These go beyond stating a point of view (#003) to imply action, as in the Declaration of Independence (U.S. 1776).
Doo Hwan Chun filled the power void in South Korea through his military coup right after the assassination of the former President Jung Hee Park in 1979. He became the president after amending the Constitutional Law that turned the presidential election into an indirect election—one that he could easily manipulate.
In the early twentieth century, Kansas was the third largest coal producing state in the United States, with more than 8,000 unionized miners concentrated in the two southwestern counties of Crawford and Cherokee. In January 1920, the Kansas legislature had established a board of compulsory arbitration, known as the Kansas Industrial Court, which banned strikes against unfair labor practices and working conditions.
At 5 a.m. on Monday, 25 August 1986, a group of 10,000 Ekpan women from the Uvwie clan within Ethiope Local Government Area surrounded the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Petrochemicals Plant, and the Pipelines and Products Marketing Pumpstation. The demonstrating women chanted war songs and displayed banners and posters on which they wrote their grievances, such as, “Give us Social Amenities,” “Review all forms of employment within the Petrochemical,” and “Our sons, daughters and husbands are qualified for key posts within the Petrochemical.”
In 1994, the Gambian military, led in part by Yahya Jammeh, carried out a bloodless coup against Sir Dawda Jawara and his People’s Progressive Party (PPP) administration. Jammeh was an important figure in the transitional government and was elected President in 1996. He has since been reelected in 2001, 2006 and 2011. Foreign governments have given his administration mixed reviews on human rights and victim advocacy. One such time of inquiry was when his administration dismissed Nigerian-born Justice Moses B. Richards as a High Court judge in April 2010. Mr.
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.
The
Georgetown Solidarity Committee (GSC) formed at Georgetown University in 1996
to support workers' rights. In the fall
of 2001, a group of students, headed by the GSC, formed the Living Wage
Coalition (LWC) in order to guarantee University workers an income to meet their
subsistence needs. The students held meetings on how to take action and organized
breakfast events with workers to hear their grievances and concerns. By 2002, the administration agreed to raise
the minimum wage of workers directly employed by the university to $10.25 per
Students at University of Notre Dame started a living wage campaign at their school in September 2005 after learning about similar campaigns happening at Harvard University and Georgetown University. A living wage was defined as a family of four being able to live above the poverty line on the working parent’s salary. The Notre Dame students campaigned to raise the minimum pay wage from $8.25 up to $12.10 per hour. The group felt that it was the responsibility of the institution as social Catholics to understand the importance of achieving a living wage for workers.
When Oregonians received notice in 1968 that the Portland General Electric Company (PGE) planned to install a nuclear power plant in Rainier Oregon, concerned citizens began to work within the political structure to prevent the plant from entering the community. Based on the anti-nuclear sentiment in the US at the time, many Oregonians were wary of the environmental repercussions of a nuclear power plant. Many also considered the construction and upkeep of the plant an unwise allocation of state money.
Greenpeace published its first “Guide to Greener Electronics” in August 2006 to rank technology companies based on their use of toxic chemicals and their participation in the disposal of their products.
On 28 September 1995 the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company fired 329 port workers in Liverpool, England, for joining a picket line in solidarity with fellow port workers in Torside. The Torside workers were fired for protesting against the “free-market” style of labor, in which there was no job security, no wage security, and a constant change of working hours. In this format, workers could be phoned at any time and asked to come in to work.
The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) wanted to situate Yugoslavia in a balance between the Soviet dominated Eastern Europe and US dominated West. In order to ensure this global placement, Yugoslavians exercised an economic reform program during 1964-65. LCY utilized market mechanisms to overcome stagnation and stimulate economic growth, but employment and a growth in wage disparity ensued instead. Members of the Yugoslavian Student League as well as professors and editors of dissonant magazines established spaces for critique and set the stage for nonviolent
In 1953 the South African Government passed the Bantu Education Act into law. This act gave the South African government the power to structure the education of Native South African children, separate from White South African children. This law was intended to organize a federal education system that would ensure that all students received an education. But it also engrained an apartheid framed education system that was predicted to impede the advancement of black children. Many ANC members, African parents, teachers, and ministers were unhappy with the way that the
In the early 2000s, many residents of rural India did not own the land on which they lived and worked. Without land rights, peasant farmers were often economically insecure.
The anti-pass campaign took place in the Orange Free State in South Africa to protest non-white South African women being required to carry documentation of formal employment. Non-white is a term that was often used in South Africa to classify non-European ethnicities including black South Africans, coloured South Africans, and Indian South Africans. The enforcement of passes was meant to establish tighter controls over domestic service. It was mandatory for non-white women to carry documentation that had to be shown to police officers or city officials on their demand.
On Sunday 26 December Bolivia’s government abruptly ended a six-year freeze on fuel prices, raising the price of gasoline by 73% and diesel by 83%. Vice president Alvaro Garcia said this change in policy was necessary because the subsidy cost US$380 million a year- 2% of Bolivia’s gross domestic national product and US$150 million of the gasoline was smuggled into other countries and sold at higher prices. The cost of the subsidies was projected to increase to over US$1 billion in 2011.
Starting in the late 1950’s commercial fishing fleets began catching tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (ETPO) using circular purse seine nets. These nets prohibit fish from swimming downwards to escape capture.
On 18 July 2010, Icelandic pop-singer and cultural icon Bjork called for Iceland’s Parliament to review the sale of Iceland’s geo-thermal company HS Orka to Vancouver-based company Magma Energy Corporation in order to consider the environmental and political implications of such a sale. Bjork argued that the sale of Iceland’s natural resources, like geo-thermal energy, should be decisions made by all Icelanders, and not just those affiliated with the company.
On 4 April 2004, Casey Sheehan, an American soldier, was killed in the Iraq War. Upon hearing the news, his mother Cindy Sheehan was completely devastated and questioned the value of the war.
From 1961 to 1996 Guatemalans endured a bloody civil war. During this conflict the military-controlled government fought the leftist guerillas or the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). These groups fought each other for political control. The extreme violence pushed many indigenous Guatemalans high into the country’s highlands or displaced them as refugees into other countries.
The Colombian military and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas have been at war since 1964. Colombian citizens, especially indigenous, are often caught in the crossfire between the two armies. Both the government and FARC have forced children to fight for them.
Gazprom, Russia’s largest oil company, intended to become the first company
to drill Arctic oil in the summer of 2012. Gazprom planned to use their aging Prirazlomnaya
oil platform to extract oil deposits made newly available with the retreat of
Arctic ice on the Pechora Sea. As a part
of their “Save the Arctic Initiative” Greenpeace targeted Gazprom in an intense
campaign to stop the beginning of Arctic oil drilling.
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
In 1963, nearly
ten years after the Brown vs. Board of
Education court case declared school segregation illegal, de facto rather
than legal segregation remained prevalent in many northern cities of the United
States including Milwaukee. Milwaukee
had begun “intact busing” of black children to predominately white schools in
1957, where black children were taught in classrooms separate from white
children and were not served in the cafeterias.
Tahir-ul Qadri is a Pakistani law professor, politician, and Sufi scholar. After serving as an elected Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan, Qadri resigned in 2004, claiming disappointment and frustration with regard to corruption and lack of accountability in President Pervez Musharraf's government. In the next year, Qadri engaged in a self-imposed exile to Toronto, Canada, where he continued to practice as an Islamic scholar.
In late 2007, Greenpeace began organizing an international campaign for Philips to reform its electronic waste - or “e-waste” - disposal policies. Philips is a major engineering and electronics corporation with operations in over 60 countries. As of this time, their environmental practices were rated among the lowest in Greenpeace’s Electronics Ranking Guide. In particular, the corporation did not provide take-back and recycle services for its products in countries that did not legally require it.
