After a modified, anti-fracking Smokey the Bear went viral, the U.S. Forest Service threatened legal action against the activist who created it. The case now revolves around fair use, culture jamming, and just whose side the Forest Service is really on.  

This article originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.

Smokey the Bear thought he smelled a fire in the woods. But as he approached the clearing and saw a giant derrick jutting out into the sky, he realized that what his nose had picked up was the scent of hydrocarbons. It was another piece of evidence that the increasingly widespread method of oil and gas extraction known as fracking was poisoning the environment that he and his human friends depend on. He decided something must be done.

At least that’s the way that artist, Occupy Wall Street veteran and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees it. But last week she received a letter threatening her with jail time and thousands of dollars in fines for enlisting Smokey to the anti-fracking cause.

In the fall, LaRoe created an image of Smokey that altered his famous invective “Only you can prevent forest fires” to “Only you can prevent faucet fires” — a reference to the phenomenon of flaming taps that occasionally occur near where fracking takes place. The adjustment seemed to her in line with the message of conservation Smokey has come to embody.

“This is the radicalization of Smokey the Bear,” said LaRoe. “This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’ Smokey wants to fight the corporations and protect the air and the water and the plants and the animals and the people.”

Her parody went viral. She began printing T-shirts at the insistence of friends on Facebook, but demand quickly surpassed those in her immediate circle of contacts. Soon she was packing Smokey in FedEx envelopes and sending him off to Australia and other far-flung terrains. There are also tote bags and patches with the Smokey meme available at LaRoe’s website. (The tote bags, she advertises, are “great for dumpster diving.”) LaRoe says she’s not out to become rich and the money she charges customers goes toward covering her costs so that she can keep spreading the message of faucet-fire prevention far and wide.

“It spread like wildfire,” she said, grinning ear to ear.

Not everyone is amused. LaRoe received a cease-and-desist letter from the Metis Group, which serves as legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service division. The letter informs LaRoe that Smokey, his character and his slogan are property of the U.S. government and warns that she has until May 2 to halt the use of Smokey on her “products” and to stop distributing electronic copies of the meme. Otherwise, she faces up to six months in prison and a penalty as high as $150,000.

“Any time anybody uses Smokey’s image for anything other than wildfire prevention,” said Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the Forest Service, “it confuses the public. What we’re trying to do is keep Smokey on message.” Cleveland added that the 1952 Smokey the Bear Act takes the character out of the public domain and “any change in that would have to go through Congress.”

Two other entities besides the Forest Service claim joint rights to Smokey. The National Association of State Foresters — a non-profit organization consisting of directors of U.S. forestry agencies — and the Ad Council.

Remember “This is your brain on drugs”? Or the Indian weeping over pollution? They were the Ad Council’s handiwork. A non-profit, it describes itself as a promoter of “public service campaigns on behalf of non-profit organizations and government agencies” with a focus on “improving the quality of life for children, preventive health, education, community well being and strengthening families.” Smokey the Bear was born at the Ad Council, on the desk of abstract expressionist and Marx-influenced art critic Harold Rosenberg, who had a part time job there in the mid-1940s.

The Ad Council’s board of directors is a conflagration of representatives of the world’s wealthiest corporations, including representatives of such companies as General Electric, which announced plans last month to spend $110 million on a research lab devoted to the study of fracking, and finance giants such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. On its website, Citibank advertises an “extensive array of deposit, cash management and credit products” for oil and gas drillers, while a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary boasts its “Oil & Gas Investment Banking group covers the complete oil and gas value chain, which includes exploration and production, natural gas processing and transmission, refining and marketing, and oilfield services.”

LaRoe believes that those who claim to own Smokey “don’t care that I’m selling a few T-shirts. They’re out to crush the meme.”

Both the Ad Council and the Metis Group declined to comment for this story.

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, the May 2 deadline to shut down her site and retire her anti-fracking Smokey came and went; LaRoe has not ceased or desisted. Instead, she enlisted the help of her own legal counsel, who fired back with a letter to the Metis Group on Friday. In it, attorney Evan Sarzin argues that LaRoe ‘s culture-jam appropriation of Smokey is permissible under the fair-use exemption to exclusive copyright ownership and chides the the Forest Service for attempting to infringe on LaRoe’s First Amendment rights.

Sarzin also points out that this is not the first time the Forest Service has sought to silence environmentalists for appropriating Smokey’s image. In the early 1990s, the Forest Service demanded reparations from the Sante Fe-based conservation group LightHawk after it used Smokey’s likeness in ads critical of the agency’s practice of auctioning off land to timber companies. (The Forest Service, as part of the Department of Agriculture, makes its land available for commercial use.) Unlike LaRoe’s Smokey, LightHawk’s black bear appeared angry and wielded a chainsaw. “Say it ain’t so, Smokey,” read the ads.

With legal funds provided by the Sierra Club, LightHawk sued the Forest Service in 1992 for infringing on its freedom of speech. The court eventually sided with the plaintiffs, noting that “the satirical use of Smokey the Bear to criticize Forest Service management techniques is unlikely to cause confusion or to dilute the value of Smokey the Bear to help prevent forest fires. Thus the Forest Service cannot have a compelling interest in prohibiting such use.”

Sarzin also calls attention to the fact the Forest Service’s own research points to environmental degradation caused by fracking. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality by Forest Service researchers linked frack fluid to the death of 150 trees in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. Despite their findings, the Forest Service is considering approving fracking leases in the nearby George Washington National Forest. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which opposes the plan, says it represents a threat to local wildlife — including the black bear.

A report released last month by the the National Parks Conservation Association warns that fracking for oil is decimating the ecosystem surrounding Theodore Roosevelt National Park, named after the Republican president who founded the Forest Service. “Unless we take quick action,” the report warns “air, water and wildlife will experience permanent harm in other national parks as well.” Thus, Sarzin writes, LaRoe’s Smokey meme “is a message that the Forest Service should endorse.”

LaRoe hopes that by gaining publicity she can force the Forest Service to take a stand against fracking. In order to continue the fight, however, she says she needs the support of groups whose mission it is to defend civil liberties or protect the environment to provide legal defense funds — just as the Sierra Club did for LightHawk.

“This about more than me as an artist,” LaRoe said. “This is about everybody’s right to freedom of speech and a healthy environment.”

Her childhood memories of Smokey, she explains, are compelling her to keep raising faucet-fire prevention awareness despite the threat of jail time. “When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests. Smokey is our bear. He belongs to the people.”

Images of Smokey the Bear meme and T-shirt by Lopi LaRoe/WePay.  

 

Three and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.

“The kids missed a month and a half of school,” explained Luis Casco, a member of the church’s congregation who pulled strings to help move Occupy into Far Rockaway. The after-school program was, in part, his brainchild. “We figured we’d start helping the kids and we could win over their parents. Then we could actually start bigger projects,” he said.

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organized by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, an organization that specializes in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval. In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors. In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years. Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner, and the federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

“Collective approach pays big dividends,” read a headline about Mondragon in The Financial Times last year, while the New York Times noted the “use of workers’ share capital and loans” has enabled the federation to remain stable through vacillations in global markets, including the ongoing financial crisis.

While Mondragon shows what is possible down the line, Far Rockaway residents are at the very beginning of the process. At one of the crowded early meetings of the cooperative initiative, children and adults buzzed about, fraternizing with disposable plates of food in their hands as extra folding chairs were arranged. Several parents whose children attended the after-school program arrived, bringing their friends and neighbors along. Most were Spanish-speaking immigrants who, having spent their lives working for someone else, were eager to learn more about cooperatives.

Many in Far Rockaway lost their jobs when Hurricane Sandy rendered commutes impossible for flooded local businesses. For those without U.S. work papers, finding new employment has been difficult.

“It’s really hard to find a new job when you don’t have papers,” Casco explained. “Their homes were destroyed, they don’t have the resources to go to welfare and FEMA ain’t helping them.”

Others, such as Olga Lezama, managed to keep their jobs after the storm, but the prospect of holding on to the profits of their labor has piqued their interest. Lezama currently works as an upholsterer for a high-end furniture company. By Lezama’s calculations, her boss makes approximately $500 every hour off the furniture that she and her co-workersupholster, while she earns roughly $100 a day.

“It hurts my feelings and my pockets,” she said. “My job and my efforts and my everything goes to them.”

By her side was her husband, Carlos Lezama, a carpenter who specialized in cabinets. The pair hope to work with others in the community to form a home-design cooperative, a service in high demand after the storm, which ruined the ground floors of most of the region’s low-lying bungalows.

“We go to stores and buy cheap furniture, cabinets and stuff, and we’re wasting our money,” Lezama said. “In two months, the cabinet is no good. So we have go buy it again. Our people deserve good stuff.” 

Workers controlling capital 

Occupy Sandy has allocated $60,000 of the $900,000 it raised in the initial flood of generosity following the storm toward forming cooperatives, an initiative they hope to spread across storm-affected areas if it proves successful in Far Rockaway. The Working World, an organization that provides zero-debt micro-finance loans to new cooperatives, has offered to provide monetary support, but for now the organization is mostly lending advice and training. At one of the early meetings, Brandon Martin, The Working World’s founder, showed the crowd a slideshow of other projects the organization has helped launch. Images of a beekeepers’ cooperative in the countryside of Nicaragua and a shoe factory in Buenos Aires glowed on the wall behind Martin as he outlined the benefits of workers sharing resources and making decisions democratically.

“A cooperative is workers controlling capital, instead of capital controlling workers,” said Martin. “It’s about reorganizing the economy around who’s really in control.”

The Working World finances itself by collecting a small percentage of the profits that member collectives generate, money that the organization reinvests in establishing new enterprises. Martin explained that the idea originated in ancient Sumeria where the word for interest was the same as the word for calf.

“If the cow I lent you has babies,” explained Martin, “I loaned you my cow, so I can have some the babies. That would be the interest.”

But if the cow was sterile, the Sumerians didn’t collect interest. The same works for Working World’s loans today. The organization only collects once a cooperative generates a steady profit, a model that avoids forcing people into debt if their business fails.

Interest grows 

The Sumerians, for their part, eventually altered their lending practices such that they collected interest regardless of the outcome. The legacy of that shift is still with us today; few in Far Rockaway can call their surroundings their own. Walk through the neighborhood in the middle of a business day and you’ll see iron grating pulled down over storefronts and plywood covering the windows of large shopping complexes. Those stores that are open often bear the insignias of chain outlets that carry money out of the neighborhood and into the coffers of large corporations. Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself — a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

At the following cooperative meeting a week later, the crowd had grown. People discussed plans for a scrap metal business and a cleaning-workers’ collective. One man pulled a citizens’ band radio out of his winter coat, explaining that drivers in the taxi cooperative he hoped to form could use it to communicate. He’d been doing research; nine other drivers were needed to secure an operating license from the city.

There is obvious enthusiasm in the neighborhood for worker-run enterprises. But are there limits to what these businesses can achieve while embedded in a broader economic framework of competition and exploitation? And does the focus on cooperatives represent a shift in direction for Occupy, one that veers away from a direct fight for systemic transformation?

“We can’t fight the city,” one Occupy Sandy organizer confided. “But we can build co-ops.”

Building an alternative 

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift. Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organize democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

“When the workers get together and decide how to distribute the income in such an enterprise, would they give the CEO $25 million in stock bonuses while everybody else can barely get by?” Wolff asks rhetorically.

He stresses the difference between the productive and distributive side of economies, explaining that worker-run cooperatives are the often-overlooked prerequisite for achieving an egalitarian distribution of wealth and resources. “There is the question of what exactly an alternative to capitalism is,” he explains. “I’ve stressed worker-self-directed enterprises as a different way of organizing production.” On the other hand are markets, which distribute the fruits of production. Wolff believes that the mistake of many 20th-century socialists was to imagine that the elimination of markets would create social egalitarianism, even though production had not yet been reorganized into a democratic model.

Given the pull between the productive and distributive side of economies, cooperatives must form networks to survive. Collaboration between networked enterprises allows these businesses to curb market pressures and, if the network manages to spread, to gain political power.

As Brandon Martin emphasizes, also, workers in new cooperatives must labor long hours to meet production quotas, just like with any other business, since their enterprise still has to compete for a market share. “Can one cooperative change that?” asks Martin. “No. But a cooperative economy might.”

Olga Lazema, however, isn’t thinking about the theoretical potential for cooperatives to challenge capitalism. She’s imagining the positive possibilities for her own neighborhood.

“A lot of people, their houses went like nothing,” she said, referring to Sandy’s destruction. “They have nothing. We could go there, build a small kitchen or whatever they need. Why not?”

Image of Far Rockaway cooperative meeting by Peter Rugh.  

Faced with shrinking budgets and a test-centric reform agenda, high school students across the country are fighting back. Risking expulsion and even arrest, students are confronting broken policies with walkouts, boycotts, and other creative actions.

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.  

“You’re going to be expelled,” an administrator at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Md., just twenty minutes away from the Washington, D.C., line, told the two boys sitting in her office on March 1, 2012.

“What?” Ricardo Fuentes, then a junior, asked, feigning ignorance.

“Project Xbox.”

Project Xbox was the code-name for the walkout that Fuentes had helped plan with El Cambio, an activist student group at Northwestern, for the National Day of Action for Education that day. Hours before the walkout he and his friend had been pulled into the office and confronted by the school’s administration. Administrators had pinpointed the two boys as key organizers — though only Fuentes was actually involved — and were determined to put a stop to it. They held the boys in the room for seven hours, offering to let them out only to visit lunch periods to tell people to stop the walkout. Fuentes, already resigned to his fate, refused to cooperate.

That afternoon, the sound of 400 students walking out of class — nearly a third of the school’s population — flooded Northwestern’s halls. Students were met at the door with teachers, administrators, security and police officers. They could see canine units waiting for them in the parking lot. Students turned back and started marching through the halls, searching for another exit, when they were blocked off at staircases. In the end, Fuentes and three of his friends were suspended for six days for helping to organize the walkout.

The walkout was not an aimless excuse to skip school, but a calculated response to a specific list of grievances. El Cambio’s communiqué, which it circulated in advance of the walkout, named seven grievances: disgusting bathroom conditions, enormous class sizes, teachers who had been refused pay raises three years in a row, the denial of promised funding for their band to go to nationals, cuts to funding for English-as-a-second-language programs, exploited and deported Filipino teachers, and the lack of a meaningful student role in the decision-making process. These grievances describe the conditions of many of Prince George’s County public schools. In a state that has been ranked number one in education for five consecutive years, Prince George’s County has only a single school that performs at or above the Maryland average, with almost all other schools falling well below it.

El Cambio found support among some teachers, who privately coached and guided the first-time organizers or gave their tacit approval. But others opposed the students’ activism altogether. One teacher went as far as to admonish Fuentes for El Cambio’s inclusion of teachers’ concerns among their grievances.

Though Northwestern’s walkout is exceptional in the region, it is not altogether unique. In the past year, for instance, there have been a series of walkouts in high schools in New York City, most notably the May 1, 2012, walkout of students at Paul Roebson High School in Brooklyn organized with Occupy Wall Street.

High school organizing presents a different kind of situation than college organizing. In public high schools, students are closely tied to their neighborhoods and their homes. They are not merely temporary residents, as many college students are, but members of their communities. Most of them have grown up in the area or lived there for a long time; many will continue to live there for most of their lives. They have a long-term commitment to the quality of their schools and neighborhoods. Meanwhile, high schoolers live under demanding, unyielding schedules determined by administrators who routinely ignore and marginalize students’ voices.

“I think that high schoolers always get forgotten,” Fuentes said. “They think that everything is easy for us, and it’s not.”

“It is authoritarian. We don’t feel like we have any power,” said Shane James, a senior at Northwestern who was suspended for helping to organize the walkout with El Cambio. “When you have no power over what dominates your life, you feel like you are powerless as a person. How are you supposed to learn to be an individual with ideas and a critical thinker if you don’t feel like you have control over your own ideas?”

Increasingly, public high schools are inundated with standardized tests and regimented expectations, from which any deviation is considered a chaotic interruption by the administration. In response to this kind of environment, in early January, teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle voted to refuse to administer the Measure of Academic Progress tests and waged a small war against their administration. Their boycott of the tests has inspired similar boycotts among teachers and students in high schools across the country, including in Portland and Rhode Island.

“We’re opting out because we want to send this greater message about not standardizing our education system,” Alexia Garcia, the student representative of Portland Public Schools student union. Her student union, which is sanctioned by the district, in conjunction with the Portland Student Union, a student-run organization in Portland high schools, launched an opt-out campaign just a couple weeks after the Seattle teachers did. In Portland, high school juniors must take the Oregon Assessment of Skills and Knowledge exam, which is used to assess Portland public high schools — and, starting next year, teachers. Based on this assessment, each school is given a grade, and it must test at least 95 percent of students in every demographic in order to get a passing grade. The goal of the opt-out is to give every school a failing grade by lack of participation, and thus compromise the whole process.

“We want to send the message that we’d like to see a more holistic approach and holistic evaluation,” Garcia said. “There is so much more to a student than how they perform on a test.”

Portland students have found support not only from their community but from their teachers. The teachers’ union can’t officially support the students or its members could risk losing their teaching licenses, but teachers have privately voiced their approval of student’s actions. Administrators, predictably, have not received the opt-out campaign so kindly. They’ve sent letters to parents stressing the importance of standardized testing. Administrators in Portland have done everything they can to end the student protest.

“We need a new mentality about how schools are supposed to function and how to educate kids,” James said. “You’re not going to educate kids by telling them to shut up and be quiet. You’re going to educate kids by letting them speak out and question authority — by letting them challenge things and really act on their interests and their passions.”

Image of gravestone protest signs at John Muir High School in Pasadena, California, by Jerome T, licensed under Creative Commons.   

 

Following the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, an OWS offshoot called Occupy Sandy quickly made headlines through its rapid response relief efforts, often beating out official relief agencies, like FEMA. Organizers Leah Feder and Devin Balkind discuss how open-source technology can help organize communities, solve problems collectively, and build democratic movements.

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.

There have been a lot of exhausting debates in recent years about the role of online social media in resistance movements, about whether these technologies really help or hurt, and how. Some commentators have even gone so far as to hand credit for home-grown uprisings around the world to the wonder-kids of Silicon Valley, and it can be tempting to believe them. Once there was Gandhi and King; now there is Facebook and Twitter. 

These just-so stories, of course, leave out the in-person, on-the-ground organizing that is still at the heart and center of movements everywhere. But they also cause us to miss what may be the most important questions to ask about movements and new technology: Who made the technology, who controls it, and how? 

Facebook and Twitter are only the most visible ways that technology is transforming how ordinary people build power — a visibility aided by a media culture eager to promote all things corporate. But perhaps even more important in the long run is how free and open-source software can help create transformative institutions. Such software — which much of the back-end of the Internet already relies on, including Waging Nonviolence — is produced through self-organized communities of developers working in collaboration, rather than competition. These communities rely on values like transparency, consensus-seeking, decentralization and broad participation. Yet they’re hardly utopian; they do this because it works. 

For Occupy Sandy, Occupy Wall Street’s relief and recovery effort after Hurricane Sandy last fall, open-source software tools like WordPress, Sahana and CiviCRM helped to mobilize thousands of volunteers in affected areas throughout New York City, and to do so faster and more efficiently than official agencies could. Leah Feder and Devin Balkind were among the organizers of this effort, and they have been working to make open-source tools available to the Occupy movement ever since the initial occupation of Zuccotti Park. They are also directors of Sarapis, a non-profit that promotes free and open technologies for the public good. 

For Feder and Balkind, these tools are proof that a more collaborative and sustainable world is possible; I spoke with them recently about why. 

—

How did you become interested in open-source software? 

LF: When Occupy Wall Street first started, I was going down to the park but not finding a way to get involved or seeing the revolutionary potential in what was happening. I thought it was exciting, and fun, but beyond that I didn’t see where it could go. It was through being exposed to open source there that I was finally moved to engage on a much deeper level in Occupy, because I saw that there was a theory of change. I saw how continuing on a specific path could take us into a fundamentally different paradigm. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? I was in grad school in media, culture and communication at New York University at the time, but thinking through ideas is fun only insofar as you can’t do anything. Once I saw that there was a possibility of doing something, I dropped out.

DB: I started on that path in college. Some friends and I put together a proposal to create a crowdfunding platform called Beex for charity walks and things like that.

Did you have a software background beforehand? 

DB: I was a history and film major; we definitely botched the development of the thing. But it brought me into contact with large nonprofits, and I realized that the non-profit sector was a disaster, primarily because organizations weren’t collaborating with each other. They basically mirrored the corporate model. That made me curious about good models for collaborative problem-solving. At the same time, I was dealing with a software project that was proprietary, and I was finding that it was a terrible, terrible way to go. So I was learning about the open-source software movement while I was recognizing the need for it in the non-profit sector. That led me down the path of developing a generalized understanding of open-source software for community organizing.

LF: I’m not a techie, either, and as a non-techie one can only get so deep into open-source software. I can’t really contribute to open source projects, for instance. I can use open source tools, though, and that increases my capacity as an individual tremendously. I can spin up a WordPress site and make it look pretty nice, really, really quickly. But then, once I learned more about the open-source model and realized that it’s also an organizing model for doing a lot of other things that can increase our capacity collectively, I saw more of an entry-point for myself in the broader peer-to-peer revolution. What it’s really about is changing the way that we organize ourselves, as individuals and as a society. Occupy could be the overtly political manifestation of this phenomenon, whereas open-source software is how the tech world takes on these same principles.

Devin, how did you first make the connection between open source and Occupy? 

DB: By the fall of 2011 I had incorporated Sarapis and was writing a plan to bring open source to community organizations in Brooklyn. I had already done research on constituent-relationship management systems, or CRMs, and on mailing lists. I had written guides for the organizations about how to use open-source technology most effectively. Then I thought I was going to have to raise tens of thousands of dollars to get people excited about the program — until Occupy Wall Street happened. It was basically free enthusiasm for deploying the ideas. Those of us in the Occupy tech group have spent 18 months building infrastructure. And then moments like the Hurricane Sandy relief effort give us the opportunity to see it work.

What in particular has worked especially well? 

DB: The biggest victories are the ones that no one sees. Occupy Wall Street was this huge movement, but no one was collecting email addresses at first — which is insane. But for Occupy Sandy, there was one email-collection system with one form for volunteers. It all went into our CiviCRM system, which had already been configured, and which a lot of people knew how to use. That became the basis for systematized volunteer outreach, where people have been receiving mailings consistently to see when they can come out to do volunteer work. Right now we’re looking at a sustainable volunteer infrastructure that we never had for OWS.

Why does it matter that these tools are free and open source? 

DB: This is part of a revolution in what I call, maybe wrongly, the means of production. That’s what open-source software is. And not just open-source software, but also hardware, and data, and knowledge, and how we collaborate. There are so many differences between open-source and proprietary systems; it’s like how you used to be able to take apart a car engine, and anyone who had basic mechanical skills could replace an air filter. Now, though, there’s plastic sheeting over the whole thing. It has been designed so that people can’t fix their own cars. In open-source systems, the flow of data is of paramount importance. In a proprietary system, the flow of data is something that you lose money on. Go to Facebook, for instance, and try to export your friend network — not easy, because that means you could migrate out.

LF: When we solve problems with open-source tools, we deliver the solutions back to the global information commons, and we build capacity for anybody who wants to do this in the future. Any such group that wants to arise and start collecting contacts can do the same, and it’s free. We have a whole bunch of tools to use, and we can grow ever more quickly on tools that we own ourselves.

So it’s a matter of self-reliance and independence? 

DB: For the people in the open-source movement who realize where this is going, the next step is to replicate what the government does, but better. How do we out-compete the government using open-source tools? I can tell you that with Occupy Sandy we already did it. We had a better system up within a month — for managing work orders, inventory, requests, workflows. What if we had had that during the occupation? How much easier would life have been for managing the Zuccotti Park experience if there had been people trained in such a system? We’d have had vehicles, warehouses and kitchens all coordinated in a way that was sustainable and easy to plug into. If we can do that, it’ll become competition between us and other systems. Then we’re on the path to the type of changes that people in the open-source world realize is coming.

We’re using the term “open source” now, by the way, but usually I use the term “FLO,” which means “free/libre/open source.” There’s a whole political dimension to these words.

What do you think it will take for more people to recognize this potential? 

DB: Open-source projects, as an organizing endeavor, pose an integration challenge. The question is always how to get one plugin to work with another. When we’ve conditioned ourselves to think more in terms of plugin architecture, our projects will inevitably plug into other projects, and when that happens we’re going to have a whole new set of functionality that’s possible. Once we’re at a certain level of advancement, we get to merge. I think that what’s going to happen is a wave. For instance, when open-source technology merges with open-source ecology in order to produce hardware locally, you’re going to see a tremendous sea-change. You’ll see, say, a new type of open-source tractor that starts selling like hotcakes. That convergence isn’t so far away, and when that happens it’s going to feel different. It is going to feel like a flick of a switch for a lot of folks.

How important is it for people in the Occupy movement to know about this broader process? 

DB: Open-source software itself exists because other models for software production didn’t meet the need. Similarly, I think the Occupy movement’s effectiveness depends on how quickly it recognizes that the best community-organizing practices are rooted in free/libre/open source. In the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, the leaders tended to be people in the Direct Action Working Group, which was organizing the actions and marches. But it was never very effective. Protest loses to production any day of the week. That’s why the Black Panthers had a breakfast program. Give people what they want if you want to be an effective movement. With Occupy Sandy, because there was such a strong demand for relief from the community, we saw the effectiveness of open-source tools. Documentation became more important. A shared Google Docs folder was the center of productivity within Occupy Sandy, and lots of people were realizing, “If I don’t share my docs as widely as possible, and if I don’t orient people to these docs, this falls apart.” That was significant.

But Google Docs isn’t open source. Where are the lines to be drawn? 

DB: I like to say “practically possible.” Use freely-available, open-source solutions whenever practically possible. Google Docs isn’t open source, but sharing data on spreadsheets is about as open-source as you can get. Any absolutes about this stuff aren’t particularly useful. What’s useful is recognizing the purpose of the activity as being new forms of productivity, not merely creating a spectacle. But this takes a lot of practice to do right. It’s hard. By the time of Occupy Sandy, there were a lot more people who understood how to do this kind of thing than during the original occupation, and they started out-performing the people who don’t work this way.

Was your experience with free-software communities in some ways preparatory for knowing how to participate in Occupy Wall Street’s decentralized structure? 

DB: Yes. Philosophically, for sure. The media would say, “They communicate over Facebook and Twitter,” but if you’re involved in organizing, you’re emailing all day. It’s emails, and it’s listservs. I came in knowing how to have intense decision-making conversations on email lists, while the vast majority of people did not. By now, the growth of people’s aptitude for that type of communication has been stunning.

LF: Although we’re still not there!

DB: No. But we’re so much further along.

LF: Whatever the political intentions of the open-source community, it models a different way of working together. Last fall, a lot of people were down with the idea that “shit is fucked up and bullshit.” But people will only go so far if you don’t show them something better. There’s a portion of the population that will really be galvanized by marches and occupations, but if you want many more people to get excited about your political project, you need to provide an alternative — alternatives. That’s what drives the politics forward, because there’s a limit to the horizon of possibility when it’s a politics of protest. But once it’s a politics of solutions and alternatives, you’re playing in a different field, and a lot more is possible.

Does that help you when you’re opposing a system backed up by state violence? 

DB: During the early months of Occupy, I would have experiences where I’d be talking to a cop who didn’t look like he was enjoying being a pawn to suppress protest, and I said to him, “Hey dude, have you ever talked about getting some land and going to a farm? If you ever need some help acquiring land, we’ve got a bunch of acres upstate, we have training, and Occupy Farms can get you up there, and you don’t have to do this anymore.” I’ve had cops say to me, “You show me that, and we can have a conversation.” The existing system is just not that competitive. It’s more competitive than chaos, or anarchy or protest, sure. But how good, really, is our suburban lifestyle, or our urban-ish suburban existence? At some point, the other option is going to look better, and then the air starts coming out of the balloon.

How close are we to that point, do you think? 

DB: A lot of the software, for instance, is still a disaster in terms of usability and other capacities. That’s just where we are as a society. We’re using it at just about 5 percent capacity. But what’s fun about this stuff — and I think this is really how good software gets made — is that you cobble together solutions, and everything kind of sucks, and you evaluate how each piece works, and then you roll it all into one. If our movement worked like a big open-source software project, there would be an extensive wiki and forums and trainings to on-board people. There would be an issue-tracker and requests for help, for what you can do at various different engagement levels. An assembly could be happening in some place like Trenton, N.J., and someone there might say, “I work in case-tracking for a homeless shelter, and it would be better if x happened,” and then bam, it would be tagged in the minutes of the meeting, and the developers somewhere else would have a filter for whatever code was used to keep the minutes, and they’d implement the suggestion in the next update. That’s the type of performance we’re going to be able to achieve.

We’re not that far away from being able to allow people to unplug from the proprietary information ecosystem. And once we get there, we’re talking about real political change. The best part of the whole open-source thing is recognizing that we can see into the future and recognizing that it’s not all crazy. It’s just going to require a lot of people to work. And that makes it a lot easier to be an activist.

Image of Occupy Sandy volunteers by Erin O'Brien (Occupy Sandy Facebook page).  

 

This story originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.  

Stories are central to our existential job description: making sense of both the world and ourselves. From creation myths to scientific explanations, from political ideologies to the quirky narratives that knead our own amorphous lives into some kind of distinctive shape, stories are essential — not only because they nudge the disconnected bits of reality we face moment to moment into a plausible and graspable form, but because they go to the heart of our identity and purpose.

This goes for navigating our lives. But it also goes for changing the world.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says that life poses two fundamental questions —What are we willing to live for? What are we willing to die for? — he presupposes a story that makes these questions intelligible. For Dr. King, this story centered on a harrowing and improbable expedition to what he doggedly called the Beloved Community, a world where all human beings will one day sit at the same table, live together in The World House, and make good on the hunch that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. This story does not come with a warranty or scientific proof. Instead its truthfulness depends on how far we’re willing to go to embellish and inhabit it. This story’s power flows, not from its lyrical metaphors, but from its ongoing, risky embodiment.

The monumental challenges we face today — poverty and economic inequality, climate change, military intervention and surveillance, unjust immigration policies, handgun violence, white privilege and many others — resist transformation for many reasons, including the stubbornly enduring frames that keep them in place. The monumental change we need will hinge on a new way of looking at the world, and this in turn will be spurred on by powerful stories that bring that new worldview alive.

Violence draws life from the endless stories that push its power. But things can work the other way too. Stories of the nonviolent option can unexpectedly seep into our right brain, disturb the certitude of the violence operating system, and open breathing space. We are living in a time when, despite the tsunami of violence, we are hearing these counter-narratives more frequently. Part of the reason for this is that there is more nonviolent action than ever. But another is that we are on the lookout for these stories more than ever. When we put on the nonviolence eyewear and start poking around — as this site does — we start to see the power of nonviolent change everywhere.

One of our most powerful alternative storytellers is Terry Messman. Messman is the editor of Street Spirit, a monthly newspaper published by the American Friends Service Committee that is sold by 100 homeless vendors on the streets of Oakland, Calif. Reporting from “the shelters, back alleys, soup kitchen lines and slum hotels where mainstream reporters rarely or never visit,” the newspaper runs stories on homelessness, poverty, economic inequality and the daily grind of human rights violations that poor people face. But Street Spirit doesn’t simply deliver the grim news of poverty. It also chronicles and raises the visibility of the movement that is dramatically working for human and civil rights, challenging inequality, and demanding — and winning — change. This month’s issue, for example, features stories on the challenges and successes of the local anti-foreclosure movement, a campaign countering the erosion of the human rights of homeless people and on affordable housing for the growing senior population. Month after month for the last 17 years Street Spirit has been getting the story out on the reality of the structural violence and consequences of poverty, but also on campaigns that are challenging this reality.

Increasingly Street Spirit has highlighted the tools of powerful and audacious nonviolent movement-building, with extensive coverage of the Occupy movement and interviews with Erica Chenoweth (on the ground-breaking research that she and Maria Stephan published in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works demonstrating that nonviolent strategies are twice as likely to succeed than violent ones) and with nonviolent action campaigner and scholar George Lakey. Last month the newspaper profiled the Positive Peace Warrior Network and one of its key trainers, Kazu Haga, who was trained by Bernard Lafayette and is organizing a growing community of activists grounded in Kingian nonviolence. (Haga’s essay, “MLK’s final marching orders,” was published this week by Waging Nonviolence.) 

By documenting injustice and building the capacity of the movement for justice, Street Spirit not only spurs nonviolent action but also has become a form of action itself. Its reporting was instrumental in shutting down the East Bay Hospital in Richmond, Calif., which was a dumping ground for homeless, poor and severely disabled people by nine counties in the region and was responsible for widespread violations of low-income psychiatric patients.

Terry Messman has long integrated telling the story of nonviolent action with action itself. In the late 1970s he was a reporter in Montana sent out to cover a civil disobedience action at a U.S. Air Force base. A lone Lutheran minister had crossed the line at the base and was sitting in the driveway, awaiting arrest. Messman was so moved by this solitary witness that he dropped his reporter’s notebook and sat down next to him. He netted six months in federal prison for this action.

Not long after this I met Terry. He was leading nonviolence training at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where both of us were then studying. He and several other workshop facilitators were preparing a group to risk arrest at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nearby facility that had designed 50 percent of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. I was immediately struck by his vision of the power of nonviolence, especially his stress on it being active, audacious, challenging and dramatic. Struck by the picture he painted that morning, I shook off my hesitations about engaging in civil disobedience and took part in the action at the lab, which netted 30 of us a week in the county jail. For the next two years I essentially put my studies on the shelf and took action with Terry and the action group he had helped form named “Spirit Affinity Group” and, in effect, enrolled in Nonviolence 101 with Terry as teacher. Terry vividly and actively shared with me, and others, the story of nonviolent change, rooted in the vision of Gandhi, Dr. King, Dorothy Day and a rebellious, law-breaking Jesus, whom the theologian and activist John Dear would later characterize as a “one-person crime wave.” But Terry’s story of the power of nonviolent transformation was rooted not only in studying history but also in a series of actions he had taken throughout the western United States. This story — reinforced by the string of nonviolent actions that we organized and participated in together — was gradually changing me.

After years of anti-nuclear activism, Terry brought this spirit to his work challenging poverty and homelessness in Oakland in the late 1980s. He and others formed the Union of the Homeless that launched an action campaign that included occupying — and winning — an unused federal building and occupying a series of homes that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had repossessed and was essentially turning over to real estate speculators. They won these homes for poor and homeless families, including a house that Terry and members of the movement (including myself) occupied overnight one time. (I will never forget a large Oakland police officer at 4 a.m. kicking open the room I was sleeping in and dragging me off with the others to jail.)

Through it all, Terry was telling the story. Two decades ago I interviewed Terry and his colleagues about their campaign, which by then had mobilized government support to build housing, a childcare center with a Head Start program and a multi-service center supporting homeless people, all run by a nonprofit organization whose board was predominantly homeless people. In one of the interviews Terry said, “We did a four-year series of nonviolent direct actions. And all we did in the early years was say, ‘We’re going to go to jail for two or three years, and then we’re going to have housing.’ Which was a totally magical prescription that we just said… And it was really something, that power of belief. We just kept saying that all over the community.”

This story — this magical prescription — was key to driving the dramatic actions that created change. Now, all these years later, Terry is still at it as he continues to call out the myriad of ways homeless people are dehumanized and excluded, but also continues to report in a detailed and thoughtful way the stories of the movement that is challenging this dehumanization and exclusion. While Street Spirit is Oakland-based, all of us everywhere can all draw new life every month from this powerful platform that’s getting the story out for justice and nonviolent transformation.

This post originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.

Last week President Obama nominated his counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. Though some civil liberties groups and other critics have raised questions about Brennan’s involvement in the CIA’s practice of torture during the Bush administration, relatively less has been said about his primarily responsibility during President Obama’s first term: accelerating and institutionalizing the U.S. drones program and its “disposition matrix” — as the government’s sanitizing parlance puts it — which has included setting weekly drone kill lists.

Politicians and the mainstream press have generally reacted warmly to Brennan’s nomination, especially in contrast to President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Defense, former Senator Chuck Hagel, who is considered suspect by some in the foreign policy establishment because he opposed the Iraq War and is said to harbor anti-war sentiments rooted in his service during the Vietnam War.

While we will have to wait to see if Hagel’s reluctance to take the U.S. into war pans out, there is no doubt about Brennan’s trajectory. As a Washington Postseries last October highlighted (which I commented on here), Brennan has created a powerful new system that fuses drone technology, satellite surveillance and massive databases to target and kill persons of interest globally, with the capacity to cross borders at will. An international law expert at the University of Notre Dame, Mary Ellen O’Connell, has urged the Senate to vote against Brennan on the grounds that the drone program is among “the most highly unlawful and immoral practices the United States has ever undertaken.” By tapping Brennan to direct the CIA, President Obama has signaled his commitment to an expanded role for remote warfare, targeted assassinations, comprehensive surveillance and an even greater projection and reach of U.S. military power.

That’s why what took place in a courtroom in California the day after Brennan’s nomination is significant.

Five activists were arraigned last week in federal court on charges stemming from a peaceful demonstration at Beale Air Force Base north of Sacramento, Calif., protesting drone warfare last October. Rev. Sharon Delgado, Jan Hartsough, David Hartsough, Jane Kesselman and Shirley Osgood were charged with unlawfully entering the Beale facility to protest the base’s drone fleet and will be headed to trial in April. (Four others were arrested but their charges were dropped.)

This small but significant action was part of a growing movement intent on alerting, educating and mobilizing the public to take stock of — and reject — the new world of remote control surveillance and control that is rapidly coming into being. This movement recognizes that the United States has crossed a line by institutionalizing drone-centric warfare and, even more ominously, is well on its way to creating a global culture in which remote aircraft will be as natural as the air we breathe. Brennan’s likely ascension to the job of the nation’s top spymaster and covert operations czar — especially in a period when the CIA has been fielding its own drones operation — makes this more likely than ever.

A drone culture is a chilling prospect. It promises to dramatically escalate a trend that the United States has been pursuing since the inception of the national security state in the late 1940s: military superiority through surveillance — beginning with U-2 flights, the SR-71 Blackbird and the NAV-STAR satellite system — and land-, sea- and air-based weapons systems. Its logic is to establish a regime of incontestable control and to create a comprehensive, remote and automated war-fighting capability.

This has profound geopolitical implications. But it also threatens something even more monumental: the increasing depersonalization and dehumanization not only of warfare but, more generally, of social organization and interaction. The terror of the Atomic Age was the potential for the annihilation of life in a matter of hours or days after a nuclear exchange. The terror of the Drone Age is living under systems of control over the course of one’s whole life. Such a regime could operationalize — and give factual bite to — George W. Bush’s pithy declaration, “You are either with us or against us.” The disposition matrix of the near future will have the capacity to more and more finely divide us into “us” and “them.” What is being worked out today over the skies of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen — with all of its attendant horror and bloodshed on the ground — will likely be applied far and wide.

All of this will be deemed “legal.” And, if allowed to proceed unhindered, will eventually pass largely out of the hands of human minders. But that’s inherent in its logic. Drones carry on the radical detachment between cause and effect that high-altitude bombers introduced during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. With the horror unseen, one could increasingly accelerate the age-old tactic of dehumanizing the opponent. In the Drone Age, the ultimate dream is to hand this task entirely off to software so that no human fingerprints are even found on the human wreckage it leaves in its path.

But there are still fingerprints — and that may be part of our salvation. My colleague Friar Louie Vitale (one of those arrested but not charged at Beale) has been part of the anti-drones movement for several years. He recently told me about a time he was vigiling at a major drone base as the employees were headed home for the day. While he stood there with a sign, a man on a motorcycle pulled over to chat. He said he was a captain who had flown a lot of missions, and now was “flying” drones sitting at a monitor with a joystick. He spoke matter-of-factly about conducting these operations. Nothing unnerved him about what he was doing, he said — except when what he called CIV CAVS (“civilian casualties”) were involved. When that happens, he told Louie, he couldn’t sleep.

Or, as another younger pilot Louie met on another occasion simply said, “I can’t stand what I’m doing!”

Do those who order these attacks sleep at night? For that matter, do we? The drone system is designed to keep our sleep untroubled. But there are some among us who have decided to wake up, like the five going to court in April, and to in turn invite us to do the same.

What if more of us wiped the sleep from our eyes and decided that we will do everything in our power to pull back from the horrific terrain we have let our policy-makers enter? It is time to deepen and broaden this movement for human rights. We could become part of Drones Watch or Code Pink. We could read Medea Benjamin’s book, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. We could put ending the “disposition matrix” on the agenda of our organizations. We could ask our religious communities to spend some of their moral capital in standing for a more ethical future, including signing onto “A Call from the Faith-Based Community to Stop Drone Killings.” We could take action like the Beale Five — who will face a maximum sentence of six months in jail and a $5,000 fine when they head to trial in April — or like Brian Terrell, who is currently serving a prison sentence for nonviolently resisting drones.

We could also investigate — and begin to resist — our local connections to the drone system. In 1988, as part of the U.S. Central America Peace Movement, the Pledge of Resistance organized the “Military Connections Campaign,” which identified how local military facilities and corporations were supporting this policy. We organized hundreds of coordinated actions with the slogan “Stopping the war starts here.” It may be time to ask, “What’s our local connection to the emerging drone culture?”

There are likely many local connections, which could be the basis of a nationwide campaign to help the nation make a decision for a world free of drones and the dehumanizing culture they portend.

Image by World Can't Wait, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

This post originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.  

A year ago around this time, Occupy Wall Street was celebrating Advent — the season when Christians anticipate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. In front of Trinity Church, right at the top of Wall Street along Broadway, Occupiers set up a little model tent with the statuettes of a nativity scene inside: Mary, Joseph and the Christ child in a manger, surrounded by animals. In the back, an angel held a tiny cardboard sign with a verse from Luke’s Gospel: “There was no room for them in the inn.” The reason for these activists’ interest in the liturgical calendar, of course, was the movement’s ongoing effort to convince Trinity to start acting less like a real estate corporation and more like a church, and to let the movement use a vacant property that Trinity owns.

A year later, even as a resilient few continue their 24-hour vigil on the sidewalk outside Trinity, churches and Occupiers are having a very different kind of Advent season together. Finding room in churches is no longer a problem for the movement.

The day after Hurricane Sandy struck New York in late October, Occupiers hustled to organize a massive popular relief effort, and Occupy Sandy came into being. By circumstance and necessity, it has mostly taken place in churches; they are the large public spaces available in affected areas, and they were the people willing to open their doors. Two churches on high ground in Brooklyn became organizing hubs, and others in the Rockaways, Coney Island, Staten Island and Red Hook became depots for getting supplies and support to devastated neighborhoods. To make this possible, Occupiers have had to win the locals’ trust — by helping clean up the damaged churches and by showing their determination to help those whom the state-sponsored relief effort was leaving behind. When the time for worship services came around, they’d cleared the supplies off the pews.

“Occupy Sandy has been miraculous for us, really,” said Bob Dennis, parish manager at St. Margaret Mary, a Catholic church in Staten Island. “They are doing exactly what Christ preached.” Before this, the police and firemen living in his neighborhood hadn’t had much good to say about Occupy Wall Street, but that has changed completely.

Religious leaders are organizing tours to show off the Occupy Sandy relief efforts of which they’ve been a part, and they’re speaking out against the failures of city, state and federal government. Congregations are getting to know Occupiers one on one by working together in a relief effort that every day — as the profiteering developers draw nearer — is growing into an act of resistance.

And that’s only one part of it. Months before Sandy, organizers with the Occupy Wall Street group Strike Debt made a concerted effort to reach out to religious allies for help on a new project they were calling the Rolling Jubilee; by buying up defaulted loans for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishing them, organizers hoped to spread the spirit of jubilee — an ancient biblical practice of debt forgiveness.

The religious groups jumped at the chance to help. Occupy Faith organized an event in New York to celebrate the Rolling Jubilee’s launch. Occupy Catholics (of which I am a part) took the opportunity to reclaim the Catholic concepts of jubilee and usury for the present economic crisis and released a statement in support of the Rolling Jubilee that has been signed by Catholics across the country.

The Rolling Jubilee idea has been hugely successful, raising more money more quickly than anyone anticipated — around $10 million in debt is poised to be abolished. But now Strike Debt, too, has turned its attention to working with those affected by the hurricane. On Dec. 2, the group published “Shouldering the Costs,” a report on the proliferation of debt in the aftermath of Sandy. The document was released with an event at — where else? — a church in Staten Island.

This newfound access to religious real estate is not merely a convenience for this movement; it has implications that a lot of people probably aren’t even thinking about yet. Occupy Wall Street has learned from the Egyptian Revolution before, and now, even if by accident, it is doing so again.

While Tahrir Square was still full of tents and tanks, and Hosni Mubarak was still in power, the editors of Adbusters magazine were already imagining a “Million Man March on Wall Street,” the idea that led to what would become their July 13, 2011, call to #occupywallstreet. More than a year after the occupation at Zuccotti Park began, though, and nearly two years after crowds first filled Tahrir, neither revolt very much resembles its origins. The Egyptian Revolution, first provoked by tech-savvy young activists, has now been hijacked as a coup for the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative religious party; its only viable challenger is none other than Mubarak’s ancien regime, minus only Mubarak himself. Occupy, meanwhile, has lost its encampments and, despite whatever evidence there is to the contrary, most of its enemies in power deem it no longer a threat.

Among many U.S. activists even today, the dream of creating a Tahrir-sized rupture in this country persists — of finally drawing enough people into the streets and causing enough trouble to make Wall Street cower. But what if something on the scale of Tahrir really were to happen in the United States? What would be the outcome?

I was thinking of this question recently while on an unrelated reporting mission at a massive evangelical Christian megachurch near the Rocky Mountains. Several thousand (mostly white, upper-middle-class) people were there that day, of all ages. They had come back after Sunday morning services for an afternoon series of talks on philosophy — far more people than attend your average Occupy action.

Every time I step foot in one of these places, it strikes me how they put radicals in the United States to shame. These churches organize real, life-giving mutual aid as the basis of an independent political discourse and power base. Church membership is far larger, for instance, than that of unions in this country.

If there were a sudden, Tahrir-like popular uprising right now, with riots in all the cities and so forth, I can’t help but think that it would be organizations like the church I went to that would come out taking power in the end, even more so than they already do — just as the Islamists have in Egypt.

If the idea of occupying symbolic public space was the Egyptians’ first lesson for Occupy Wall Street, this is the second: Win religion over before it beats you out.

Through religion, again and again, people in the United States have organized for power. Religion is also the means by which many imagine and work for a world more just than this one. Just about every successful popular movement in U.S. history has had to recognize this, from the American Revolution to labor, and from civil rights to today’s campaigners for marriage equality — and now Occupy.

When I stop by the Occupy Sandy hub near my house — the Episcopal church of St. Luke and St. Matthew — and join the mayhem of volunteers carrying boxes this way and that, and poke my head into the upper room full of laptops and organizers around a long table, and see Occupiers in line for communion at Sunday services, I keep thinking of how Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program ends. The 12th step is where you cap off all the self-involved inner work you’ve been doing, and get over yourself for a bit, and heal yourself by helping someone else.

Anyone who has been around Occupy Wall Street during the year since its eviction from Zuccotti Park knows it has been in need of healing. Whether through flood-soaked churches, or on the debt market, this is how the Occupy movement has always been at its best, and its most exciting, and its most necessary: When it shows people how to build their own power, and to strengthen their own communities, this movement finds itself.

Image by Poster Boy NYC, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

This post originally appeared at WagingNonviolence.org.  

For Mahoma Lopez, a long-time restaurant worker in New York City, it came down to a decision between fight and flight. Last fall, his boss at the cafe on the Upper East Side where Lopez had worked for years began cutting hours and screaming at his employees, withholding overtime pay and threatening to fire anyone who complained. Being Mexican-born and with halting English, Lopez had been in this position before. Time after time, he’d quit; to be a proud man in his industry required a fair number of employment changes.

“Hot and Crusty —” Lopez said, smiling as he began the story of his most recent employer, one in a chain of cheap, 24-hour eateries sprinkled across Manhattan. Lopez leaned back in the flimsy chair of the pizzeria a few blocks from his Queens apartment. With his large stomach thrust forward and his wide cheeks covered in a trimmed beard, the 34-year-old looked stately, almost regal. 

“In December, the campaign began underground,” he said.

Last month, Lopez and his co-workers at the Hot and Crusty on 63rd St. won a suspenseful and highly atypical 11-month labor campaign. The battle pitted 23 foreign-born restaurant workers, supported by a volunteer organizing center and members of Occupy Wall Street, against a corporate restaurant chain backed by a multimillion dollar private equity investment firm. The campaign itself was filled with enough twists, betrayals and finally triumphs to be the subject of an upcoming documentary,Cafe Wars (check out the trailer, below). Yet the story of Mahoma Lopez’s own year-long evolution from an employee to an organizer exemplifies the new, dynamic direction of the U.S. labor movement that appears to be on the brink of resurgence.

Lopez has a friendly disposition, which he employs in conversation to smooth over whatever difficulties have come his way. Crossing the Mexican-American border with a coyote — a smuggler of migrants — was no big deal, he says, even though the coyote was detained and imprisoned at the border, leaving 18-year-old Lopez in charge of the rest of the group once they reached Texas. Lopez also talks about his father’s early death deftly, explaining that it left him a good job as a gas station attendant, which Lopez assumed when he was 13. His relaxed demeanor didn’t inure him to things like chaotic protests; as a boy growing up in Mexico City, he was generally against marches.

“I thought: The people are crazy,” he remembered.

His aversion to chanting crowds doesn’t mean that Lopez can’t be rash and impulsive in his own life. “Me enojé” — which means “I got angry” in Spanish — is frequently his answer for why he made various life decisions, from quitting unpleasant jobs to immigrating to the U.S. But what Lopez sees in himself as recklessness, labor organizer Virgilio Aran sees as the type of pride and steadfast character that can make someone a good organizer.

“He’s very disciplined, that’s one of the most important qualities,” said Aran, who became involved in the Hot and Crusty campaign at the end of 2011. “He has been developing throughout the campaign, but I think that quality came with him before I met him.”

The beginning 

Aran, who co-founded the Laundry Workers Center along with his wife, Rosanna Rodriguez, first heard about Hot and Crusty when he received a call from one of Lopez’s co-workers, a man named Omar. At that point, the campaign was in its “super-secret” infancy. It consisted only of Lopez and two others, Gretel Areco and Gonzalo Jimenez, encouraging trusted co-workers to call the city Labor Board’s anonymous hotline. This, at first, was about as radical an action as Lopez was willing to take against his boss’s threats and frequent tirades. Omar hadn’t yet been vetted, and his unsolicited offer to call Aran put Lopez in a panic.

The moment was one of Lopez’s first brushes with the heart-racing anxiety that can come with organizing. By the end of the campaign, it would become a frequent sensation.

As it turned out, Omar was trustworthy, and Aran was one of the city’s best unaffiliated labor organizers. The newly-formed Laundry Workers Center was looking for its first campaign — although, as the group’s name implies, Aran had been eying the city’s notoriously exploitative laundry industry, not the low-wage restaurant business. Aran began an eight-week political education crash-course for the Hot and Crusty workers, and Lopez became his most curious and determined pupil. As the New Year approached, few could expect what was on the horizon — both for the Hot and Crusty campaign and on the national scene.

For the labor movement, 2012 began with all the paralysis of an election year, combined with the gloomy disappointment of the failed Scott Walker recall campaign in Wisconsin six months earlier. To many grassroots activists, organized labor was too lumbering and bureaucratic; to nearly everyone else, it was a pension-hungry special interest group that no longer belonged in today’s economic reality.

By the end of the year, however, labor had re-established itself through the popular teachers’ strike in Chicago, the first successful strikes at Walmart stores and warehouses in its 50-year history, the world’s largest private employer, the airport workers’ Thanksgiving Day walkouts at LAX, and the beginnings of an ambitious campaign to unionize employees at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food chains in New York City. The movement seemed invigorated, bursting with new leaders — and nowhere was this rapid transformation happening faster than at the fringes of the labor world, where the organizing could be focused on worker empowerment rather than continually being constrained by restrictive labor laws.

“The places I see [exciting organizing] happening most consistently are on what we would call the margins of the former labor movement,” writes Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer and author of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. This, she explains, “is in a lot of the immigrant organizing.”

On a blistering cold day in late January, smack in the middle of Manhattan, Mahoma Lopez and his small cadre of co-workers and volunteer organizers went public with a 50-person march to his Hot and Crusty store, where Lopez delivered a list of demands to a stunned manager.

“For me, that was one of the most incredible moments,” Lopez remembered. He confessed to being so nervous that, nearly one year later, he couldn’t quite believe that it had been he who delivered “la carta de demandas.”

The stakes 

Compared to the scale of the teachers’ strike or the snowballing Walmart walkouts that would erupt less than six months later, the Hot and Crusty fight was minuscule. Yet, the backdrop — the Manhattan food-service industry — was a microcosm of today’s highly globalized and highly unequal economic system.

Combined, the city’s tens of thousands of restaurants net an annual profit of more than $12 billion, according to the New York State Restaurant Association. Inside the sector’s hierarchy, however, this wealth hardly trickles down. The majority of the jobs the industry produces are low-wage, no-benefit positions that are overwhelmingly held by immigrants, about a third of whom are undocumented. According to a 2005 study, 60 percent of surveyed workers reported their bosses violating overtime laws, and one-third reported being verbally abused at work.

Mexican workers like Mahoma Lopez often endure the most exploitative conditions. According to a 2010 New York Times investigation, Mexican men are more likely to be employed in the restaurant industry than any other ethnic group, including American-born workers, in part because fear of deportation and desperate economic need makes them unlikely to report below-minimum-wage pay or workplace abuse.

While this addiction to cheap labor drives down wages throughout the industry, investors and private equity firms end up accumulating much of the resulting profits. The chain that includes Lopez’s Hot and Crusty is owned by Praesidian Capital, a $700 million company with a white South African operating partner named Mark Samson. To the Hot and Crusty workers and supporting organizers, Samson — living in a high-rise around the corner from the restaurant — became the symbol of the industry’s power imbalance. Rumors flew about his investing practices and his numerous chains of restaurants. But the bottom line that sparked the labor struggle wasn’t jealousy over Samson’s and other investors’ tax filings — it was their labor practices.

“It doesn’t matter how rich you are, it matters what type of situation you’re putting the workers’ lives in,” said Diego Ibanez, a volunteer organizer who worked with Lopez and Aran to plan actions throughout the Hot and Crusty struggle.

The campaign 

After that first freezing march, the escalation on both sides was fierce. The employees organized and won an independent workers’ association recognized by the National Labor Relations Board in May. They received tens of thousands of dollars in back pay, only to learn that the company decided to close the store in retaliation against the newly formed workers’ association. At that point, the legal handbook went out the window, and Lopez’s impulsiveness became indispensable. Far from being against a noisy protest, Lopez now hungered for it.

“Organizers like to joke about the most radical things we could do, and he always liked those conversations,” said Ibanez. When we joked about occupying the workplace, and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do that.’ He liked the possibilities of escalation.”

On August 31, the day the manager came to inform Lopez that the store was to be closed — a decision made weeks earlier — Lopez, his co-workers and a handful of community members rushed into the restaurant and prevented its closure by holding a workers’ assembly. The action resulted in multiple arrests and kicked off a picket line and a week-long sidewalk cafe that, fittingly enough, opened for (free) business on Labor Day.

The back-and-forth continued. Finally the company relented, only to reveal that unpaid rent had soured the relationship with the landlord, who wouldn’t renew the lease. The workers’ picket stretched into its second month, straining finances and spreading fatigue. Still, Lopez remained a bedrock of the campaign.

At one point, his financial situation had become so precarious that Virgilio Aran found Lopez — who has a wife and two sons to support — a part-time job, which kept him away from the picket line for the first time since it began.

“The first day that he went to the part-time job, one of his co-workers stayed at the picket line himself,” said Aran. “Mahoma called me that night and he said, ‘I won’t take the job. That was my first and last day.

“‘We’re here in the struggle for the victory, and the picket line is more important than getting some type of income,’” Aran remembered Lopez saying. “That’s his character.”

Finally, in late October, the company ceded to the workers’ demands — agreeing to reopen the store, recognize the workers’ association and sign a collective-bargaining agreement that included paid vacation and sick time for the workers, required wage increases, a grievance and arbitration procedure, and a union hiring hall that gives the association the power to hire new employees. That night, after Lopez learned that he had finally won, he sat down and called every single organizer and thanked them.

The next week, as he waited for the store to reopen, Lopez became the newest volunteer organizer with Laundry Workers’ Center. According to Aran, Lopez is now one of the lead organizers on another underground labor campaign.

But, like any seasoned organizer, if you ask Mahoma Lopez about the new campaign, he won’t reveal a word.

Photo by Workers of Hot and Crusty. Used with permission.

Cafe Wars Trailer from Robin Blotnick on Vimeo.

This post originally appeared at Waging Nonviolence.  

“We are standing up to live better,” say Walmart’s retail workers, playfully twisting Walmart’s slogan of “live better” into a rallying cry for better conditions and treatment. In a taste of what the nation’s largest retailer can expect on Black Friday, frustrated Walmart workers have again started walking off their jobs to protest their employer’s attempts to silence outspoken workers.

Workers from both the retail and warehouse sectors of Walmart’s supply chain have called for nation-wide protests, strikes and actions on, and leading up to, next Friday — the busiest shopping day of the year. In the past week, wildcat strikes in Dallas, Seattle and the Bay Area saw dozens of retail workers — from multiple store — walk away from their shifts, suggesting that the Black Friday threats are to be taken seriously.

Dan Schlademan, Director of the Making Change at Walmart campaign, said in a nation-wide conference call organized for media on Thursday that Walmart can expect more than 1,000 different protests, including strikes and rallies at Walmart stores between now and Black Friday.

According to organizers working with the Walmart retail workers’ association, OUR Walmart, stores around the country — including, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Washington D.C. and others — can expect workers to go on strike. Specific dates have not been announced yet out of concern to minimize chances for Walmart to preemptively silence workers’ voices.

“We are expecting a wide variety of activity — strikers right in front of their stores, demonstrations, flash mobs, rallies and people working to educate customers — I think it’s going to be a very creative day.” said Schlademan. “Brave strikers are seeing a huge amount of support from community allies.”

As Waging Nonviolence has previously reported, the historic wildcat strikes are invigorating a new form of labor organizing of non-union labor. By drawing on the support of community allies — particularly from religious and student groups — workers are finding it increasingly easier to resist their employer’s abuses.

In addition to joining striking workers at rallies at Walmart stores, supporters are able to donate to Making Change at Walmart to help the striking low-wage workers make up lost wages. In the form of food gift cards, the community support organization Making Change at Walmart is providing concrete ways for others to be in solidarity with Walmart’s workers. Thus far, $25,000 has been raised.

But this kind of grassroots support pales in comparison to the revenue and capital at Walmart’s disposal. Some Walmart executives are making upwards of $10 million a year while full-time retail workers struggle to make ends meet. Sara Gilbert, a customer service manager at a Seattle Walmart, makes only $14,000 a year to support her family.

“I work full time for one of the richest companies in the world and yet my children are on state healthcare and we get subsidized housing,” said Gilbert who joined other OUR Walmart associates in Seattle’s walkout on Thursday. Walmart posted almost $16 billion in profits last year and recently announced changes to employee healthcare premiums that could raise the cost for workers as much as 36 percent.

Also back in the struggle against Walmart are its warehouse workers. On November 14, the Inland Empire, Calif., warehouse workers — who are privately contracted through the logistics company NFI but move 100 percent Walmart goods — resumed their strike due to retaliations against outspoken workers. The workers were part of the 15-day strike in mid-September that re-ignited workers’ efforts to change Walmart’s treatment of its employees.

David Garcia, a warehouse worker from Southern California who took part in the first strike, was recently terminated for speaking out against unsafe working conditions and broken equipment. According to Elizabeth Brennan, an organizer with Warehouse Workers United with whom the NFI workers are affiliated, about three dozen workers have had their hours cut while others have been demoted and suspended in retaliatory efforts from Walmart’s contractor to curb organizing efforts.

“It’s been tough,” said Garcia. “My kids need food, school supplies and an apartment to sleep in at night, but right now it is difficult to provide them these basic things.”

On Thursday, six community supporters were arrested for blocking a major thoroughfare to the Walmart-contracted warehouse. The two dozen striking warehouse workers returned to work on November 16.

The Inland Empire strike, which still demands an end to unsafe working conditions, retaliatory practices and poor wages, comes during a crucial time when much of Walmart’s supply chain is moving into high gear. It remains unclear whether the strikes and walkouts will generate enough pressure to force Walmart to systematically change how it treats its 1.4 million employees, but the Walmart workers movement seems to be spreading and growing.

The Corporate Action Network is hosting online activism for supporters as well as publicizing some of the events planned at Walmart stores for Black Friday. While some activists for workers’ rights and just wages advocate boycotting Walmart and shopping on Black Friday in general, Making Change at Walmart has not called for boycotts but affirms all efforts that support workers’ rights to assemble and speak out.

Charlene Fletcher, a Walmart employee in California plans to go on strike to emphasize her message that Walmart is not listening to its workers. Fletcher and her husband both have to work Thanksgiving Day for Walmart and will miss spending the holiday with their two young children. Complaints have alleged that Walmart’s scheduling practices have made it very difficult for families to spend time with each other on holidays like Thanksgiving when Walmart plans to open its doors to shoppers that evening. Fletcher wants Walmart executives to know that Walmart’s employees are just as important as its customers.

“We are going to make the ultimate sacrifice,” said Fletcher who is also a part of OUR Walmart. “By going on strike on the busiest shopping day of the year, we hope to send a message out to Walmart that we are not a small percentage of workers who are struggling and that we mean business.”

Image by Walmart Corporate, licensed under Creative Commons.    

 

 

---

 

And check out this video from OUR Walmart, "Why Are We Standing Up to Live Better?"