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.

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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.

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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.

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• 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.

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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• Galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests began in New Zealand, touched parts of Asia, spread to Europe, and resumed at their starting point in New York with 5,000 marchers decrying corporate greed and economic inequality in Times Square. Meanwhile, 24 people were arrested at a Manhattan Citibank branch while trying to close their accounts.

• Police arrested around 175 demonstrators at the Occupy Chicago camp in a downtown park early on Sunday, hauling them away in vans and buses even as protesters vowed to carry on their campaign against economic inequality.

• Yemeni security forces used live rounds as well as tear gas and water cannons to disperse thousands of people attempting to march on the city center in Sanaa from their stronghold in Change Square. At least 16 people were killed.

• The dissident group Ladies in White sent a message of defiance to the Cuban government on Sunday, having men join them for their weekly protest march for the first time since forming in 2003. It is also believed to be the first time in decades men had taken part in a public protest in Cuba.

• Author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West was arrested while protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court on Sunday about corporate influence in politics.

• Activists with the October 2011 Stop the Machine protest in Washington’s Freedom Plaza gathered outside the Supreme Court yesterday to draw attention to corporate influence in politics. Nineteen people were arrested, including author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West.

• Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was among 19 demonstrators arrested during an anti-Wall Street protest in Sacramento, California yesterday.

• More than 2,000 Tunisians have marched in favor of a secular state that allows press freedom and other rights. The demonstration is a response to protests and violence by Islamist extremists.

• Organizing for Occupation, a coalition of housing advocacy groups, disrupted a Brooklyn foreclosure auction on 60 homes last Thursday with a singing protest.

• Hundreds rallied in the disputed Iraqi town of Khanaqin on Sunday to demand the reversal of a central government ruling barring the flag of the autonomous Kurdish region in official buildings.

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence”

To be radical—stemming from the Latin radix meaning root—suggests that it is about getting at the heart of a matter. Dr. King cut right through to the source of injustice and over forty-five years later, are we witnessing the rebirth of a radical revolution of values that Dr. King prophesied? Is #OccupyWallStreet and its comrades nationwide “on the right side of the world revolution?” In that bold speech Dr. King gave a year before his death, publicly breaking from the civil rights movement’s acquiescence to the status quo support of American involvement in Vietnam, King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Has the United States, by spending upwards of $3 trillion on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya and maintaining over 1,000 overseas military bases in more than 50 countries, reached a moral, economic, political and spiritual tipping point?

#OccupyWallStreet is well into its third week of camping out at Liberty Plaza. On October 1, The New York General Assembly—the “official” spokesgroup of #OccupyWallStreet—released a document, “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” naming its reasons for the occupation. A brief glance at part of the manifesto gives a snapshot of the state of the union.

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• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets of Kabul to condemn the recent shelling of border towns by Pakistan’s army and accusing its powerful spy agency of involvement in the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the country’s influential former president.

• Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger strike to protest conditions in the state’s highest-security prisons, where some prisoners have been held in virtual isolation for decades.

• Hundreds of people filled a small town gymnasium in Nebraska on Thursday to protest at a State Department hearing on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Residents fear it will pollute the Ogallala Aquifer, a major U.S. drinking water source.

• Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday to protest austerity measures imposed under the terms of an EU/IMF bailout, the first major rallies since a center-right government took power in Portugal in June.

• U.S. actor Sean Penn joined thousands of Egyptian activists who packed downtown Cairo on Friday demanding that military rulers speed up the transfer of power to civilians and end emergency laws once used by Hosni Mubarak against his opponents.

• Hundreds of indigenous Bolivians angry at plans to build a highway through an Amazon nature preserve resumed their protest march Saturday after a violent police crackdown a week ago.

• Thousands of Syrians took to the streets on Friday in demonstrations against the regime. Human rights activists said that at least 13 people were killed when troops opened fire.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in Savannah, Georgia on Saturday to attend the funeral of Troy Davis, the recently executed death row inmate many believe was innocent. They pledged to keep fighting the death penalty.

• Dutch police forcibly dispersed around 200 squatters in the center of Amsterdam on Saturday during a protest on the first anniversary of the introduction of a law formally outlawing squatting.

• Thousands Hungarians rallied in central Budapest against the measures of Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a demonstration organizers dubbed “D-Day.” Their demands included “fair” taxation, the constitutional protection of early retirement, the restoration of the right to strike, social dialog and the scrapping of retroactive laws.

• More than 200 Tibetans, including monks, protested in a tense area of southwestern China on the country’s 62nd National Day after a Tibetan flag and a photo of the Dalai Lama were torn down, a news report said Sunday.

• British unions organized a rally of 35,000 protesters against government budget cuts Sunday in Manchester where the Conservative Party opened its annual conference.

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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