February, 14 2022, 01:05pm EDT

Poor People's Campaign Steps Toward Mass Poor People's and Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls With 5-State Southern Virtual Mobilization Stop
AL, FL, GA, MS & TN hold 1st gathering of march toward DC; next virtual stop includes TX, OK, LA & AR; in-person planned for WI, OH, NC, NY, PA, CA & TN
WASHINGTON
The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival launches its march toward Washington with a Mobilization Tour that starts Monday with a virtual gathering covering five Southern states.
The first stop of The Mass Poor People's & Low-Wage Workers' Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls Mobilization Tour begins online at 7 p.m CT/8 p.m. ET on Monday, Feb. 14. Speakers from Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi who are directly impacted by the policy violence of the U.S. Congress will headline the program.
Faith leaders and artists also will join the program, which will be live streamed here.
All these states suffer from high poverty, voter suppression, denial of healthcare and the lack of living minimum wage:
PLI=poverty/low-income
State | PLI- Raw numbers | PLI - % | Black | Latinx | White |
Alabama | 2,169,848 | 45% | 59% or 762,000 | 64% or 141,000 | 37% or 1.1 million |
Georgia | 4,684,520 | 45% | 58% or 26 million | 70% or 38 million | 35% or 66 million |
Florida | 9,848,449 | 47% | 66% or 2 million | 63% or 3.3 million | 39% or 4.3 million |
Tennessee | 2,529,045 | 38% | 58% or 631,000 | 66% or 263,000 | 37% or 1.8 million |
Mississippi | 1,380,188 | 48% | 65% or 708,000 | 66% or 54,000 | 39% or 649,000 |
But poor and low-income people in these states also voted in high percentages in the 2020 presidential election: Alabama, 44%; Florida, 45%; Georgia, 37% and Tennessee, 39%. Figures were not available for Mississippi at the time of the study in May 2021.
These numbers show that a fusion coalition of Black, white, Latino, Asian and Native poor people and their allies can shift the outcome of elections and public policy. We will use the tour to declare that we must change the moral narrative and that we must resist the lie of scarcity.
The Mobilization Tour will make at least 10 stops nationwide to Mobilize, Organize, Register and Educate people for a movement that votes.
Speakers will demand that this nation do MORE to live up to its possibilities:
MORE to fully address the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the war economy and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism.
MORE to change the narrative and build the power of those most impacted by these injustices.
MORE to realize a Third Reconstruction agenda that can build this country from the bottom up and realize the nation we have yet to be.
The reality of 140 million people who are poor or low-wealth and just one $400 emergency away from being poor - and who represent every race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation, ability and political party and account for 43.5% of the people living in the richest nation in the world - is a moral crisis.
Because of COVID, this stop and the next one, scheduled Feb. 28 for Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas are virtual. Other in-person stops on the tour are: Madison, Wisconsin, and Cleveland in March; Raleigh, North Carolina, New York City and Philadelphia in April and Los Angeles, Memphis and the Delta of Mississippi in May.
The June 18th assembly in DC will be a generationally transformative declaration of the power of poor and low-wealth people and our moral allies to say that this system is killing ALL of us and we can't...we won't...we refuse to be silent anymore!
"It is NOT just a day of action. It is a declaration of an ongoing, committed moral movement to 1) shift the moral narrative; 2) build power; and 3) make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up."
--Bishop William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. co-chairs of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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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Rejecting the corporate media's narrative that U.S. President Joe Biden's newly-released offshore drilling plan includes the "fewest-ever" drilling leases, dozens of climate action and marine conservation groups on Friday said the president had "missed an easy opportunity to do the right thing" and follow through on his campaign promise to end all lease sales for oil and gas extraction in the nation's waters.
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The new leases will be added to more than 9,000 drilling leases that have already been sold, and is "incompatible with reaching President Biden’s goal of cutting emissions by 50-52% by 2030," said the Protect All Our Coasts Coalition, citing the findings of Biden's own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its Office of Atmospheric Protection earlier this year.
While the final plan scales back from the eleven sales that were originally proposed, said the coalition, "the plan is a step backwards from the climate goals the administration has set and for environmental justice communities across the Gulf South, who are already experiencing the disproportionate impact of fossil fuel extraction across the region."
The coalition includes the Port Arthur Community Action Network, which has called attention to the risks posed to public health in the Gulf region by continued fossil fuel extraction.
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Kendall Dix, national policy director of Taproot Earth, dismissed political think tanks that applauded the "historically few lease sales" on Friday.
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Along with groups in the Gulf region, national organizations on Friday condemned a plan that they said blatantly ignores the repeated warnings of international energy experts and the world's top climate scientists who say no new fossil fuel expansion is compatible with a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.
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The lease sales, said Sarah Winter Whelan of the Healthy Ocean Coalition, also represent a missed opportunity by the administration to treat the world's oceans "as a climate solution, not a source for further climate disaster."
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Democratic Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has joined the growing movement to stop the Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, a liquefied natural gas export terminal planned for Louisiana's Gulf Coast.
Experts warn that CP2, which the Biden administration is expected to either approve or reject in the coming months, would emit 20 times the climate pollution expected from the controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska.
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Directly addressing President Biden, Merkley added: "Say no to CP2!"
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However, the Biden administration has a chance to stop the project. First, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) could reject CP2 at its October commission meeting, though McKibben noted in The New Yorker that this appears unlikely. In July, FERC opined that the project would not have a major impact on local resources, making no mention of its global climate impacts.
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"After a northern hemisphere summer like the one we've just experienced, that should be an easy call," McKibben wrote on his Substack.
Merkley's statement indicates he agrees.
"Many many thanks for standing up here, Senator!' McKibben posted in response.
Climate advocacy group Oil Change International boosted Merkely's call.
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A progressive advocacy group on Friday filed a lawsuit on behalf of Michigan voters seeking to bar former U.S. President Donald Trump from the state's 2024 presidential ballot, arguing his role in inciting the deadly January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection constitutionally bars him from holding public office.
Free Speech for People filed the suit, which contends that Trump—currently the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination—is disqualified from holding public office under a constitutional provision known as the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause.
As the group explains:
Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies from public office any individual who has taken an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution but then engages in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or gives aid or comfort to its enemies. No prior criminal conviction is required. Trump's involvement in the violent attack on Congress to prevent the certification of election results, which resulted in the disruption of the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our nation's history, disqualifies him from holding any future public office. State election officials do not need permission from Congress to enforce the Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause, just as they do not need congressional approval to enforce the U.S. Constitution in general.
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