International Message of Support from the USA for Grassroots Protests at Shannon

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Monday June 28, 2004 11:47 by Maggie - Global Women's Strike 087 7838688

This should have gone up Friday night but got delayed due to email problems.
Maggie
Global Women's Strike

'....We in the US have paid for the brutal and illegal wars that this unelected president has urged us to fight for him, with homelessness, starvation, high infant mortality, no health care for millions, working three and four jobs just to survive. Our children are neglected, illiterate, undernourished and poisoned by junk food, polluted air and water, and pharmaceutical drugs. This is the greatness of the United States of America...we and our children are left with fewer choices other than Mcjobs, prostitution, prisons, and finally the military - we call it the poverty draft...'

Message to Shannon protests of Bush visit to Ireland, from Global Women's Strike, USA.

The Global Women's Strike in the United States is excited to have this opportunity to address the people of Ireland and from around in the world who are at Shannon Airport on this "dark day" of Bush's visit.

We want you to know that we in the US refuse to take responsibility for what Bush is doing. A majority of us never voted him in and millions of us are working 24 hours a day to get him out. The movement in the US against Bush's war and against rape and torture at the hands of the military, is massive - much bigger than they will ever let on. We constantly hear from more and more
people from every sector, especially grassroots women, that we must bring
this endless war to an end.

And so we share your outrage, as the Global Women's Strike in Ireland has said, "that a war criminal who has organized torture at US bases around the world - only the latest in Iraq - is being welcomed at the very airport that the US has illegally used to transport its war machine for slaughter and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan."

We in the US have paid for the brutal and illegal wars that this unelected president has urged us to fight for him, with homelessness, starvation, high infant mortality, no health care for millions, working three and four jobs
just to survive. Our children are neglected, illiterate, undernourished and poisoned by junk food, polluted air and water, and pharmaceutical drugs. This is the greatness of the United States of America.

What the US is doing in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere it has done around the world but especially in Latin America in support of dictators, and is of a piece with what happens in US prisons, and first of all against people of colour. Some of those in charge of raping and abusing Iraqi women have done the same in prisons at home. A recent report on National Public Radio
reported that 120 servicewomen came back from Iraq claiming that they had been raped. A former US captain in the army, a Black woman who had been raped and sexually and racially harassed in the military, told us,
"...there's a tremendous amount of assaults and harassment going on."

And, so we've been working to expose these truths and draw out the connection between what the US does at home and its horrific torture and rape abroad. Why do these photos and reports of sexual violence against
women remain hidden even when the torture and sexual abuse of men make the
front page news?

We not only want to get rid of Bush but of a whole system of exploitation and plain theft which enabled people like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell to come to the top of US society. Rice and Powell are there to camouflage the racism and exploitation of those of us who are
people of colour in the US and all over the world. With the massive cuts in services, including welfare reform in the US that denies the caring work of mothers and is putting even more of us - especially women of colour and immigrants - and our children into poverty, we and our children are left
with fewer choices other than Mcjobs, prostitution, prisons, and finally the
military - we call it the poverty draft.

We know well that our sisters in the Global South are getting it even worse. Women and children are 70% of war's victims, 80% of displaced people, and have the ever diminishing least. as governments prioritize the profits of industry over the care of societies and people.

Despite media lies about Reagan, we have been celebrating the end of this brute's life - on whose terrible "legacy" Bush is building. Your protest is one with ours, we say no to Bush and no to the military budgets that keep
him and his like in power.

Invest in caring, in carers, in life and in our planet. End the investment in killing, in rape and in every form of torture and deprivation. Together we can - we must - stop the world and change it!.

Global Women's Strike, USA
25th June 2004

Email: [email protected]