Warm greetings from the people of the U.S.A. I know that a group like the one gathered here already knows this, but just to remind you, we delegates from the U.S. hate what the U.S. government is doing as much as or even more than our brothers and sisters who are being harmed by its horrific actions across the world. Although we hate this regime, we love our country. We also love the rest of the world, which is one reason why we are here in Mother Russia.

I am pleased and proud to represent the progressive, anti-imperialist women's movement in the U.S., which some call the belly of the beast or the empire of chaos. We are grateful for this opportunity to address other activists who have come together at this crucial time in history.

Women, especially, in my country are growing increasingly aware of the dangers posed by the machinations of the US government elite. Their policies, we know, threaten the well-being and in some instances, the very lives of men, women, and children across the globe, just as they threaten our own. We wish to express our solidarity with the people of our guest country, Russia, fully recognizing the dangers being posed against it by the very some governmental elites that we deplore.

In particular, along with the movement against war, globalization, and exploitation, my work involves mitigating the harms done to women and children who, in the U.S. and many allied countries, are psychologically, emotionally, and financially harmed or destroyed by an unjust and corrupt legal system, the family court system, which in the U.S. adjudicates cases of child custody and visitation after parents divorce. What we see in this system--the civil, or non-criminal, legal system-- are emanations of the same irresponsibility, lack of accountability, immorality, and inhumanity that are evident in the actions of U.S. agents across the world. The same devious exploitation perpetrated by U.S. empire builders as they back the most brutal forces in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and other places in the word is also reflected in how the U.S. court system treats women and children. I could spend hours discussing what happens to divorcing and separating women in the U.S. who are victims of domestic violence—but you need only look at how the U.S. treats other disadvantaged groups--especially, of course, unarmed black, brown, and other non-white citizens like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City, Trayvon Martin in Florida, and countless others—to get an idea.

If you've been following U.S. mainstream media news-- called the prostitute media by author Paul Craig Roberts--you'll hear all about the grudging admissions from the CIA and other deep state structures that, yes, "we tortured some folks," followed by the hasty caveat, "but torturing people saved lives!" This claim is based, of course, on the age old rationalization that "the ends justify the means," which we've heard so many times in our country. For example, those of you old enough to remember the Vietnam War, that 9 year misadventure that claimed almost 60,000 American lives and 4 million or more Vietnamese lives, might remember the claim, "We had to destroy the village to save it." That pretty much wraps up the position of the power elite as far as the rightness or wrongness of what the U.S. has done, and continues to do, via the fake "global war on terror."

In fact, the master of darkness, Dick Cheney himself, to this day makes this same claim, publicly, that all of the torture and illegal renditions and use of black sites abroad are justified, that the end justifies the means. That's exactly the same justification being used against the many peoples, countries, and groups across the globe who are oppressed in the name of progress, neoliberalism and globalization.

Rest assured that we, and many, many likeminded people in the U.S. do in fact see through this very thin veil of self-justification. Just yesterday, I read a recent poll stating that 67 percent of people in the U.S. stating that they are against sending any weapons to the Ukraine government. Yet fully 97 percent of our so-called leaders in the U.S. voted to send not just non-lethal but lethal weapons, and for free, to the fascist, U.S-NATO-EU supported government in Kiev.

In my own work in the US, I encounter many, many women who are harmed by the domestic impacts of empire building. As we all know, wars perpetrated abroad always come back home to roost. Wars against the "other" inevitably evolve into a war against the self. The evils done to others always hurt us, ourselves, ultimately the most. It is not just people of foreign countries that these power mongers are harming. The war abroad is very much being waged at home against people like me and against my comrades speaking at this conference. The measure of a nation's moral compass is how it treats its most vulnerable members. I can tell you that the most vulnerable members of U.S. society are treated shamefully by the same powers that mistreat women and children in Ukraine, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and in decades past, countries in South America victimized by America's CIA-led dirty wars.

I myself do not take personal responsibility for the wickedness of the masters of empire, but I do take responsibility, as you do, for doing whatever I can to fight back.