Poor People's Campaign
Floor Speech
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership in the Progressive Caucus and thank all my colleagues for the deep devotion that they have shown over the years to addressing racism, poverty, and inequality.
It is my honor to help bring a light, shine a light, on the stories of men and women around the country who are fighting to make ends meet. These are our neighbors, our brothers, our children, our parents, our friends, and they are struggling.
Here is an incredible statistic: Across the United States today, 67 percent of all Americans do not even have $1,000 in their savings accounts. That means they can't take care of a leak in the roof; they can't take care of a sick child; and if they don't get paid sick days, they don't get to take care of an aging parent. They are focused merely on surviving and not on thriving. That is outrageous for a country of our wealth.
It is time for us to lift up the American people who are the bedrock, the national bedrock, of our country: the teacher who spends more time with our children than any other but hasn't yet been compensated for that; the domestic workers and the caregivers who take care of our elderly, our homes, and our lives with their grace, strength, compassion, and efficiency; the laborers who build the foundations of the homes and the workplaces that we stand on, live and work in; the women in every single industry who have faced disrespect, unequal pay, but are the glue that hold our society and our families together; the farmworkers who pick the food we eat; the nurses who listen to our hearts and bring us back to wellness; the sanitation workers; the parks people; the oceanographers; the scientists; the servers; the artists; the advocates who shine a light on the most vulnerable, the poorest, among us.
These are the people who have come together as the Poor People's Campaign under the incredible leadership, the visionary leadership, of Reverend William Barber, and with a huge coalition of organizations to fight against racism, poverty, inequality, militarism, and ecological devastation that continue to plague our country still today.
Mr. Speaker, I am proud to join Representative Raskin and others as we tell their stories today. I am proud to stand with these courageous soldiers for peace and for justice as we fight for equity, and I thank them for leading with love, with generosity, and with abundance.
One of those people is Reverend Sarah Monroe from my home State of Washington. I wanted to start by reading her testimony:
I wanted to start by speaking to the context I am in. I am speaking as a Christian theologian. I am speaking as a person working in one of the least religious parts of the country. And I am also speaking, more specifically, as a pastor and an Episcopal priest in Grays Harbor County. This is a rural community on the Pacific coastline of Washington State.
I also grew up in this county. We face a postindustrial economy. Timber was our main industry, and today it is gone. We live in a context where 46 percent of our people are on public assistance and one out of 25 people are homeless. We are a majority White community just south of the Quinault Indian Nation, who were and continue to be victims of genocide.
We have very little legal industry to employ our people, which means that our people turn to a black-market economy that most often sells and trades drugs, sex, just about everything else, and also brings our young people into extensive gang involvement.
So many of our most struggling people, both White and Native, are very young. They are millennials. They are teenagers who have never had a steady income, many of whom have been incarcerated as young as 8.
So, in this context, morally, we face a lot of issues, and three of those I want to talk about right now.
First, we as an organization are committed to lifting up the leadership and the agency of poor and struggling people. e:
We believe that God takes the side of the poor. And we believe that Jesus built the poor people's movement. We believe in raising up young leaders from the streets, from the jails, from the homeless encampments, from the trailer parks in Grays Harbor County. And we believe that they are the only moral voices that can save us and that can lead us to liberation.
We believe that the outcasts and the sex workers and the drug addicted will find their own healing and will bring that healing to us all. We believe that no poor people's movement or campaign can be built without this fundamental commitment.
As one example of that, we had a group over this past Easter of young men in jail, and they organized their own Bible study. They fasted and prayed. And they came to us and said, from Isaiah 58, which they were reading and studying, that they were called to be the Restorers of the Streets with Dwellings.
Second, in this county, as in so many other places across this country, we face the moral issue of State violence. What I mean by this is that poor people in this country are systematically disenfranchised at every turn. That means that the county has money for militarized police equipment, but not for housing. The county and the cities in this county have resources for consultants to build the tourist industry, but not for providing a path out of poverty for young people.
But what I also mean is that our people across lines of race face extensive police brutality. Death, beatings, shakedowns, and the use--and really the extensive use--of a bench warrant system that ensures that if you are young and you are poor, you are likely to have a warrant that allows you to be stopped or chased at any time.
Most of our young people go from the juvenile system to an early felony for drug possession or property crime and spend most of their lives in and out of jail and prison where they also experience extensive and institutionalized violence. State power now, as in the time of Jesus, is used to violently repress people and to deprive them of their rights.
But last, we are theologically committed to hope. And for us, hope is not a feeling, because we face powers that are larger than us at every turn, and we know that we face impossible odds. We face a staggering amount of personal and communal trauma. We openly stand against the narrative of White supremacy that has often been fed to our people, and we believe in the power of the Gospel.
We believe in the power of the moral voice of the people waking up and claiming their own dignity, even when they are taught to deny it at every turn. Claiming their own power when they are taught that they are powerless. We believe that we are a resurrection people. Even when Jesus was murdered by empire, and I said this in a sermon a couple of years ago for Easter, that he rose again, and, in rising, God gave the finger to every power in this world that seeks to oppress the poor and keep us down.
I thank the reverend from our community for that testimony and that story. We have other stories, but I want to make sure other Members have a chance to tell theirs as well.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Raskin for yielding.
You know, that story about payday lending just reminded me of how in the State senate right before I came here, we had to fight back to make sure we stopped the rollback, because we actually were able, with activists from around our community, to pass some of the strongest laws that prevented payday lenders from taking advantage of people, with great off-ramps.
Unfortunately, there were over and over again attempts to try to roll those back, and we at the Federal level need to make sure that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is strong, so that we can make sure that these folks are not getting trapped in payday lending.
So I know we are running short on time. I want to make sure we get some of these read. So let me read another one from my home State. This is testimony from Mashyla Buckmaster.
I am 28 years old. I am a proud single mom of a beautiful 1-year-old named Ella. As of today, I am celebrating almost 2 years clean and sober. I live in Westport in Grays Harbor County, Washington. I have spent 5 years of my life homeless.
Once during my homelessness, a neighbor tried to assault me by throwing a log through the window of the empty building where I was squatting because he was so enraged that homeless people were living on his block.
I got Section 8 housing after my daughter was born just before my organization began providing cold weather shelter to our homeless members. For 110 days last winter, Chaplains on the Harbor hosted about 20 people in our church, most of them millennials who caught a record trying to survive in a county with no good jobs; no decent, affordable housing; horrible healthcare; and plenty of heroin.
Business and property owners were outraged by our cold weather shelter. Our homeless members were stalked by police. Our pastor was threatened with vigilante violence. The same man who had tried to attack me during my own time squatting also assaulted a 19-year-old homeless member of our community on church property and later attempted to run him over with a truck.
I volunteered to stay overnight at our church and keep people safe while they slept. I stayed there through the nights while the threats continued to pour in. I stayed because my community stepped up to save my life, when the rest of society didn't care whether I lived or died, and now it was my turn to protect my community.
I am joining the Poor People's Campaign because I need a movement that is as tough as I am.
Poor and homeless people get stereotyped like we are too stupid or lazy to solve our own problems. I wasn't homeless because I was stupid and lazy. I was homeless because our country has no problem with pregnant mothers being homeless in the dead of the winter, while just 2 hours away in Seattle, the founders of Microsoft and Amazon have made themselves the richest individuals on the planet. You tell me who is messed up in this situation.
Some of you might be suspicious about a Grays Harbor County person getting up in front of this crowd, thinking, ``Aren't they just a bunch of rednecks out there?'' Hell, yes, we are rednecks. We are radical rednecks. We are hillbillies for the liberation of all people. ``We are the living reminder that when they threw out their white trash, they didn't burn it.'' We are here to stand shoulder to shoulder with anybody taking up this campaign, and trust me, we are the kind of Scrappy you want on your side in a fight.
Mr. Raskin, that testimony resonates for me, because I represent Seattle where we do have some of the biggest corporations. But I will tell you what, we also have 11,500 homeless people in Seattle. And it has been breaking my heart that my community, so tolerant, so wonderful, so inclusive, has been, unfortunately, turning anger of inequality in our system against people who are experiencing homelessness just like the testimony I just read.
I want to read another one that also strikes home for me, because it is a testimony from the Fight for $15 in Massachusetts. As you know, I was proud to be on the committee that passed a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, proud to be one of the first cities in the Fight for $15.
This is testimony from Deanna Butler, and this is from August of 2016. She is in Massachusetts. I think I said that.
I am a 31-year-old resident of the Dorchester area. I am a fast-food worker and a member of the Fight for $15. I have been working in the fast-food industry for over 15 years. I work at the Shake Shack, and I make $11 an hour as an end cashier. I am married with three children ages 8, 14, and 15. My check is the only income for my family, because my husband is disabled and battling with several health conditions.
$11 an hour isn't much. I have worked other jobs, too. I have worked in the retail industry and at the YMCA. But the one thing I have found in all of those jobs is that anything less than $15 an hour just isn't enough. It prevents families like mine from thriving to our full potential.
My family receives food stamps and MassHealth, which takes off a heavy load, but I am still left to figure out how I am going to make my $350 paycheck stretch for five people. School is about to start again, and I have three kids getting ready to go back to school. I have student loans that I have to pay back, but I am also behind in bills, so I am left to prioritize which bill I can afford to pay this month.
Me and my family have been living in the shelter for 6 years--yes, 6 years--because I don't make enough to afford market rate rent anywhere in the greater Boston area. I don't understand how these multibillion-dollar corporations are able to build an empire on the backs of low-wage workers and get away with making millions in profits while we have nowhere to live and have to depend on brothers and sisters to help us make it through. My kids deserve so much more, and I deserve so much more.
That is why I am fighting for $15 an hour, so that one day soon, I will be able to provide for my kids the way I have always hoped to. I will be able to go back to school and finish my medical billing program that I had to put on hold, because making poverty wages and taking care of my family made it challenging for me.
We work hard. We deserve more. And people have started to realize that $15 an hour is the new minimum wage standard. We have been winning in cities across the country, and I hope through this moral revival, we can build a tomorrow where not only the rich matter, but we all matter.
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