesters.

• Dozens of activists against gender segregation boarded buses serving Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jews on Sunday to protest the unwritten rule that women sit at the back.

• Thousands of angry Shia protesters staged a sit-in outside the Sindh Governor House in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday night to protest the targeted assassination of their community leader.

After a year of ongoing work, Spain’s premier anti-foreclosure organization, the Platform of People Affected by Mortgage (PAH), has been compelling both the government and the banks in the country to react, pushing them to make some small but positive steps toward securing the right to housing.

The PAH started in February of 2009 from a small group of citizens in Barcelona in order to demand that the Mortgage Law include dación en pago, a measure that would make possible to hand back the keys and the property to the bank, discharging all mortgage debt if the holder fails to pay the mortgage. But as more and more families were evicted from their homes, PAH took to the streets in November, 2010 with the Stop Evictions campaign, which gained even more momentum during this year’s May 15 movement mobilizations. PAH became a meeting point for people in danger of losing their homes, organized locally by citizens and activists to provide legal advice and promote civil resistance actions.

Today, PAH has chapters in more than 40 cities, and it has stopped at least 110 evictions through nonviolent resistance. Since October, hundreds of 15-M activists had been occupying empty buildings to provide living space for evicted families in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Terrassa and Granada; dozens of families have decided to occupy empty houses themselves.

Activists associated with PAH in Elche, a city near Alicante, has advised as many as 50 families and, in many cases, they’ve discovered irregularities bordering on illegality. “There are families that have been paying a default insurance,” explains Gloria Marin, from PAH Elche, for instance. “They didn’t know that and the bank didn’t tell them a thing about it while trying to evict them.” In Elche, as in many other cities, the courts and the police have not moved to intervene against anti-eviction actions.

Barcelona, one of the cities where PAH’s work began, the response of the regional government has been even more positive. In October, thanks in part to PAH, the City Council moved to declare Barcelona “active on the prevention of evictions,” creating a commission to study each case, to ensure the right to housing and to support the inclusion of dación en pago in the Mortgage Law. A hundred other cities have taken similar action as well.

In other places, however, the situation has become a bit more difficult. In Madrid, where PAH has succeeded in stopping 17 of the 20 evictions it fought, police response has been escalating. PAH started its work in Madrid last June, but, after a month of several eviction preventions, the courts decided to increase the police presence. In July, more than 50 riot police prevented over 100 citizens from stopping an eviction.

The police presence since then has increased even more. “In recent weeks, the courts have sent in the police forcefully,” says Chema Ruiz of PAH Madrid. “In the beginning there were just a few police officers, and the evictions were easily stopped, but the situation has changed.” Last week, some people were arrested in an anti-foreclosure action, among them a photographer from the alternative newspaper Diagonal. Facing the increased police presence, PAH Madrid activists have changed their tactics, focusing more on the visit of the judicial commission to an endangered house and attempting to prevent it from approving the foreclosure.

Despite the repression of these actions in the Spanish capital, the message of PAH has been heard and echoed in mainstream Spanish politics. After the two-year campaign for the dación en pago was ignored by the two major parties, some months ago most of the country’s political parties included it in their platforms going into the November 20 election. Even PSOE, which rejected the dación en pago last June in Congress, reversed course and incorporated the proposal in its platform. But the victory of the right-wing Partido Popular in the Congress makes it impossible to know whether the PSOE’s promise would have become a reality.

Political promises aside, PAH’s work has forced the government to relieve some of the sting of eviction felt by those who suffer it. “We have forced the government to make a move,” says a statement on the PAH website. “It’s a ridiculous and insufficient change, but it marks the path.”

Now, the regional government of Catalonia is going further and has announced to enact the dación en pago and to purchase option agreements to let families keep their homes. PAH is also working on a “popular initiative” to petition Congress to reexamine the inclusion of dación en pago in the Mortgage Law. Soon they will begin collecting the 500,000 signatures needed to do so.

Even the banks are starting to react to people’s calls on behalf of the right to housing. In Murcia, PAH has negotiated the dación en pago for 100 families, as it has for thousands throughout Spain. In many cases, after accepting the dación en pago, canceling the debt in exchange of the house, the banks consented to allow a family to stay in their home by paying subsidized rent. “It’s not because they are better now, but because we have forced them to take care of their image,” says a statement from PAH.

Some banks have launched such programs as “Supportive Leasing” in La Caixa, which offers 3,000 houses with a monthly rent between €75 and €150, or the inclusion of dación en pago in their mortgage products—though generally with very high interest rates.

Today in Spain, banks are becoming major real estate holders. Bankia alone—a bank that was recently privatized—began the year with more than €11 billion in property, making it the country’s largest landowner. Other banks, such as CAM (also recently privatized), Santander or BBVA, offer more than 20,000 foreclosed houses with significant discounts. Most of these banks has received thousands of millions euros from the government last year in bailouts. PAH calls on the government to purchase these houses from the banks in order to increase the number of public housing units, but, for now at least, the government has yet to listen.

I am trying to get excited about Christmas—which is right around the corner (as though anyone needs a reminder), but I can get a bit “bah humbug.” Christmas music drives me nuts, I think most decorations are tacky, and all the manic shopping and false cheer turns my stomach.

I blame my parents, who never once took me to the mall to visit Santa Claus when I was young. I also never wrote the old man a “wish list.” So here I am, at 37, sitting down to write my very first letter to Santa Claus.

Dear Mr. Claus,

I hope this letter finds you and the missus well. I know you are known by many names—Kris Kringle, old Saint Nicholas, but I will call you by your American commercial name for the purpose of this letter.

I have been very nice this year: kind to neighbors, generous with my time and energy, a compassionate ear in times of difficulty. I have tried not to complain or gripe or whine too much, even though there is much in the world to be grumpy about. I did not participate in as many “Occupy” events as I should have, but New Year’s Resolution time is almost upon us, and trust me when I tell you that will be on that list.

So, with that preamble, allow me to give you the list of things I want for Christmas this year.

Of course, there is very little that I need—other than very warm winter outfit that will not be too bulky or down-fashion (I am going to spend the first two weeks of January outside demanding that President Obama shut down Guantanamo, close Bagram, end torture and ensure accountability for the architects of this travesty).

So, put that at the top of my list, please. Warm, not bulky, winter coat. This Patagonia one is really nice, but it is made in China. Never mind about that. I’ll just layer up.

Other than that… hmm. I thought long and hard about how to make this a real Christmas wish list and not just a list of all the ills in the world that I want changed.

Food for hungry children. I know that you have an enviable distribution network, so in addition to toys and tchotchkes, could you also hit up all the hungry kids with nourishing food. There are about 16 million “food insecure” kids in this country, so it will take some effort.

Good places for all the Occupy folks to be for the winter. A lot of people dropped everything and “came home” to Occupy Wall Street, Hartford, San Diego and countless other upspringings around the country. They found community, meaning, a platform for their outrage and alienation—and the daily necessities in those anarchic and somewhat miraculous spaces. Now, with spots like Zuccotti Park closed to Occupiers around the country, many of those friends are looking for a place to go. In Providence, Occupiers put it to the city. We’ll leave the park if you open a day shelter for the homeless.

Peace. It’s not too hard, right? I mean, you can fly through the air behind eight tiny reindeer. That stretches the bounds of credibility just as much as the belief that humankind can all breathe air and share space without killing each other, right? Well, maybe it is all a stretch. But especially right now, as the killing returns to Iraq with a vengeance, we need a little help in the peace department. Wasn’t President Obama just crowing about the end of war in Iraq? And now, the papers are full of news of a new wave of bombings and a crippling political crisis: 63 dead in Baghdad and more than one hundred wounded on Thursday.

Good work and more time. I am happily unemployed and feel really privileged to spend my time doing things other than making money. But, I know so many people who are out of work or who are really unhappy in their jobs. And beyond being unfulfilled or bored, there are countless people working in dangerous and unhealthy environments—mining, machine shops, fishing vessels, farms—and who are being exploited. And then there is the modern scourge of slavery and human trafficking. I wish for good work that is meaningful and justly remunerated for all people. And while we are on the subject, just how much are you paying those elves of yours?

I could go on and on, there is a lot to wish for better in the world. But, I will conclude my letter by noting that if you are able to deliver all these things to me on Christmas morning, I would be most grateful (and I would not be the only one). My family is making chocolate peanut butter balls and beer to give to friends and family for Christmas, so we’ll leave some out for you.

By the way, I don’t have a chimney, but you should be able to figure it out.

All the best,

Frida Berrigan

Occupy Wall Street found a new home today—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house. Just weeks after the eviction from its encampment in the financial district, hundreds of occupiers joined local community members in a foreclosure tour of the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn through the rain, which concluded with a celebratory block party as a family reclaimed a foreclosed home owned by Bank of America. It was one of many anti-foreclosure actions taking place in communities across the United States today.

As the march passed, I heard a local woman saying, “This was a long time coming.”

For those of us who have been organizing and reporting on Occupy Wall Street for months, the afternoon was a reunion of familiar faces, of people who used to see each other daily in Liberty Plaza. But more visible than usual at Occupy Wall Street actions were collared clergy and members of the State Assembly and City Council. Together with locals and organizers with the NYC General Assembly’s Direct Action Committee, they were leading the marches and queuing the chants—all through the people’s mic, of course, megaphone-free. Along the way, staffers of groups that were once waiting-and-seeing from afar what Occupy Wall Street would do were now busily coordinating the action; among these are Van Jones’ Rebuild the Dream, New York Communities for Change, and Organizing for Occupation. And this, it seems, is our clearest glimpse yet of what Occupy Phase II will look like.

The General Assembly and its related working groups are only able to do so much on their own. Without the focal point of an encampment anymore, the movement’s actions will rely more and more on coordination with institutions more firmly entrenched in neighborhoods where it works—as well as, despite the movement’s own leaderless structure, those institutions’ leaders.

While occupiers have almost always welcomed the support of outside organizations cheerfully, today I heard grumbling among some of the older ones who have had negative experiences with this or that public figure in the past, and who are suspicious of traditional institutions as a whole. A City Council member might stand with the movement one day, but what will he or she expect from it on election day? And how far will a given non-profit organization go with civil disobedience before it starts to scare away its funders? These are new questions that the Occupy movement will be facing more and more.

The answer, though, seemed clear to me when I passed an activist running from the soon-to-be-reclaimed house with a drill in his hand—which presumably had been used to bypass the lock. With the march came a team from Occupy Wall Street’s Sanitation Committee to clean up inside the house. Outside, the occupation’s library and kitchen set up shop, along with teach-ins and a piñata. The answer I had in mind, that is, is direct action. As long as this movement keeps nonviolent direct action at its center, refusing to wait for the powers that be to approve of the undertakings it deems necessary, its momentum will continue to grow. Politicians and non-profits will join the cause not so much because they see an opportunity for themselves but because they can’t afford not to.

That’s exactly what appears to be happening in Phase II, even more than Phase I. As more and more occupations are hardened by the experience of forced eviction, they’re less receptive to the kind of coddling by politicians that took place in some cities early on. The spirit of direct action is spreading. David DeGraw of OWSNews.org tells me that he has been getting text messages from all over the country today like the following:

I just removed a newly changed lock off of a house to let original owner back in. my leatherman rules!

Without the need to focus on encampment sites, furthermore, the attention of Phase II is much more carefully oriented around root causes, around the very means by which the movement’s corporate opponents perpetuate themselves: foreclosed homes, ports, rampant consumerism, and more to come. Foreclosures, as ground zero of the 2008 financial crisis, are a fitting place to start. They’re also where the often-abstract machinations of Wall Street actually hit home for many Americans. By preventing them, or reversing them, the movement will find new allies who were less moved by the earlier talk of ending corporate personhood or imposing a Tobin tax.

This was a foregone conclusion for the May 15 movement in Spain, which was such an inspiration to many Occupy Wall Street organizers in the first place. (See our report on the Spanish squatters from back in September.) At the action today, I talked about this with Monica Lopez, who was part of the Spanish movement and has been at Occupy Wall Street since the beginning:

• Occupy protesters across the country celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, bringing all the trimmings of a traditional meal to the unlikely location of a demonstration. In New York’s Zuccotti Park, organizers said they distributed some 3,000 individually wrapped plates for what they described as an “open feast.”

• Some 10,000 people from the majority Shi’ite community in Bahrain took to the streets of the town of Aali, chanting slogans that were taken from the inquiry led by international rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni.

• Yemeni protesters—who have been in the millions for nearly 10 months—were out again Thursday, rejecting a provision that gives Saleh immunity from prosecution.

• Portuguese workers’ general strike halted public transport and some factories in many parts of the country on Thursday and thousands marched to protest austerity measures imposed as the price of an EU/IMF bailout.

• A Romanian mayor has begun a hunger strike to protest cuts in heating subsidies imposed under a government austerity drive, reawakening memories of the harsh final years of communism.

• Hundreds of people in Thailand’s Pathum Thani province north of the capital blocked cars from using the outbound lane of an elevated highway on Wednesday to pressure the government to accelerate the drainage of water.

• Iran’s main government-run newspaper was published Tuesday without a front-page headline, replaced by photographs of its headquarters during an assault a day earlier by forces working for the judiciary who briefly arrested the newspaper’s top official and more than 30 others.

• Several thousand Colombian students participated in multiple marches on Thursday to demand more funding for public education. In Argentina, about 1,000 student marched through Buenos Aires holding flags reading “the student struggle is walking through Latin America.”

• Thousands of Peruvians have protested a $4.8 billion open-pit gold mining project they fear will damage their water supply.

• Thousands of workers in southern China went on strike in the last week to demand higher pay and better treatment, disrupting work at companies including one that supplies equipment to International Business Machines Corp.

• A dozen men in suits, including the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum (middle-left) and Mike Bonanno (middle-right), marched with hidden placards last week after announcing at Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly that they were about to take part in a highly arrestable action. As the police, who overheard the announcement, prepared to make arrests, the suits lifted their hidden placards, revealing the message: “Brokers and Police for the Occupation.”

• While Occupy Wall Street protesters braved snow, sleet and rain in New York this weekend, scores of protesters in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas were arrested after refusing police orders to disperse.

• Hundreds of students staged an anti-government rally in eastern Sudan on Sunday, protesting against poverty and rising food prices, witnesses said.

• Workers at the world’s third-largest copper deposit, Chile’s Collahuasi mine, ended a partial strike begun early on Saturday after reaching an agreement with management over bonus payments.

• Air France cancelled one in five flights on Sunday after cabin crew stopped work for a second consecutive day to protest against employment conditions.

• More than 30 farmers who staged a sit-in Thursday in front of the Myanmar government housing department in Yangon to protest the unfair confiscation of their land. Seven people were arrested, despite the government’s stated commitment to democratic reforms.

• Activists say Syrian security forces have killed at least 44 people, as large protests calling for a no-fly zone to protect civilians and soldiers deserting the army were held across the country on Friday.

• More than 30,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv Saturday night to express anger over the high cost of living. Thousands more protested in Jerusalem.