Post by Sunday at midnight.
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Dozens of Unionized Media workers go on Hunger Strike to Protest Working for Lee's Political Appointee at YTN
3. I'm endlessly amazed at the high level of brinkmanship in Korean protest strategies. Recall the 'normal' behavior in the 1946 Peasant Protests we discussed in class. When we get to our discussion of culture and social movements, I think it will begin to make a lot more intellectual sense how cultural perspective on social movements helps us understand different societies levels of acceptable mobilization and strategies of mobilization.
The interesting question for me is still historical: what cultural strategies of protest factors would come up in a comparison of protest behavior in Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam?
This is just another normal day in Korean culture, I think. However, as Chenyang from China said in his post, coming from cowed China's culture of more tentative protest given past state repression realities and the lack of political opportunities there, he's amazed as well at the level of culture mobilization in Korean social movement activities.
As I am fond of noting, and I admit I admire, it's only because France is in the streets every time it's government does something it dislikes that it has kept (so far...) its sturdy distributionary forms of democratic socialism. However, this is perhaps a durable cultural issue, and cultures only change slowly I think.
It would be interesting to attempt to compare features of highly mobilized cultures like Korea and France with those that are more terrified (rationally due to state/movement histories of the past) or limited in their actions.
---------------------------
09-29-2008 17:44
YTN's 55 Junior Reporters Go on Hunger Strike
By Kim Tae-jong
Staff Reporter
A group of junior employees at cable news channel YTN started a relay hunger strike Monday to protest the appointment of President Koo Bon-hong, and management's punitive measures against unionized workers.
The group calling themselves ``YTN's Young Employees'' opposed President Lee Myung-bak's appointment of Koo, who helped Lee during his presidential campaign, claiming the news channel's political neutrality will be significantly compromised. Fifty-five unionized workers will join the relay protest. [So the movement strategy has moved to other unionized workers? I'm not sure what that sentence means--whether these 55 hunger strikers were unionized or whether yet another group at the station will be hunger striking with them in solidarity! Remember Social Movement Organizations with the same 'frame bridge'. Multiple organizations clear here as well as culture I think.]
They also demanded the withdrawal of punitive measures against 33 unionized workers, and the cancellation of lawsuits against 12 union members and recent job transfers of employees.
``We are facing the most serious crisis since the establishment of our company,'' a member of the group said during a news conference in front of company headquarters in Namdaemun, downtown Seoul. ``We will fight for fair news reporting and YTN. If the management keeps turning a deaf ear to our demands, we will fight in more aggressive ways.''
The group, which consist of employees who have joined the company since 2001, went on hunger strike together, but from next month, they will continue on a relay-basis.
e3dward@koreatimes.co.kr
---
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/09/117_31848.html
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Week 4: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post by Sunday at midnight.
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Article demonstrating the terms we learned last week about SMOs, SMIs, weak links, and novel targets, etc.
3. This is a nice example of high grievance that was only mobilized by SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS, instead of just random people in the streets. It is about Americans protesting in front of the White House against the 700 billion bailout of bad debts of multi-billionaire bankers without any help for common Americans at all.
Note the issue of how a social movement industry was assembled from preexisting social movement organizations from previous mobilizations on different targets. They reformed in a novel way, around a novel topic, instead of forming a novel organization to handle the mobilization. Note how unpredictable were the transmission of information about the mobilization from one organizational member to another. In that, note the 'weak links' carrying the message about the mobilization until it hit the right groups willing to turn sympathy into action and avoid erosion. We talked about all the words in boldface this last week. Then it was contentious enough to turn into a media frame as well, which got more publicity.
--------------------------------
Protesters against bailout plan picket White House
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday September 26, 2008
Chanting "Main Street first" and carrying signs and colorful umbrellas, a few hundred protesters marched in front of the White House on a rainy Thursday afternoon to demand the rejection of Treasury Secretary Paulson's Wall Street bailout plan.
The demonstration was one of hundreds organized by TrueMajority.com and UsAction and was timed to coincide with a meeting between President Bush and Congressional leaders.
According to the Boston Globe, "A coalition (or SMI) of [pre-existing SMO] groups calling itself the Main Street Coalition marched from the Treasury Department down Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting 'No deal for Wall Street, New Deal for Main Street' and handing out copies of a 'Taxpayer Invoice' for $700 billion."
Skip Roberts of the Service Employees International Union told the Globe, "Something has to be done, but this is going to be put on the backs of the average taxpayer when they had nothing to do with it."
According to Wired.com, the idea for the protests began with New York City journalist Arun Gupta, who last Sunday sent out an email urging a demonstration on Wall Street. The email quickly raced around the Net, author Naomi Klein posted it on her website, and "TrueMajority, a 700,000 member activist group headed by Ben and Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen, sent out an action alert the next day."
"This was a convergence of everyone having the same thought at the same time," TrueMajority's online director Matt Holland told Wired.com. The protests are planned to continue into next week.
This video is from ABCNews.com, broadcast September 25, 2008.
---
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Protesters_march_againt_White_House_bailout_0926.html
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Article demonstrating the terms we learned last week about SMOs, SMIs, weak links, and novel targets, etc.
3. This is a nice example of high grievance that was only mobilized by SOCIAL MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS, instead of just random people in the streets. It is about Americans protesting in front of the White House against the 700 billion bailout of bad debts of multi-billionaire bankers without any help for common Americans at all.
Note the issue of how a social movement industry was assembled from preexisting social movement organizations from previous mobilizations on different targets. They reformed in a novel way, around a novel topic, instead of forming a novel organization to handle the mobilization. Note how unpredictable were the transmission of information about the mobilization from one organizational member to another. In that, note the 'weak links' carrying the message about the mobilization until it hit the right groups willing to turn sympathy into action and avoid erosion. We talked about all the words in boldface this last week. Then it was contentious enough to turn into a media frame as well, which got more publicity.
--------------------------------
Protesters against bailout plan picket White House
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday September 26, 2008
Chanting "Main Street first" and carrying signs and colorful umbrellas, a few hundred protesters marched in front of the White House on a rainy Thursday afternoon to demand the rejection of Treasury Secretary Paulson's Wall Street bailout plan.
The demonstration was one of hundreds organized by TrueMajority.com and UsAction and was timed to coincide with a meeting between President Bush and Congressional leaders.
According to the Boston Globe, "A coalition (or SMI) of [pre-existing SMO] groups calling itself the Main Street Coalition marched from the Treasury Department down Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting 'No deal for Wall Street, New Deal for Main Street' and handing out copies of a 'Taxpayer Invoice' for $700 billion."
Skip Roberts of the Service Employees International Union told the Globe, "Something has to be done, but this is going to be put on the backs of the average taxpayer when they had nothing to do with it."
According to Wired.com, the idea for the protests began with New York City journalist Arun Gupta, who last Sunday sent out an email urging a demonstration on Wall Street. The email quickly raced around the Net, author Naomi Klein posted it on her website, and "TrueMajority, a 700,000 member activist group headed by Ben and Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen, sent out an action alert the next day."
"This was a convergence of everyone having the same thought at the same time," TrueMajority's online director Matt Holland told Wired.com. The protests are planned to continue into next week.
This video is from ABCNews.com, broadcast September 25, 2008.
---
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Protesters_march_againt_White_House_bailout_0926.html
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Week 1: Opening Thread: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week
Post Comments like this:
1. Your Name
2. A Title
3. A short personal commentary what you learned from it or what made you curious about it given the week's class content. However, it doesn't have to be about the week's content, only something related to human-environmental interactions.
4. Then put a long line ('-------------------)'.
5. Then cut/paste the article or topic you found.
6. Then a small line '---'.
7. Then, finally, paste the URL (link) of the post.
Post for this week on this thread. I'll set up a new main post each week, and then we will do the same.
1. Your Name
2. A Title
3. A short personal commentary what you learned from it or what made you curious about it given the week's class content. However, it doesn't have to be about the week's content, only something related to human-environmental interactions.
4. Then put a long line ('-------------------)'.
5. Then cut/paste the article or topic you found.
6. Then a small line '---'.
7. Then, finally, paste the URL (link) of the post.
Post for this week on this thread. I'll set up a new main post each week, and then we will do the same.
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