Newsitem List

10/11/01 Approximately 2,500 people attended the People Have the Power rally 1 | 2 in San Francisco. Speakers from a variety of organizations spoke in favor of the creation of a Municipal Utility District....

Governor Davis' bailout is now disguised as the $7 billion purchase of the transmission system which has a book value of only $3.8 billion. We should pay less than book value; these utilities say they're near bankruptcy (though their parent corporations are fat with assets they bought with our last bailout)." --Medea Benjamin, February 24, 2001. Meanwhile, California legislators have been dismantling the state's pollution-control regulations in order to build cheap energy plants....

Former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Curtis Hebert, Jr. revealed that Enron CEO Kenneth Lay threatened Hebert that he should obey or Lay would have his close friend Bush fire Hebert. Hebert refused to obey and was fired. Recently Hebert made a new, even more explosive charge: he says Bush also let Lay interview him and other candidates for FERC chairman in the first place. In other words, Bush gave Enron "hire and fire" authority over the FERC, betraying his oath to the Am...

Power scam: What You Can Do...

By January, Canadian border patrol had already begun to turn away suspected demonstrators, including renowned activist Lorenzo Kamboa Ervin. Canadian authorities, preparing the largest police deployment in the country\'s history, will establish a four square mile security perimeter in downtown Quebec, surrounded by an enormous metal fence. There are plans to clear six hundred plus inmates from a local prison for the duration of the Summit to house arrested protestors. Local legislators also u...

Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART), which includes representatives of environmental, human-rights, U.S. labor, women's, family-farm, development, religious, and public-policy organizations, has presented the Committee of Government Representatives on Civil Society Participation with "Alternatives for the Americas: Building a Hemispheric Peoples' Agreement." The document contends that "trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather the instruments for achieving just and s...

The existing proposals will also force countries to accept any agricultural imports, effectively breaking down barriers for large agribusinesses. As cheaper agricultural products flood their local markets, small family farms (in many countries, a primary form of subsistence for indigenous populations) are suddenly unable to compete. Forced off their land by economic necessity, and often actual displacement as governments award land rights to multinational corporations, many people face factor...

While borders remain wide open to goods and services, people are not allotted similar privileges. The maintenance of a cheap workforce requires a "captive audience", as laborers with the option to migrate would likely seek out better conditions. Thus, FTAA will inevitably lead to further militarization of borders and a vicious crack-down on immigration. Hear more about the militarization of the border....

Modeled after NAFTA's infamous Chapter 11, FTAA will undermine the regulatory power of sovereign nations by permitting corporations to initiate "investor-to-state" lawsuits over any legislation that may impact their profits. For example, a NAFTA tribunal ordered the Mexican government to pay $16.7 million in compensation to the U.S. based Metalclad Corporation, after a Mexican state shut-down the company's toxic waste disposal facility, a contaminant to the local water supply. The ruling foun...

An "effort to unite the economies of the Western Hemisphere [excluding Cuba] into a single free trade arrangement," FTAA began during the Organization of American States (OAS) December 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami. According to the OAS website, "these [FTAA] negotiations will encompass all of those areas previously negotiated and which fall within the World Trade Organization's ambit, with the goal of going beyond previously agreed multilateral liberalization within the Hemisphere, wh...