PHA-Exch> PPEHRC: Poor of US Call for Participation in Global Day of Action

[Jennifer Cox]

  Pronto mandaremos el espanol.
   
  Statement by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign - USA (PPEHRC) about Participation by the US Poor in the Global Day of Action on January 26, 2008 
  and in the upcoming US presidential elections:
   
   
  ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE!!

  ANOTHER UNITED STATES IS NECESSARY!!
   
  Version of the Declaration read by Maurice Taylor of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) to about 1500 people at  the PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ASSEMBLY at the UNITED STATES SOCIAL FORUM on July 1, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
   
   
  PPEHRC Announces Participation in Global Day of Action on January 26, 2008, 
   
  And calls on the people of the United States and the world to join in a “MARCH FOR OUR LIVES” for "MONEY FOR HEALTH CARE NOT FOR WAR!" at the Republican National Convention on September 2, 2008, during the U.S. presidential elections!
   
   
  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 2, 2008, we will hold a massive “MARCH FOR OUR LIVES" for "MONEY FOR HEALTH CARE NOT FOR WAR!” on the second 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.” 
   
   
  POOR PEOPLE'S ECONOMIC HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN
  www.economichumanrights.org
  info at economichumanrights.org
   
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