KWRU observes 5th anniversary of the signing of Welfare Reform and links welfare reform and poverty in the United States to the FTAA and IMF policies.

[8-22-01]: In September, KWRU will send a delegation of poor, homeless and unemployed families to participate in the upcoming protests against IMF, World Bank and free trade policies during the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC. We will highlight the ways in which free trade policies such as the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) are causing massive job loss and poverty across the United States and worldwide. We will draw the connections between Welfare Reform in the United States and IMF-imposed Structural Adjestment Programs, which are a part of the same program to make the rich richer while destroying the lives of the poor and of workers in the US and around the world.

Today, August 22, 2001 marks the fifth anniversary of the signing into federal law of the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, better known as Welfare Reform. Over the coming year, as a result of Welfare Reform, states across the United States will face the 5 year lifetime limit for families to receive TANF (Temporary Asssistance for Needy Families). With unemployment and underemployment reaching record levels, millions of families will be cut off of welfare for life, with no guaranteed right to provide for themselves and the children. The signing of Welfare Reform into federal law five years ago today, and the implementation of the five-year lifetime limit this year, marks the dismantling of the social safety net in this country. With this, all of us have lost our human rights to the basic necessities of life - a job at a living wage, health care, housing, food, heat, water and education.

Welfare Reform, as well as cuts and privatization in health care and education, is taking place as communities across the United States are experiencing daily plant closings and massive job loss connected to free trade, globalization and the automation of the economy. The recent wave of layoffs and signs of economic downturn in the United States are merely an extension of national and international policies and practices designed to ensure the profits of the global rich at the expense of the world's majority - the poor in both the North and the South. The final stages of welfare reform in the United States is occurring in the context of, and as a result of, global economic policies and trends that are causing the sharpest wealth gap in world history - where billions of the world's people live in ever-worsening misery, while a few billionaires possess enough wealth to end poverty forever worldwide.

As a result of globalization, and in particular of agreements such as the NAFTA and the FTAA, and the policies of the WTO, businesses have the right to move wherever they can pay workers the least, provide the least healthy and safe working conditions, and be ensured a non-unionized workforce. "Free Trade" has meant daily layoffs of thousands of people in cities and towns across the United States and the world, as mines, factories, stores, mills and even business offices close, never to return. Downsized, outsourced, evicted, thrown off of our land, in debt and cut off of government assistance, we, the poor of all races across the United States and around the world, are forced to compete with each other for lower and lower wages and worsening working and living standards. In this context, welfare reform, privatization and cuts in health care and education in the U.S., like IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP's) in the "global south" and cuts in social safety nets across the industrialized world, is designed to ensure a cheap, desperate labor force in the United States to compete with workers worldwide. These policies have resulted in record levels of homelessness, hunger, illness, and absolute misery in both the North and the South, as billions of people are exploited or left permanently unemployed, while a few become richer every day.

For more than five years, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign have been documenting the effects of Welfare Reform, downsizing, health care cuts and other economic human rights violations occurring in every part of the United States. We have documented the stories of death, loss, pain and devastation experienced by millions of families of all races in hundreds of communities in our country, the richest country in the world: the stories of mothers and children dying in house fires because they could not afford heat; of a disabled father in Kansas who regularly faces the threat of eviction with his family; of children in Mississipi and Wisconsin who died because their mothers had to leave them alone when they were forced to work under welfare reform - for two dollars an hour; of laid off coal miners' families in Pennsylvania and West Virginia who live in houses which are crumbling around them; of the homeless family who died in a flood because they were camped under a bridge; of the homeless mother in Philadelphia who recently lost her two-month old baby because of inadequate nutrition and health care

We know that the violations of our economic human rights here in the United States are inextricably linked to the violations of economic human rights of people around the world. The same people who are responsible for causing our hurt and pain and devastating our lives, our families and our communities in the United States are responsible for doing the same to the poor around the world. They are the same people responsible for the famine now occurring in Central America and Mexico, for the rash of suicides among farmers in India who are losing their farms due to debts caused by WTO policies, for the unemployment and cuts in health care, housing and welfare in New Zealand and across Europe, for the increase in debt and poverty among coconut growers in the Phillipines and peasants in Indonesia, for the health care crisis in Africa.

Given the role of the government of the United States in the creation and enforcement of these policies, we believe that the movement of the poor in the United States has a key role to play in an international struggle to end poverty. We see our movement to reclaim our basic economic human rights, our right to live a dignified life without poverty, as a part of a growing international movement of the poor, of workers - employed and unemployed, and of all of those committed to economic and social justice.

Therefore, on September 28 - 30, 2001, we, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union will send a delegation of poor and homeless families to Washington D.C. to protest policies which are killing the poor worldwide. We will represent this growing movement of the poor in the United States as we stand with the farmers of India, the landless of Brazil, the unemployed of Europe, the peasants of El Salvador, the homeless of Canada, the shantytown dwellers of South Africa and all of the poor of the world in fighting to reclaim our economic human rights.