Take Action Now!!!

Cold Drinks, Hot Planet

    Stop Coca Cola from undermining the environmental guidelines of the 2000 olympic games and it's continuous use of global warming HFC gases. "In the Green Games, Coca-Cola isn't winning the race. Coke keeps its products 'always cool' with the help of HFCs, some of the most potent global warming gases ever produced."

Despite the existence of environmentally friendly cooling systems, Coke continues to use systems that use ozone-destroying chemicals. "A wide range of systems are available to replace HFCs in freezer cabinets, soda machines and ice-cream coolers from the supermarket to the corner grocer". So why does Coke continue to keep their products cool using such potent global warming gases?

Click here to find out how you help challenge the "real thing" to do the right thing.

 

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Protecting Human Rights in a Globalized Economy

    The globalisation of the world economy has resulted in an exponential growth of multinational power in recent years. Multinational companies now represent a massive concentration of money and power that, in some cases, supersedes that of elected governments. It has now become vital that a system of accountability for multinational corporations must be put forward for the protection of human rights worldwide.

Some multinational corporations have been directly associated with human rights abuses; the full facts of which are seldom fully unravelled. Some of these abuses include:

• employing sub-contractors who abuse child labour or bonded labour or slave labour
• contracting producers who have prohibited or repressed unions or who violate accepted labour standards and endanger the health & safety of workers or other citizens
• occupying indigenous peoples' lands to extract natural resources
• failing to stop discrimination or observe rights to equal pay and many lesser infringements of standards

Various mechanisms have been proposed to make multinationals accountable including having rules included in the World Trade Organisation. "In January 1999, the European Parliament adopted a set of proposals on the accountability of European based [multinational corporations]" in a report subtitled "towards a European Code of Conduct" which aims to establish a 'European Monitoring Platform' concerned with multinational accountability.

A summary of European Parliament resolution on multinational accountability is available here

    Take action against these abuses of human rights by writing to your government or to the President of the EU; press for measures to make multinationals properly accountable. Write to:

The President of the European Council
rue de la Loi, 175 / B-1048 Brussels
Fax (32-2) 285 73 97 / 81

MEPs or European Parliament Committees -
via General Secretariat of the European Parliament
L-2929 Luxembourg

"What crushes human spirit while delighting the blue chip men with ties and collars? The answer to that my friend is the all mighty dollar..."

 

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Organizations

This is The Home of the Anti-Racist Action Network, a coalition of individuals and organizations dedicated to halting the rise of the racist right.

 

Amnesty international - working to protect human rights worldwide. Make a personal commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 

Students for a Free Tibet and the Milarepa Fund: Support human rights now. Every opportunity to demand that our government act in the interest of all humanity must be taken. "How ironic that a society which possesses the very solution to our problems is on the verge of extinction, by the very forces of destruction it could alleviate." - Adam Yauch

Reading material

Are We Living in an Age of Corporate Rule? - by Phil

In these recent times, the modern world is going through changes that were never experienced before. New technological innovations have permitted advances in communications, which has led to what many refer today as globalization. Some could argue that this "phenomenon" creates the illusion of a disappearance of territorial borders and of a joining of many groups and cultures into one.. In Canada, the principle organization representing the most powerful Canadian based corporations is the Business Council on National Issues which has had a tremendous impact on the Canadian government's policy. In order to investigate the emergence of this group, its history must be looked at as well as its impact on the Canadian government.

 

20 Years on the MOVE-by MOVE

In May 1985 the Philidelphia Bomb Disposal Unit dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto a commune run by revolutionary ecologists MOVE, killing eleven people and burning down sixty surrounding houses. Before dropping the bomb they shouted, "Attention MOVE, This is America!"

 

Writings by Mumia Abu Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal -- an award-winning 28 year old journalist -- has been on death row since July 3, 1982 for the alleged 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner -- who had been beating his brother, William Cook, at the time. A former Black Panther member and MOVE activist, Abu-Jamal maintains his innocence and four eyewitnesses attest to the presence of a third party that shot Faulkner. His prison writings have been published in The Nation and The Yale Law Review and in a book, Live From Death Row (Addison-Weseley).

 

Necessary Illusions-by Noam Chomsky

These five chapters are modified versions of five Massey lectures that Chomskey delivered over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio in November 1988.
 
"In capitalist democracies there is a certain tension with regard to the locus of power. In a democracy the people rule, in principle. But decision-making power over central areas of life resides in private hands, with large-scale effects throughout the social order."

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