(Each Tuesday during Occupy Fringe, Jeff Questad will bring us a roundup of the latest Occupy news.)

Don’t call it a comeback.

You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking Occupy has taken a step back or receded from public consciousness a bit. After surviving a bleak (and physically painful) period of police assaults, Occupiers now face antagonistic weather and a news media determined to ignore them. The squatting phase, tent villages outside city halls, was a good opening act, but where does a young and growing protest movement just beginning to feel its strength go as winter moves in?

South. Yes, yes. But in the bigger sense?

Indoors. And what do they focus their attention on?

Foreclosures. Justin Elliot, who has covered Occupy since the beginning, has a conversation with MSNBC about what might be next, and The Nation has more about how Occupy might be coming to the aid of underwater homeowners. I know privately and semi-privately many Occupy groups around the country are sending out calls to find people facing eviction. There are already stories of officials arriving to evict people from homes and finding the residents have invited Occupiers to stand with them.

JPMorgan Chase was ready to make a 103-year-old Atlanta woman and her 83-year-old sister homeless, but sheriff’s deputies refused to evict the sisters.  It’s not officially an Occupy story, but it is a story that made the rounds this week fueled by public support for that act of police disobedience. The bank has now decided to work something out with the Hall sisters.  That happened because the story of the cops who refused to throw them out struck a chord and went viral.

Occupy has managed to capture support by tapping into the national pain and by taking beatings from the police. Standing alongside people being tossed from their homes is a no-brainer. The 1% hoped to squash the movement while it was still perceived as dirty bongo players sleeping in parks and before they got to the Robin Hood stage. They failed. Expect to hear much more about the Occupy movement aligning with struggling homeowners in the coming months.

Then you may well see defending home owners from banks emerge as a major issue in the 2012 elections thanks to Occupy. After years of illegal foreclosures and people being unjustly kicked out of their homes, there still wasn’t political will to side with people over financial institutions, even when those financial institutions broke the law.

That’s why we Occupy.

That’s not the only good idea Occupy has.  In San Francisco, Occupy intends to open a credit union that will employ students and the homeless, make micro-loans for small businesses, add 1,000 jobs to the city payroll and even operate a food co-op.  Occupy has been talking about saving homes, housing the homeless, putting banking in the hands of people, and more, since the first days, and things are happening.

Let’s not equivocate about that.  Those who say the movement is all protest and no solution are either not paying attention or lying.  This is where this was always headed and it’s been obvious in every city and every open meeting. The people who made the loudest claims that Occupy didn’t have a plan were simply those who were most threatened by an informed agenda that was there for anyone to see and contribute to.

The 99% are also having an effect on the campuses of the big business schools, where recruiting future financial criminals has been complicated by protests.  The business leaders of today were hatched during decades of deregulation and veneration of corporations that left them thinking they could act with impunity. Letting incoming business majors know people are watching is something that will stick in the memory of these future CEOs and managers and make the lives of our children better. Bankers aren’t bad people. They were just taught they could do anything without consequences.  They’re getting a new lesson.

You really have to see this story about police support of Occupy. It is said revolutions reach a tipping point when the police and military begin to switch sides. The irony of the fact you have to get this story from English language Russian media is lost on no one, except perhaps those who run the American corporate media.

Speaking of police and the American media, is there any chance we could find out a little more about Urban Shield?

Check out literary mag n+1.  They’ve been publishing dispatches from the front lines and now they’re collecting some of these first-hand accounts into a book.  Todd Gitlin is said to be writing a book about the movement.  Who’s next?  Maybe some of these guys.

But so what if a bunch of writers are on the side of protestors. Show us some economists who are going on record supporting the movement.

Does it seem to you like protestors are celebrating Christmas earlier every year?  I only did a drive-by, but I got to hear a bit of the music when Occupy Austin sang Christmas carols to the crowd at the State Capitol.

Yes, that’s my local Occupy group.  If you want to see more about your local group, write your own piece.  In fact, write it for Fringe.

My favorite story of the week took place at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.  Composer Philip Glass was present for a performance of his Satyagraha, an opera about M.K. Gandhi’s early political coming of age in South Africa. The word Satyagraha itself – and I’m sure Sanskrit experts will let me know if I’m wrong – means something like truth or holding on to truth.  Ghandi made the word his own and employed it in developing his model of non-violent resistance, establishing a model that inspired Nelson Mandela and lights the way for Occupy protesters today.

At the December 1 performance at The Met, the show had a unique encore. Occupiers were there, and Glass joined them, along with musicians Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, in an Occupy Lincoln Center action. Many of those in attendance at the show came out of the hall and joined the crowd afterward. What they heard was Phillip Glass leading the crowd – playing the human microphone – in special Occupy chants.

The New Yorker’s music critic, Alex Ross, was there, as was Seth Walls, writing for The Awl.  Both reports include some of the shaky phone video we’re now used to seeing, including the moment when Glass led the crowd in an invocation.

It might be hard to make out the words Glass reads in the video, but they are from The Bhagavad Gita. I can’t think of a better way to end this piece than to quote them.

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”