Call to an On-Line Consulta among People in the Western Hemisphere

Our unity and collaboration are the keys to our survival and progress.

The institutions that we, as people and societies, have relied on have now completely failed us.

They have buried us, our families, neighborhoods, towns and countries in the quicksand of an economic system driven by greed that has virtually destroyed so much and threatens to widen the destruction.

They have fractured us into an isolationism that makes virtually impossible collaboration among people of different countries and even different regions of countries. What's more, they have cast us as enemies and convinced many among us that we are.

In spite of the many advances some of us have made in specific countries in agriculture, production, social organization and wealth distribution, they have refused to allow us to share these technologies and approaches, entrapping us in a prison of oppressive hopelessness.

They won't let us work together because they know that, when we do, we will work to correct what they have harmed, protect what they are destroying and redistribute the power they now have.

And so we must collaborate ourselves.

The Western Hemisphere is a laboratory of progressive social experiment and it is ready for greater collaboration.

During the last decade, many of its countries have transformed themselves from dicatorships into democracies.

Its combined economy, social structure, mass education, geography and topography make it capable of collaboratively feeding, clothing and caring for its people.

Its projects in health care, innovations in agriculture and production and leadership in education give it a limitless future.

Its long tradition of union, community and revolutionary struggle demonstrate its peoples' will, skill and courage.

It is highly technologically advanced.

In an attempt to reverse the failures of its institutions, protect its resources and realize its potential, the people of the Hemisphere seek to collaborate and communicate.

They have organized the Internet and invented its technology.

We believe it is time to take the next step.

We call on all progressive people and organizations in the Western Hemisphere to join in a Hemispheric Consulta over the Internet -- a discussion to develop a program of economic and social collaboration that would serve as a basis for future Tri-Continental organizing.

We invite all to come to this consulta to share your thinking with everyone else and to combine it with the thinking of everyone else so that some consensus might emerge.

We offer, as a means of real collaboration, the Collaborative Democracy workshop software develped by May First/People Link that has been used at scores of events including World, las Americas and United States Social Forums.

And we propose that this collaborative process begin now, locally, in every country in the Hemisphere and regionally leading up to a major Consulta event during the Social Forum of the Americas in July, 2010.

Join Us

We are asking members of May First/People Link that maintain event and organizing spaces to come to the table to talk about our goals for this consulta, this collaborative project.

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