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poor peoples campaign
Post-Election Beatitudes
Blessed are those of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Nov 24, 2024
Whatever postures our country has projected to the world—shining city on a hill, leader of the free world, model of democracy, the indispensable nation, a rules-based order—all have crumbled like a house of cards. Our country’s failures, however, are deeper and older than the recent election.
The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to No. 41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society. These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared with other wealthy countries. Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of U.S. people live paycheck to paycheck.
Blessed Is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low-income Americans. Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must… deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the denial of healthcare, militarism, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.” Add sexism to that list of injustices.
Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million. In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit.
In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not. In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness
Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism. Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston. Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country. From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives. Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach. Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.
Blessed are the nearly 3,000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women rebuild their lives, offering legal assistance, counseling, educational opportunities, and multi-services for their children.
A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education, and organized religion—a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.
Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences. They disputed the idea “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”
Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country, who challenge, resist, resign, and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War, Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC. All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-U.S. war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.
Blessed are those of the people, for the people, and by the people—beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality for women.
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William Barber Says Presidential Debates 'Failing' the Poor
"We should really be talking about how to abolish the majority of poverty, because we know what would happen if we did have serious living minimum wage and healthcare," Barber said.
Oct 03, 2024
William Barber, a bishop and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, said in an interview published Thursday that U.S. presidential debates, and the race more broadly, was "failing" the poor, whose needs and concerns he said aren't being addressed.
About 38 million people in the U.S. live in poverty, roughly 11.5% of the population, as determined by the federal government. PPC says that one-third of the electorate, or 85 million people, are poor or low-income.
"We're talking about poverty that is not an anomaly among one group of people. But in fact, is across the country, in every community, in every city," Barber told USA Today. "We should really be talking about how to abolish the majority of poverty, because we know what would happen if we did have serious living minimum wage and healthcare."
Both @KamalaHarris & @realDonaldTrump say they want to represent working people. Why not accept @RevDrBarber’s challenge to debate the causes of America’s exceptional poverty & the policies that could end it. https://t.co/TIjUvOof0O
— Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (@wilsonhartgrove) October 3, 2024
PPC was inspired by a 1968 movement of the same name organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and led by allies after his assassination. They set up a 3,000-person protest camp on Washington Mall in the spring of that year, staying for six weeks.
Barber, a Black pastor and political organizer from North Carolina, was among those who led the relaunch in 2018—Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival—which started with demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and at statehouses across the country.
Barber, who recently wrote a book about white poverty, has said that there's a "deafening silence" on the part of the media with regard to economic justice in the U.S.
Barber told USA Today that the debate moderators, as well as the presidential and vice presidential candidates, have failed to address it. He said Tuesday's vice presidential debate should have featured a question on a living minimum wage.
"To not have that as a major question and drill it down and make these candidates answer the question is a failing, we believe of the debate system," Barber said.
The current federal minimum wage is $7.25, set in 2009. Barber has frequently expressed outrage that Congress hasn't acted to raise it in the last 15 years.
In 2021, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) moved to raise the minimum wage to $15, via an amendment to the Covid-19 stimulus package, but all 50 Republican senators and eight members of the Democratic caucus voted it down.
Barber noted that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, raised the need to expand the child tax credit and for affordable housing in the debate, but said the moderators should have explicitly asked about the needs of poor people.
"I think there's a great failure of the press, of those who planned the debate, and even the politicians themselves, for not putting millions of people at the center of the political debate," Barber said.
Barber in fact recommended a reform to the debate format in which nonpartisan experts lay out facts on an issue before candidates speak—and people who are affected by an issue, rather than professional moderators, ask the questions.
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'The Bible Exposes Grifters': Trump Rebuked as Christian Nationalist 'Con Man'
"All those legal fees are apparently really making Donald Trump's pockets hurt because his latest commercial venture, after selling sneakers and cologne, is as a Bible salesman," said one critic.
Mar 28, 2024
Critics of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday derided the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee for hawking $60 patriotic-themed Bibles, with one prominent progressive cleric warning that the so-called Good Book "exposes grifters who try to exploit it."
The
God Bless the USA Bible—which is actually a rebranded 9/11 commemorative Bible first offered for sale in 2021 by country musician Lee Greenwood of "God Bless the USA" fame—has been slammed by devout Christians for having an American flag emblazoned on its cover and for containing nationalist documents including the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Pledge of Allegiance.
"You all should get a copy of God Bless the USA Bible," Trump said in a 3-minute video promoting the book—which is not connected with his campaign. "You have to have it for your heart, for your soul."
"Replacing the real Bible with Trump Bibles is a too-perfect symbol of what has happened to evangelical Christianity."
Critics from across the political spectrum slammed what Slate senior writer Amanda Marcotte called Trump's "newest grift to squeeze money out of his cult followers."
"The not-at-all subtle message of the video is that Trump doesn't believe any of this faith-in-God crap, but he definitely believes in using Christian identity as a weapon to make money and dominate his foe," Marcotte wrote.
Bishop William Barber, the founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School and a co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign,
said on social media that "the prophet Ezekiel named it in his day: Greedy politicians make an unholy alliance with false religion that says God is on their side when God has said no such thing!"
Conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes on Wednesday
blasted Trump for "commodifying the Bible during Holy Week," while former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming said that "instead of selling Bibles, you should probably buy one. And read it, including Exodus 20:14."
The volume's release comes during Christian Holy Week, and as Trump struggles to pay a $175 million bond after a New York judge found that he and his company committed massive fraud.
"Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country," Trump said in the promotional video. "It's one of the biggest problems we have, and it's why our country is going haywire. We've lost religion in our country."
"All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It's my favorite book," he added. "We must make America pray again."
Some observers noted how Trump used Christianity and the Bible as a prop during his White House tenure, including the time in 2020 when he ordered the violent dispersal of racial justice protesters in the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police so he could pose for a photo-op outside a Washington, D.C. church.
Despite facing 91 federal and state criminal charges, Trump is all but certain to secure the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Christian nationalists have been busily preparing for a second Trump term, in part by drafting Project 2025, which one watchdog described as a "far-right playbook for American authoritarianism."
While his words and deeds may be antithetical to Christian doctrine, Trump is wildly popular among Evangelical Christians.
"Replacing the real Bible with Trump Bibles is a too-perfect symbol of what has happened to evangelical Christianity," Marcotte wrote. "The mistake is in believing Trump's followers are confused or ashamed about their devotion to a godless creep who laughs at true believers. In Trump's hands, the Bible is not a text for prayer and reflection, it's just a weapon. It's much easier to beat people down with a book if it's closed."
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