On Monday, hundreds of teachers, councilors and pupils have protested over the axing of England’s school rebuilding programme. Led by trade unions, the Save Our Schools lobby urged ministers to reconsider the move which led to the halting of 735 school projects.
Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Cairo have ended their sit-in, following Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment to the workers from Banque Misr, the factory’s creditor.
In Chile, more than 20 Mapuche political prisoners began a hunger strike Monday. The prisoners, jailed in Concepción and Temuco, took note of the recent prisoner releases in Cuba and began the strike in hope that President Sebastián Piñera would take notice.
At 1am this morning, Democracy Village – the antiwar protest camp on Parliament Square in London that began on May 1 – was finally brought to an end. According to witnesses, it took about 60 bailiffs, with the assistance of police, to remove the remaining protesters after a few tied themselves to scaffolding.
The activists involved, however, do not appear discouraged. According to the AFP:
“People from ‘Democracy Village’ are going to carry on with this protest. We’re not going away,” said Pete Phoenix, a 36-year-old protester with blond dreadlocks and sunglasses.
“Lots of areas around the city are going to be taken over in the next few days and weeks.
“Our spirit is stronger after this eviction,” he told AFP, saying the camp had “raised awareness around the world” about Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The BBC is reporting that some are even planning on returning to their makeshift camp on Parliament Square once the fences that have been erected are removed.
While Democracy Village was started by antiwar protesters, they were over time joined by an eclectic mix of climate change activists, pro-democracy campaigners, anarchists and the homeless.
According to Maria Gallastegui, who has run a vigil for Gaza in the square for four years, in its 11 weeks the camp changed from being “from 100% activist to 30% activist and 70% homeless.” This led to many activists focusing more of their energy on helping those in need than direct action.
The eviction order will not affect Brian Haw, the most well-known protester at Parliament Square, who has camped out there since 2001 to protest Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, Haw was never a fan of Democracy Village, calling the protesters “deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous.”
While it was probably not a wise move strategically to include activists pushing so many different issues in the camp, or to allow alcohol and drugs on the premises, they were no doubt fighting the good fight.
Last Friday, three Christian activists involved with Witness Against Torture – two of whom (Luke Hansen S.J. and John Bambrick) are contributors to this site – traveled to Bermuda to visit with four Uyghur men who were wrongly detained at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for more than seven years.
The Uyghurs are a persecuted ethnic minority group from western China. While seventeen Uyghurs have been resettled since a federal judge ordered their release in 2008, five have not been able to leave Guantánamo. According to the press release:
The purpose of the delegation to Bermuda is to build relationships with the Uyghurs, seek their counsel concerning further advocacy for both current and former Guantánamo prisoners, and to bring a message of atonement and reconciliation from the American people to the former prisoners. “In the United States, public discourse on Guantánamo is mainly informed by various perspectives from the military, politicians and the U.S. public,” says John Bambrick, a Chicago youth minister. “We have come to Bermuda to seek the perspectives of men who have experienced Guantánamo firsthand.”
“The Uyghur men in Bermuda, like us, are people of faith,” says Jeremy Kirk, a Ph.D. student in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. “We are practicing our Christian faith by seeking connection with our Muslim brothers, in whose detention and abuse we have participated as U.S. taxpayers and citizens.”
On Saturday, the three activists visited the Uyghurs’ apartment, shared a meal and swam in the ocean with the former prisoners, and swapped stories about family and religious faith. The Uyghur men shared some of their experiences of being in Guantánamo and discussed their gratitude for and challenges associated with resettlement. (They are very grateful to the Bermudan Government’s support and hospitality.)
The group returned to the United States yesterday, and I have yet to hear how the rest of their trip went. They were going to meet with the Uyghurs again on Sunday and were expecting to discuss in greater depth what their detention at Guantánamo was like and the conditions that the Uyghurs who are still there currently face. We will hopefully be able to share a reflection from one of the members of the delegation soon.
Over the course of his career primatologist and popularizer Frans de Waal has had a sustained interest in the relationship between human nature and violence. Circumstances in the study of our primate relatives has forced the issue: in the 1970s chimpanzees, which were previously thought to live in Edenic tranquility, were observed conducting raids and even killing one another. Meanwhile, their close relatives, the bonobos, entered the popular imagination as the hope for more utopian future: their females are empowered, and they resolve conflicts in tender orgies. Over at 3QuarksDaily, de Waal summarizes the debate about apes and human violence and thinks about how to apply it to violent conflict in the modern world. His essay is accompanied by a short video produced by the impressive Department of Expansion:
Here’s de Waal:
In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage?
[…]
Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.
The danger in any discussion like this is that we might bind the sense of possibility for ourselves by what happens to be reflected in both human history and the natural world. That’s a false restraint; things can change. Social arrangements possible in the modern world, from the United Nations to mass genocide, would have after all been unthinkable in past ages. What we see among apes should expand our sense of human possibility but certainly not contract it.
Click for full-size chart and reference.
To Churchill’s point, one can just as easily say the opposite is true, and far more so. Peace reigns over ordinary life far more than war, even if it goes unnoticed while violence excites our attention. So much is this the case that, in the early history of anthropology, it was thought that “primitive” tribal societies were on the whole blessedly peaceful compared to the turbulence of modern states. Like the observations of chimpanzees for so long, this turned out to be the error of impatient observers; wait around long enough, and they will fight. And they will die, on average, at actually far higher rates than were found in Europe and the US in the 20th century (see chart).
De Waal insists in the end that, given the chance, humans and other animals will opt for less killing. We’re caught between ancient, dueling inclinations to kill and to coexist. The latter, he believes, is the stronger.
Say what? According to the Wall Street Journal, many unions are now hiring unemployed nonunion demonstrators to protest work that’s being done with nonunion labor.
While many big unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, frown on using nonmembers in picket lines, “we’re not at all ashamed,” says Jimmy Gibbs, director of special projects for the Southeastern Council. “We’re helping people who are in a difficult situation.”
Not surprisingly, the high national unemployment rate has been fueling this trend, providing protest organizers and advocacy groups with an endless steam of recently layed-off workers or retirees seeking a little extra income. While unions aren’t the only groups seeking paid demonstrators, they are certainly the most baffling—if only because such a practice contradicts their message. But organizers don’t see it that way.
For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else,” explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.
If only the lack of parking at protests was the biggest problem facing labor activism. Unfortunately, it runs a lot deeper, as I mentioned in a recent post about the decline of labor in America. The article I quoted in that post cited union leader incompetency as a major factor for the decline. As an example of that incompetency, I would now have to include hiring protesters, as it shows a complete lack of understanding as to the dynamics of nonviolent action. Beyond the irony of unions hiring nonunion demonstrators to protest nonunion labor, how is any business, or the public for that matter, going to be convinced that workers are being exploited if they can’t be bothered to take part in their own protest?
Also is it worth hiring people to protest for you if they aren’t good representatives? The Journal article described a group of about 50 picketers-for-hire, as “smoking cigarettes, reading the paper, or on their phones; a few leaning on canes.” Meanwhile…
Inside, Juan Flores, Can-Am’s foreman, said his nonunionized workers are paid fairly. Of the protesters, he said, “I don’t blame them—they need the money, but they look like they are drunk or something.”
While it’s good that out-of-work people are getting a chance to make some money (above minimum-wage no less, as the going rate for paid demonstrators seems to be around $8.50/hour), perhaps unemployment wouldn’t be so bad if labor was once again an effective force in the struggle for economic justice.
Gotta love this. Illegal immigration and unemployment are both above-the-fold policy issues currently being bantered about in American politics. Bringing them together in a clever campaign, United Farm Workers has created a program called Take Our Jobs, where undocumented immigrant farm workers will train “legal” American citizens to take their jobs in the farms and fields. This is a fitting solution, since these are the jobs that illegal workers “stole” from taxpaying Americans. See Ronald W. Mortensen, founder of the conservative, nativist organization Center for Immigration Studies (which the Southern Poverty Law Center has expressed serious concerns about) urging Tea Partiers to get more vocal on illegal immigration.
Evidently, however, the campaign is under-promoted because thus far, only a handful of people have filled out a form. It’s odd because surely there are more than a few unemployed Tea Partiers in Arizona alone. So please help us encourage unemployed Americans to walk their walk. Tea Partiers, do the patriotic thing and go work in the farms and fields for minimum pay and maximum labor, just like the founders intended. To apply to take an undocumented farmworker’s job in the fields, go to TakeOurJobs.org. But make sure to invest in a hat and some sunscreen. It can get hot out there.
More than a thousand nurses wearing red scrubs gathered outside California Republican gubernatorial nominee and nurses union foe Meg Whitman last Thursday to protest her vow to cut the state’s nurse-to-patient ratios and fire health workers.
More than 100 indigenous activists and supporters marched past the Ministry of Forests offices and the Ministry of Environment office in Smithers, British Columbia on Friday to protest plans for a pipeline that will carry tar sands crude to ports off the west coast of Canada.
Members of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN gathered on the Independence Square in Kiev where they stripped down and bathed in a public fountain to protest hot water cut offs in the capital and rising tariffs for housing and utilities services.
A fenced-in lot at 7th and R Streets in DC has become home to a tent city as local residents protest the building of high-income apartments, where the city had once promised to build affordable housing.
An estimated 2,000 farmers gathered in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taiwan on Saturday to protest the government expropriation of their land. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.
300 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto ono Saturday to call for a G20 police inquiry and the right to blow bubbles. The latter was in response to an officer caught on tape threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles.
On July 10th, over 200 members of ONE DC and supporters of affordable housing occupied a vacant city-owned lot at 7th & R St NW just north of downtown Washington, DC. The lot is known as Parcel 42, and has been the target of tenant leaders in the Shaw neighborhood for almost ten years, who have waged a long campaign to get the city to finance new, permanently-affordable apartments at the site. Almost three years after the current mayor promised a quick groundbreaking, and fed up with broken promises, neighborhood leaders decided to take action. A week later Tent City DC continues to blossom into an intentional community bigger and more vibrant than the organizers had hoped, hosting artists, musicians, film screenings, and even kids playing vacant-lot-racquetball.
The International Solidarity Movement posted a video (above) of a “dance protest” in Hebron last Saturday – where three dancers playing the role of soldiers searching three Palestinians – as a response to the YouTube video of Israeli soldiers dancing near the illegal settlement of Tel-Rumeida.
They performed in front of the gate that closes off Shuhada street and prohibits all Palestinians from using it. The demonstrators called for justice and the opening of Shuhada street, and for the inhabitants of illegal Israeli settlements to leave the city and take the soldiers with them.
The demonstration, held weekly on a Saturday afternoon, then turned and paraded through the town. As they approached the market the peaceful protesters’ path was blocked by a line of soldiers armed with M-16 rifles – some of whom were seen kicking and hitting protesters. After a short sit-in the protest continued by turning around and heading towards the Old City.
Israeli activists gave speeches in Hebrew aimed at soldiers and settlers, calling for an end to the Apartheid situation in Hebron. One settler living in a house from which Palestinians were evicted threw water down on protesters but this did not dampen their spirits. Palestinians and international activists chanted together: “One two three four, occupation no more, five six seven eight, stop the killing, stop the hate.”
A strike has broke out at a south China factory supplying parts for Japan’s Honda Motor on Monday, with about 90 of the plant’s 200 workers stopping work to demand a nearly 60 percent pay increase.
PETA, Last Chance for Animals, and other activists were in downtown Los Angeles at the Staples Center Wednesday night to protest the opening of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. They called for a boycott of the circus based on the disturbing photos that had been turned over to PETA by an industry whistleblower.
Workers at Nokia’s Chennai factory in south India went on strike on Tuesday, demanding higher wages. The factory is a key hub for the manufacture of mobile handsets and employs 8,000 workers.
A recently established student movement pushing for reform of Taiwan’s assembly law, which restricts people’s right to demonstrate, announced their plan today to expand their ongoing sit-in protest at Taipei’s Liberty Square that began last Friday.
Thousands of protesters poured into the center of the main city of Indian Kashmir on Thursday after authorities lifted restrictions for the first time in five days. The Muslim-majority region has been wracked by demonstrations since June 11 when security forces were accused of killing a 17-year-old. Since then, another 14 protesters and bystanders have been killed.
