FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 18, 2011
Amanda Martin, AF3IRM National Coordinator
AF3IRM DEMANDS:
END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN PERPETUATED BY CAPITALISM;
DISMANTLE THE WALL STREET ECONOMY!
AF3IRM Joins the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign 2011
In solidarity with women the world over, AF3IRM once again joins the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence, which starts on November 25th, International Day Against Political Violence Against Women, and ends on Human Rights Day on December 10th.
This year, within and alongside the worldwide Occupy mass movements, AF3IRM will rage against capitalism’s buying/selling of women, against the exploitation of women workers, against bank bail-outs and sub-prime mortgages, and against the worldwide exile of women into poverty at the hest of global capitalism.
The exploitation of women is pivotal to the maintenance of the current capitalist system. Women workers in the United States suffer huge income disparity with white women earning only $0.77 to every dollar a white male worker makes; black women earning $0.64 and Latinas, only $0.52. Women workers lose $300,000 over their lifetime, and only own less than 1% of the world’s wealth.
Even as it robs women of the value of their work, capitalism simultaneously cuts funding to public healthcare, day care centers, senior citizen centers, housing and reproductive health services. The government claims that it can no longer afford to provide services to its women, yet bailed out banks with $700 billion of taxpayers’ money. Women and their families are not a priority under the current system.
The economic crisis perpetuated by capitalism with its global tentacles has created a worldwide system of exploitation. Multinational corporations derive 68% of its global profits from an export manufacturing workforce that is 60-80% female. These women workers of developing countries are paid the equivalent of $2 a day while what they produce – clothes, shoes, electronics, etc. – are sold (delete for) at enormous profits in the global market. Job segregation has become a standard in imperialist globalization, with dead-end jobs in call centers, manufacturing assembly centers, domestic work, etc., largely reserved for female workers.
The products that women workers produce are in turn sold to other women in a consumer culture, “shop ‘till you drop” manufactured frenzy, exploiting women on both ends of the process, as workers as well as consumers and taxpayers.
That AF3IRM each year still has to call for the observance and recognition of women’s rights is testament to how little women have advanced against a system determined to maintain the hierarchies of class, race and patriarchy. Only an equally determined struggle for global respect for the rights of women and a radical democracy that gives them the right to wield social, political and economic power, will stop the escalation of economic and political violence against women and girls. The global economic crisis we currently find ourselves in only heightens our call to action this year.
All chapters of AF3IRM will engage in national and local campaigns during the 16 Days of Activism Against Violence Against Women, with a thematic emphasis on economic violence, and the call to dismantle the unethical and exploitative economy created byWall Street.
Each day will bring the particularities of economic violence against women to the forefront. Highlights of these days include: a national boycott of Black Friday on November 25th; the New York/New Jersey chapter, alongside several other women’s organizations, marching on Wall Street on Black Friday; the Los Angeles chapter doing teach –ins at public high schools, colleges, and at Occupy LA; San Diego, Riverside, and Irvine will do women's teach-ins at Occupy SD and UCI; the Bay Area will do social investigation of trafficking of women around coffee shops in the Bay area and will host a women's workshop at San Quentin state prison. A calendar of AF3IRM’s national 16 Days Campaign actions and events can be found at: (Link to calendar of events)
AF3IRM calls on all women to rage against capitalism: the profound system of women’s exploitation!
AF3IRM calls for the dismantling of Wall Street and its cronies in all levels of the US political and economic systems!
AF3IRM calls on the US government to restore all basic services for women and their families.
AF3IRM calls for the establishment of an equitable and ethical economy.
Onward to Women’s Liberation and the true liberation of humanity!
Wall Street is Violence Against Women.
WOMEN SAY DISMANTLE WALL STREET!
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