• Workers gathered and made traditional Chinese funeral offerings yesterday at Foxconn headquarters in China after a series of suicides and suicide attempts.  Protesters say the company, which makes Apple’s iPad, has unhealthy working conditions.

• Members of the Fishermen Cooperative Society in coastal Pakistan gathered yesterday to protest recent police actions against villagers protesting the occupation of an ancient graveyard.

• On Monday off the Louisiana coast, seven Greenpeace members boarded an offshore drilling support ship and painted anti-drilling messages in oil on the side of the ship.  They have since been arrested and charged with unauthorized entry.

• Thousands of people marched in Switzerland on Monday to protest the building of nuclear power stations in the country.

• Members of the group Manchester Plane Stupid chained themselves to the wheels of a plane on Monday to protest the expansion of the World Freight Centre at Manchester Airport, which they say will be an environmental disaster.

• The Kayapo indigenous group in Brazil continues their month-long blockade of an Amazon highway to protest the building of a dam they say will destroy their communities and livelihoods.

The French Young Farmers (Jeunes Agriculteurs) union turned Paris’ Champs Elysées into a giant farm on Sunday by covering the capital’s busiest road with 8,000 plots of earth, 150,000 plants and 700 fully grown trees, as well as pigs, cows, horses and sheep. According to the BBC:

The union, which represents some 55,000 farmers under the age of 35, wants to impress on the public – and the government – the efforts required to produce what goes on the table.

“It’s about re-establishing contact with the public about what our profession is and what they want from it,” William Villeneuve, president of the Jeunes Agriculteurs, said on Friday.

“Do they want the cheapest products in the world or do they want products that pay producers?” he added.

For the Parisians who last year witnessed farmers blocking traffic and setting fire to piles of hay and tires on the Champs Elysées, this bucolic sight is no doubt a welcome approach to one of France’s most enduring issues. At the same time, however, it cost 4.2m euros to stage. But that isn’t stopping the organizers from promising to take their concept overseas.

“We want to take “Nature Capitale” to New York (to work with) the farmers and woodmen of New York state, to Istanbul with their farmers, Berlin and other cities who want to welcome us,” Gad Weil, who created the concept, told France Info radio.

Despite the cost, there certainly is a lot to be said for raising awareness among city folk about the food process. It will be interesting to see if the reaction in Paris justifies its expense and whether such an undertaking can be replicated in other parts of the world.

Renowned street artist Shepard Fairey—known best for creating the iconic Obama HOPE poster—caused a stir in Covington, Kentucky last week with the unveiling of a new mural, depicting an Asian child soldier brandishing an automatic rifle. The proprietor of the business who offered up his wall was not pleased and quickly covered it in white paint. According to Cincinnati.com, “He didn’t think his location across the street from an elementary school was an appropriate place for an image of a child soldier.”

Fairey, however, was unaware that his mural directly faced an elementary school. Had he known, Fairey said he might have made alterations. Nevertheless, he defended his work saying, “I felt like it was very obvious that it was about promoting peace and discouraging violence but not everybody agreed, obviously…It’s not hurtful so much as it is discouraging that there can’t even be a discussion about it.”

Surprisingly, though, the school and the city seemed just as disappointed by the business owner’s decision to paint over the mural.

No one involved in the mural project wanted to censor Fairey, said Natalie Bowers, Covington’s arts district manager.

She said she wished the mural could have stayed up so teachers could have discussed it with their students, and she stressed that the city of Covington did not play a part in the decision to paint over the mural.

Kudos to Covington for showing that provactive and political art has a place in small-town American society.

Earlier this moth, the LA Times did a story on UC San Diego Professor Ricardo Dominguez, who led what he called a “virtual sit-in” that targeted the university president’s website. According to the Times:

When protesting students spilled into University of California campus courtyards in March, Ricardo Dominguez took to the streets in his own way — digitally — leading a march to the online office of the UC president.

The bespectacled associate professor triggered a software program that continuously reloaded the home page of UC President Mark G. Yudof’s website.

“Transparency,” hundreds of protesters wrote, over and over again, in the search box of the home page.

The jammed website responded with an error message: “File not found.”

The protesters’ message: Transparency doesn’t exist in the UC system.

It was a virtual sit-in, an oft-used tactic from Dominguez’s academic specialty at UC San Diego: electronic civil disobedience.

Dominguez, who was hailed just months earlier by his university and other major institutions for his work creating the immigrant cell-phone, now faces serious disciplinary measures:

According to Dominguez and a faculty group, the university has launched at least two probes: One to determine whether creation of the phone was a proper use of public funds, the other to see if legal grounds exist for filing criminal charges for the virtual sit-in.

The charges, they said, could lead to disciplinary measures and the revocation of Dominguez’s tenure. Dominguez’s salary was $65,000 before furloughs.

He is also facing attacks from Republican congressmen in his county, who feel that his work is a waste of tax-payer money. But beyond that question, and more to the purposes of this site, I wonder what others think of virtual protest tactics. Keep in mind, this is something Dominguez has been pioneering for quite some time. The Times explained the beginnings of his work in New York in the 1990′s:

Read the rest of this article »

As oil from the BP rig continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, activists are stepping up to hold the company to account.

Last week, the Energy Action Coalition organized 45 “Crude Awakening” vigils, rallies and events around the country to mark the one-month anniversary of the offshore drilling disaster. (Click here to see a preliminary report, with pictures and links to local news coverage, on the actions.)

In London, two Greenpeace activists scaled BP’s office building and “hoisted a flag depicting the firm’s logo covered in oil and with the slogan ‘british polluters’ above the entrance in St James’s Square.”

And perhaps most significantly, a boycott of BP is taking off. Public Citizen is calling on folks outraged by what’s happening to pledge that they will boycott BP’s gas and retail products for at least three months.

Ultimately, however, we should use the horror of this environmental disaster to push for more fundamental change. As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, writes:

…cash compensation for economic harms caused — while necessary — doesn’t bring back destroyed ecosystems and does little to mitigate the company’s culpability for not preventing the blowout in the first place.

The only good that can come out of the BP disaster is if it forces the United States to fundamentally reorient energy policy. As a matter of simple common sense, the Obama administration should reverse its new policy and stop offshore drilling expansion. More fundamentally, BP’s oil gusher is yet another reminder of the need for a massive shift away from fossil fuels and to investments in efficiency and renewable energy.

• Hundreds of public sector workers marched to protest right-wing President Sebastián Piñera’s first state of the union address in Valparaíso, Chile, where the national Congress is located.

• An estimated of 30,000 to 35,000 people gathered Saturday near New Jersey’s Statehouse to protest Gov. Chris Christie’s proposed budget cuts.

• Environmental activists gathered in California yesterday to protest the removal of a moratorium on whaling.

• Warehouse workers marched through Boston yesterday to protest unfair contract practices at Shaw’s supermarkets.

• 70 employees at a Fabco plant in Windsor, Canada walked off the job in a wildcat strike last Wednesday to support a colleague who was abruptly suspended the week before.

• Victims of landslides by Attabad Lake in Pakistan ended their sit-in on Saturday after reaching a relief-package compromise with the government.

• A hundred Greeks living in Brussels demonstrated outside the EU and IMF last week to oppose the proposed rescue plan of Greece’s economy.

• Hundreds protested the screening of a film at the Cannes Film Festival in France on Friday.  “Outside the Law” depicts French atrocities against Algerians and is alleged to be ‘anti-French.’

Remember the controversy that erupted back in 2005 when a Danish newspaper published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad? While there were nonviolent protests around the world, including a boycott of Danish goods, violent riots also broke out in many cities that left more than 100 dead.

Over at True/Slant, Michael Peck just wrote about one creative nonviolent response to the drawing of the Prophet Mohammad that occurred earlier this month in Wisconsin:

When the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to defend the right of free speech by drawing stick figures of the Prophet Muhammed on campus sidewalks, the campus Muslim Students Association quickly responded. They followed the atheists on their blasphemous journey, and whenever a drawing of the Prophet Muhammed appeared, the Muslim students drew boxing gloves on the figure, and changed the name to Muhammed Ali.

[...]

Confronted with satire, the Muslim students responded with humor (yes, you could say they desecrated the atheists’ grafitti, but grafitti artists are in no position to complain).

And not only did they not complain, but the atheists actually were moved by the nonviolent response. As Chris Calvey, one of the group’s members, wrote on their blog:

You’ve got to hand it to them, it was a creative and non-confrontational way to minimize the intolerable offense of seeing stick figures labeled Muhammad. It was a celebration of free speech for everyone!

• Activists have put up tents and opened a protest camp they are calling Democracy Village in London.  They are mainly protesting problems with the recent election, as well as the war in Afghanistan and British capitalism, but the police have told them to leave before Parliament opens next week.

• Greenpeace activists climbed BP’s London headquarters yesterday to hang a flag accusing the company of polluting the environment.  The flag read, “BP: British Polluters,” a play on British Petroleum.

• 20,000 Greeks marched to parliament in Athens yesterday in continued protest of severe austerity measures.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, on Wednesday to protest incipient wage cuts planned by the government.

• Thousands of nurse-anesthetists staged a sit-in at a Paris train station yesterday and demanded greater professional recognition and higher salaries.  The blockade halted rail traffic.

• 250 students and workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago protested high administrative salaries and tuition increases as they gathered outside a Board of Trustees meeting yesterday.

• 160 United Steelworkers members gathered in Washington, DC yesterday to protest Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s visit to the U.S.  Ralliers denounced Calderón’s treatment of workers in his country and referred specifically to the Cananea mine workers, who have been on strike since 2007.

• Dairy farmers gathered with milk cans and cows in towns across Colombia on Wednesday to protest a new trade accord with the EU; they say they cannot compete with subsidized European farmers.

• Inmates of a Japanese immigration center have been on hunger strike for more than a week after recent deaths of fellow residents.  They are also demanding to be released.

On Tuesday, a woman in London stopped traffic in front of the House of Parliament for five minutes after taking off her clothes and sitting on top of a black taxi cab to protest the war in Afghanistan.

While getting naked in public is definitely a way to draw attention, I question whether it is really a method that should be used to promote any cause, unless exposing your body has some very direct connection to the issue at hand.

In general, I tend to agree with those (here, here, here and here) who critique PETA, for example, for using nudity and sex to promote animal rights. What are your thoughts?

Three undocumented immigrants who were arrested on Monday during a sit-in at Sen. John McCain’s office in Arizona spoke with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! this morning in a very powerful segment.

The three are immigration reform activists and took this serious risk to call for McCain to support the DREAM Act, which would grant permanent citizenship for the children of the undocumented if they are able to complete two years of college.

Thankfully their nonviolent action has garnered national attention and kept the spotlight on the injustices that the undocumented face in this country. As I listened to these articulate and courageous young people speak about their cause and the sacrifice that they made I was touched. The idea that the United States may deport them for taking this stand is tragic. What a loss that would be for this country!

Click here to watch the second part of their interview.