Eight Catholic Workers’ Movement supporters, peace activists arrested after occupying an Obama campaign building.

Four immigration rights activists, including a priest, were arrested for not leaving a courthouse.

There is also the heavy case of the #Nato3; for further illumination on the case, read the National Lawyers’ Guild statement against the charges, and the Rolling Stone’s article discussing the frequent abuse of arrests and charges in this style.

A few arrests occurred on Friday as some protesters split off from the Nurses’ protest.

(Ed. note: submit other arrests if you know of them or as they come up, please.)

Think Progress has put together a neat little list of why Bank of America is Bad for America. It’s reproduced in an abridged version below:

“1) Cruel and unusual foreclosure practices: Bank of America’s foreclosure practices are something out of a science fiction novel. There’s the case of the woman and her disabled daughter who were foreclosed on, even after they’d received a loan modification; there are the homeowners that BofA offered loan modifications to if they erased mean things they said about the bank on Twitter….

2) Bank of America places Bank of America over its customers: Serious accusations leveled against Bank of America include the claim that Bank of America intentionally blocked its customers from seeking mortgage help (“The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged”), and that they allow homes to fall apart in areas that are heavily populated by people of color.

Continue reading Top Five Reasons to Occupy Bank of America

A Walmart distribution center in southern California — the focus of local #F29 Occupy protests — has laid off its warehouse workers en masse.

A Walmart distribution center in Mira Loma has laid off a group of Inland Empire warehouse workers. Workers say the decision was made because they’re trying to gain higher wages and safer working conditions.

[...]

At the time of their dismissal, the company paid them minimum wage, while their counterparts hired through another agency earn, on average, three or four dollars more an hour for the same work.

“Everybody thinks it’s in retaliation because we are organizing,” says Sauceda. “We’re standing up for our rights. This is not fair, we are not happy with the wages we are getting for this job. We know that they’re making more money and we know they can do better, but they don’t want to. We’re not asking nothing for free.”

Read more at scpr.org

In The New Inquiry, Elena Schwartz discusses the #J14 housing protests that took place in Israel last summer, and the question of whether class war can truly be waged on behalf of the middle. The result is a thought-provoking exploration of class and privilege, relevant to Occupations everywhere.

Although the Occupy Wall Street movement may have been started by anti-capitalists on the radical left, it quickly spread as a brand of middle-class populism. And while those who started it don’t have exclusive rights over the direction of the movement, the rhetoric of “the 99 percent” presents a worrisome analog to Tel Aviv’s rejection of politics in favor of a sweeping, general consensus. Indeed, Karl Vick’s article in Time magazine article advocated precisely that — non-partisanship — as the important lesson for Occupy Wall Street to take from Tel Aviv. The language of “the 99 percent” speaks to a moment in the United States at which nearly everybody identifies as “middle class.”

Like the Israeli distinction of the social, such a bizarre formulation must raise questions as to the kinds of erasures effected by an expansive notion of the middle class. What are the contours of a struggle that claims to represent nearly everybody? What is the legibility of a class struggle, waged on behalf of the middle class?

[...]

“The 99 percent” has been an extraordinarily powerful symbol in the popularization of this movement, but it has done so precisely because it meaningless. It speaks to the suffering of a middle class hit by economic crisis and claims to represent them, at the same time that it demands nothing of them. It draws upon a lesson learned by the #J14 protesters: You can achieve a social consensus through the reproduction of existing social exclusion. The crucial question, in occupied territories here and abroad, is 99 percent of what?

Read more at The New Inquiry

It turns out that our old friends at ALEC may be indirectly responsible for the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, thanks to their sponsorship (read: manipulation) regarding the controversial “Stand Your Ground” Law in Florida. Huffington Post reports:

There is little doubt that it was George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old self-appointed “neighborhood watch vigilante,” who shot and killed the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin last month as he “returned from a trip to 7-11 with an iced tea and a pack of Skittles.”

Less known is the relationship between the Florida “stand your ground” law, which may allow the killer of Trayvon Martin to walk free, and a powerful but private, behind-the-scenes organization that has channeled such bills into the legislatures of Florida and other states.

The Florida law that is drawing such sudden attention due to the death of a teenager in Sanford “is the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ‘model bill’ that has been pushed in other states,” PR Watch’s Brendan Fischer recently reported.

[...]

According to Fischer, “The bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA), and fits into a pattern of ALEC bills that disproportionately impact communities of color.”

Read more at HuffPo

In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, it seems appropriate to share this article, originally from the Zinn Education Project on the unspoken history of the Irish potato famine, and how it was not so much the act of God many of us were told, but in fact a problem exacerbated by uncaring landlords. Some things never change.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato — during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry — food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.