Posted inPolitics / ToMl / USA Empire

US treating corporations like people and people like things

weeks-long direct action campaign known as the new Poor People’s Campaign, aimed at fighting poverty and racism in the United States. Nearly 2,000 people have been arrested across the country since the campaign began in March. This comes 50 years after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. launched the first Poor People’s Campaign and was assassinated, on April 4th, 1968. Organizers say the Poor People’s Campaign is the most expansive wave of nonviolent direct action in the U.S. this century.

Reverend Barber was taken into custody, was arrested, along with a hundred other people. Just after they were detained, across the street at the Supreme Court, his co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend Liz Theoharis, with eight other religious leaders and activists, were standing on the steps of the Supreme Court. They, too, were arrested. They were held overnight in cockroach-infested cells, like so many others are held. When they were brought before the judge the next day, they were in ankle irons.

Rev. William Barber talking:

There were actions last Monday in over 40 states, simultaneously, at 2:00. Actually, the numbers have gone up now. Over 2,000 persons have engaged in nonviolent march, fusion civil disobedience. And thousands have committed to and been witnesses and planning to come on June 23rd to D.C.

You know, when we had those people arrested in Washington, it happened in—it was happening across this country, because we’ve done a study called “The Souls of Poor Folk: Auditing America 50 Years After the First Poor People’s Campaign,” and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call Revival audit says there are actually 140 million poor and low-wealth people in this country. Seventy-three percent of them are women and children. That’s 43.5 percent of all of the people in this country are poor. Are poor. Upwards of 250,000 people die every year from poverty. Incomes—and, no, it’s no longer true that if you work, you’re coming out of poverty. In some places, you’d have to work 99 hours at a minimum-wage job just to be able to get a basic apartment.

So we have an impoverished democracy right now. It didn’t just start with Trump, but it certainly is being exacerbated by Trump. Too often, we have seen a political dialogue, a narrative, for the last 40 years, that has literally removed poverty from any of our political discussions. Politicians talk about the middle class and military, and not about poverty. And we have this impoverished democracy.

On top of that, we have, Amy, the systemic racism, particularly around the works—not the words of racism, like Roseanne Barr saying something, but the works of racism—voter suppression that hurts the poor, gerrymandering that hurts the poor and allows people to get elected who use racialized voter suppression to get elected. And once they get elected, they pass policies that hurt mostly the poor. All of the states that have racialized voter suppression since 2010 have elected statehouses and congresspeople and senators that are against funding for the poor, that are against living wages, that have tried to block healthcare, that have passed tax cuts that are devastating to the programs that help the poor.

So we have an impoverished democracy, which is why we have to have massive, nonviolent, moral fusion civil disobedience, massive voter mobilization among the poor, and massive power building among the poor, if we’re going to turn this nation around.

as a person of faith and a person of deep religious values, and even my constitutional values, there are some things that we are supposed to be about. The scriptures say, “Woe unto those who rob the poor of their right and make women and children their prey.” It also says we’re supposed to care for the least of these. And our Constitution says we’re supposed to establish justice and provide for the general welfare.

We live in a country now where we’re treating corporations like people and people like things. We live in a country where we say banks are too big to fail, but then we let human beings fail. We cannot deal with poverty if we do not deal with wages. And it’s as though we give—we give corporate welfare to corporations. We make sure everything else survives, but then, when it comes to poor people, it’s almost as though we can write them off.

There are hurting people. There are disabled people. I think about Pamela Rush, who’s down in Lowndes County, who was tricked by predatory lenders and made to buy 120—spend $120,000 for a one-room trailer, that’s now falling apart. It’s mold-infested. Her daughter is now on a CPAP machine. She’s disabled. Her daughter is disabled. And she has raw sewage coming up in the back of her yard. She should have a guaranteed basic income. She should have a guaranteed basic income to survive, because the system did so much to her to cause her life to be so miserable. And there are many, many more people.

Just like healthcare should be guaranteed as a human right. It should not just be for those who can afford it or those that some say deserve it. We have 37 million people in this country without healthcare. Without healthcare. For every 1 million people without healthcare, over 5,000 people die, literally die, in the wealthiest country in the nation, in the country with the most advanced health. And we are the one—of the 25 wealthiest countries, and we’re the only one that does not provide some form of guaranteed universal healthcare.

These things are immoral. And as Joseph Stiglitz says—the Nobel Peace Prize economist—not only are they immoral, we have to look at the cost of inequality. It is costing us people. It is costing us our moral fiber. And it is doing great injury to our democracy.

– Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ policy of ending the right of domestic violence survivors to seek asylum here in the U.S. On Thursday, Sessions quoted the Bible to justify the Trump administration policies. He was speaking to an invitation-only crowd in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This is what he said.

– ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.

– Critics seized on Sessions’ reference to Romans 13, noting it was a favorite passage of defenders of the Confederacy used to justify slavery.

Rev. William Barber talking:

That’s why we—another reason why we’ve got to get in the streets, why we’ve got to have this massive, nonviolent, moral civil disobedience. Clergy and others have to come out of our sanctuaries. People have to come into the street, because this administration seems to be the administration of meanness. It decided to be the administration of lies. And now it’s being the administration of theological heresy. And I don’t just blame Sessions. I blame the congresspeople that are not challenging him, the extreme so-called Christian nationalists that will be quiet on this kind of stuff, who probably sent him that scripture.

Let me just say this, Amy. First of all, he’s misinterpreting that text. Paul actually was arrested by the government, because Christians challenged the government. That’s one of the reasons Paul ends up getting killed. So that’s the first thing. Second of all, the Bible is clear, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, that one of God’s primary concerns is that we care for the stranger, that we do not rob children of their rights, and mothers of their children, that we welcome the stranger and make sure that the stranger, the immigrant, the undocumented person, is treated like a brother or sister. You cannot find anywhere where Jesus or the prophets would say anything like what Sessions said.

Now, he is operating from a playbook. That’s the same kind of heresy that was used to support the genocide of Native Americans. It’s the same kind of biblical heresy that was used to support slavery and used to support Jim Crow. “It’s the law.” And that’s why movements broke it. And remember, Dr. King said any law that’s against God’s law and against the law of justice, we have a responsibility to challenge that law. America has a long history of having laws that do not line up with the moral demands of our Constitution

Come June 23rd, on the west side of the Capitol, in the lawn, 10:00. We are having a massive call to action, the final launch of the 40 days of this campaign. We will continue. Bring everybody you know. The people will be speaking. We will be talking about what we do going forward. But we will not turn around. Somebody is hurting our people, and it’s gone on far too long.
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Rev. Dr. William Barber
co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach. He is a distinguished visiting professor of public theology at Union Theological Seminary, the former president of the North Carolina NAACP and Moral Mondays leader.

— source democracynow.org

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