‘National Emergency Poverty and Truth Bus Tour’ Comes As President Trump Peddles Lies with His Border Emergency Declaration
California – The California Poor People’s Campaign will organize a tour as part of the nationwide National Emergency Truth & Poverty Bus Tour aimed at highlighting the true emergencies facing the nation’s 140 million poor and low-income people, leaders announced Monday.
The Revs. William Barber II and Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, announced the tour, which will hit more than two-dozen states starting in late March, at a press conference in Washington, DC Monday.
“We have real socio-political and moral emergencies–they are the ongoing realities of systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation the war economy/militarism and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism,” said the Rev. Barber. “These are not are not left or right, but moral issues that must be addressed. Democrats haven’t done enough to make things better and Republicans do too much to make things worse.”
The announcement of the bus tour comes a week after President Trump declared of a state of emergency along the southern border in an attempt to divert $8 billion of funding away from other government projects and toward his border wall proposal.
“Instead of tackling real and urgent problems, the President is focused on an emergency predicated around building a monument to callous and immoral white nationalism,” said the Rev. Theoharis. “Instead, we should be talking about the real emergencies facing the nation today. Right now, there are 140 million people who are poor or living paycheck to paycheck, just one emergency away from poverty. Thirty-seven million people live without health care and 62 million are paid less than $15 an hour. Fourteen million families cannot afford water and millions are living without access to clean water and sanitation services.”
California’s tour will highlight, poverty, prison economy targeting the poor, environmental degradation, housing built on toxic waste sites, gentrification and displacement of entire communities, racism, police brutality aimed at communities of color, lack of access to quality education, the military economy preying on the most vulnerable, families being separated by ICE and held for profit at privatized detention centers and fueling all of this is the consciousness of profit over people justified by a distorted moral narrative that somehow people deserve the treatment they are subjected to.
“The California Organizing Bus Tour will engage and highlight communities who have been left behind in the richest and poorest state in the Nation. Starting April 1st to April 12th we will begin our tour in Northern California near the border with Oregon in the Yurok Reservation. This is to ground us from the beginning in the understanding on who’s lands we are standing on and remind us that these communities have been suffering poverty, systemic racism, ecological devastation and the war economy from the inception of this country. We will make our way down to the border towards San Diego where we currently face a humanitarian crisis; where children are being separated from their parents and asylum seekers are being turned away. Along the way we will stop in the most impoverished communities in California hearing testimony and bearing witness to the need for housing, food, jobs and dignity. In Fresno County rated the 2nd extremely poor city in the US and the number 1 in poverty in California we will convene a statewide hearing that will uplift the economic apartheid in one of the highest agricultural producing regions. We want to invite all Californians to join us in our demand for justice. FORWARD TOGETHER NOT ONE STEP BACK!” Rev. Edward Anderson, Co-Chair, CAPPC.
California will be one of over 28 states to participate in regional bus tours to shine a light on examples of the five interlocking injustices that the campaign has set out to dismantle: systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, the war economy and the distorted moral narrative of Christian and religious nationalism.
The bus tours will launch at the end of March and run through the month of April. In addition to raising awareness of the true emergencies facing the nation’s poor, the nationwide tour kicks off an organizing effort aimed at registering poor and impacted people, clergy, and activists for a June Poor People’s Moral Action Congress in Washington, DC.
Event Link: bit.ly/PPCFeb25
Or access on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anewppc/
Contact: Mylene Carberry, mylenemass@aol.com, 310-621-1087 (Los Angeles)
Faye Wilson Kennedy, fayek@springmail.com, 916-812-7429 (Sacramento)
