WASHINGTON—With the stark theme of “Poverty = Death”, the Poor People’s Campaign is renewing its drive to put poverty eradication atop the U.S. agenda.
In a day-long Moral Poverty Action Congress in D.C. on Juneteenth, a June 20 rally on Capitol Hill, and lobbying lawmakers in between and the day after that, more than 1,000 people—the poor, the near-poor and their supporters—took the message to Congress that ending poverty in the U.S. is not only the morally right thing to do but that it would benefit the nation economically, too.
“The nation will never get itself together if you have permanent poverty,” said campaign co-chair the Rev. William Barber II. “This doesn’t have to be.”
“Economics kills,” he declared. “Jewish scriptures say ‘You must loose the bands of wickedness’ by paying people what they deserve.”
“If politicians know that what they’re doing causes death, then that’s policy murder,” declared one panelist later in the program, Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy.
The campaign’s longtime goals are the focus of both the conference and the lobbying. They include raising the minimum wage to a living wage, restoring strong and enforceable voting rights laws, enabling workers’ right to organize, “ending the war economy” and halving—at least—Pentagon funds while diverting those dollars to domestic needs.
Include health care for all
They also include health care for all, improved educational opportunity, combatting climate change, and opposing false religion that equates Christianity with right-wing politics.
“It’s not right that poverty, low wages, lack of health care, and suppression of our votes should not be declared a national emergency,” as the coronavirus pandemic was, said the campaign’s other co-chair, the Rev. Liz Theoharis.
“Poverty is the fourth leading cause of death nationwide,” said Barber, citing data produced by a panelist at the session UC-Riverside sociologist David Brady. “It is a death sentence for Americans. It is a moral travesty and a detriment to the soul of our nation that poverty kills more people than homicide yet the powers that be don’t want to address it.
“There’s not a scarcity of resources, but a scarcity of political will. Until our nation’s leaders invest the great riches of this nation in ensuring equal justice for all, beginning with the poor and low-wealth of this nation, we cannot be silent.”
What type of reception the campaigners will get is uncertain. As Barber pointed out in his speech/ sermon to the group, both Democrats and Republicans have enacted past policies which, as panelists of experts invited to the session said, deliberately pushed millions into the ranks of the poor.
That’s the same thing, and often the same policies, deliberately enacted to hamstring the right to organize and other workers’ rights, unions and workers have said for years.
And lawmakers of both parties have shown little to no appetite to attack the root causes of poverty the campaign highlights, especially systemic racism. Its end is another campaign goal. Even though there are more poor whites (66 million) than any other group, a higher proportion of Blacks and Spanish speakers are poor.
The nation’s poor and low-wealth people also have the electoral power to change that policy choice, a theme Barber, Theoharis, campaigners, and their allies—including organized labor—have consistently pointed out. The campaign is urging them to use it.
“Poor people can’t be prey,” Barber declared. “You can’t get into office and swear the oath of office on the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah,” and then refuse to attack poverty. “But they [politicians] want to put it in a box and not talk about it.”
That box is often a coffin, guest speakers said. Death rates from the coronavirus, for example, soared far above those for the general population, panelist Brady reported. And even before that, the U.S. lagged behind its comparable partner developed nations in eradicating child poverty and in maternal mortality.
“For the last several decades, poverty” in the U.S., measured by official statistics with a drastically low threshold for who is not poor, “is around 17%,” Brady said. “In the typical” developed “country, it’s around 9%.”
Ending poverty puts money into pockets
Ending poverty puts more money—at least $300 billion—into people’s pockets and the U.S. economy, Barber noted. “The question is not ‘What’s the cost of ending poverty?’ but ‘What’s the cost of not ending poverty?’”
Another panelist fingered capitalism as a cause of both poverty and the failure to combat climate change, which also disproportionately harms the poor. “Mobil and Shell” profit “while the Maldives sinks under the rising waves,” Yale public health professor Greg Gonsalves said.
But if morality and economics don’t sway lawmakers, Barber warned electoral clout will–if the poor exercise it. They did in 2020, where increased turnout from those classes helped Democratic President Joe Biden narrowly carry key swing states.
Barber said they can do it again, noting poor and low-wealth people comprise 40% of the potential electorate in key swing states in next year’s election and 30% in other states. If their turnout rises and they vote their wallets, or what’s not in them, pols who enacted those policies, or their successors, will be turned out.
“This is not just idealism,” Barber said. “The people in power who are profiting off the [coronavirus] pandemic are the people in power who are fighting for low wages. They’re scared of the people in this room. They’re scared of the people in poverty.”
And, appealing to the highest ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, Barber said “I love this country enough to critique it.”
And Barber again noted that in all the presidential campaign debates of 2020, both Democratic and Republican, ending poverty was never discussed. And despite his promises to Barber during that campaign, Democratic President Joe Biden has never met with campaigners, though his staff has. Biden, too, never discussed it during debates with then-Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“This is no time for foolishness,” avoiding the problems afflicting at least 140 million poor and low-wealth people in the U.S.—figures compiled before the coronavirus pandemic descended on the nation, and worsened the damage, said Barber. He added later that compromise on raising the minimum wage and on total poverty eradication, to take two examples, is not an option. “As my momma would say ‘You can’t put lipstick on a pig.’
“Foolishness would be us turning on each other” and not fighting for all the movement’s goals, he declared. “Foolishness would be relying on Democrats or Republicans” to eradicate poverty without public pressure from the bottom. “Foolishness would be to think you can have one event and that’s all you have to do. Foolishness would be having a moment, not a movement.
“If you’re here other than to fight the foolishness, please exit.”
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