SOLIDARITY MEANS ATTACK!
A Manifesto from the Friends of the Forest
On the morning of February 23, at the start of the national call to action against Nationwide Insurance, a group of autonomous community members targeted three Nationwide locations on unceded Lenape territory to send a message to the insurance company regarding their involvement with Cop City in Atlanta.
This is their manifesto:
We demand that Nationwide Insurance immediately cut ties with the Atlanta Police Foundation. We demand that Nationwide cease insuring the Cop City Project.
Nationwide is directly tied to the building of Cop City and cements their complicity in state-sponsored violence by supporting a training facility for urban warfare. Without Nationwide, the construction of Cop City would not be feasible. Through its subsidiary Scottsdale Insurance, Nationwide underwrites the Atlanta Police Foundation. Without this backing, construction on Cop City would halt. This support of Cop City makes Nationwide synonymous with the death of communities and the destruction of Atlanta. This includes upholding police oppression, environmental destruction of the Weelaunee Forest, and the murder and incarceration of activists fighting in the interest of humanity.
People do not need police. People need resources and funding. The last three years in Atlanta have seen the construction of public housing come to a virtual standstill, while job training and placement programs have been cut in half, and legal services to the poor have been reduced. Cop City’s budget will require up to 67 million dollars of taxpayer money — money stolen by an archaic government out of touch with the people it claims to represent. In our own city of New York, police budgets have swelled. Our libraries are closed, our infrastructure is failing, and people live without healthcare while drones surveil our skies. The cost of housing soars while 123,000 people seek refuge in our collapsing shelter system. There is no doubt that the police are becoming increasingly militarized — if we don’t act now, what is happening in Atlanta today will happen in New York tomorrow.
Where do we draw the line? Cop City drastically accelerates existing police militarization and violent policing tactics across the world: from Atlanta, where forest defenders are being deemed “domestic terrorists,” to the US Borderlands, where victims of American imperialism are being caged, and Palestine, where “Israel” is committing a high-tech genocide. The police and military of the “United States” are accomplices in all these forms of violence. The city of Atlanta is over 598 million dollars in debt, with everyday people paying the price of a loss of social services in exchange for deforestation, displacement, and a mounting military state. In 2023 alone, the police killed 1,348 people in the “United States,” amounting to one murder every 6.6 hours.
We stand in solidarity with our community in Atlanta, the US Borderlands, Palestine, and the oppressed in every corner of the world. Now is the time to act! Strike while the iron is hot. Let it be known that solidarity means attack.
The effects of Cop City are not bound by the geographic limits of one city or state. The movement to Stop Cop City cannot be, either.
CUT THE CONTRACT, STOP COP CITY, STOP KILLING US!
—Friends of the Forest
