General News and Announcements

February 26, 2009

The United Church of Canada has joined with the World Council of Churches and partners who called, during the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil, on February 1: "For a new economic and social model. Let’s put finance in its place!"

An excerpt from the full statement reads: "The financial crisis is a systemic crisis that emerges in the context of global crises (climate, food, energy, social…) and of a new balance of power. It results from 30 years of transfer of income from labour towards capital. This tendency should be reversed. This crisis is the consequence of a capitalist system of production based on laissez-faire and fed by short term accumulation of profits by a minority, unequal redistribution of wealth, an unfair trade system, the perpetration and accumulation of irresponsible, ecological and illegitimate debt, natural resource plunder and the privatization of public services. This crisis affects the whole humanity, first of all the most vulnerable (workers, jobless, farmers, migrants, women…) and Southern countries, which are the victims of a crisis for which they are not at all responsible."

The full statement has gone out to faith communities, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, and social movements. They are being challenged to mobilize all over the world in order to create a citizen struggle in favour of a new model, particularly on March 28, shortly before the G20 meeting of the world's largest economies in London.

Read the statement and see the signatures of those that have signed on the website of Choike*, a project of the Third World Institute. Organizations and individuals can add their signatures to the statement until March 2.

• Joy Kennedy
  Program Coordinator, Poverty, Wealth and Ecological Justice
  The United Church of Canada
  3250 Bloor Street West, Suite 300
  Toronto, ON
  Canada M8X 2Y4
  Tel: 416-231-7680 ext. 4069
  E-mail: Joy Kennedy