031. "Haunting" officials

The town of Huashui, in Dongyang County, Zhejiang Province lies in eastern China. The town is known for plastic recycling, and is divided into 18 “administrative villages” that then have “natural villages” within them. Dongyang County opened the Zhuxi Chemical Industrial Park in early 2001, on land from the Huaxi and Huangshan villages, and announced that the first factory to move there would be a relocated pesticide factory.

In 1973, American president Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act into law after vetoing its first two iterations. The legislation was concerned with funding vocational rehabilitation, services meant to help disabled individuals find employment. It also sought to improve the government’s services with respect to disabled individuals more generally.

The anti-sweatshop movement was the largest student activism movement in the United States since the South African divestment movement over ten years before. Students all around the country pressured college and university administrators to adopt strict labor codes that guaranteed that merchandise bearing the college’s logo was not made by people working under unacceptable, “sweatshop-like” conditions.

By November 1929, Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria had had enough. From the perspective of the British colonizers, the women became loud, angry, and disruptive. They marched through cities and towns and demanded political leaders to step down. The women took their British rulers completely by surprise. The British were ignorant of the discontent among women that had been building for years, and that had recently bubbled over the surface. They mistook the women’s organized action for spontaneous, ‘crazy’ outbursts.

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
- James Oppenheim (Used as the rallying cry for the movement)

In reaction to the continuing apartheid in South Africa, many colleges and universities in the United States divested from South Africa, meaning that they removed the holdings they had from companies which operated there. Apartheid separated blacks and whites; the whites, however, had a monopoly on power and had much higher living standards. Divestment was viewed as a way to put pressure on the South African government to end apartheid by hurting them economically.

During his first seven years as president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic led the country into several wars with Croatia and Bosnia and isolated it internationally. While he spent money on the country’s secret police and military, unemployment reached as high as 50 percent before 1996. Citizens led several anti-war and pro-democracy campaigns in the early ‘90s, but failed due to lack of outside support. Opposition groups continued both violent and non-violent struggles against the regime, but neither was having any success.

The London Heathrow Airport was of the busiest airports in the world when the English government began to contemplate expansion in 2002. Considered to be one of the premier airports in the world, the English government wanted to preserve the airport’s place among the best airports by improving its efficiency through expansion, including a third runway.

The Bombay Government (through its Revenue Department) had, in 1927, enhanced the land revenue assessment in the Bardoli taluka (county) by a nominal 22 percent, which, when applied, amounted in some cases to as much as 60 percent enhancement. This translated in increased land taxes. The Bardoli peasants had immediately made several claims regarding this modification, the most important of which were that the rate of enhancement was unjust and that it had been established without full and appropriate investigation.

The Mayday protest was a series of large-scale demonstrations against the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War.  It happened in 1971 in Washington, DC from May 1 to May 3 and diminished within several days. The goal was to shut down the federal government offices, because the Mayday Tribe (a largely young and more militant segment of the U.S. anti-war movement) had given an ultimatum to the Nixon Administration that this would happen if it did not end the war.

In the fall of 1998, Harvard students began a Living Wage Campaign that would last for almost four years. The Campaign was headed by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) and aimed to help all Harvard employees receive a “living wage”. The demands of the LWC were that each Harvard employee (janitors, security guards, cafeteria workers, etc.) receive a wage of $10 per hour or more. Most workers were receiving the minimum wage at the time, which was around $6.50. In 1998 Cambridge, MA, this was not enough to get by individually, let alone to support a family.

Immediately before
the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Summit, Greenpeace International took major
direct action against Asia Pulp and Paper in the heart of the Indonesian forest,
launching their “Asia Pulp & Paper under Investigation” campaign.  Thirteen Greenpeace activists locked down
cranes at Asia Pulp and Paper’s main port, attaching themselves to dangling crane
cables.  All thirteen activists were ultimately
arrested, and the last four activists occupied one of the cranes for twenty-seven hours.  Though Greenpeace activists

The International Whaling Commission permits whaling for research purposes and allows whales to be discarded by lethal means as long as whale meat is not used and sold from the specimens. Japanese whalers, who are permitted to whale strictly for research purposes, have not published any peer-reviewed journal articles.  In addition, whale meat frequently appears in Japanese markets and sushi bars with the only possible source being from these Japanese whalers who are killing whales and not publishing research.

The animal rights movement of the 1980’s moved into the mainstream media as it was joined by professionals and academics. The new public attention increased demand from concerned consumers for products developed without animal testing, and companies began more widely using alternatives such as in vitro cell cultures and computer catalogs of known substances.