http://www.alternet.org/story/46015/
The 2006 You Didn't Hear About
(edited )
* Black Mesa Coal shut down its mine on indigenous land in Arizona.
* Labor leader Evo Morales, as president of
Bolivia, made good on his campaign promises to
nationalize energy resources and negotiated
contracts giving the impoverished nation far
higher percentages of profits from natural-gas
extraction.
* Achuar people of the Peru-Ecuador rainforest
blockaded a major oil producer and forced it and
the Peruvian government to implement
environmental reforms.
* The Nigerian courts ordered Shell Corporation
to pay $1.5 billion to the Ijaw people of the
Niger Delta, who had been fighting the oil
company for compensation for environmental
devastation since 2000.
* In Botswana, the ¡San people, called the
Bushmen, won the court case over their eviction
from their homeland and the decision restored
their right to live, hunt, and travel on their
ancestral lands.
* Congress banned all new oil, gas, and mineral
drilling leases on the Rocky Mountain Front
region of Montana.
* The October defeat of attempts to privatize and
jack up usage fees on the Internet, despite $200
million in corporate spending on the issue. A
new grassroots movement defeated the telecom
industry's attempt to take over this major new
zone of global communication for its own profit
... Net neutrality matters.
* Five central Asian nations -- Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and
Turkmenistan -- signed a treaty foreswearing
nuclear weapons anywhere on their considerable
territory in September, further upsetting the
Bush Administration which hoped to reserve the
option of siting a few nukes there.
* Ecuador canceled a contract with Occidental Petroleum.
* Wal-Mart met with major setbacks, starting with
an ever-increasing bad image around the world,
thanks to activist exposes. Domestic sales
slumped in the U.S.; South Korean sales were so
dismal that Wal-Mart sold its 16 stores to a
Koran discount chain; the world's largest
corporation also announced that it would pull out
of Germany.
* The European Union struck a blow against the
reign of the corporations when it adapted the
Reach Regulation, a set of laws that essentially
implements the precautionary principle:
corporations will have to prove that their
chemicals are safe, rather than requiring
government agencies to prove they are dangerous.
* Austria banned Monsanto's genetically
engineered canola and genetically engineered
corn; Romania banned genetically engineered soy.
* The passage of the Global Warming Solutions Act
in California is a landmark in states doing what
the federales refuse to do: address the obscenely
disproportionate American contribution to climate
change.
The power of small activist groups, citizens, indigenous tribes, MATTERS.
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