Workers belonging to CGIL, Italy’s biggest labor union, will walk off their jobs today for four hours to protest cuts at companies such as Fiat SpA, Alcoa Inc. and Antonio Merloni SpA. The strike called by CGIL, with a membership of 5.5 million people, and a demonstration in city centers will cripple traffic and cause delays in public transport and air travel.
More than 300 unionized workers at Shaw’s food distribution center in Methuen, Mass., have been on strike since Sunday after rejecting what they call an “unjust and inequitable” contract offer.
Zimbabwe’s striking civil servants say they are now resorting to a hunger strike after the cash strapped government ignored their month long job boycott.
The National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) workers – led by Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Marvi Memon – ended their seven-day long protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club after the Sindh government assured the protesters that it will regularise 1,547 temporary NPIW employees.
At least 70 detainees at the West Japan Immigration Control Center, which has long been criticized by human rights groups and Diet members, have been on a hunger strike since Monday.
The jury trial of three Ploughshares peace activists, Adrian (Adi) Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land is being held in Wellington, New Zealand this week. People are coming from around New Zealand and Australia to support them and to give voice to the issue behind their trial—the need to close the Waihopai Spy Base and end New Zealand’s links with the US war machine. Waihopai is New Zealand’s most important contribution to that war machine, far more so than any Special Air Service presence in Afghanistan, and has been operating as an outpost of US intelligence 24/7.
Lets rewind, to 6 a.m. the morning of the April 30, 2008. Adrian, Peter and Sam have entered the Waihopai Spy Base in Blenheim, New Zealand, and used a sickle to deflate one of the two 30 meter domes covering satellite interception dishes. The group then build a shrine and pray for the victims of the war with no end—the so-called “War on Terror” led by the United States, a war that has resulted in illegal military invasions, illegal detention and torture and an unprecedented attack on civil liberties in all Western democracies.
The use of the sickle in deflating the dome was significant. It is taken from the vision of the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew scriptures:
“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles; nation shall not lift sword against nation; and there shall be no more training for war” (Isaiah 2:4).
A parade of Indian people from many nations gathered in Seattle on Monday to commemorate the invasion of Fort Lawton 40 years ago, when more than 100 Indian people and their allies stormed the property and took a portion of the land “by right of discovery.” After a month of protests the government decided to donate a portion of the land for a cultural center.
About 30 people gathered outside the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Denver, Colorado on Sunday to protest a decision by the archdiocese not to re-enroll a child in a Catholic school in Boulder next year because the child’s parents are lesbians.
Days after staging protests on campus as part of the national March 4 Day of Action, a small group of students at Stony Brook University sat down in the hallway outside of President Stanley’s office for hours and begged passersby for spare change to cover the rising costs of tuition.
Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week condemning the student protests in California for invoking the spirit of social justice movements from the 1960s and 70s. According to Robinson, the protests “demonstrated the entitlement mentality and self-absorption that has come to dominate much of higher education.”
We have here the vocabulary of the peace movement, of the struggle for decent conditions for migrants and other exploited workers, and of the civil-rights movement. Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves. At a time when one American in 10 is unemployed and historic deficits burden both the federal government and many of the states, the protesters attempted to game the political system. They engaged in a resource grab.
Yeah, these whiny college students have it all: massive loan debt and a shrinking job market. Why should they complain about being exploited by the student loan industry or being victims of poorly managed state funds? So what if they have to spend more money to go to school longer or possibly not at all for a job that’s likely not waiting for them.
And what about the issues facing minority students that have also bubbled to the surface? I guess that doesn’t show that these protests are about more than just money or that they have something in common with the struggles of minority groups in the 60s and 70s.
It’s clear we all need a lesson in economic justice from Peter Robinson. How else are we going to understand why it’s not “entitlement mentality and self-absorption” when wealthy conservatives like Robinson and his colleagues at the Hoover Institution oppose taxing the rich?
Yup, if there’s one thing history has proven it’s that self-absorbed people love to protest, engage in nonviolent direct action, face possible arrest or even police brutality. Those are clearly the traits of people who feel a sense of entitlement, not people who feel burdened, exploited and marginalized.
Downtown Athens was paralyzed once again on Friday when thousands of Greeks took to the streets to protest against the country’s newly announced package of austerity measures.
In Pakistan, the workers of the National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) continued their protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club on Friday, protesting against the Sindh government over delay in regularizing the services of employees.
Dutch gay rights groups have called for a halt to protests against a Catholic church southwest of Amsterdam after it said it would no longer seek to bar homosexuals from taking communion.
In the Philippines, Gabriela – the country’s foremost alliance of progressive women’s organizations - has declared March 8, International Women’s Day, as a “day off” for Filipinas, to be spent out in the streets, marching, protesting and asserting their rights.
Hundreds of thousands took part in the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education yesterday. It was the largest day of coordinated student protest in years. While much of it was focused on the university and state college campuses of California, where students face a 32 percent tuition hike, there were protests at campuses across the country on issues ranging from minority representation to privatization. According to Amy Goodman:
At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, police used pepper spray to break up a student protest organized by Students for a Democratic Society. Fifteen students were arrested. At SUNY Purchase in New York protesters took over the Student Services Building. Students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill staged a sit-in at the chancellor’s office. In Washington state, the Olympia Coalition for a Fair Budget held a mock funeral for public education and healthcare and brought a coffin to the state Capitol building. And here in New York City, students and teachers at the City University of New York rallied outside Governor David Paterson’s office.
Watch the above Democracy Now! segment for more details.
Fourteen percent of all adults said that in the past year they have actually moved some of their banking from a large national bank to a community bank or credit union. We asked them why they moved their banking and listed several possible reasons. They could choose more than one reason. Based on that question, we found that 9% of all U.S. adults have taken some of their business away from big banks as a protest.
While this seems pretty encouraging, Zogby also noted that it’s hard to tell what effect the protest is having on the banks, as well as whether more people will get involved. But both sides of the political spectrum are taking part.
Our survey found Democrats more likely to be interested in moving their money out of big banks, but one-quarter of Republicans have also considered doing the same.
For Zogby, the ultimate question is whether this “big bank backlash” will force the Obama administration and Congress to reform the nation’s banking and finance. He isn’t holding out hope.
Bank reform is a much more an inside game with rules that are even more complex than those of health care. That, and the campaign contributions of bankers, gives the financial industry much more ability than any of the players in healthcare reform to shape legislation. Congressional challengers will hammer incumbents who voted for the bailouts, but their election won’t likely change how banks and Washington relate.
But he closes on this encouraging thought:
If enough Americans are serious about making big banks more accountable, they will need to do it themselves by taking their business elsewhere.
Members of Greenpeace climbed the Benelux headquarters of Samsung, in Brussels, yesterday to protest its continued use of toxic substances despite committing to eliminate certain ones by 2010.
An Irish town council has removed a page in its guestbook signed by the Israeli ambassador to protest Israel’s diplomatic record after the alleged use of fake Irish passports by the Jewish state’s spies.
Students at Sussec University in England are staging a sit-in to protest plans to make 115 staff redundant, which will close the environmental science degree and impact on English, history and life science departments.
Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.
Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment. “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd. Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.
Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.
For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy. Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.
Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.
Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission. “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”
After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.
The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence. Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population. For 18-year-olds arrested for robbery in 1980, that point was 7.7 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.
Employment barriers don’t make us any safer. They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society. “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”
Yesterday, Democracy Now! covered escalating tension and protest at the University of California San Diego over a spate of racist incidents over the last few weeks on campus, including the hanging of a noose in the main library.
Towards the end of the interview, which is cut off on the Youtube video above, Professor Daniel Widener says:
And I think that it’s very important that people throughout the country try to do what they can to mobilize to help us, whether that’s emailing our chancellor, chancellor(at)ucsd.edu, calling her office at (858) 534-3135, or looking at a website that the students have put out called stopracismucsd.wordpress.com. These are all things that people can do immediately now to help us build pressure for change.
Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).
Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.
Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.
Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.
On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.
Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.
Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.
Where were you on February 15, 2003? If you were a part of the biggest global demonstration in history against war, which took place that day, I’m sure you remember well.
I was in the streets of Castellon, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where I was studying for a master’s in Peace Studies, with some 20,000 other Spaniards protesting the impending war against Iraq. It was really very moving to be a part of such a large gathering.
Now a team is working on a full-length documentary, called “We Are Many,” about that historic day. Although it’s not set to come out until late 2011 or early 2012, they have already completed a very nice trailer for the movie (above).
While I’m all for commemorating that important event, I also think it’s worth looking at critically. Yes, millions of people around the world came out to protest a war that had not even begun yet. Nothing like that has ever happened before. As Noam Chomsky has said, it took years for any comparable protest to develop during the Vietnam War. And there is hope in that.
Nevertheless, it didn’t stop the invasion of Iraq. Bush brushed off the demonstrations with ease. To let the protesters influence his decision to attack Iraq, he quipped, would be like saying “I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.”
And unfortunately, when the war began a little more than a month later, many who took part in that global day of protest felt deflated. Afterwards, it took months to build the momentum for action back up and it’s my sense that many people stopped demonstrating against the war for good. Perhaps they felt that it was of no use, since the massive protests before the invasion didn’t apparently bear fruit.
However, the hard truth is that we never should have expected one day of protest, no matter how big, to stop a war. That’s not how nonviolence works. If we actually wanted to stop the imminent attack on Iraq, we would have had to come back the next day, and every day after that, until the administration listened. Almost all nonviolent campaigns that have been successful against such a powerful, determined opponent required this type of sacrifice and perseverance from participants.
Protesters would also have needed to try other, more aggressive tactics – like civil disobedience or even a general strike – that more directly disrupt business as usual. If millions of people indefinitely refused to go to work, blocked roads around the country and filled the jails, then Bush may have perhaps faltered.
Rather than simply celebrate February 15, I would encourage the filmmakers to include some discussion along these lines, so that their very promising documentary can contribute to the building of a more effective movement in the future.
More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Athens Wednesday after two of Greece’s largest trade unions organized a nationwide strike to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing the country’s public debt. But the largely peaceful rally of disgruntled workers was unfortunately disrupted by a group of violent youths who clashed with police.
Hundreds of rallies took place across the nation on Wednesday—the eve of President Obama’s White House Health Care Summit—and over a million signed a petition sent to Congress urging lawmakers to “finish the job and pass real health care reform.”
Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.
Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.
Classes at a secondary school in Midland, Ontario were disrupted Wednesday morning when nearly 200 students walked out to protest rumoured cuts in programming.
On the first day of Lent last week, I started my day with mass. I sat with my fellow students. I sat with Jesuits and sisters. I sat and waited to receive ashes. I waited and listened, searching for the meaning of the day. Hoping the priest would remind me why I was there; remind me what Ash Wednesday represented. If only after two decades of attending Ash Wednesday services I could be more grounded in the meaning behind the tradition.
But in my mind and in my heart, I was carrying my agenda for the day. I would not be returning to class after mass. I would be catching the el to head south. I would be a part of the dialogue at the Union League Club. I would be part of the presence outside of its doors. I would be sitting at a table and fasting through lunch. I would wait, and listen actively in order to assess the words of Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway as he gave his lecture, “Closing Guantánamo: Policy, Legal and National Security Concerns”.
As we traveled south, we read the cases of men imprisoned at Guantánamo. We read their names, their trials and the details of their continued detention.
When we reached the Union League Club, we opened our banners and we put on orange jumpsuits. We pulled hoods over our heads and processed to the front entrance.
There we stood. Masked. Solemn. Strong.
Our message read, “We are all human beings. End indefinite detention.”
Underneath the hood, I felt people stare at me. I felt their curiosity. I felt their indifference. I began to think of the men I represented. I began to imagine them standing in my place, on the streets of Chicago, as people walked by and nodded, as people walked by and gawked. I wondered at the shame one feels as a prisoner, made to wear a hood, made to wear a costume, made to feel inhuman. I wondered at the powerlessness of standing erect in the face of indifference, imprisoned.
I had the choice to walk away. I had the choice to drop the banner. I had the choice to go to class. I had the choice to fast. The men at Guantánamo do not have these choices. Their protest is met by force-feeding.
Greece faces a growing fuel shortage as a customs workers’ strike halts the flow of petrol into the country. Customs workers have extended their strike against wage freezes and bonus cuts until this Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.
Last week, A group of lawyers from the Law and Democracy Platform, an Turkish NGO working to strengthen the rule of law while respecting democratic values, protested against the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) decision to strip prosecutors conducting a probe into jailed Erzincan Chief Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner of their special authorities.
