Statement on May 1st, 2015
Contact:
Leani Auxilio & Patricia Ramirez, AF3IRM NYC, [email protected]
NEW YORK–This day, International Labor Day, comes on the heels of massive worldwide protests against the intensifying exploitation of human and natural resources by corporations and their puppet governments.
The results are with us: nations destroyed; histories erased; men, women and children shackled to endless work; human bodies sold and re-sold to generate profits; eternal wars bringing death to millions; dispossession and dislocation to even more millions.
Time to stop the reign of the corporate oligarchy over Earth.
- We charge corporations and their complicit governments with theft of land, water, seeds and other natural resources. Via Campesina’s declaration estimates 200 million hectares of land stolen by corporations and their conniving oligarchal and government elite, in projects supported by Capital’s fifth column: the IMF, the World Bank and other allegedly “international” institutions.
- We charge corporations and their complicit governments with genocide and species-cide. As a result of the privatization of natural resources, some 3000 people die each day due to lack of water. As a result of the havoc and pollution they have unleashed upon the Earth, 150-200 species die per day.
- We charge corporations and their complicit governments with the murder of nations, of creating and encouraging extremism, so that an endless cycle of wars, big and small, ripples across the earth constantly, setting people against people, worker against worker, generating profits for weapons manufacturers in an eternal Armageddon. The global weapons trade is worth over $43 billion annually and while corporations reap profits, humanity reaps death.
- We charge corporations and their complicit governments with ethnocide – the destruction of cultures – as Capital seeks to re-structure the world in its own image, reducing everything to the cash nexus and holding every working man, woman and child in wage slavery.
- We charge corporations and their complicit governments with patriarchy and gender-cide – the concerted disenfranchisement of women and people of non-conforming genders, subjecting them to a variety of oppressive measures meant to enhance the oppressive binary gender system of capitalist patriarchy. From wage and employment discrimination to sex slavery and outright murder by police forces and racist and sexist bigots, Capital has waged a relentless war on women, LGBTQ communities and other marginalized sector, in its intent to continue the existence of a reserved labor pool designed to drive down wages.
We call on the working class – on its men, women, LGBTQ communities; on (im)migrant workers; on those driven by war and occupation to leave homeland and country; on those dispossessed of land and nation by settler societies – to affirm the right of people to hold in common all the resources of this earth; to affirm the right of people to a just and righteous life within communities; to affirm the right of people to an honorable peace with justice, without systemic and systematized oppression and exploitation.
NO MORE BUSINESS-AS-USUAL!!!
END EARTH’S SUBJUGATION BY CAPITAL!!!
DISMANTLE CORPORATE RULE OVER HUMANITY!!!
Endorsers:
AF3IRM – “Respect Women’s Work: From the Home to the Office to the Factory and Fields”
DRUM – South Asian Organizing Center
Ugnayan Youth for Justice and Social Change
[Image Credit: Javier Soriano // javiersoriano.com]