Milwaukee, WI – This Saturday, November 11th at 2:00pm, the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee (MAC), as a member organization of the NO2APEC Coalition, will be holding an event at Norris Park, to say No to APEC, End Neo-Liberal Expansion in the Indo-Pacific. MAC will be joined by the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression (MAARPR) and the Young Workers Committee (YWC). This comes as world leaders are set to gather in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit from November 11-17th.
The NO2APEC Coalition and the Milwaukee Anti-War Committee know that the goals of the APEC summit follow a neoliberalist framework that works to serve the ruling class under capitalism at the expense of people and the planet. Further neoliberalist expansion into the Indo-Pacific by the rich and their big business interests harms Native and working class people not only in the Asia-Pacific region, but everywhere around the globe. As APEC’s deregulated economic policies violate the environmental regulation we need as a species, we witness the global north and global elite force the planet deeper into the climate catastrophe. Yet, the burden of the climate disaster falls onto those least responsible for its creation: working class global southerners and Indigenous communities.
APEC is an intergovernmental forum of 21 member economies with the mission to facilitate regional economic growth through free trade and investment liberalization, business facilitation and economic and technical cooperation, with the ultimate goal of realizing a free trade region in the Asia-Pacific. This region is of interest to the US because it makes up 75% of all global mining trade and investment, 60% of global energy demand, 55% of global energy production. Over 60% of American goods are exported to the region.
The effect of this free trade region is a reinforcement of import-dependent and export-oriented trade imbalances that keep the smaller nations in this region underdeveloped, in debt, and reliant on foreign powers, such as the US. Furthermore, the rich, ruling class of those nations is kept in power, so long as they remain subservient to foreign capitalist interests harming the working class natives. We oppose APEC as an arena for the U.S. to assert its agenda to contain and attack its global rivals, particularly China. The US-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is meant to block out the China-led economy and seize control of less powerful countries. These actions are economic coercion and bring us closer to war.
