Poor, low-wealth people declare in Memphis: We are ready to finish the work of the Poor People's Campaign
Poor and low-wealth people from Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi declared Monday that they are the resurrection of the Poor People's Campaign and that they will finish the work of that movement as a united force to lift from the bottom.
They spoke at the final Mobilization Tour march and rally of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival as the campaign moves to its Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls on June 18th.
Poor and low-wealth people from Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi declared Monday that they are the resurrection of the Poor People's Campaign and that they will finish the work of that movement as a united force to lift from the bottom.
They spoke at the final Mobilization Tour march and rally of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival as the campaign moves to its Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls on June 18th.
Murriel Wiley, a 31-year-old single mom from rural southwest Arkansas, spoke about the struggle and difficulties of voting in rural America and of working as a tipped worker. She described only making $2.13 an hour and "praying people will tip 20%."
"As a part-time waitress working for $2.13 an hour, relying on the kindness of strangers for tips, you can guess that benefits aren't included for people like me. But that doesn't mean all service industry members deserve to have to go without seeing a doctor simply because they can't afford it," she said. "Rural voters matter. Waitresses and dishwashers and bussers matter - in the polls, at doctors offices and in every part of the United States."
She's mobilizing for June 18th because "we need policy changes to include the protection and value of ALL our people, not just some and ALL our voices deserve to be heard."
The Mid-South Mobilization Committee, made up of people from Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, led the march and rally, which can be viewed here. The march ended at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
Emilee Johnson of the Mississippi Poor People's Campaign said she's mobilizing for June 18th because "exploitation doesn't have a color or a party. I'm here as a survivor of sex trafficking, formerly incarcerated, and I'm a low-wage worker."
She said she's a single mother of four working two jobs, seven days a week for the last four years and barely making ends meet.
"I have been faced with many challenges in my life due to a broken system in the state of Mississippi that has a long history of punishing the poor while rewarding the corrupt wealthy class," she said. "I stand with the Poor People's Campaign because we are in desperate need of this Third Reconstruction. We must do more. Forward together!"
Also speaking at the program were the national co-chairs of the PPC:NCMR, Bishop William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.
"Now, this is not about nostalgia. It's not about just remembering the path," Bishop Barber said. "Because for 50 years, we've been talking about what he (MLK) did, but nobody picked it up. It's been 54 years since the sanitation workers month. And right here in Memphis, they still don't have full living wages and full union rights!
"Even in a predominantly Black city, because in this moment, you don't get a pass because you're Black. You get a pass if you fight and stand up for poor and low-wealth people. Right here in this city, you raise the wages of policemen and firemen, and didn't raise the wages of poor folk and sanitation workers. .. When people in this city stop a pipeline company that would damage a black community and after you stop it, there are attempts by that company to find other ways to still bring toxic waste and to get the legislature to write laws that would block communities from blocking the pipeline, then we don't need nostalgia."
Rev. Dr. Theoharis said that this nation "must be serious about the suffering that is going on here. All of these years after Dr. King was killed: still no living wages, still attacks on the homeless, still the lack of healthcare, still the mass incarceration of our people, the poisoning of our water, and so close to the Mississippi Delta, where there's still the deepest poverty in this, the richest country ever to exist.
"Let's recognize the cries of pain and the cries of power, and let's then commit to not stopping even an inch, even one person, even one drop of water, short of victory."
Two women who were with the Poor People's Campaign begun by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the National Welfare Rights Organization and faith leaders also spoke.
"Join me by cars, by buses, by airplanes. I heard that some are going to be walking. Hallelujah! said Mother Georgia King, 82, who became involved with the Poor People's Campaign when she was in her 20s and who once walked 255 miles from Roanoke, Virginia, to the nation's capital to fight for aid for homeless people. "I thank God I'll be able to join it with you."
.Also speaking was Carrie Louise Pinson, 72, another stalwart of the PPC. .
"Do you know Dr. King was even thinking about you when he was dating Coretta?" she asked. "Do you know what he said? 'Let us continue to hope, work and pray that in the future, we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel I will preach to the world. ... And that's why you need to be in Washington, D.C., say on June the 18th, because he would have done it for you. And he would be proud."
There were 140 million people nationally who were poor or low-income before COVID in this nation/ Poverty is not a personal choice but a policy choice and even before COVID, these policies were killing and hurting people, with 250,000 dying from poverty each year in the US.
But poor and low-income people have power, including at the ballot box. Our study tells us that poor and low-income people hold power at the ballot box when they vote. In the 2020 presidential election, poor and low-income people made up 39% of voters in Tennessee. In Arkansas the figure was 47%. A second round of analysis showed they accounted for 43% of voters in Mississippi.
Justin Pearson, founder of Memphis Citizens Against the Pipeline, which successfully fought the Byhalia pipeline only to have legislators try to pass laws that would allow it to be built, noted the hypocrisy of what this country's budget supports: "We got a big fight that's ahead of us, whether you're in Memphis or Mississippi, these interlocking, justices of systemic racism and systemic poverty, ecological devastation, the denial of healthcare, the false moral narrative of religious nationalism and militarism. We pay for bombs, but we can't give a child tax credit."
Previous tour stops were in Cleveland; Madison, Wisconsin; Raleigh, North Carolina; New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, is building a generationally transformative digital gathering called the Mass Poor People's Assembly and Moral March on Washington, on June 20, 2020. At that assembly, we will demand that both major political parties address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism by implementing our Moral Agenda.
'Insure Our Survival': XR Launches Campaign at British Insurance Industry Awards Night
"We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy," one activist said.
Key industry players arriving at London's Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night for the British Insurance Awards were met with a warning: Stop underwriting new oil, gas, and coal projects or face direct action from Extinction Rebellion.
Climate activists greeted the insurers with signs, photographs of extreme U.K. flooding, protest music, performance art, and business cards announcing XR's new "Insure Our Survival" campaign to pressure the industry away from backing fossil fuels.
"This is just the beginning," Insure Our Survival spokesperson Alex Penson said in a statement. "Thousands of XR activists stand ready to focus their nonviolent direct action energy on the insurance firms who are greenlighting the climate crisis by providing fossil fuel crooks with the insurance they need to dig and drill for oil, gas, and coal."
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest,"
The insurance industry has emerged as a target of the climate movement in recent years, as advocates point out that new fossil fuel projects would not be able to move forward without it.
"The insurance industry has a superpower," Penson said. "At a stroke, it could stop the fossil fuel crooks in their tracks and save the lives of billions of people threatened from the worst-case climate scenarios that scientists are saying are increasingly possible."
However, to date the industry has not chosen to use that power. According to the most recent report from the global Insure Our Future campaign, not one of the 30 major insurance firms it analyzed in 2023 had policies in line with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The insurers included in the U.K.-based Lloyd's market were the leading fossil fuel insurers, Insure Our Future found, earning $1.6-2.2 billion in premiums from oil, gas, and coal in 2022.
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest," Penson continued, "struggling to survive in barely habitable countries haunted by crop failures, malnutrition, deadly storms, floods, and heatwaves."
At Wednesday's event, XR activists held up photos taken by photographer Gideon Mendell, showing massive flooding in the U.K. that has been made worse by the climate emergency. They also held up signs reading, "Stop Insuring New Fossil Fuels" and "Insure Our Survival."
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
At the sound of a violin, XR's Oil Slickers—activists draped in black cloth to resemble an oil spill—glided around the insurance luminaries as they approached the hall for the industry's annual awards ceremony.
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
A choir also sang a song to the tune of "Imagine," including the line, "Imagine all insurers, fighting for us all."
"Last night we challenged insurers having a good time and congratulating each other on their good work at the Royal Albert Hall to face up to some uncomfortable truths—that some of their work leads to flooded homes and wrecked lives for their customers facing more and more climate crisis-driven extreme weather events," Penson said.
The activists also distributed business cards to the attendees warning them that, if they continued to back new fossil fuel projects, XR would target them with direct action designed to hurt both their reputations and their bottom line.
Pension said: "We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy to speed a just transition to a low or no-carbon economy."
XR's U.K.-based Insure Our Survival campaign emerged from the global Insure Our Future campaign, and in particular an international week of action it organized in late February and early March, including events in London and around the U.K.
About a month after the protests, Zurich Insurance announced that it would no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects.
Sierra Signorelli, Zurich's chief executive of commercial insurance, said at the time that Zurich took the action in keeping with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
"Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn't required for the transition," Signorelli said. "We think it's the right time to evolve our position."
Insure Our Survival campaigner Lucy Porter said that since the spring, many insurance employees, in both senior and junior positions, had spoken to XR saying they supported a move away from backing climate-polluting projects.
"We intend to work with them to make insurance part of the climate solution, not part of the problem, and we invite other people in the industry to contact us and work with us," Porter said.
Porter continued, "To those who continue to put their profits before a livable planet we say: We will hold you accountable through an escalating campaign of nonviolent direct action across the country."
'More Unhinged by the Minute': Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," the hardline Knesset member and former Israeli defense minister said.
A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. "And we will have to use all the means that are available to us."
"We will have to stop with the deliberate policy of ambiguity, and it needs to be clear what is at stake here," Liberman continued, apparently referring to Israel's refusal to say whether it has nuclear weapons. "What is at stake here is the future of this nation, the future of the state of Israel, and we will not take any risks."
Member of Knesset and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, live on Channel 12, openly calls to use nuclear weapon against Iran, in order to prevent it from reaching weaponization of its nuclear program. What a fuckin' psycho. pic.twitter.com/NYGfQ1zqVp
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 4, 2024
When pressed on what he meant by stopping Iran with non-conventional means, Liberman said, "I said it very clearly."
"Right now there is no time to stop the Iranian nuclear program, their weaponization, by using conventional means," he added.
Liberman made similar comments on social media, where his remarks sparked alarm and condemnation. The lawmaker's hardline call comes amid powder keg tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran, which warned last week that any Israeli invasion of Lebanon—from which Iranian ally Hezbollah is resisting Israel's annihilation of Gaza—would trigger an "obliterating war."
According to the Arms Control Association (ACA), a U.S.-based advocacy group, Iran is a "threshold state," meaning "it has developed the necessary capacities to build nuclear weapons."
However, a February 2024 threat assessment report authored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device."
"Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits," the report says, a reference to so-called Iran Nuclear Deal from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018 under former President Donald Trump. "Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so."
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
told the Financial Times earlier this week that his country would "have to change our doctrine" if faced with an existential threat.
The ACA and others estimate that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material for approximately 200 more.
Liberman isn't the first Israeli lawmaker to suggest nuclear war against Iran. Far-right Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi—who sparked outrage by saying Israeli forces are "too humane" in Gaza and should "burn" the Palestinian territory—said in April that "in the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition, we will have to use everything we have."
'They're Everywhere': Common Foods Linked to Elevated Levels of PFAS in Body
Results from a new study "definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," a co-author said.
Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of "forever chemicals" in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.
The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.
"The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," Megan Romano, a Dartmouth epidemiologist and co-author of the paper, toldThe Guardian. “Now we're in a situation where they're everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation."
PFAS are a class of 16,000 compounds linked to a wide range of adverse health conditions including cancer, with research ongoing. The chemicals' development and production went effectively unregulated for decades, but has received significant attention in recent years, with alarming studies coming out regularly.
3M, a consumer goods multinational that developed and manufactured many PFAS compounds, knew that they were accumulating dangerously in the blood of the general public, but concealed it, according to a recent investigation co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker; the article was written by journalist Sharon Lerner, who previously reported on PFAS-related deception by 3M and Dupont for The Intercept.
Such corporations may yet face unprecedented legal action. As Steven Shapin wrote in the London Review of Books on Thursday, "It is thought that the monetary scale of American lawsuits against companies responsible for PFAS water pollution may eventually dwarf those involving asbestos and tobacco, considering that people are in a position to decide whether or not to smoke cigarettes but everybody has to drink water."
While much of the concern about PFAS has rightly centered on drinking water—in which they're found worldwide—that is just one of the ways the chemicals can get into the human body. A new study this week showed they can be absorbed through the skin.
Food intake is also a primary means of accumulation in the body, and the new Dartmouth study indicates which foods are the worst. The study doesn't explore why, though Romano discussed some possible reasons with The Guardian. Rice is likely contaminated because of PFAS in soil or agricultural water, while coffee could have PFAS because of various factors including filters. Animal products can be contaminated if, among other reasons, the ground that the animals lived off was treated with PFAS-fouled toxic sludge, which is used by farmers as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.
Even consumption of backyard chicken eggs lead to elevated levels of PFAS, and that could be because of the table scraps the chickens are often fed, Romano said.