On May 14, 2000, massive numbers of people, fed up with a recent string of school shootings, descended on Washington DC to rally for common sense gun laws. This movement started with practically no funding, no central organization, no TV ads, no direct mail budget, no email database, and no social media websites like Facebook yet in existence. Yet, somehow, in just nine months, the Million Mom March was able mobilize more than 850,000 people to participate nationally — with our help.

How did we do it?

May 14, 2010 was the 10th anniversary of the Million Mom March, an organization advocating sensible gun control laws and one of Abstract Edge’s first clients. Founded in September 1999, the MMM became perhaps the first mass grassroots movement of the Internet era, mobilizing more than 850,000 people to march on Washington on Mother Day 2000 and in smaller, local marches throughout the US.

When the MMM founders first came to us, we had to figure out exactly how we were going to engage and motivate hundreds of thousands of people in only nine months. This was quite a challenge and success was hardly guaranteed. We weren’t simply asking them to write letters or send a check; we were asking them to travel to Washington and spend their Mothers Day at a rally to fight for a cause.

This was no small task. At that point there was no “formal” MMM organization or central office. The entire organization pretty much consisted of just a small handful of New Jersey soccer moms and a vision.

More through link.

I wrote this over at my “main” blog. Feel free to check it out if you’re following this topic.

About a month ago, the folks over at Adbusters (a great alternative media source) released a call to arms of sorts, for American radicals and dissidents:

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Drawing parallels to the Arab spring and Tahrir square, several Twitter accounts emerged which have served to “educate, organize, agitate,” including@OccupyWallSt, @radleft, and @USDayOfRage. They work to conjurer up images of a new American revolution, going beyond the disillusionment shared by most Americans and still yet something greater than a leftist response to the right’s  hysteria last year (see  the Glen Beck rally and other Tea Party outings).

Motivated by class-conscious resentment, they are spurred forward by popular support for Wikileaks and the vacuum of criticism for Anonymous. They echo the lingo of a movement which has been asleep for nearly forty years, with various self-drafted radical slogans; some tired (“We are witnessing the death of neoliberalism!“), some inane (“Ideology offers ppl the illusion of identity, dignity, & morality, while making it easier to part with them“). But their weakness is also their strength: the New Left of the past fell apart from in-fighting, nit-picking on it’s internal doctrine, and strict organizational structures. Horizontal coordination on the web and greater latitude for communication has created the illusion of strength in numbers. It’s difficult to say how many have committed  to the planned demonstration/occupation. There are still bigger problems on the horizon for these organizers. I believe they are setting themselves up for failure – whether this is the “perceived failure” of Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan which leads to majority support, or a catastrophic embarrassment which further illegitimizes  the American left, I don’t know. Here are the reasons why.

click thru for the rest.

Two grandmothers, two priests and a nun were sentenced in federal court in Tacoma, WA Monday March 28, 2011, for confronting hundreds of US nuclear weapons stockpiled for use by the deadly Trident submarines.

Sentenced were: Sr. Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart sister from New York, who was ordered to serve 2 months in federal prison and 4 months electronic home confinement; Fr. Bill Bischel, 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma Washington, ordered to serve 3 months in prison and 6 months electronic home confinement; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore, Maryland, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton Washington, ordered to serve 6 months in federal prison; and Fr. Steve Kelly, 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland California, ordered to serve 15 months in federal prison. They were also ordered to pay $5300 each and serve an additional year in supervised probation. Bischel and Greenwald are active members of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a community resisting Trident nuclear weapons since 1977. 

What did they do?

In the darkness of All Souls night, November 2, 2009, the five quietly cut through a chain link perimeter fence topped with barbed wire. 

More through link.

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

Blind-sided by security officers who pounced upon him, Mr. McGovern remarked, as he was hauled out the door, “So this is America?” Mr. McGovern is covered with bruises, lacerations and contusions inflicted in the assault.

Mr. McGovern is being represented by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “It is the ultimate definition of lip service that Secretary of State Clinton would be trumpeting the U.S. government’s supposed concerns for free speech rights and this man would be simultaneously brutalized and arrested for engaging in a peaceful act of dissent at her speech,” stated attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the PCJF.

Mr. McGovern now works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Video and pictures through link.

Ray McGovern is also an author for Common Dreams. More of his works are available here.  

socialisimo:

An extraordinary thing has happened. In Egypt, a million-strong movement forced the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government, even though the state had pulled the plug on the internet. After over a week without reliable access to their Facebook profiles, the people of Egypt did not abandon their revolution. They have forced concessions from the government and sent shock waves through the region - without firm help from Twitter. What on earth is going on?

Despite what you might hear on the news, there’s a lot more to the recent uprisings than just the knock-on effects of social media. As the world’s press has struggled to retain control of the narrative, it has seized on how many of the dissidents are - gasp - organising online.

In what appears to be dogged unwillingness to recognise the economic brutality of governments as the root cause of popular unrest, news people everywhere have boggled exhaustively over the way in which protesters in Cairo, Tunis, Paris and London are using the internet to communicate. What did they think we were going to use - smoke signals?

Of course, technology has been a shaping force in these uprisings. The internet is a fascinating and useful tool, the best we have for organising and sharing information.

The low cost of participation in digital networks allows protesters to circumvent the sometimes arthritic hierarchies of the old far left and to organise horizontally, while the instant dissemination of camera and video footage and reportage from citizen journalists means that the truth can travel around the world before government propaganda gets its boots on. This has allowed the protests to grow and evolve faster than anyone expected.

While this is pretty obvious to early adopters and anyone who isn’t a tech “laggard”, it’s important to note that the technology gap still in force in many regions and areas where such conditions would warrant an insurrection or popular revolt. So we’ll probably hear this reminder several more times as new tools for social change emerge and are disseminated to other peoples as they inherit the technologies of the developed world.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that — not me.”

More through link. Don’t forget to check out From Dictatorship to Democracy.

Why the Egyptian dissent will not spread across the Gaza border:

Human Right Watch (HRW) said PA policemen were joined by detectives, preventive security force personnel and others from general intelligence, “all of them plainclothesmen.” They beat, kicked and dragged demonstrators away violently. Numerous arrests were made. Photograph-taking was prohibited. Cell phones and cameras were confiscated, and PA forces videotaped events, wanting activists identified for later arrests and detentions.

Their numbers, however, grew to about 2,000, marching and chanting the slogan heard in Tunisia and Egypt:

“The people want the fall of the regime….The people want the fall of Abbas,” and an end to the internal Palestinian “inqisam (rift)!….Raise your voice, Arab masses! Dignity or death, we need a true unity!” Two (unnamed) “well-known” Fatah members joined them in solidarity.

On February 5, hundreds of Bil’in residents, joined by international and Israeli supporters, protested in solidarity with Egyptians and Tunisians. Calling for national unity, Israeli troops attacked them with tear gas and concussion grenades.

Gathering in Bil’in center for their weekly Friday demonstration, they marched toward Israel’s Separation Wall, what they call the Annexation Wall on village land. Their public statement said:

1. “We salute the Egyptian and Tunisian people” in solidarity with their struggle for freedom;
2. “We call for national unity and the preservation of civil peace (to) pass this historic stage successfully;”
3. “We hope that rebelling Arab people make it their priority to demand from any government or leadership to come to sever their ties with the Israeli occupation and abandon the Egyptian - Israeli peace treaty” that ignored Palestinian people, leaving them occupied and repressed under militarized harshness.
4. “We call on all free nations in the world” to rally in solidarity with Arab people struggling to be free.

From his perspective, Omar Barghouti, a founder and director of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, expressed no surprise how PA forces reacted, saying:

“Unelected, authoritarian regimes tend to stand together. They are very scared of popular mobilization especially in light of the Palestine Papers. (They) agree on repression and have no interest in empowerment of people or mobilization.”

On February 10, Haaretz writer Gideon Levy headlined, “The Middle East does not need stability,” saying:

When children throw stones at tanks entering neighborhoods it’s called “Disturbing the peace.” When they’re detained for resisting occupation, it’s called “Restoring order.”

“The occupier oppresses, the occupied people overcome their instincts and their struggle, and good order is maintained - for now. Stability.”

More from Steven Lendmen through the link. 

redguard:

AN URGENT APPEAL TO THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT:

EGYPT IS AN ANTIWAR ISSUE!
IT IS TIME TO TAKE TO THE STREETS!
PROTEST THE U.S.-BACKED MUBARAK DICTATORSHIP

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 4, 
STARTING AT 3:30 PM –
COME AFTER WORK –

TIMES SQUARE, NYC 
42ND AND 7TH AVE.

MARCH at 5:30 PM to the 
Egyptian Mission to the UN 
44th St & 2nd Ave.

We have marched by the thousands, and sometimes in the hundreds of thousands against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time has come for us to march in those same numbers with every bit as much purpose and obligation to demand an end to the U.S.-Pentagon backed Mubarak dictatorship.

We must march to support the Egyptian revolution against dictatorship, brutal repression and poverty.

But the struggle to end the U.S-backed Mubarak dictatorship is not only the responsibility of the Egyptian people; it is every bit as much the responsibility of the U.S. antiwar movement.

Why is the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department and the entire military, intelligence, and foreign policy apparatus of the US, frantically trying to crush the revolution sweeping the Middle East?

The answer is simple and clearly understood by all who understand what it is that makes U.S. imperialism’s policy of war and occupation from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Palestine and beyond, possible.

The U.S. war and occupation policy is not sustainable without effective control over Egypt and its military. The U.S. armed regimes and militaries of Egypt and Israel are the two biggest pillars of U.S policy in the region.

Don’t be confused by the deceptive and false statements uttered by President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Roddam Clinton suggesting that they have sympathy for Egyptians fighting for liberation and jobs in Tahrir Square. 

Don’t doubt for a moment that U.S. officials who are in close contact with the Egyptian police and military are complicit in the fascist attack on Egyptian demonstrators on Wed., Feb. 1 organized and directed by Mubarak’s hated police with the cooperation of the Egyptian military.

Those of us who consider ourselves informed and serious members of the U.S. antiwar movement cannot afford to be passive at this critical moment. To do so would only make it easier for the Pentagon to stabilize its control over Egypt, and crush the Egyptian revolution with counter-revolutionary violence.

It’s time for the world to see the U.S antiwar movement in full strength out in the streets in full force demanding an end to the U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship and an end to US imperialism’s policy of war and occupation in the Middle East.

International Action Center
c/o Solidarity Center
55 W 17th St Suite 5C
New York, NY 10011
212-633-6646
iacenter@iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org/

In all revolutions, the agents of change – usually a small core of fired-up individuals – reach a personal point of reckoning where to do nothing becomes harder than to step forward. Then come the televised actions, the rebellions on campus, the random acts of defiance in high schools, supermarkets, malls, workplaces. A mass of support accrues. The little daily confrontations escalate. Momentum builds.

And finally the revolution ignites. Very often the ignition spark is a single symbolic act that takes the old power structure by surprise, a gesture that becomes a metaphor, living forever. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus. A Vietnam protester feeds a daisy into the barrel of a rifle. A dissident stares down a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Nelson Mandela walks out of his prison cell in South Africa. A freedom flotilla breaks the siege on Gaza. These memes penetrate skulls like bullets.

The biggest impediment to revolution is a personal one: our own deep-seated feelings of cynicism and impotence. How can anything “I” do possibly make a difference? Most of us have trouble accepting radical change as a viable option. Entrenched in a familiar world, we cannot imagine another. It’s hard to see our current system as simply one stage of a never-ending cycle that sooner or later will fall and be succeeded – but this process of creative destruction is exactly how the world works.

We don’t need a million activists to jumpstart this revolution. We just need an influential minority that smells the blood, seizes the moment and pulls off a set of well-coordinated strategic moves. We need a certain level of collective disillusionment (a point I think we have now reached) and then we need the leaders of the affluent, “First” world nations to fumble a world crisis like global warming, a stock market crash or a nuclear standoff in the Middle East. By waiting for the right moment and then jamming in unison, a global network of a few hundred of us can pull the coup off. This November we create a sudden, unexpected moment of truth – a mass reversal of perspective; a global mindshift – from which the corporate/consumerist forces never fully recover.

What will you do? Share your ideas: memewarriors@adbusters.org

Not sure what it means by “this November” but ok.

Oakland City attorney John Russo has served civil lawsuit papers to four of the 90 people arrested protesting the Mehserle ‘involuntary manslaughter’ verdict on July 8^th. The lawsuit was first announced about a week before Mehserle’s sentencing on November 5^th when the city expected more large-scale protests against government injustice and Mehserle’s blank check for murder. However, until recently, the threat of a civil suit seemed empty. That is, until the first of the four was served papers in the beginning of January, while incarcerated for his actions in the July 8^th protests.

The Oakland 100 Support Committee has proudly supported all four of the people being targeted by this lawsuit during their criminal charges, but we don’t know exactly what will happen with these civil suits. This is mostly because every lawyer we work with who we’ve spoken to about it has been confused as to how and why the city can charge these folks in civil court, as they’ve all already been charged criminally, and generally have had to either serve jail time or pay restitution fines (or both).

More through link.