The Kensington Welfare Rights Union Announces:
Poor Across the United States Join in the
Hemispheric Referendum on the FTAA

"No to the FTAA, Yes to Economic Human Rights For All"

The "No the FTAA, Yes to Economic Human Rights for All" national campaign, led by the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, will bring the hemispheric referendum on the FTAA to families and communities across the country which are most directly affected by free trade policies. As families who have watched our communities be torn apart as a result of free trade policies, privatization and welfare reform (a form of structural adjustment) - we refuse to remain silent or invisible. We are determined that those of us whose very lives are threatened by these policies play an active role in the fight to stop the FTAA.

Over the past year, along with movements of the poor from across the Americas, we have carried out educational and organizing activities across the US, Central America and Canada in which we, the poor from across the hemisphere, have come together to speak FOR OURSELVES about the effect of globalization on our lives and to unite as movements of the poor to oppose the FTAA.

This year, in a year of major local and national activities by the poor across the country, we will be educating about the FTAA and organizing for the hemispheric plebiscite in poor and downsized communities across the United States. Activities include:

At the same time we must ensure that we are able to speak on our own behalf to the American public and to the international community about the very deadly effect that these policies have had and will have on our families and communities. We will join with the labor movement, the religious community, and others to organize people all over the U.S. to say:

"No to the FTAA, Yes to Economic Human Rights for All!"

Poor of United States Join in Hemispheric Referendum on the FTAA

We join this effort because our lives depend on it. This year, as we continue to organize, educate and unite the poor across the United States, we will be bringing the FTAA to the communities hardest hit by free trade around the United States. We will be organizing for the referendum among those whose lives are directly threatened by these policies: From Kensington, in North Philadelphia, where homeless, unemployed families sleep inside of abandoned factories, where hundreds of thousands of jobs which we have lost and are never coming back…to Kansas, in the US heartland, where farmers are being thrown off of their land because they cannot compete against large agri-business…to Flint, Michigan where automation of the automobile industry followed by the loss of jobs to the NAFTA left hundreds of thousands of people with no jobs, crumbling housing, and land on which nothing will grow…to Florida, where farmworkers can barely afford to eat the food they pick…to Idaho, where families who have been laid off live in tents along the river in one of the coldest places in the United States.

Already close to 60 million people in the United States - close to one fifth of the population - are living in poverty, and this number will grow over the next several years as the economic crisis continues. This year, our social safety net, which has been in existence for 60 years, is being eliminated across the country. For the first time since the Great Depression, millions of people will have no way to feed, house, and provide health care for their families, here in the richest country in the world.

We speak to you from the long-silenced throats of the poor of the United States; we who have been disappeared are now breaking the isolation, which was forced on us. We join in the hemispheric effort to stop the FTAA as families and communities whose lives are under direct threat by agreements such as the NAFTA and the FTAA.

Everyday we watch as thousands more jobs leave our communities; we see our land, the lifeblood of generations of our families, taken away from us; we watch as neighbor after neighbor is evicted, our homes demolished to make way for wealthier people; we see our hospitals closed, leaving us with no place to go for even the simplest care.

This is what free trade and privatization mean to us - we know it is the same as what it means to our brothers and sisters across the hemisphere; we know that only true unity between us will stop this.

A movement of the poor, unemployed, landless, and homeless has been born in the United States and is growing every day. From the tent cities and encampments of the homeless, to the abandoned factory towns and farming communities, from housing takeovers and farmworker camps, to the unemployment offices, closed-down hospitals and impoverished mining towns, we have begun to get organized to demand a dignified life and to reclaim our country. It is here that we will be educating the masses and allowing those affected by the FTAA to cast their votes and send a message to our government and to all of those who wish to impose free trade and other policies for their own benefit at the expense of our lives. A message demanding that the priorities of our country no longer be profits but instead reclaiming one’s human dignity and economic human rights

As we begin to build a movement of the poor in this country we unite with movements of the poor, the landless, the homeless, and the unemployed from around the world. We know that our suffering is your suffering; our struggle is the same. Those who are responsible for our misery are the same ones who are responsible for the misery of people around the world - therefore we must be united on an international level.

We know that our lives depend on our talking with each other, our strategizing together, our joining together. We can no longer afford to act as if what is happening to the poor in the United States is different from
what is happening to the poor across the Americas and around the world. We can no longer afford to separate our realities and our struggles.

And, we the ones who are in the trenches every day, who every day must listen to our children's cries for food, who live in houses which are crumbling around us, who have watched our livelihoods bled from us by free trade policies to benefit the rich, who have had to bury countless loved ones - can no longer afford to be isolated from each other, no matter what country we live in.

We, the poor in the United States, join the hemispheric fight against the FTAA because it is a matter of life and death for us. We are the ones who have gone homeless when the factories close down leaving us with no jobs; we are the ones who cannot feed our children when our farms are taken away; it is our land that is poisoned when companies are given absolute freedom; We share the hurt and pain with the poor across the Americas; we know that the FTAA benefits NONE of us. Only by being visible, organized and united will we reclaim all of our economic human rights.

Kensington Welfare Rights Union/
Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign - USA
PO Box 50678 * Philadelphia, PA 19132 * USA
(215) 203-1945 * (215) 203-1950 (fax)
kwru@kwru.org * www.kwru.org