PHA-Exchange> PPEHRC to March for Water and Hold Bushville at US Social Forum, Summer 2007

[Jennifer Cox]

The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign Announces
  A March for the Human Right to Water 
  and Bushville at the 1st United States Social Forum, 
  Atlanta, Georgia, USA, Summer 2007
   
  CALL to ACTION!!
   
  At the U.S. Social Forum in Summer 2007, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign will lead a massive non-violent "March for the Human Right to Water" in Atlanta, Georgia. We will erect a ‘Bushville’ Tent City to be the base for our involvement with the Social Forum, the March, and also the location of daily teach-ins, panels, workshops, and performances.  The ‘Bushville’ will feature a large medical tent as a statement addressing the health care crisis in the US and the healthcare ramifications of living without access to clean water.  Throughout the week, we will be taking members of the national and international media, the human rights community, religious people and others on Water Crisis Reality Tours of Atlanta and surrounding areas, exposing the plight of Americans living without water. 
   
  Far from a privilege or a commodity, water is the essential element of all life on our planet. For societies across the globe, it is integral to transportation, agriculture, industry and culture. It is the obligation of local, national and international public institutions to protect and deliver safe water to all by ensuring that provision of water is public, social, cooperative, equitable and not for profit. However, President Bush is cutting federal aid to public water systems while privatizing the nation’s water supplies and services. Alongside multinational corporations, he is making survival ever more difficult to afford. Escalating rates threaten to deny drinking water and turn off the faucets in homes of increasing numbers of poor people around the country. While stockholders reap the benefits, the poor are essentially being denied our basic human right of access to water. The United Nations guarantees clean, safe water as a basic human right
 yet the United States
 ignores this. The Bush Administration continues to attack other nations under the pretense of human rights violations while horribly violating the rights of its own people. As poor and working people of this country, we demand access to clean and safe water. Next Summer we will bring together thousands of poor people, along with community organizations from across the country, students, social workers, union members, lawyers, religious leaders and everyone who believes it is wrong to put a price on life. We will make our voices heard as we March for the Human Right to Water. 
   
  All across the country, Americans are fighting to protect the public control of water services in their communities. Organizers from Stockton, CA and Champaign, IL to Detroit, MI, Philadelphia, PA and elsewhere have all organized to fight major multinational corporations that seek to privatize water, regardless of high ecological, societal and human costs. Many of these campaigns have already tasted success. Others remain in the trenches, but are gaining ground. The U.S. Social Forum is a unique opportunity for us all to make a dramatic, defining statement against water privatization and to assert water as a human right. Water is an essential resource that cannot be confined by city, state, political or economic barriers. Neither should be our fight to protect it.  
   
  The privatization of water prioritizes profit above the provision of services to those most in need. Thus, in the United States and across the globe, the right to water is most often denied to the poor. People who fight poverty, homelessness and lack healthcare, must also struggle without access to clean water for drinking, cleaning, cooking, washing, bathing and other daily functions. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign recognizes that economic rights and the right to water are inextricably linked, and will unite with existing grassroots efforts in demanding that sufficient access to clean and safe water be protected for all. 
   
  Water should never be a luxury. Not in the United States. Not anywhere. Toward this end, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign calls for you to join us as we flood the streets of Atlanta in a powerful demonstration for the human right to water.  
   
  Contact: 
  Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign sarakwru at hotmail.com
  www.economichumanrights.org 

 		
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