Dear Friends,
We pray you are safe and well.
In today's Meditation Rev. William Barber and The Poor People's Campaign: A Call for a Moral Revival propose 14 Priorities to Heal the Nation. You may remember Rev. Barber's challenging each of us to be a moral defibrillator in our own corner of the world calling forth in others (and in ourselves) the moral life-giving response.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in healthcare, in the workplace, in the Church--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that in God’s economy of abundance, when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you and your loved ones experience genuine peace of mind and heart, and remain in good health during this challenging time.
May this Advent Season be a time of peace, of healing and hope, of the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Jean & Ron
MEDITATION 221: 14 Policy Priorities to Heal the Nation: A Moral and Economic Agenda for the First 100 Days
“If America does not address what’s happening with visionary social and economic policy, the health and well-being of the nation is at stake….What we need is long-term economic policy that establishes justice, promotes the general welfare, rejects decades of austerity and builds strong social programs that lift society from below.”
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Shailly Gupta Barnes and Josh Bivens, “Moral Policy = Good Economics“
On behalf of the 140 million poor and low-income people in the country, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival – and our 45 state coordinating committees, thousands of religious leaders, scholars, economists, advocates and hundreds of supporting organizations – insists that the following policies from the Poor People’s Jubilee Platform take precedence during the first 50-100 days of the new administration and 117th Congress.
Our 14 Policy Priorities:
- 1. Enact comprehensive, free and just COVID-19 relief:
This relief must prioritize the needs of essential workers, people of color and poor and low-income people who have been hit hardest in this pandemic, including:
Mandate the collection, monitoring and reporting of the impact of the pandemic by race, ethnicity, income, occupation and geography and in high risk congregate settings
Equitable and free COVID-19 testing, treatment and quality care, including mental health care and safely tested vaccines, regardless of income, age, ability, documentation status, insured status or any other factor; first access to the vaccines must be guaranteed to low-wage frontline workers, as well as health workers, the elderly and most vulnerable
A targeted plan to guarantee access and education around the safety and efficacy of vaccines, especially for poor and low-income communities
A guaranteed and adequate income, including rapid and direct payments to all low-wage and temporary workers for the duration of the crisis
A national rent freeze and mortgage moratorium, as well as a national moratorium on utilities’ shut offs, without credit penalties
Increase the impact of food and economic security programs like SNAP, WIC, CTC and EITC by raising the minimum allocations and expanding eligibility
Resources to keep all rural hospitals and community health centers open, with an infusion of resources to Indian Health Services
Permanent protections for Social Security, SSI, SSDI, Medicare and Medicaid
Emergency OSHA standards for health workers, first responders and anyone else in frontline positions
Protections for people in mental health facilities, prisons, detention centers, juvenile detention centers and other congregate settings
Suspension of all CBP and ICE enforcement and ensuring all emergency provisions are made available to immigrants, including undocumented people
Increased support for public schools to provide continuous, equitable and quality remote learning access for the duration of any school closures, including for children with disabilities, and for schools to continue to provide social services for qualifying children and families
Student debt relief
These measures must remain in place until the economy recovers from the bottom up and we are guaranteed health care, housing, and adequate incomes for all.
- 2. Guarantee quality health care for all, regardless of any pre-existing conditions
- 3. Raise the minimum wage to $15 / hour immediately:
- 4. Update the poverty measure:
- 5. Guarantee quality housing for all:
- 6. Enact a federal jobs program to build up investments, infrastructure, public institutions, climate resilience, energy efficiency and socially beneficial industries and jobs in poor and low-income communities:
- 7. Protect and expand voting rights and civil rights:
- 8. Guarantee safe, quality and equitable public education, with supports for protection against re-segregation:
- 9. Comprehensive and just immigration reform:
- 10. Ensure all of the rights of indigenous peoples:
- 11. Enact fair taxes:
- 12. Use the power of executive orders:
- 13. Redirect the bloated Pentagon budget towards these priorities as matters of national security:
- 14. Work with the Poor People’s Campaign to establish a permanent Presidential Council to advocate for this bold agenda:
We are encouraged by the commitment of President-elect Biden to take these issues seriously. When he joined the Moral Monday Mass Assembly on the voting power of the poor on September 14 in front of over 1 million viewers, Biden said that under his presidency, “ending poverty will not just be an aspiration, it will be a theory of change — to build a new economy that includes everyone, where we reward hard work, we care for the most vulnerable among us, we release the potential of all our children, and protect the planet.” (Watch President-elect Biden’s statement from September 14, 2020 and also his and Vice President-elect Harris statements at the Poor People’s Campaign’s Moral Action Congress in 2019.)
This is a reconstruction and restoration agenda that, when implemented, can repair and transform the lives of people of every race, ethnicity, age, sexual and gender orientation, who have been suffering unjustly, for far too long. Poor and low-income people, moral and religious leaders, advocates, progressive economists and public health experts hold this agenda as necessary for the true healing of the nation. Indeed, the pre-existing problems of poverty, economic insecurity and systemic racism, combined with the gross impact of COVID-10 on poor and low-income people from Appalachia to Alabama, Michigan to Mississippi, California to the Carolinas, necessitates a bold, moral and Constitutionally consistent agenda that can heal the great wounds in the body and soul of America.
The policy priorities for the first 50-100 days of the Biden/Harris Administration must lift from the bottom and take seriously the costs of inequality. After all, every year, we lose $1 trillion to child poverty costs and $2.6 trillion in lost earnings from gender and racial wage gaps; we have lost $1.3 trillion in government revenue by lowering the corporate tax rate in 2017 and $6.4 trillion in endless wars; inaction on climate change may cost close to $3.3 trillion annually; and 250,000 people die from poverty and inequality every year. And the cumulative financial costs of the pandemic alone are estimated to be $16 trillion.
These costs are threats to genuine democracy in this country. The health, healing and well-being of the nation depends on concretely and expeditiously addressing policy-based systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the false narratives of religious and white nationalism. When left unaddressed, these narratives divide and pit us against each other, while giving rise to a modern form of economic tyranny for the 140 million people who are poor or one emergency away from being poor in the wealthiest country in human history. We cannot heal by refusing to address poverty, blaming the poor, or through the failed approach of neoliberalism and austerity.
The priorities below are Constitutionally consistent, morally defensible and economically sane. They come out of the lives, struggles, agency and insights of the 140 million and their moral, economic and legal allies. They embody a politics of love, justice and truth that can defeat the politics of death, heal the nation and bring us down the path towards genuine democracy. Rather than the puny politics of right or left, we must be guided by a politics of what is right or wrong.
We have been organizing around these priorities for the past several years and will continue to do so until they are met. We who believe in freedom will not rest until it comes.