PHA-Exch> WSF Global Day of Action, January 2008

[Jennifer Cox]

Hi PHM Friends,
   
  We are forwarding this in hopes that PHM circles around the world will join in this Global Day of Action along with the Assembly of Social Movements and the World Social Forum (this Global day of Mobilization is being held instead of the WSF this year, January 26, 2008). The Poor People's Economic HUman Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) a part of PHM USA and also on the leadership of the WSF and ASM has been working on this Global Day. 
   
  Please join us on January 26 and write to me (as PPEHRC International Relations Committee) and to the website/contact below with any qeustions or thoughts on PHM's participation in the GDA on any level. 
   
  Attached is the overall call for the GDA and the PPEHRC's call, from the US Social Forum in JUne 2007. Movements are encouraged to develop their own calls, activities and theme areas.
   
  See the mobilization website for the call in many languages.
   
  Jen Cox
  PPEHRC
   
  From Mobilization 2008 working group:
  Dear friends,
  You are receiving this letter due to your prior engagement to the World Social Forum process, particularly through the mobilization and building of local Social Forum Committees and local Social Forums.
  As you might know, the WSF 2008 brings a new concept! Instead of having a meeting in one specific city, the idea is to mobilize everywhere we can in a Global Day of Action. On January 26th, any movement, group or organization can promote their own actions to build "another possible world”. 
  Below you will find the call for action issued by the WSF International Council. 
  Spread the information in your cities and within your network contacts!!
  Please send information on the activities you are planning to globalaction at wsf2008.net Soon, at the website www.wsf2008.net it will be possible to publish the initiatives that are being planned worldwide.  
   
  ENGLISH
   
  Call for day of action / mobilisation January 26th 2008
   
  We are millions of women and men, organisations, networks, movements, trade unions from all parts of the world; we come from villages, regions, rural zones, urban centres; we are of all ages, peoples, cultures, beliefs, but we are united by the strong conviction that 

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE 

With all the richness of our plurality and diversity and our alternatives and proposals, we struggle against neo-liberalism, war, colonialism, racism and patriarchy which produce violence, exploitation, exclusion, poverty, hunger and ecological disaster and deprive people of human rights. 

For many years we have been resisting and constructing innovative processes, new cultures of organization and action from the local to the global, in particular within the processes and Charter of Principle of the World Social Forum from which this call emerges. 

Aware of the need to set our own agenda and to increase the impact of these thousands of expressions and manifestations, we are committed to strengthening the solidarity and convergence amongst our struggles, campaigns, and constructions of alternatives and alliances. 

We commit ourselves to a week of action which will culminate in a Global Day of Mobilisation and Action on January 26, 2008. 

With our diversity which is our strength, we invite all men and women to undertake throughout this week creative actions, activities, events and convergences focusing on the issues and expressed in the ways they choose. 

ACT TOGETHER FOR ANOTHER WORLD! 
   
   
  ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!
  ANOTHER UNITED STATES IS NECESSARY!
   
   
  Declaration read by Maurice Taylor of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) to 1500 people at the PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY at the UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM on July 1, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia
   
   The POOR PEOPLE’S ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN (PPEHRC) announces its participation in the GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION AND MOBILIZATION on JANUARY 26, 2008,
   
  And calls on the people of the United States and the world to join in a “MARCH FOR OUR LIVES” to “STOP THE WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD” at the Republican National Convention on September 2, 2008.
   
   The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) is building a movement that unites the poor across color lines. Poverty afflicts people of all colors in the United States . Daily more and more of us are downsized and impoverished. We share a common interest in uniting against the prevailing conditions and around our vision of a society where we all have the right to health care, housing, living wage jobs, and access to quality education. The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign includes people of many backgrounds. We are mothers, fathers, children, and grandparents; we are the unemployed, people without health care, the working poor, veterans, the downsized, the homeless, the victims of welfare reform and NAFTA, the cast-asides of the new economy; we are social workers, religious leaders, labor leaders, artists, lawyers, and other people of conscience; we are young and old; we live in rural areas and in urban centers.

We are committed to uniting the poor as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty everywhere and forever. We work to accomplish this aim through the promotion of economic human rights, named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as Articles 23, 25, and 26. These articles state our right to such provisions as housing, health care, a living wage job, water, heat and education.  While claiming to defend human rights, the United States has consistently ignored and undermined the global consensus on economic human rights.
   
  From the beginning, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign has dedicated ourselves to building the United States Social Forum and to ensuring a large presence of the poor from across the US here, as part of our efforts to create a massive movement for our very lives, in the face of an economic system and a government that has sentenced millions of us here in the United States and billions of us around the world to death from poverty and war. 
   
  Here at the United States Social Forum, we marched together from the Martin Luther King History Center to the International Headquarters of Coca-Cola to insist that “Another world is possible; Another U.S. is Necessary!” With this “March for Economic Human Rights”, poor and homeless people from across the United States and our brothers and sisters from around the world condemned economic human rights violations in the richest country in the world, including violations of the human rights to health care and water, while our government spends billions on immoral wars abroad. We also protested human rights violations committed by companies such as Coca Cola and Burger King, here in the United States , in Colombia , in India and elsewhere, including violations committed under “free trade” agreements such as the NAFTA and the FTAA. At Coca Cola, we delivered a charge for Crimes Against of Humanity to the corporation.
   
  This coming year, 2008, marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). It also marks the next presidential elections here in the United States , in which the successor to George W. Bush will be elected. In this election year, and in honoring the anniversary of the UDHR, the PPEHRC will be stepping up our efforts on both the national and international level to highlight for the world the crimes of the Bush administration. At the same time, we will be organizing the people of the United States , in unity with the people of the world, to build a massive social movement to fundamentally change the direction of our country, to bring about a future of human rights and peace for all people in the United States and around the world.
   
  On January 26, 2008, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign will be joining people around the world in a Global Day of Action and Mobilization, initiated by the Assembly of Social Movements and the International Council of the World Social Forum. We call on movements and organizations worldwide to join in this historic event.
   
  On September 1, 2008, we will hold a massive “MARCH FOR OUR LIVES TO STOP THE WAR AT HOME AND ABROAD” on Opening Day of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, in the United States. It is at this Convention that the Republican candidate for the November presidential elections will be named. In the days preceding the March For Our Lives, we will hold several Truth Commissions and a World Court of Women to highlight before the international community the economic human rights violations which people across the United States have suffered under the Bush administration. 
   
  As the United States wages war around the world, there is also a hidden but deadly war occurring in the United States, a war which every day leaves millions of poor and working families of all races in the US without basic economic human rights to food, housing, healthcare, education, water, heat, communication and living wage jobs. As our government spends billions of dollars on immoral wars abroad, thousands die every year in the United States without health care, housing, heat, water and food. And every day, it gets more and more dangerous to organize the poor in the United States , as the Bush Administration seeks to stop this growing human rights movement in our country. For organizing in our country, we have had our loved ones imprisoned under false criminal charges, we have watched as our children have been taken away by the government and put into institutions or more well-off families, we have faced threats of imprisonment for up to 22 years on fabricated
 charges, and we have been victims of constant surveillance, infiltration, sabotage and harassment by the US government. 
   
  Yet while the situation of poverty, war, repression and rampant human rights violations worsens both in the United States and around the world, we know that the only answer is to organize a massive social movement in our country and to unite it with peoples and movements worldwide. 
   
  With our participation in the United States Social Forum, in the Global Day of Action and Mobilization in January 2008, and at our March for Our Lives in September 2008, this growing movement of the poor in the United States , stands among millions of the world’s people in denouncing both the war and the impoverishment of the world’s majority.  Despite every effort to keep the poor in the United States isolated and to divide us from the rest of the poor internationally, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign joins with the U.S. and World Social Forums and with the Assembly of Social Movements in building a global movement dedicated to creating another world that is both possible and necessary, a world of human rights for all. 
   
  Our fledgling movement of the poor for economic human rights in the USA is growing, and in spite of the increasing dangers and repression we confront, we are committed to waking up this “sleeping giant” that is the people of the United States. For we are convinced that when the people of the United States are organized to struggle for their own interests, in unity with the peoples of the world, not in the interests of the Bush Administration against the peoples of the world, that it is then that “Another World” truly will be “Possible.” 
   
   
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