Day of Action Against Corporate Globalization and War
KWRU Statement of Solidarity
September 13, 2003

The Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign join our brothers and sisters around the world in today's Worldwide Day of Action Against Corporate Globalization and War. We join in the international effort to stop the WTO, as families and communities whose lives are under direct threat from agreements such as the NAFTA and the FTAA, and institutions such as the WTO. At the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999, our Director and National Spokesperson, Cheri Honkala was the person to be arrested, along with Ward Morehouse, when they attempted to deliver a charge of "Crimes Against Humanity" to the WTO ministers. While we were unable to afford to come to Cancun, we have been busy organizing here in the United States to stop the WTO, the GATS, and the FTAA (as in our recent Poor People's March for Economic Human Rights.)

As a movement of poor, homeless, and unemployed people in the United States, we have suffered the economic human rights violations committed by the WTO and by the Bush administration. We have also been the victims of growing political repression here in the United States.

The Bush administration plans to spend over $87 billion more into their war against the poor, both here at home and around the world. At the same time, a growing number cannot afford to feed our children. Our loved ones have died outside of the world's best hospitals, and too many sleep on frigid streets and in unheated homes with no water. We have mourned for family members who have committed suicide when their farms were taken away from them by the government as a result of NAFTA and WTO policies. In Kensington, in North Philadelphia, homeless, unemployed families sleep inside of abandoned factories, where hundreds of thousands of jobs which we have lost are never coming back. In Kansas, in the US heartland, farmers are being thrown off of their land because they cannot compete against large agribusiness. In Clinchco, Virginia and Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, automation of the coal mines followed by the loss of textile jobs to the NAFTA left hundreds of thousands of people with no jobs, crumbling housing, and land on which nothing will grow. In Florida, farmworkers can barely afford to eat the food they pick. In Idaho, families who have been laid off live in tents along the river in one of the coldest places in the United States.

When we organize, our leaders have been arrested, jailed and threatened with life imprisonment, with having our children taken away by the government, and with violence by the police. We are determined to organize the numbers of people of ALL races who are hurting in our country, and to build a movement, led by the poor, that can reach and organize the American people in an urgent effort to change the priorities and policies of our government.

In last month's Poor People's March for Economic Human Rights across the United States, we carried the struggle of the poor of the U.S., in unity with the poor of the world, into the heart of the empire, to Washington DC. Representing the more than 100 organizations from across the United States that form the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (a number which grew as we marched), we travelled for a month across the poorest region of this country, the South, documenting economic human rights violations committed by the Bush administration, by WTO policies and under agreements such as the NAFTA and the FTAA - from towns like Kannapolis, a town in North Carolina where the entire community is being destroyed with the sudden recent closing of Pillowtex, the 2nd largest textile company in the country which is closing factories across the southern US, to rural Mississippi where farmers are having their land and their homes taken away because of debt.

On August 23rd, we erected an encampment on the National Mall in Washington DC, just blocks from the capitol building and the White House, and dubbed it "BUSHVILLE, to make known to the entire world the crimes of the Bush administration, crimes that are being committed not only around the world, but here at home." After a night of harassment by the National Park Service, the tent city was dismantled by the police, and nearly twenty people were arrested. This event was witnessed by representatives of countries around the hemisphere, including the MST - the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil - and members of the COMPA - the Convergence of Peoples' Movements of the Americas, and supported by movements around the world who answered our call for "An International Day of Action in Solidarity with the Movement of the Poor in the United States: A Call for an End to Poverty in the United States and Worldwide."

As we begin to build a movement of the poor for economic human rights in the United States, we unite with movements of the poor, of workers, the landless, the homeless, and the unemployed from around the world. Despite efforts to keep us from doing so, we know that our lives depend on our talking with each other, our strategizing together, and our joining together.

In two years the Bush administration, has ransomed our country's future to the imperial ambitions of a radical few, many who have personal ties to big oil companies. The administration's plans would eliminate millions of jobs (more than 3 million have been lost in the last 2 years alone), undermine labor rights, further erode environmental protections around the globe, and force thousands of families off of their land and so we must continue the struggle to ensure that the voices of the long silenced will be finally be heard.

In response, on October 25th, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign will join in the March on Washington, to protest the war that continues against the poor of Iraq. This November 17-21 we will be joining people from around the country and around the world at the FTAA Miami Ministerial Meetings, to ensure that those of us in the United States whose very lives are at stake as a result of the NAFTA and the FTAA, are seen and heard. There we will bring the ballots we have collected as part of the hemispheric referendum about the FTAA, which show that the people of the USA are also aware of the dangers of the FTAA and oppose it.

We will continue this struggle next year, when the Poor People's Campaign for Economic Human Rights will lead a national and international POOR PEOPLE'S MARCH on Opening Day of the Republican National Convention in New York City in late August 2004. Please see www.kwru.org for more information about our movement and our recent and upcoming plans.