Women are the life-givers, the first caregivers, from breastfeeding and subsistence farming which feeds most of the world, to cleaning, nursing, teaching.  We have invested our lives’ work, blood and tears into making and protecting people, from Palestine to Colombia, from Indonesia to Ogoniland (Nigeria), from Kurdistan to the Narmada dam (India), from Chiapas to inner cities, rural communities and reservations in the US.  The last thing we want is to see our loved ones destroyed by a global market on the rampage and the wars that protect it.  While $80 billion would alleviate the worst poverty and suffering, $940 billion a year is spent on military budgets worldwide.

The brutality of those priorities that the US inflicts on the world, is also inflicted on us here, as Native Americans and other people of color are the first to testify.  Here we have the death penalty, the largest prison population in the world, and a lack of benefits where either you make it or you’re homeless and starving in the wealthiest country in the world.  Here we get welfare “reform” which denies that caregiving is work and forces mothers to leave our children for jobs with the worst wages and working conditions, which treats the relationship between mother and child and thus all human relationships everywhere as obstacles to even more obscene profits.  This is the American way of life as we daily experience it.

We are marching today against this brutality at home and abroad, and against the wars that impose it.  Join us in demanding the military budget and mothers' & other caregivers’ right to welfare and other resources.  Caregiving work worldwide is valued at $11 trillion establishing our right to welfare and more.  Money going for welfare is money not going to bomb people around the world.  It’s money not going to Bush’s “endless war”, to military coups in Venezuela and elsewhere, to the bombing of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and who knows who is next.  In defending welfare, paid from the military budget, we defend the wages of all workers, including caregivers, and the right of everyone everywhere to a caring not killing society.

This statement is issued by the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network and the International Wages for Housework Campaign for the April 20, 2002 DC march against the war.

INVEST IN CARING NOT KILLING  is the theme of the Global women’s Strike, internationally coordinated actions of women in over 60 countries on March 8.  
Strike website:  http://womenstrike8m.server101.com