February, 24 2019, 11:00pm EDT
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Rev. William Barber Launches Nationwide Tour Challenging Trump Border Emergency Declaration
‘National Emergency Poverty and Truth Bus Tour’ to Hit Over Two-Dozen States, Highlight True Crises Facing Nation’s 140 Million Poor, Low-Income People
WASHINGTON
The Revs. Dr. William Barber II and Dr. Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival announced Monday plans for a nationwide National Emergency Truth & Poverty Bus Tour aimed at highlighting the true emergencies facing the nation's 140 million poor and low-income people.
The announcement of the tour, which will launch later this month and hit more than two-dozen states, comes in response to President Trump's declaration of a state of emergency along the southern border in an attempt to divert $8 billion of funding away from other government projects and toward his border wall proposal.
"Instead of tackling the real emergencies of systemic racism, poverty, militarism and ecological devastation, the President is diverting funds to build a monument to white supremacy at our southern border," said the Rev. Theoharis. "Right now, there are 140 million people who are poor or living paycheck to paycheck, just one emergency away from poverty. Sixty-two million people are making less than a living wage and fourteen million families can't afford water."
Following the President's emergency declaration announcement, the Revs. Barber and Theoharis announced a nationwide action plan with the campaign's state coordinating committee members and prominent faith leaders to push back against the Trump administration's manufactured border crisis.
It is designed to shine a light on the five interlocking injustices the campaign has set out to dismantle: systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative. For example:
In Mississippi, ranked worst in the nation for poverty and household income, the Poor People's Campaign will travel through some of the poorest counties in the Mississippi Delta to reveal the plight of poverty and how conditions have worsened in the last 50 years. Testimonies from residents, historians, and civil rights activist will show the poverty crisis and the critical state of the Mississippi Delta from over 50 years ago until now.
In California, the Poor People's Campaign will organize a 12 day tour beginning on the Yurok Reservation in Northern California near the Oregon border to highlight issues facing indigenous communities. In Fresno County, the poorest county in California and the 2nd poorest city in the US, the campaign will convene a statewide Poor People's Hearing to uplift the economic apartheid in one of the highest agricultural producing regions. The tour will then make its way to San Diego toward the border shining a light on the current immigration and humanitarian crisis there. Along the way, stops will include some of the most impoverished communities in California, hearing testimony and bearing witness to the need for housing, food, jobs and dignity.
In Utah, the Poor People's Campaign will visit San Juan County, home to the state's highest poverty rate, the nation's last uranium mill. The your will feature Ute and Dine people who recently elected the county's first indigenous-majority commission.
The campaign has found that the president's $8B border wall budget could fund critical social safety net programs. Instead of directing $8B of funding toward the border wall, the government could provide 3.36 million children or 2.25 million adults with low-income health care for one year; fund 897,800 Head Start slots for children for one year; or power 9 million homes with wind energy for one year.
"We have real socio-political and moral emergencies--they are the ongoing realities of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation the war economy/militarism and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism," said the Rev. Barber. "These are not are not left or right, but moral issues that must be addressed. Democrats haven't done enough to make things better and Republicans do too much to make things worse."
The tours are expected to hit 28 states or more. In addition to raising awareness of the true emergencies facing the nation's poor, the nationwide tour kicks off an organizing effort aimed at registering poor and impacted people, clergy, and activists for a June Poor People's Moral Action Congress in Washington, DC.
States include: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Washington, DC, West Virginia, Wisconsin
Background
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is co-organized by Repairers of the Breach, a social justice organization founded by the Rev. Barber; the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; and hundreds of local and national grassroots groups across the country.
In 2018, the campaign waged 40 days of direct action, marking the most expansive wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in U.S. history, calling attention to the issues facing the nation's poor and disenfranchised communities. More than 30,000 people participated in over 200 direct actions at statehouses from coast-to-coast and in Washington, DC. Over 3,000 people participated in nonviolent civil disobedience.
For the past two years, leaders of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival have carried out a listening tour in dozens of states across this nation, meeting with tens of thousands of people from El Paso, Texas to Marks, Mississippi to South Charleston, West Virginia. Led by the Revs. Barber and Theoharis, the campaign has gathered testimonies from hundreds of poor people and listened to their demands for a better society.
A Poor People's Campaign Moral Agenda, announced last year, was drawn from this listening tour, while an audit of America conducted with allied organizations, including the Institute for Policy Studies and the Urban Institute, showed that, in many ways, we are worse off than we were in 1968: 23 states have passed racist voter suppression laws; 140 million people live in poverty; each year more than 250,000 people die in the United States from poverty and related issues; and the share of national income going towards the top 1 percent of earners has nearly doubled.
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.
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"The richest 1% of humanity continues to fill their pockets while the rest are left to scrap for crumbs."
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The richest sliver of the global population hauled in more than $40 trillion in new wealth over the past decade as countries around the world cut taxes for those at the very top, supercharging inequality that poses a dire threat to democracy and the planet.
An Oxfam analysis released Thursday ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers estimated that over the past 10 years, the global 1% has accumulated $42 trillion in new wealth. That's "nearly 34 times more than the entire bottom 50% of the world's population," the group observed.
"That is disgusting," Michael Taylor, founder of the Australian Independent Media Network, wrote in response to the new figures.
The analysis comes amid a growing push by current and former world leaders for rich countries to enact a global tax on billionaire wealth that would begin to reverse the damage done by decades of regressive policy. Oxfam found in a separate analysis released earlier this year that economic and political elites' global "war on fair taxation" has slashed taxes for the rich by 32% since 1980.
Oxfam said Thursday that global billionaires "have been paying a tax rate equivalent to less than 0.5% of their wealth."
"Inequality has reached obscene levels, and until now governments have failed to protect people and planet from its catastrophic effects," Max Lawson, Oxfam's head of inequality policy, said in a statement Thursday. "The richest 1% of humanity continues to fill their pockets while the rest are left to scrap for crumbs."
"Momentum to increase taxes on the super-rich is undeniable, and this week is the first real litmus test for G20 governments," Lawson added. "Do they have the political will to strike a global standard that puts the needs of the many before the greed of an elite few?"
A recent report by renowned economist Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley outlined how nations could go about implementing a 2% minimum tax on the wealth of global billionaires—a policy change that he shows would raise up to $250 billion in annual revenue that could be used to support a range of priorities, from climate investments to education and healthcare programs.
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The economist's report was commissioned by the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has championed a global billionaire tax in the face of resistance from powerful nations, including the United States—which has more billionaires than any other country. In 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans.
But reporting indicates that the leaders of G20 nations—which are home to roughly 80% of the world's billionaires—are likely to rebuff Lula's push for billionaire wealth tax, opting instead to pursue what Bloombergdescribed as "research on taxation and inequality that could take years to deliver results."
Reuters similarly reported Wednesday that G20 finance ministers meeting in Brazil "are preparing a joint statement for Thursday in support of progressive taxation that will stop short of endorsing the hosts' proposal for a global 'billionaire tax.'"
The global billionaire wealth surge comes in the context of growing misery for large swaths of the world's population. A report released Wednesday by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that one out of 11 people around the world—or up to 757 million people—"may have faced hunger" last year.
"The world's poorest people are paying the highest price of hunger," Eric Munoz, Oxfam's food policy expert, said in response to the FAO report. "We need deeper, structural policy and social change to address all of the drivers of hunger, including economic injustice, climate change, and conflict."
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Over two dozen organizations on Wednesday demanded that the Biden administration launch a multi-agency investigation into recent reporting that "the Israeli government is engaging in illicit social media influence operations targeting U.S. elected officials and U.S. civil society."
Pointing to June reports by The New York Times, Haaretz, and The Guardian, the groups—including the Center for International Policy, CodePink, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), National Iranian American Council (NIAC), U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) Action, and Win Without War—wrote to President Joe Biden and the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State.
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"Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg."
Although the Israeli ministry denied involvement in the campaign and Stoic didn't respond to requests for comment, the newspaper noted that "at its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook, and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats."
As The Guardian reported on June 24, "That effort is only one of many such campaigns coordinated by the ministry."
The newspaper detailed "a sprawling relaunch of a controversial Israeli government program initially known as Kela Shlomo, designed to carry out what Israel called 'mass consciousness activities' targeted largely at the U.S. and Europe."
"Concert, now known as Voices of Israel, previouslyworked with groups spearheading a campaign to pass so-called 'anti-BDS' state laws that penalize Americans for engaging in boycotts or other nonviolent protests of Israel," The Guardian explained, referring to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
"Its latest incarnation is part of a hardline and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back at student protests, human rights organizations, and other voices of dissent," according to the newspaper. "Voices' latestactivities were conducted through nonprofits and other entities that often do not disclose donor information."
The coalition calling on Biden to launch an investigation wrote that "it is incumbent on our government to protect its citizens from efforts by foreign governments to inappropriately interfere in our democratic process by spreading disinformation, targeting U.S. elected officials, and seeking to intimidate members of U.S. civil society."
Highlighting previous action "to punish and deter such nefarious behavior" by Russian firms, the groups argued that "as an administration that has defined itself as defenders of American democracy against threats from both domestic and foreign state actors, the news of the Israeli government's attacks on our democracy must be addressed."
NIAC president Jamal Abdi said, "What this letter asks for is very simple: that President Biden and his administration treat reports of inappropriate Israeli influence operations with the same seriousness that it has allegations of Russian and Iranian influence campaigns."
"Unfortunately, what has been reported thus far could just be the tip of the iceberg," he continued. "The administration must work to defend our democracy fully, and ensure that no foreign state has a green light to inappropriately target American citizens or manipulate our democratic process."
The U.S. government has provided weapons and diplomatic support for Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed at least 39,145 Palestinians and injured another 90,257, according to local officials, and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
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In addition to the reported covert operations, there have been overt actions by Israel's leaders. As Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Wednesday endorsed former U.S. President Donald Trump for the November election, saying that he believes the Republican "will receive the backing to act against Iran," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to address a joint session of Congress, despite protests from American lawmakers.
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FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said in a statement that "transforming agrifood systems is more critical than ever as we face the urgency of achieving the SDGs within six short years. FAO remains committed to supporting countries in their efforts to eradicate hunger and ensure food security for all."
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"It calls for increased and more cost-effective financing, with a clear and standardized definition of financing for food security and nutrition," the agency added.
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In the 2000s, Lula's leftist government implemented plans including Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) and Bolsa Familia (Family Allowance) that significantly reduced malnutrition and poverty in Brazil.
"We need to build on the progress achieved in this region, and share this experience with other regions, especially Africa," Qu said.
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Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP), said Wednesday that "a future free from hunger is possible if we can rally the resources and the political will needed to invest in proven long-term solutions."
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