Solidarity from Chicago to Florence

November, 7, 2002

Chicago is holding a corporate globalization meeting on November 7 and 8. Business leaders and government officials from the EU and the USA will meet to discuss about transatlantic trade, in particular this year about the arms trade. This body is called the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue. As a response, a descentralized structure of different activist groups in the city has been put together to plan resistance. We're called the TABD protest party, and we include a diverse cross-section of people resisting global capitalism and war in the city of Chicago and the Midwest region.

During the TABD meetings, discussions take place that serve as the rough drafts for policies at the nation-state and WTO- levels that lower labor and environmental standards and that pave the way for further corporate control of our natural resources and our lives. This year in particular, arms industries such as Boeing, BAE systems, Northrop Grumman among others, are dominating the discussions examining how they can take advantage of the new situation of “endless war” to further push sales of their destructive merchandise.

Many of us have come together in a very short period of time in order to resist with what means we have, this meeting of global warmakers in our city. The police have spent tons of money and time training to repress us while we have been criminalized by the press, which is more interested in the health of a store window belonging to Citibank than they are in human rights and impending war.

We are deeply inspired by what you are doing in Florence and we wish to send our deepest solidarity out to and with you. While thousands of you- social movements, unions, activists, etc. are meeting, discussing and building ties of love, solidarity and struggle in the spaces of the European Social Forum/Eur@ction Hub we will be taking our streets. We will not allow those who believe that the world is privatized property, the peoples- its consumers, and the Global South- its shooting range, to conspire in our city without being challenged by our communities' voices.

The fact that this wonderful meeting of militants is happening in Florence comprising of thousands and thousands of people while 2-300 corporate CEO's meet in Chicago is not lost on us. The same spirit of the World Social Forum meeting in order to challenge the World Economic Forum comes to mind. May our paths be guided by our cultures and communities, by the youth of Palestine, the unemployed of Argentina, and the peasants of the Phillippines. We will be with you and you with us in our hopes, prayers, dreams and struggles.