Civil Disobedience

Students Use Civil Disobedience Over Revised Curriculum

November 8, 2014 Nicholas Garcia, www.co.chalkbeat.org Resist! Civil Disobedience, Education, History, Student Activism

GOLDEN — Jefferson County students, upset over how their board of education redesigned a curriculum review committee, interrupted the school board’s proceedings tonight by reading aloud from their history books. About 10 students either read out of turn about historical figures, known for acts of civil disobedience, at a podium or from their seats. Another dozen students also recited the Pledge of Allegiance before making a mass exit. All students left peacefully. No arrests were made. As part of their demonstration, the students said they had four demands: a public apology from the school board’s conservative majority for referring to students as “union pawns;” a reversal of an earlier decision to amend content review policies; proof from the board that they listen and act on community input instead of what students called an “ideological” agenda; and more resources for classroom instruction.

15 Arrested Protesting Seneca Lake Fracking Project

November 4, 2014 We Are Seneca Lake, www.earthfirstjournal.org Resist! Civil Disobedience, Energy, New York (NY)

Entering the third week, starting at 7:00 AM this morning protesters blocked the gates of Texas-based Crestwood Midstream’s gas storage facility on the shore of Seneca Lake. 15 people were arrested at about 9:00 AM after Crestwood called the police. Last week, ten protesters were arrested in acts of civil disobedience blocking the gates, just as the 15 people did today. Protesters have held blockades at the Crestwood gate since Thursday, October 23; on Wednesday, October 29, they began blocking two of the gates to Crestwood. Notably, the ongoing protests also included a rally with more than 200 people at the Crestwood gate on Friday, October 24th. Friday, October 24th marked the day that major new construction on the gas storage facility was authorized to begin. The ongoing acts of civil disobedience come after the community pursued every possible avenue to stop the project and after being thwarted by an unacceptable process and denial of science.

Massive Civil Disobedience In Vermont A Possible Game-Changer

October 30, 2014 Earth First! Newswire, www.earthfirstjournal.org Resist! Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, Energy, Environment

This morning, a group of students stood in protest against Governor Shumlin’s fossil fuels infrastructure policy after a night of massive civil disobedience that saw some 64 people arrested. Yesterday’s demonstration consisted of more than a hundred community members staging a mass sit in at Shumlin’s office on the top floor of the Pavillion Building, accompanied by a dance party on the bottom floor. The sit in lasted several hours. Shumlin was not present, but requested that everyone act respectfully, stating, “While I agree that climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing our state, nation, and world, I disagree with the protesters’ position on the natural gas pipeline, which I believe will help hasten our state’s transition away from dirtier fuel oil and help our economy.”

In Protests, Who Owns The Highways?

October 29, 2014 Sarah Goodyear, www.citylab.com Strategize! Civil Disobedience, Police the Police, Protest

The typical American highway is no place for a person on foot. It is really not a place at all. These roads exist entirely outside of the human context, designed for the accommodation of cars and trucks that carry men, women, and children inside at high speed, and yet have their own brutal mechanical needs, wholly incompatible with flesh and blood. That was what made the images of last week’s protest on the road known as the Atlanta Downtown Connector so jarring. A few dozen individuals, including members of the group Southerners on New Ground, walked out onto that roadway and laid down a banner reading "#BlackLivesMatter." This was one of several actions around the country protesting police violence and mass incarceration, and expressing solidarity with those who have been demonstrating in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of black teenager Michael Brown by white policeman Darren Wilson. “These are just some ordinary folks who are sick and tired of being criminalized, overpoliced, the mass incarceration,” organizer Mary Hooks told WSB-TV. “Ordinary people get fed up. Ordinary people need to be heard.”

Flood Wall Street Protesters Assert ‘Necessity Defense’

October 29, 2014 James Woods, www.dcmediagroup.us Resist! Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, Environment, Flood Wall Street

The following Monday [from the Climate March], a much smaller group numbering in the thousands stormed through the Financial District en route to Wall Street and staged a “sit-in” large enough to wreak havoc on traffic and commerce in the area for the entire day. As a result, the “Flood Wall Street” action received more press coverage than the previous day and more than 100 protesters (including a large polar bear) were arrested for failing to disperse after being confronted by the NYPD. While protesters being arrested in New York City has become a common occurrence since the 2011 evolution of Occupy Wall Street, the affirmative “necessity defense” being asserted by the 12 protesters who entered a plea of not guilty is definitely worthy of note because it is so seldomly used, it could actually work.

Montreal Protest Law Is Being Defeated By Ongoing Protest

October 27, 2014 Macho Philipovic, www.montreal.mediacoop.ca Resist! Canada, Civil Disobedience, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Law, Montreal

After longstanding speculation about whether Montreal’s anti-protest by-law P-6 can more effectively be challenged at theballot box or in the courts, a court decision released on Thursday suggests that the answer is neither: sustained mass action and solidarity in the streets itself may be straining the court system to the point that P-6 will become unenforceable. On Thursday 23 October 2014, Judge Gilles R. Pelletier of the Municipal Court of the City of Montreal dismissed the cases of twenty-seven self-represented people who had been detained and given P-6 tickets at a demonstration on 21 April 2012. The cases were not dismissed because the judge recognized a violation of the protesters’ rights to assembly, expression, or protest, but because there were simply too many cases for the system to effectively process. Pelletier ended his decision by suggesting that P-6 cases are at risk of bringing the rest of the trials heard by the court to a crawl.

Hong Kong: Protesters Vow More Civil Disobedience

October 10, 2014 Jonathan Kaiman, www.theguardian.com Resist! China, Civil Disobedience, Democracy, Hong Kong, Protests

Hong Kong authorities have called off negotiations with leaders of the pro-democracy “umbrella movement”, accusing them of undermining efforts to break the impasse that has paralysed the city’s main commercial hubs for almost two weeks. Representatives of the protest movement Occupy Central with Love and Peace, the student groups Scholarism and the Hong Kong Federation of Students, and a group of pro-democracy legislators held a press conference on Thursday near the city government headquarters, where they vowed to begin a “new wave of civil disobedience”.

Activists Chained To Fence In Montreal To Protest Enbridge’s Line 9

October 8, 2014 Amanda Kelly, www.globalnews.ca Resist! Civil Disobedience, Energy, Environment, Tar Sands

According to a statement, the activists are hoping to disrupt Suncor’s refinery operations to raise awareness of the issues involved in transporting oil across the country. You can view a detailed map of Line 9′s route here. Activists said they are expressing public outrage against the arrival of tar sands oil in Quebec. The oil will by transported by the Enbridge pipeline 9B, which activists say will ship up to 300,000 barrels of crude oil to the province from Alberta every day. MONTREAL — It took nearly seven hours for Montreal police to finally remove a protestor chained to a fence outside Enbridge’s Montreal headquarters in Montreal’s east end. One of the activists, Alyssa Symons-Bélanger, said in a statement that the reason for the protest is that many feel there are no other means to have their voices heard.

A Quaker’s Ceaseless Quest For A World Without War

October 8, 2014 Terry Messman, www.thestreetspirit.org Organize! Civil Disobedience, Peace, Religion, Wars and Militarism

During a long lifetime spent working for peace and social justice, David Hartsough has shown an uncanny instinct for being in the right place at the right time. One can almost trace the modern history of nonviolent movements in America by following the trail of his acts of resistance over the past 60 years. His life has been an unbroken series of sit-ins for civil rights, seagoing blockades of munitions ships sailing for Vietnam, land blockades of trains carrying bombs to El Salvador, arrests at the Diablo nuclear reactor and the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, Occupy movement marches, and international acts of peacemaking in Russia, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Iran and Palestine. It all began at the very dawn of the Freedom Movement when the teenaged Hartsough met Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy at a church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 as the ministers were organizing the bus boycott at the birth of the civil rights struggle.

This Crusty Activist Gave Up On Playing By The Rules

October 4, 2014 Heather Smith, www.grist.org Resist! Activism, Civil Disobedience, Energy, Environment

It’s been over a year since Alec Johnson was arrested for locking himself to an excavator sitting on a pipeline easement in Atoka, Oklahoma. He’s still waiting to go to trial. Rural Oklahoma communities only hold jury trials once or twice a year, and every time a new court date comes up, Johnson gets bumped – priority goes to anyone charged with a felony or presently cooling their heels in jail, which Johnson is not. A lot has changed in that year. The protest around U.S. energy policy and climate change has shifted fronts – coal terminals, oil-by-rail, divestment, solar, and a massive climate rally planned for this September. Keystone XL South (now renamed the Gulf Coast pipeline) is up and running and being monitored by an ad hoc group of volunteers.

4 Things We Need To Do To Win The Climate Fight

October 1, 2014 Harvey Wasserman, www.ecowatch.com Resist! Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, Direct Action, Energy, Environment

1. Local organizing is our ultimate source of power. The green movement has the great luxury of tangible targets. The King CONG corporations (Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas) need actual land on which to do their dirty work. So we can fight them inch-by-inch, at the source. 2. But our planet as a whole is now infected with a lethal mega-virus—the global corporation, a metastasized cancer that usurps human rights but shuns human responsibilities. 3. As we work this through, there are inter-related issues we can’t avoid. 4. For each of us there’s also a deep internal dimension to this work. Being an activist is itself a great leap of faith.

My Night In Jail With Flood Wall Street

September 30, 2014 John Tarleton, www.indypendent.com Resist! Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, Environment, Flood Wall Street, Law

“What is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once.” – Naomi Klein Early Monday evening I sat down in the street at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street with a polar bear, two women dressed as Captain Planet, and almost 100 other people. Following a vibrant day of unpermitted Flood Wall Street protests that drew as many as 3,000 demonstrators to Lower Manhattan, we locked arms and insisted that this symbolic piece of real estate should remain occupied through the following day when world leaders were scheduled to gather at the United Nations to continue discussions about how to address climate change.

Faces Of The Grassroots Climate Movement: Rowdy And Rowdier

September 27, 2014 Cally Carswell, www.hcn.org Resist! Civil Disobedience, Energy, Environment, Tar Sands, Utah

The guises were defenses not against the weather, but against the cops and a security camera trained on a test pit for what could soon become the first commercial tar sands mine in the U.S. Tar sands contain an unconventional crude called bitumen, that with a great deal of water and energy can be extracted from sand and rock, and refined into fuel. The industry is big business in Alberta, Canada, and one of the most carbon-intense fossil fuels. U.S. environmentalists have fiercely opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport Canadian tar sands crude to U.S. refineries, in a bid to influence further development to the north. Less known, and less opposed nationally, is the push to develop Utah's own tar sands deposits.

Flood The NYSE With Climate Resistance

September 12, 2014 Staff, www.floodwallstreet.net Resist! Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, Energy, Environment

On Monday, September 22nd at 9:00 am, thousand of people will gather at Battery Park in Lower Manhattan to confront the root cause of the climate crisis - an economic system based on exploiting frontline communities, workers, and natural resources. On the heels of the largest-ever march on climate change, we have an opportunity to transform the economic system driving climate change. Wearing blue to represent the sea that surrounds us, we rise to the steps of the NY Stock Exchange at 12:00 pm, flooding the area with our bodies in a massive sit-in - a collective act of nonviolent civil disobedience to confront the system that both causes, and profits from the crisis that is threatening humanity. There is no time to waste - Wall Street must be transformed. Through the power of people taking collective action we will build an economy based on justice and sustainability, and stop the climate crisis.

Man Uses Wheelchair To Protest Enbridge

September 8, 2014 Frank Peebles, www.princegeorgecitizen.com Resist! Civil Disobedience, Disabilities, Enbridge, Pipeline, Protest

A Toronto man is wheeling his way along the general route of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline project, and halted Prince George traffic as he did so. David Clow, a C6 quadriplegic, deliberately held up the travelling lanes on Victoria Street, Tuesday morning. At each set of traffic lights he tarried long after the light turned green in order to stack up vehicles behind him by the time he had gone a few blocks through the downtown. It was an act of civil disobedience aimed at causing unexpected awareness about the message on the back of his wheelchair: opposition to the pipeline. Imagine how inconvenienced you'd feel, he said, if the pipeline ever leaked, or worse. "Northern Gateway is such a risk," he said. "That risk is being put on the environment of this area, and the people of this area, and whatever jobs they're talking about just doesn't add up to accepting that risk." Within days of passing through previous towns in Alberta, existing pipelines did rupture, he said, sending him even more momentum to carry on his difficult journey. He attended a Tar Sands Healing Walk in June in the Fort McMurray area and was embraced so movingly by the resident aboriginal people for wheeling those 14 kilometres that he was seized by the idea of the Enbridge route - a distance 10 times that distance. He is now approximately two-thirds of the way to Kitimat where the proposed pipeline would end.

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