Portside

The New Politics of the Poor in Joe Biden’s (and Mitch McConnell’s) USA

Series of gatherings around the country builds momentum for June 20 march.The notion that victims of poverty are no longer willing to be blamed for their plight surfaced again and again at the mass meetings.

...according to the Children's Defense Fund, kids now constitute one-third of the 38.1 million Americans classified as poor and 70% of them have at least one working parent -- so poverty can’t be chalked up to parental indolence.

When 250,000 people die every year from poverty, it is time for the presidential candidates to make good on the promises they made during the Poor People’s Campaign Moral Action Congress in June 2019 to push for a debate on poverty.

In misused irony, Scott Walker pokes fun of a photo of Sanders and Tlaib at a food pantry in Detroit with empty shelves

Watching the Poor; Centrists in Search of a Majority; Justifying Nativism; Nice Terrorists; Forget and Forgive; One In, Two Out

The bonds of memory and today’s vast disparities in wealth and well-being tell us that we must continue the struggle launched by workers and by King in the spring of 1968. Today, more people live in poverty in America than in 1968. Now as then, the majority of the poor are “white” but poverty’s heaviest concentration is among people of color, especially young people and women. Poverty exists in part because most of the new jobs in Memphis, as in America, do not pay a living wage.

Following his US fact-finding mission, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights concluded extreme poverty in the US “is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated.”

What follows is written in concert with the project initiated by the National Council of Elders on April 4, 2017: Time to Break Silence. Groups around the country will stage public readings of Martin Luther King’s Beyond Vietnam speech on its 50th anniversary. In confronting the deeply rooted racism, militarism and materialism of the United States, Dr. King described the United States as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

The word “inequality” makes conservatives uncomfortable, as if it invokes class struggle, the 99 percent versus the 1. They much prefer “mobility,” which connotes a purely aspirational relationship to wealth and the wealthy.