Amidst Britain’s political chaos comes good news for environmental activists who have opposed the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport: The new government has pledged to scrap it. According to the UK activist group Plane Stupid:
That decision comes at the end of a momentous campaign lasting nearly a decade, involving local communities, activists, national campaign organisations, sympathetic politicians, some of the trade unions and even some leading business figures.
Proposed runways at Stansted and Gatwick airports are also being scrapped by the new government, but Plane Stupid is still concerned about expansion at a number of other regional airports.
Activists stand ready. Unless Cameron and Clegg scupper these plans, they can count on a very sticky future.
This is a reference to an action waged by Plane Stupid back in 2008 that involved an activist supergluing his had to Gordon Brown’s jacket. An odd protest, no doubt. But as a friend of ours recently put it, he may have been fined the price of a suit jacket, but he got millions worth in publicity.
In an effort to draw attention to a boycott called by the workers of Hyatt Hotels, LGBTQ activists staged a flash mob adaptation of Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Romance” in the lobby of the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. The lyrics were changed to address the workers’ struggle to win a fair contract and affordable healthcare. With an influx of LGBTQ people coming to San Francisco’s annual Pride Celebration next month, Hyatt could be hurt by its decision to not heed the workers’ demands.
Protesters draped large black tarps that represented oil spills over beachgoers in Miami Beach yesterday to demonstrate the negative effects of offshore drilling.
Two thousand people gathered in front of the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti yesterday to call for the resignation of Rene Preval after his ineffective handling of the February earthquake.
Opposition groups continue to sit-in in front of the Cairo parliament against the emergency law in Egypt, even as politicians say they will not remove the decree.
Colombian presidential candidate Robinson Devia chained himself to a statue and declared a hunger strike in Bogotá yesterday to protest biased media coverage of his campaign.
A hundred protesters marched from the Department of the Interior to the White House today to protest government support of fossil fuels. They carried a banner that read, “Obama: This is your crude awakening.”
Parent protesters succeeded in lowering the jail bond for a group of Detroit teenagers from $25,000 to $500 yesterday after picketing the courthouse.
Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area, I watched as the “war on terror” turned the streets of D.C.’s federal district into a maze of barricades, permanently parked police cars, and inexplicable no-go zones. It may be government by the people and for the people, but the people can’t get anywhere near.
I’m also a bicyclist, raised to idolize the city’s fearless bike couriers. I’ve put my bike and my body in those streets, removing one more murderous car from the congestion and a few more pounds of CO2 from the air. In return, in the name of order and hurry, I’ve been pulled over by cops and hit from behind by an impatient taxi. Security means insecurity. Transporting myself sanely means risking my life.
At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.
[T]he Nuclear Summit security situation showed that mentality isn’t just silly—it actually causes danger, it actually introduces hazards. Again, heads of state obviously need some protection, like bodyguards; but it was just as obvious to anyone who tried to get within a mile of the Convention Center last month that security had spilled over into paranoia. To the point that military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.
The Week in Green with Hamid Dabashi, a weekly broadcast supporting the civil rights movement in Iran, recently conducted an interview with Cornel West. Using his characteristic soulful intellectualism, West called the Green Movement, “the most significant and exemplary movement for justice in the world today” and encouraged its leaders to “try to make some connection to those on the inside of the system.” He also addressed the importance of economics and involving the poor and working people of Iran.
Forty years ago last week, on May 4, 1970, soldiers opened fire on unarmed antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and shocking the nation.
Of the Kent State killings, President Richard Nixon’s adviser Richard Haldeman wrote in The Ends of Power that the 67 rifle bullets fired that day would, metaphorically, ricochet right back into the White House.
“Kent State, in May 1970, marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate,” Haldeman writes.
[...]
The heart-rending snapshot of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in anguish, was taken by student photographer John Filo. It would help mobilise some four million outraged students in the nation’s first and only nationwide student strike, just days after the killings.
“That clearly had a powerful impact on congress, they started seriously to end the war in Vietnam, they started to cut off the funding” said Alan Canfora, a survivor of the shootings, and an activist who wants Barack Obama, the US president, to open a new investigation into the events of that day.
Unfortunately, despite extensive photographs, audio recordings and video footage of the shooting, no one went to jail for the killings.
Thanks to Reverend Billy and his Church of Life After Shopping we have another reason to move our money to small independent banks. As part of its ongoing protest of Chase Bank’s funding of mountaintop removal in Appalachia, Rev. Billy and his cohorts have begun a campaign to disinvest. This hidden-cam style video shows the approach they’re taking, which involves talking to Chase employees about the issue while they close their account. The two bank employees featured in this video seem rather shocked and disappointed to hear of their company’s poor environmental record. So that’s a good start!
Producers of a documentary in Malaysia held a silent protest today to highlight media censorship. They read newspapers upside down while they marched through Kuala Lumpur.
On Saturday a spirited protest action was held in front of the Department of Labor, in Washington, D.C. Its purpose was to demand the creation of a federally-mandated public jobs program, similar to the WPA, which was launched by FDR’s administration back in the middle of the Great Depression.
Thousands of people protested in Taipei on Saturday to call for the release of former president Chen Shui-bian and to support the Taiwanese independence movement.
Several hundred people gathered in London on Saturday to call for electoral reform. They wore purple and chanted “Fair votes now!”
For the last nine years, Brian Haw – an evangelical father of seven – has camped outside of the Parliament in London to protest his country’s foreign policy, particularly the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to an interesting profile in In These Times, Haw has persevered through many difficulties:
Haw has been the target of many attempts to suppress a critical voice. Council chiefs, the police and the government have all tried and failed to evict him from this prime piece of real estate. His placards have been confiscated. He has been arrested several times. He has suffered a number of assaults and broken bones. Parliament even passed a specific piece of legislation aimed at ridding Parliament Square of his presence.
Haw has fought and eventually won every attempt to have him removed, though his encampment was once much larger than it is now. In 2006 police raided the site and confiscated most of its contents. They also imposed a limit on its size: 3 meters by 3 meters.
In addition, Haw has apparently managed to generate significant media coverage and debate, even earning the admiration of many in the UK, through his dedication and personal sacrifice.
The media have described Haw as irascible, irritable, embittered and angry. Some he has worked with consider him self-righteous, pedantic and a control freak who suffers from a bit of a God complex. But many hail him as a peace-loving hero and a champion of free-speech.
[...]
In 2007 he won Channel 4’s most inspiring political figure of the year — beating out the prime minister, the leader of the opposition party and the head of the army. And, while his Parliament Square protest site has been called a “grotty eyesore”, a “squalid encampment” and a “national embarrassment” by members of Parliament, it was faithfully recreated in a show titled “State Britain” inside the Tate Britain Museum and resulted in the artist Mark Wallinger winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 2007.
Haw’s protest reminds me of Concepcion Picciotto, a Spanish women I met last year, who has camped outside of the White House since 1981 to protest nuclear weapons. Anyone know of any other long-term protest encampments worth mentioning?
Hundreds of librarians protested in Trenton, New Jersey yesterday against a $10 million proposed budget cut, stressing the importance of public book-sharing.
Six Greensboro, NC ministers were arrested Tuesday night for blocking the entrance to the local police department. Their action protested the subculture and double standards of the police.
Multiple sclerosis patients held a protest march on Wednesday at the Alberta, Canada legislature to demand funds for research.
A group of parents and bus drivers protested yesterday outside the Michigan governor’s office in Lansing against a new school bus contract they say is illegal.
Amidst Britain’s political chaos comes good news for environmental activists who have opposed the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport: The new government has pledged to scrap it. According to the UK activist group Plane Stupid:
At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.
