Photo/daymonjhartley.com
DETROT, MI — The Poor Peoples Campaign for over two years has been organizing around the nation, traveling to cities and townships near and far, to interview impoverished populations. A database has been developed that explains why such deeply engrained poverty exists while at the same time we have one hundred families controlling 80% of the nation’s wealth.
Technology that we once used to enhance labor, today replaces labor. The millions of hands used in manufacturing across the globe have been drastically reduced because of technology. Our social fabric is tied to work in exchange for payment. If workers are no longer needed to produce, that connection is broken. At the hands of “the 1%,” we are falling into harm’s way because there is no need to feed, educate, house or provide us healthcare, etc.
In Michigan, this draconian and immoral analysis has been playing out for years in places like Detroit, Highland Park and Flint. A narrative has been composed to explain these practices and to help lull us to sleep. The poverty experienced by millions is often tied to questions of race, or gender, or culture or some other excuse that blames the victims of poverty for their situation.
The following is an announcement of the 2018 Poor Peoples Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival. This historic movement falls upon the 50th Anniversary of the death of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr and his Poor Peoples Campaign of 1968.
Our demands:
We want you to be the first to know the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival just unveiled a Declaration of Fundamental Rights and Poor People’s Moral Agenda that will guide us through our upcoming 40 days of nonviolent direct action and beyond.
The agenda includes demands for a massive overhaul of the nation’s voting rights laws, new programs to lift up the 140 million Americans living in poverty, immediate attention to ecological devastation and measures to curb militarism and the war economy.
Help us make sure these demands are heard loud and clear in every statehouse in the country and in the U.S. Capitol by becoming a sustaining supporter of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
We’re demanding major changes to address systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative, including repeal of the 2017 federal tax law, implementation of federal and state living wage laws, universal single-payer health care, and clean water for all.
We’re calling for the immediate restoration and expansion of the Voting Rights Act, automatic registration at the age of 18 and an end to extreme racist gerrymandering.
Fifty years after the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign declared that silence was betrayal, we are coming together to break the silence and tell the truth about the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and our distorted moral narrative.
If silence was betrayal in 1968, revival is necessary today.
Help us make that revival possible by becoming a sustaining supporter of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. To show our thanks, we’ll send you a campaign T-shirt.
Thank you for all you do, Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.
Text “MORAL” to 90975 to get updates on upcoming actions and campaign developments.
