002. Letters of opposition or support

Prime minister John Key and his National Party emerged victorious in the election of 2008 against the incumbent Labour Party on promises to revive the struggling economy. In August 2009, his Energy Minister Gerard Brownlee hinted at changes to the Crown Minerals Act, which protected conservation lands from mining. His speech also included possible plans to allow mineral exploration in lands overseen by the Department of Conservation. Public interest in these proposed changes were low.

Casco Viejo, a historic district of Panama, was designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site in 1997. The popular cultural destination had long sustained a modest infrastructure, until the Panamanian government proposed to extend a national revitalizing plan known as “Cinta Costera” to the district in 2010.

After 8 years of negotiation and organizing, the New York University (NYU) Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) won voluntary recognition from NYU on 26 November 2013, partially in response to a letter signed by 1300 graduate student employees in support of unionization. The NYU administration withheld formal recognition until after 98.4 percent of graduate students voted in favor of the union on 11 December. This made NYU the first private university in the United States to recognize a graduate student union. 

In 2013, Newark, Delaware, USA, was a town of 30,000 and home to the University of Delaware. Local citizens felt  great concern about job creation to recover from the losses resulting from the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008, and they pressured their politicians to bring job creation opportunities to Delaware. In June of 2013, a representative of a company called The Data Centers, LLC, contacted local leaders of the Delaware Sierra Club asking for their support to build a data center to provide retail IT services on property owned by the University of Delaware.

In August of 2008, Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen was premiering his new documentary, “Leaving Fear Behind”, to a group of journalists in a Beijing hotel when Chinese police interrupted and forcibly shut down the screening.

From its founding in 1935 until the early 1950s, Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas accepted only white students. In 1951, when NAACP chapter leader Henry Boyd Hall began work to desegregate the college, community college classes for African American students were held at the city’s Solomon M. Coles High School for Negroes. However, these classes were insufficient in several ways.

In November 2010, Bianca “Nikki” Peet attempted to start a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) in Flour Bluff, Texas, part of the greater Corpus Christi area. She initially went through the normal channels within the local high school, but the school’s principal, James Crenshaw, denied her request to form a GSA. Crenshaw asked her to change the club’s name and mission and come back for reconsideration. After this initial denial, Peet revised the club’s mission statement. She resubmitted it in January of 2011 and was again denied.

In 2011, Mexico faced huge costs from the drug trade and efforts to
counteract it.  Mexico constituted a key part of the global drug trade,
as cartels trafficked illegal drugs through Mexico to their main buyer,
the United States.  Cartels committed extensive violence as they tried
to ensure compliance from citizens and maximize profit.  The most
frequent victims of drug violence were poor Mexicans, and some cities,
such as the border town of Ciudad Juarez, were particularly dangerous. 

Following President Lee Myungbak’s inauguration in February 2008, media workers criticised his policies on the press. The workers accused Lee of attempting to exert greater control over the media by handpicking the chair of the national broadcasting committee and YTN, a prominent television network in South Korea, and by pressuring the executive of the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) to resign.

The May 1959 opening of French government internment camps for Algerians suspected of being subversive agents of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) came towards the end of the Algerian War (11/1954-03/1962). The war, which ended with Algeria winning its independence from France, featured a wide variety of tactics, including torture by both sides. This torture led to the original conferences and protests of l’Action civique non-violente, a group dedicated to the right to resist oppression.

The Earth Quaker Action Team’s first campaign, BLAM! (Bank Like Appalachia Matters!) began on 18 February 2010. Ingrid Lakey, Board Member of EQAT, sent a letter to PNC Vice President Jean Caulfield, which described the health and environmental dangers of mountaintop mining and requested a meeting. Shortly after Lakey wrote her letter, three EQAT members met with J. William Mills (the president of the Philadelphia Regional PNC banks) and relayed their expectations of PNC Bank to him. Less than a week later, PNC Bank sponsored a flower show on 9 March 2010.

In 2012, Swaziland was a small landlocked country in southern Africa ruled by  King Mswati III. Sixty three percent of the country’s population lived below the poverty line. Government spending on education had continuously decreased since 2008. With the economy virtually stagnated, the International Monetary Fund had urged the government in February 2012 to reduce the size of its civil service.

Divest UMaine formed in December, 2012 at the University of Maine by co-founders Brooke Lyons-Justus, Connor Scott, and Catherine Fletcher. Sparked by a growing disapproval of fossil fuels in the United States along with increased public awareness of global warming, UMaine students, staff, faculty, and alumni formed Divest UMaine and aimed to convince the University of Maine System to freeze assets invested in top 200 fossil fuel companies and to “reinvest in a sustainable, socially responsible alternatives.”

The United States first used Napalm as an incendiary device in Japan
during WWII. It melted flesh and produced horrific wounds. Napalm once
again took on a functional role for the US in Vietnam, and the
government requested bids from chemical manufacturing companies to make
Napalm in 1965. Dow Chemical, based out of Midland, Michigan, won the
contract.

The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) was founded at the University of Oregon in December 1975 as a union to represent the interests of graduate students employed by the University. In 2014, during an era of weaker unions, the University hired an outside law firm to negotiate its labor relations, though in it's 39 years of existence, the GTFF had never engaged in a strike to negotiate a labor relations dispute.

In 1892, students at Havana University in Cuba (then called The Royal University at Havana) staged a strike in protest of the suspension of Doctoral degrees from the University. The student campaign took place from mid-March to mid-September and utilized striking, letters and public exhibitions comprised of notes displayed on the school walls as acts of nonviolent protest. During this time of the campaign, the president of the University of Havana was Joaquín Francisco Lastres y Juiz, whom the student activists held accountable for the suspension of Doctoral Degrees.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected President of Iran on 12 June 2009 The next day, hundreds of thousands of people peacefully protested the results, chanting “Where is my vote?,” because they believed that the election was fraudulent. Most of the protesters joined the Green Movement, a nonviolent pro-democracy group opposed to Ahmadinejad’s leadership and was led by Mir Hossein Mousavi and his spouse, Zahra Rahnavard. The Ahmadinejad regime responded violently to the protesters with its Revolutionary Guards, Basij paramilitary units, and Lebas Shakhsi forces. Many were beaten and arrested.

In the fall of 2013, University of Hawaii graduate student and oceanography major Michelle Tigchelaar launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign after witnessing the devastation that climate change was bring to Hawaii’s famed coral reefs. Initially, the campaign was organized by members of the University’s Graduate Student Organization. The campaign launched in September 2013 with a movie screening 350.org’s movie Do the Math. The campaign lost traction in its first year after several members of the Graduate Student Organization graduated in the at the end of the fall semester.

The Fossil Free SOAS’s (the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London) divestment campaign began in the autumn of the 2013 school year as part of a cluster of divestment campaigns led by People & Planet, a network of student campaign groups in the UK focused on alleviating global poverty, defending human rights, and protecting the environment. On 13 November 2013, SOAS students, staff, and alumni joined together in signing a divestment petition to Professor Paul Webley, the director of SOAS at the time.

Standardized testing in the United States dates back to the early 1900s, when the military issued standardized tests of intelligence to potential candidates for the armed services. In the 1970s, public school students began taking “high stakes” tests, in which their scores affected school district funding and the students’ ability to move on to the next grade. The original purpose of these tests was to hold school districts accountable by providing a standard measure of academic comparison across students and school districts.

Nigeria, the most populous African country, is filled with oil reserves, particularly in the Niger River Delta. Oil was the main national export, comprising 98% of Nigeria’s export earnings and 83% of government revenue in 2002. Starting in the mid-1980s, the Nigerian government subsidized fuel, letting Nigerians buy oil and gasoline at prices significantly below market levels.

Approximately ninety-seven percent of publishing climate scientists agreed that climate change was occurring in 2013, and that the primary cause was human activities. If the planet was to remain within safe levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and maintain temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, four-fifths of the known fossil fuel reserves needed to stay in the ground and not be burned.

On 31 March 2010, a group hoping to stop the demolition and preserve the cinema launched a petition and started a Facebook group in an effort to attract international media and elite attention. Over the coming months, the Facebook page attracted over 10,000 members, and they gathered 6,850 signatures from prominent international filmmakers, directors and actors. Campaigners held a series of three smaller peaceful rallies over the following year.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is home to 6 million people with approximately 1.5 million residents living in favelas. These residential communities, named after the favela trees native to the region, are commonly misunderstood by outsiders. Although 32% of favela residents belong to the lower-class, a 2013 study found that 85% of people residing in favelas like where they live. Some favelas have high crime rates, but many are high-functioning, self-governing communities.

Starting in 2008, the Brazilian government began commissioning nearly forty police pacification units (UPP) in over two-hundred of Rio de Janeiro’s shantytowns, known as favelas. This pacification project aimed to maintain security in territories after Rio’s special police unit (BOPE) cleared the communities of gang leaders and drug traffickers who, for decades, controlled the favelas and inspired their violent reputations.