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A petition to all governments
Invest in caring not killing!

We, the people of the world, demand that:

· The ‘war with no end’ and the arms trade and genocide it imposes, be brought to an end.

· The over $900 billion now spent on military budgets worldwide be invested instead in the care and welfare of all the people and our planet.

· All caring work, now done mainly by women, be valued and paid for, and a pension paid to all those whose decades of work have never been recognised.

· Caring, and therefore the survival and enrichment of every life and of the planet’s, becomes the aim of every society and every economy.

OR POST TO: Global Women’s Strike, Crossroads Women’s Centre,
230a Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2AB, England
Tel: 020-7482 2496 Fax: 020-7209 4761 Email: womenstrike8m@server101.com

BECAUSE $900+ billion a year¹ is spent on military budgets, half by the US alone; yet 10% of this would ensure the essentials of life to everyone in the world²;

BECAUSE 86 million people, mainly from countries of the South, have died in wars since world war II, and the US has been involved in most of these³;

BECAUSE women and children are the majority of victims of armed conflict, 80% of refugees and displaced people, and are killed or maimed long after by landmines and other weapons⁴;

BECAUSE rape is routinely used as a weapon of war, but rape victims are rarely granted asylum;

BECAUSE women’s caring work of giving life to and looking after everyone is unvalued and unwaged, but working in the military is waged and glorified;

BECAUSE only half the human race is expected to do the caring work needed for everyone’s survival, while the other half has "more important things to do";

BECAUSE this devaluing of life and carers devalues everything women do and all caring jobs; thus women’s wages are lower than men’s and childcare, domestic work, nursing, teaching, catering are low-waged whoever does them;

BECAUSE most soldiers are either conscripted or join the military to escape poverty or criminali-sation (the US Army is 40% people of colour) and are expected to kill people who have even less;

BECAUSE soldiers who return disabled and traumatised by fear, killing or pollution from weapons, are discarded by governments, and it falls on mothers, partners and other carers to cope;

BECAUSE the military is lavishly funded, at the expense of wages, welfare, pensions, other benefits, grants and services – all of which women struggle to make up for with unwaged work;

BECAUSE the US "war on terrorism" (imposing economic, political and military domination on behalf of oil and other multinationals) has already claimed thousands of lives, and threatens us with the destruction of our climate and life on earth;

BECAUSE there’s always money to pipe oil, but in non-industrial countries millions of women and girls are condemned to walk hours to fetch water which there is no money to pipe;

BECAUSE the IMF and World Bank impose globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, patenting, oil and other mineral extraction, large dams and genetically modified crops . . . by taking over economies, corrupting governments, and bonding the population to pay a debt we never incurred;

BECAUSE ‘development aid’ or ‘loans’ to ‘Third World’ countries are often tied to buying arms from the US and EU;

BECAUSE capital and the arms trade move freely to profit from wars and dictatorships which cause the impoverishment and displacement of millions, but those who emigrate to escape this devastation are accused of "swamping" countries, draining resources, witch-hunted, detained and deported;

BECAUSE opposition, often led by women, to globalisation (and the resulting poverty, theft of water, land, seeds and genes, slave wages and working conditions, displacement of whole populations, obliteration of Indigenous cultures, histories and languages, ethnic cleansing, and destruction of the environment) is met by military coups, disappearances and other repression;

BECAUSE the media (private or state-controlled) do the job of disinforming the population and censoring our opposition in order to rally support for wars and genocide;

BECAUSE women the caregivers are the backbone of anti-war, human rights and justice movements as we refuse to allow our loved ones to be either civilian ‘collateral damage’ or military casualties.