Poor People's Campaign

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to take this hour with several of my distinguished colleagues to talk about a matter of moral, social, political, and economic urgency to the American people, which is the vast group of Americans who are living in poverty today.

We are observing the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's Poor People's March on Washington, the Poor People's Campaign, which he was organizing and starting work on shortly before his assassination. The Poor People's March on Washington took place even after the death of Dr. King.

Today, there is a new Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival that has been working for the last 2 years, reaching out to communities across the country, working in more than 35 States across America in order to put in the very forefront of the public consciousness the fact that tens of millions of our fellow citizens simply don't have enough money to meet the basic needs of life.

The Poor People's Campaign has met with tens of thousands of Americans and witnessed the courage and strength of a lot of poor people across the country, and they have gathered testimony from hundreds of individual Americans. A number of the testimonials will be read this evening by Members of Congress in this Special Order.

The testimony we are going to read powerfully reinforces the empirical assessment conducted by the Poor People's Campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies about the effect of systemic poverty, racism, ecological devastation, and militarism in the country. ``The Souls of Poor Folk'' report reveals how the evils of these interrelated problems are persistent, pervasive, and perpetuated by a distorted moral narrative that must be challenged today.

We believe that, when Americans across the country see the faces and the facts that are represented in this testimony and by this report, America will be moved deeply to change things. When confronted with the undeniable truth of the indignity and the cruelty of poor circumstances that so many of our fellow Americans are living under, we believe that millions more Americans will join the ranks of those who are determined to see an end to poverty in our lifetime.

I am joined by a number of my colleagues this evening who will come up and read some of the testimonials as well as give thoughts of their own. I will be interspersing some commentary of my own as I bring up my colleagues. I am beginning first with my colleague Gwen Moore from Wisconsin.

Moore), who is a great leader for the people of Wisconsin and a terrific spokesperson for poor people across the country.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Jayapal for her eloquent statement and thank her for her leadership here in Congress.

One of the shocking findings of the Poor People's Campaign is that there are nearly 140 million Americans, more than 43 percent of people in our country who are either legally poor, living below the poverty line, or low income in the United States, which is the world's richest Nation, and we are at the richest moment in our history today.

And yet, we still have 140 million people who simply don't have enough money to meet the basic expenses of existence. This should not be a matter of partisan politics. It should be a matter of concern to everybody on both sides of the aisle and across the political spectrum.

Here is President Dwight Eisenhower speaking in April of 1953. On April 16, 1953, he said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern bomber, President Eisenhower said, is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities, 2 electric power plants, 2 hospitals, a half million bushels of wheat, 8,000 new homes.

And he said:

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense, this cloud of threatening war that is paid for by the treasure of our people.

So we are appealing to people across the political spectrum at this time of roaring stock market and trumpeted claims of great wealth and bounty in the society to look at the costs of social and economic inequality; that is, what it is like looking, not from the top down, but from the bottom up at the situation with wealth in America.

I am delighted now to yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna), my distinguished colleague, who has been a great champion of putting the question of poverty and economic inequality at the forefront of our discussions here.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Jackson Lee for her eloquent words.

There is a distinction between misfortune and injustice. I know this because I am somebody who is a cancer survivor. If you wake up one day and a doctor tells you that you are suffering from stage III colon cancer, and you have not one but two jobs that you love, and constituents that you love, and work that you are engaged with, and a great family, and you are told that you have this terrible diagnosis, it can happen to anybody, and that is a misfortune in life. It happens to people in every State, in every city, and in every country all over the world every day.

But, if you get a diagnosis like that and you can't get healthcare because you are too poor, or because you lost your job, or because, as it used to be, you loved the wrong person, that is not just a misfortune in life, that is an injustice because we can do something about that. We know how to organize society in such a way that everybody gets healthcare, that everybody gets the attention they need in the event of a catastrophic diagnosis like that.

Life is hard enough with all of the sicknesses, the illnesses, the misfortunes, and the accidents that we don't need to compound the misfortunes of life with governmentally imposed injustice on people. The role of government has to be to liberate people from injustice and to alleviate the misfortunes of life.

But now we have, here in Washington, a whole new public philosophy, which is government is a moneymaking operation for the President, and the President's friends, and the President's business associates, and the people who surround him. That is the new royalist vision of government that we have in America. It is a betrayal of the original conception, which is that government would be an instrument of the common good of advancing the public interest of everybody in the country, not just the people who happen to use their wealth and their power to get into public office.

Now, if you are poor in America today, you have a lot of problems. You have problems with healthcare. We know that health crises remain the single dominant cause of personal bankruptcy, not business bankruptcy, the kind that the President of the United States filed for five different times. Business bankruptcy is not caused by a sickness or an illness. Donald Trump was perfectly covered in healthcare while his businesses went bankrupt and he got covered. But we have millions of Americans who have been forced into bankruptcy because someone got sick and we didn't have a national health insurance policy to take care of them and they didn't have the private health insurance that they needed.

As Congresswoman Jayapal told us, two-thirds of Americans don't have $1,000 to deal with a personal crisis, whether it is a healthcare crisis or something else. They don't have $1,000 to deal with it. And we know that for a serious kind of diagnosis, the bills can run in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Education is affected by poverty. It affects where you can live, what kind of schools your kids go to, and, if you have to move a lot the way that a lot of poor people do, it is disruptive of the continuity that the educators tell us is necessary for young people to make progress in school, if you are constantly being uprooted and shifted to another school or you have to deal with the various crises and agonies that attend to homelessness.

Well, what about voting? Well, here is someone who provided some testimony about voting, from Kansas City, Missouri. Her name is Latifah Trezvant, with Stand Up Kansas City. She writes this:

My name is Latifah Trezvant, and I work at Burger King, where I make $9.50 an hour. I am a leader with Stand Up Kansas City. As a low wage worker in America, I deal with a lot. I don't have paid sick leave, and I don't make enough money to afford all my basic needs, like a stable place to live. And now, Missouri lawmakers want to make it harder for people like me to vote.

Earlier this year, we weren't able to afford our rent and had to move out on a moment's notice. In the rush to pack up all my stuff and find some place where I can lay my head, I lost my ID. So I had to get a new State-issued ID. Should be pretty simple, right?

I go to the DMV office, and I am already knowing that I had to have proof of address. As I walk to the window, I tell the lady I need a new ID. She asked for my proof of address and I show her my debit card statement. Immediately, she tells me, ``There is nothing I can do for you.'' And she gives me a piece of paper of the things I needed to use:

A utility bill--I don't have that because I am homeless and I stay with a friend.

A paycheck--I don't have a paycheck because I had to leave my last job when I couldn't afford reliable transportation so I could get to work.

A government check--I don't have that.

A mortgage statement--well, I sure don't have that because I am a low-wage worker and I can't even afford rent, let alone a mortgage statement.

Property tax--no.

A housing rental contract--well, I am homeless, so no.

A bank statement--I don't have a bank account. I don't have enough money to open up a bank account and deal with all those fees and penalties.

Okay, so here, I am looking at this long list that I do not have. I am so upset. I am standing in line looking at this paper with tears running down my face.

But there is one more way I can prove that I am a Missouri resident: a voter registration card. Okay, I actually have that because I plan on voting this year, for the first time in my life, so I had to register back in March. So I go into the election board and get a voter form to take back to the DMV. Two days later, I finally get my ID.

There are so many people in my shoes: unpaid workers living in poverty, our elderly people, people who don't have a State-issued ID. For us, it can be really hard, or even impossible, to get an ID.

If Missouri passes amendment 6--which is an attempt to restrict who could actually register to vote--over 220,000 people may lose their right to vote in our State. The people who would be disenfranchised would be mostly elderly, students, and low-wage workers like myself. Please make sure that all people in our country have the right to vote. Fight for America to be a country of freedom, justice, and equal rights for everyone.

There is one more. Because my grandfather used to say to us, you know, it is very expensive to be poor, and a lot of these statements that I read dealt with the way that people are essentially charged or taxed for being poor. So here is one that comes from Kentucky.

My name is Mary Love, and I have testified in Frankfort, Kentucky, and other places about the payday lending trap. Fourteen years ago, when I was making a pretty good salary, I came up short one month when the rent was due. I saw an ad for a payday lender and I thought, ``This will be a good way to cover the rent until I get to payday.'' So I applied for their $200 loan. I gave them a check for $230, and I walked away with the cash that I needed.

When payday came around, I went into their office and gave them $230 in cash, and I got my check back. But I wanted to pay off a few more bills, so I wrote them another check that same day for $400 plus $60 interest, and I walked away with $400 cash. Next payday, I did the same thing, and the next and the next and on and on for 2 years.

Because I was paying them an exorbitant amount of interest--$60 every 2 weeks--I could never catch up. Someone told me that I paid over $1,400 in interest over 2 years, but I sat down with my computer and recalculated that, and I ended up paying them almost $2,880 in interest charges over 2 years.

Payday lending as advertised is a one-time solution for emergency financial needs, but all too often the story doesn't end there. Many people like me get loan after loan and end up paying an exorbitant amount of interest. I was finally able to pay all my outstanding debts, but it took me over 2 years to do it.

The payday loan industry is making millions every year by charging exorbitant interest rates and driving consumers deeper into debt. I believe the Bible has something to say about folks engaged in usury. It is past time that politicians stopped letting them engage in this criminal practice.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield back to my friend, Ms. Jayapal, who has come back with further testimony to read.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ms. Jayapal for participating in the Special Order.

What does climate change have to do with poverty? Well, today we face accelerating extreme weather events, such as intensifying hurricanes that displaced and impoverished hundreds of thousands of citizens in Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, New Jersey.

Here is another way that climate change affects people in poverty: through healthcare events that take them out of the workforce.

Here is the testimony from Liz Betty-Owens from Vermont. She writes:

I am 26, a home care provider and a bartender. Just over a year ago, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease and began a lifelong battle with not only this crippling disease but also the healthcare industry and my struggle to access the healthcare I need.

At 25, I was incredibly ill, attempting to continue my work as a healthcare provider and making all of my healthcare decisions not based on a doctor's recommendation, but based on what my health insurance at the time would cover and what I could afford with my meager out-of-pocket expenses. I realized that BlueCross BlueShield of Vermont had more power over my health and wellbeing than me or my doctor.

I accumulated several thousand dollars of debt, and then, in April, I was booted off my mom's insurance plan because I turned 26. I began the 3-month process of registering for my State's Medicare. I was unable to go to the doctor for months while I was still showing symptoms and recovering from initial treatment. I was held up in the process of trying to prove I made such a small yearly income that I was in fact eligible for the State's Green Mountain health plan. And ever since I was finally accepted, I have had to try and tread a careful line making sure I don't make too much money and get booted off the State plan, risking fines from lack of health insurance and, yet again, not having access to the care that I need as I fight this debilitating disease.

It is devastating to experience the exhausting and harmful approach of a healthcare system controlled by insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hospital monstrosities that care more about the bottom line than the needs of healthcare workers and patients, rather than living in a society where everyone can get the care they need and have it be solely based on decisions between the individual and the doctor. It is exhausting to know that I am already struggling with this at the age of 26 and that I live in a rapidly aging State where an entire generation will have to fight to get the care they need. And home care providers like myself will be caught in the crossfire of providing care services with working people who are not allowed the resources to compensate for the care that they actually need.

It is also terrifying being diagnosed with Lyme disease, which is transmitted by a tick bug that is infected by a bacterium. As weather patterns continue to hit new extremes because of climate change and the northeast continues to warm, the number of infected tick bugs is only expected to grow. The people at the greatest risk are those of us who work outdoors growing food or working on farms, maintaining State and Federal lands, and our heightened risk to this disease is made even more terrifying by the continued threat of our already limited access to healthcare.

We need universal healthcare as a human right and a public good, and not a commodity to buy and sell. We need this Poor People's Campaign to unite the poor and dispossessed, and indict the immoral status quo that produces poverty and is ravaging our communities.

Mr. Speaker, with those words, I yield back the balance of my time.

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