Just days after U.S. Reps. Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal joined with leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival to announce a historic congressional resolution detailing a comprehensive vision for eradicating poverty on a national scale, supporters hosted a #MoralMonday event celebrating the effort.
The resolution—Third Reconstruction: Fully Addressing Poverty and Low Wages From the Bottom Up (pdf)—unveiled last week by Jayapal (D-Wash.), Lee (D-Calif.), and campaign co-chairs Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, begins by noting that “there are over 140 million people who are poor, low-wealth, or just one emergency away from economic ruin in the United States.”
Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement that “poverty exists because we allow it to exist. In the wealthiest country in the world, 140 million people are poor because we have chosen to allow it to be so.”
“We have the power to end poverty,” Jayapal said. “We must implement bold proposals that center the poor—providing housing, healthcare, climate justice, and equitable public education. In everything we do, we must take the extraordinary wealth that is here in America and design policies that build from the bottom up, putting at the center of all of our solutions the real people whose lives are most at stake.”
Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, summarized the sweeping new resolution:
The Poor People’s Campaign’s website explains the roots of the resolution.
“Drawing on the transformational history of the First Reconstruction following the Civil War and the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights struggles of the 20th century,” the campaign says, “the Third Reconstruction is a revival of our constitutional commitment to establish justice, provide for the general welfare, end decades of austerity, and recognize that policies that center the 140 million are also good economic policies that can heal and transform the nation.”
The progressive push for a Third Reconstruction comes as the coronavirus pandemic rages on despite national efforts to boost the U.S. vaccination rate—even at the expense of poorer countries—and people worldwide are still struggling with the economic consequences.
“We are facing a poverty crisis on top of a public health crisis that is disproportionately impacting communities of color and low-income communities,” Lee noted last week. “It’s past time that we address the historical injustices of structural racism and economic inequality and center the needs of the millions who have fallen into poverty just since the start of this pandemic.”
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