Teamsters and Turtles?

Teamsters and Turtles?
Author: John C. Berg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780742501928

After decades of single issue movements and identity politics on the U.S. left, the series of large demonstrations beginning in 1999 in Seattle have led many to wonder if activist politics can now come together around a common theme of global justice. This book pursues the prospects for progressive political movements in the 21st century with case studies of ten representative movements, including the anti-globalization forces, environmental interest groups, and new takes on the peace movement.

One Week to Change the World

One Week to Change the World
Author: DW Gibson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2024-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1668033577

The definitive history of Seattle’s 1999 World Trade Organization protests, featuring over 100 original interviews and timed to the event’s twenty-fifth anniversary. One week in late 1999, more than 50,000 people converged on Seattle. Their goal: to shut down the World Trade Organization conference and send a message that working-class people would not quietly accept the runaway economic globalization that threatened their livelihoods. Though their mission succeeded, it was not without blowback. Violent confrontations between police and protestors resulted in hundreds of arrests and millions of dollars in property damage. But the images of tear gas and smashed windows that flashed across TVs and newspapers were not an accurate representation of what actually happened that week. In the oral history One Week to Change the World, award-winning journalist DW Gibson pieces together a complex and compelling account of what really went down in Seattle, immersing you in the angst that defined the end of a millennium, complete with fight clubs and Y2K doomsday scenarios. In more than 100 original interviews with protestors, police, politicians, anarchists, artists, activists, union members, and many others, Gibson reconstructs the events in gripping detail; documents its antecedents and aftermath; and shows how so many of its themes remain just as pressing today, including the vitalness and difficulty of grassroots activism, the aspirations and limitations of globalization, the militarization of policing, the sensationalism of the media, and the undeniable power of the people. Timed to the 25th anniversary of the protests, this book is a page-turning drama, an essential history, and a practical handbook for how to make one’s voice heard.

Focus

Focus
Author: William Bosshardt
Publisher: Council for Economic Educat
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2006-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781561836352

12 lesson plans.

Power Politics

Power Politics
Author: Karen Brodkin
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2009-08-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813548489

In the late 1990s, when California's deregulation of the production and sale of electric power created massive energy shortages, a group of environmental justice activists blocked construction of a power plant in their working-class Mexican and Central American neighborhoods. Why did they choose this battle? And how did the largely high school student activists come to prevail in the face of statewide political opinion? Power Politics is a rich and readable study of a grassroots campaign where longtime labor and environmental allies found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that pitted good jobs against good air. Karen Brodkin analyzes how those issues came to be opposed and in doing so unpacks the racial and class dynamics that shape Americans' grasp of labor and environmental issues. Power Politics' activists stood at the forefront of a movement that is building broad-based environmental coalitions and placing social justice at the heart of a new and robust vision.

Labor and the Environmental Movement

Labor and the Environmental Movement
Author: Brian K. Obach
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2004-02-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780262263993

Relations between organized labor and environmental groups are typically characterized as adversarial, most often because of the specter of job loss invoked by industries facing environmental regulation. But, as Brian Obach shows, the two largest and most powerful social movements in the United States actually share a great deal of common ground. Unions and environmentalists have worked together on a number of issues, including workplace health and safety, environmental restoration, and globalization (as in the surprising solidarity of "Teamsters and Turtles" in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle). Labor and the Environmental Movement examines why, when, and how labor unions and environmental organizations either cooperate or come into conflict. By exploring the interorganizational dynamics that are crucial to cooperative efforts and presenting detailed studies of labor-environmental group coalition building from around the country (examining in detail examples from Maine, New Jersey, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin), it provides insight into how these movements can be brought together to promote a just and sustainable society. Obach gives a brief history of relations between organized labor and environmental groups in the United States, explores how organizational learning can increase organizations' ability to work with others, and examines the crucial role played by "coalition brokers" who maintain links to both movements. He challenges research that attempts to explain inter-movement conflict on the basis of cultural distinctions between blue-collar workers and middle-class environmentalists, providing evidence of legal and structural constraints that better explain the organizational differences class-culture and new-social-movement theorists identify. The final chapter includes a model of the crucial determinants of cooperation and conflict that can serve as the basis for further study of inter-movement relations.

Introducing Human Geographies

Introducing Human Geographies
Author: Paul J. Cloke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 666
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 034088276X

A comprehensive, stimulating and innovative introduction to human geography.

The People's Choice

The People's Choice
Author: Ray Boomhower
Publisher: Indiana Historical Society
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 087195298X

This first-ever biography of Congressman Jim Jontz examines his remarkable long-shot political career and lifetime involvement in local, state, and national environmental issues. As a liberal Democrat (he preferred the terms progressive or populist) usually running in conservative districts, Jontz had political pundits predicting his defeat in every election only to see him celebrating another victory with his happy supporters, always clad in a scruffy plaid jacket with a hood from high school that he wore for good luck. “I always hope for the best and fight for the worst,” said Jontz. He won five terms as state representative for the Twentieth District (Benton, Newton, Warren, and White Counties), served two years in the Indiana Senate, and captured three terms in the U.S. Congress representing the sprawling Fifth Congressional District in northwestern Indiana that stretched from Lake County in the north to Grant County in the south. Jontz told a reporter that his political career had always “been based on my willingness and role as a spokesman for the average citizen.” In his career Jontz also led an unsuccessful campaign to stop the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement with the Citizens Trade Campaign, helped protect the Endangered Species Act when it was under attack in the 1990s as director of the Endangered Species Coalition, campaigned to save old-growth forests as executive director of the Western Ancient Forest Campaign, and tried to foster progressive causes as president of the Americans for Democratic Action.

Partnering for Change

Partnering for Change
Author: David B Reynolds
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317463218

In the past decade unions and community groups have come together around a wide range of campaigns for economic justice - from fighting for living wages, to electing progressive champions, to questioning market-oriented economic development, to promoting anti-sprawl/smart growth efforts. Partnering for Change brings together activists and intellectuals on the forefront of these organizing efforts. They discuss general patterns of labor-community coalitions in terms of alliances between unions and such community players as environmentalists, religious groups, low-income organizations, and local employers. The contributors also offer a wealth of case studies such as the successful campaign for corporate subsidy accountability in Minnesota, Vermont's Livable Wage Campaign, The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, and the model regional power building projects of the South Bay AFL-CIO. The volume's editor, David Reynolds, combines a broad overview of labor-community coalitions, practical examples applicable to diverse communities, and an appreciation of the challenges as well as the opportunities for building the movement for economic change.

Networking Futures

Networking Futures
Author: Jeffrey S. Juris
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2008-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822389177

Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization. In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.

Grounding Global Justice

Grounding Global Justice
Author: Eric D. Larson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2023
Genre: Anti-globalization movement
ISBN: 0520388569

"'Globalization.'" The rise of Trumpism has once again galvanized public debate about this highly charged term. This book looks at the last time the concept spurred wide-ranging and unruly agitation: the late twentieth century. In offering a transnational history of the explosive emergence of antiglobalization movements in the United States and Mexico, it considers how farmers, workers, and Indigenous peoples struggled to change the direction of the world economy. They did so by grounding their efforts to confront free-market economic reforms in frontline struggles for economic and racial justice. The story revolves around three popular organizations, and their paths allow us to reinterpret some of the crucial moments, messages, and movements of the era, including the Mexican roots of the idea of food sovereignty, racism and whiteness at the momentous 'Battle of Seattle' protests outside the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings, and the rise of dramatic street demonstrations around the globe"--