006. Group or mass petitions

On 18 July 2010, Icelandic pop-singer and cultural icon Bjork called for Iceland’s Parliament to review the sale of Iceland’s geo-thermal company HS Orka to Vancouver-based company Magma Energy Corporation in order to consider the environmental and political implications of such a sale. Bjork argued that the sale of Iceland’s natural resources, like geo-thermal energy, should be decisions made by all Icelanders, and not just those affiliated with the company.

On 20 June 2010 Greenpeace kicked off
their campaign targeting Costco wholesale super market’s seafood policies by
floating a blimp with the words “Costco: Wholesale Ocean Destruction” over the company’s
corporate headquarters in Issaquah, Washington. 
According to Greenpeace, Costco was selling 15 out of 22 “red-listed”
seafood species, including critically threatened orange roughy and Chilean sea
bass.  Greenpeace demanded that Costco:
immediately stop selling these two fish; implement a policy refusing to sell

On 16 December 2012, six men raped and nearly beat a 23-year-old woman to death in New Delhi, the capital of the Republic of India. The woman had boarded a local bus with a male companion that night. Once the couple was on the bus, the six men began to taunt the couple. They gagged and beat the woman’s friend until he was unconscious. Then, the six men dragged the woman to the back of the bus, beat her with an iron rod, and gang-raped her. Following their attack, the men threw both the woman and her friend out onto the streets. 

Following the rise of global food prices in 2007-2008, international investors began buying or leasing large tracts of land in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.  In these deals, called the “Great Land Grab,” local governments and private landholders sold over 203 million hectares of land.  Organizations, such as the Oakland Institute, have brought these exchanges to public attention through studies and media coverage.

In 2004, Western Michigan University outsourced its custodial labor to a private company called Commercial Sanitation Management. The contract cut costs for the university by $1.1 million dollars a year and eliminated 58 positions. Commercial Sanitation Management did not pay what the national living wage movement deemed a living wage: $9.50 an hour with health insurance or $10.50 without health insurance. 

Yevgenia Chriikova was a 33 year-old mother of two who held two degrees in business and engineering. She moved to Khimki with her husband to start a new family free from the urban center of Moscow. A few years after they moved there, they noticed trees in the Khimki Forest marked with red markings. After doing some investigation, Yevgenia discovered the government had plans to raze the trees in the Khimki Forest in order to make way for a 10-lane superhighway connecting the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

After U.S. President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the battle for health care reform truly began to build in the United States of America. In fall of 2009, Mobilization for Health Care for All began a campaign for a single-payer health care system, soon known as “Patients Not Profits.” 

In 2006, President Evo Morales passed the National Plan for Equality and Equal Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. The plan included legal measures to ensure equal access for people with disabilities in the areas of health, education, economic rights, personal and social capacity-building, and institutional and organizational development. It also guaranteed increased financial support totaling $6 million annually, but the money never made it to the people to whom increased subsidies were promised.

On 30 April 1999, at 2 am, Jessica Lal was shot dead at an unlicensed bar in New Delhi. Lal, a 34-year-old model at the time, had been working as a barmaid at a party filled with actors, politicians, and other socialites. A little after midnight, the bar had run out of alcohol. At 2 AM, Siddharth Vashisht, known as Manu Sharma, along with some of his friends, Alok Khanna, Amardeep Singh Gill, and Vikas Yadav, asked Lal for some alcohol. Sharma offered to pay Lal 1000 Rupees, but she refused. He then took out a .22 pistol and fired it twice, killing Lal with a bullet in the head. 

In the early 2000s Israeli bus lines began gender segregation as part of a pilot project. The gender segregation was part of the ultra-orthodox community’s religious guidelines. By February of 2007 there were more than thirty gender-segregated Haredi bus routes operating. Most of these bus lines were less expensive and more easily accessible than other bus routes. On 23 February 2007, New York-born novelist, feminist, and observant-Orthodox Jew Naomi Regan was asked to move to the back of a gender-segregated bus in Jerusalem.

On 12 July 2011 Greenpeace released a report titled
“Dirty Laundry” naming H&M as the largest clothing manufacturer amongst a
number of international brands linked to textile manufacturing facilities in
Indonesia and China discharging hazardous chemicals local water systems.  The facilities’ discharge waters had dangerous
levels of caustic and hazardous substances present, including endocrine
disruptor nonylphenol and solvent tribuyl phosphate.

Gazprom, Russia’s largest oil company, intended to become the first company
to drill Arctic oil in the summer of 2012.  Gazprom planned to use their aging Prirazlomnaya
oil platform to extract oil deposits made newly available with the retreat of
Arctic ice on the Pechora Sea.  As a part
of their “Save the Arctic Initiative” Greenpeace targeted Gazprom in an intense
campaign to stop the beginning of Arctic oil drilling.

Immediately before
the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Summit, Greenpeace International took major
direct action against Asia Pulp and Paper in the heart of the Indonesian forest,
launching their “Asia Pulp & Paper under Investigation” campaign.  Thirteen Greenpeace activists locked down
cranes at Asia Pulp and Paper’s main port, attaching themselves to dangling crane
cables.  All thirteen activists were ultimately
arrested, and the last four activists occupied one of the cranes for twenty-seven hours.  Though Greenpeace activists

Following an industrial boom during World War II, Chester, Pennsylvania began an economic decline.  In 1990, the census reported that about 60% of residents were African American, 25% were living below the poverty line, and 20% were unemployed.  

On 28 December 2007, Australian Jock Palfreeman was in downtown Sofia, Bulgaria, with some friends when he witnessed a young man being attacked by what he believed were football hooligans. Palfreeman chose to help the man, and suddenly found himself fighting a few men after they turned on him. Jock and two attackers fought, and when the dust settled, one of the attackers was fatally wounded and the other was severely wounded.

In 1974, workers at seven textile plants in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina owned by the J. P. Stevens company voted to be represented by the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA). However, the company refused to sign a contract with the new union. In 1976, the TWUA merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) to form the American Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU). The new union immediately launched a campaign to pressure J. P. Stevens to sign a union contract.

In Crystal City, Texas, 87 percent of high school students in 1968 were Chicano, or Mexican American, and nearly half of these were children of migrant farm workers. But the high school principal, five of the seven school board members, and 75 percent of the teachers were white. During the summers, local government and school officials, all white, selected candidates for the fall elections. In doing so, the minority population maintained a majority white school board with just one or two Chicanos they believed to align with their views.

Peabody Energy Corporation is an international coal company based in St. Louis, Missouri (MO).  In 2007, they created a spinoff company Patriot Coal Corp., also based in St. Louis, MO.  Following the spinoff, Peabody Energy has gradually transferred responsibilities for many of its retirees over to the new company.

In the fall of 2009, the University of California Board of Regents met at UCLA to discuss and vote for a tuition hike necessary for them to deal with shrinking budget and spending cuts across the board. The Universities’ budget deficits were associated with those troubling the state of California. The proposed increase in tuition of 32% would force annual tuition costs above $10,000 for the first time in history.

In late 2007, Greenpeace began organizing an international campaign for Philips to reform its electronic waste - or “e-waste” - disposal policies. Philips is a major engineering and electronics corporation with operations in over 60 countries. As of this time, their environmental practices were rated among the lowest in Greenpeace’s Electronics Ranking Guide. In particular, the corporation did not provide take-back and recycle services for its products in countries that did not legally require it.

Following the financial crisis of 2008, landlords evicted many residents in Chicago who could not pay their rent, and banks repossessed homes with overdue mortgages.  Northpoint is one such entity, which manage the residences of Section 8 housing in the Rogers Park area of north Chicago.  To live in these houses, tenants pay a fixed portion of their income as rent.

The United States proposed the enactment of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia in 2004. The United States said that, by lowering the tariffs in a few markets and by making the majority of the other markets entirely duty-free, it could become more competitive. While the Colombian Government responded positively to such a contract, significant groups declared their opposition.  

Mary Ann Good planted the tree that came
to be known as the Wolseley Elm, along with many others, on her family farm in
1860, before Wolseley Avenue existed. Mary’s elms began to be removed as the city
of Winnipeg expanded, until the Wolseley Elm was the only elm remaining that did
not stand on the side of the road. The city of Winnipeg made its first attempt
to remove the tree to make way for Wolseley Avenue sometime between 1907 and
1909. The City paved Wolseley Avenue with asphalt in 1925 and the Elm came

On August 23rd, 1966, the workers of the Wave Hill Station in Northern Territory, Australia, participated in a walk off led by Vincent Lingiari. The workers felt oppressed by the low wages, poor working and living conditions they received at the Wave Hill Station. The Indigenous people known to be part of the Gurindji Tribe were pastoral workers situated at Vesteys' Wave Hill station. The Vestey family was a rich British family that owned many acres of land and companies in Australia.