Open Letter From Moral Activists To Senator Mitch McConnell In Regards To Tax Reform

[G_j]

https://medium.com/brepairers/statement-by-moral-activists-to-senator-mitch-mcconnell-in-regards-to-tax-legislation-503093981911


To Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

The U.S. Senate and House have passed tax legislation that, if given final approval, would amount to one of the most immoral laws in our nation’s history.
As this legislation heads to a final vote in Congress, the country’s poor and disenfranchised, along with moral leaders and people of conscience nationwide, call on you to stop the gross act of violence these bills would commit against our nation’s most vulnerable to serve its richest and most powerful.

You and your colleagues in the Senate approved this legislation under the cover of night, voting in the final hours to reward some of the country’s most powerful corporations and industries. The poor, working poor and most vulnerable in our society will pay for the billions in tax breaks you approved for the most wealthy among us.

The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation has found that while big corporations, millionaires and their heirs will benefit, most people making under $75,000 a year will see their tax burdens rise. Meanwhile, this legislation will add $1.4 trillion to the national debt, setting the stage for future cuts to programs that help the poor. In the short term, we could see automatic cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. In the long term, this tax plan lays the groundwork for massive cuts to Social Security and other programs that sustain the poor, the elderly, and the most vulnerable among us.

This is not blind speculation. We have watched the agenda you are now pushing in Congress play out in statehouses from Kansas to North Carolina to Michigan and Wisconsin.

The voice of the prophet Isaiah speaks to each of us in this democracy:
Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. (Isaiah 10:1–4)

You and many of your colleagues say you are Christians and that you let your religion guide your policymaking. You even say you are “pro-life.” But your actions are stripping people of the healthcare they need to survive. You are working to pass legislation that is antithetical to the more than 2,000 verses that call on all of us to care for the poor and the sick.

You assert that this tax scheme will grow the economy, thus helping everyone. But no independent analysis agrees. Mr. Majority Leader, you are acting on faith, in spite of the evidence. We are writing to inform you that your faith is not in line with the Scriptures, nor with what your party’s
first President called “the better angels of our nature.”

This country’s most vulnerable will not remain silent as this immoral legislation moves through Congress. Tens of thousands of poor and disenfranchised people, clergy and moral leaders today announced that we are coming together to launch the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. We will combine direct action with grassroots organizing, voter registration, and power building in the largest wave of nonviolent civil disobedience in U.S. history. Fifty years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King and others called for the original Poor People’s Campaign, this legislation you are championing makes clear that we need this work now more than ever.

You do not have to move forward with this legislative violence. No opinion poll says that the American people are with you. The Scriptures and the Constitution itself condemn it. Whatever has convinced you that this is the right thing to do, you can live without. But people will die because of this attack on our people.

Today, we are serving notice that we will not remain silent while the basic institutions of our democracy are undermined. We invite you to join people of conscience across the country in rejecting the war on the poor that this tax legislation would wage. But even if you will not, we vow to move forward with a campaign to reconstruct America. Our nation’s soul is at stake. We cannot turn back — not now, not ever.


Respectfully,

Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Co-Chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival Steering Committee Members:
Aaron Scott, Chaplains on the Harbor
Al McSurely, Esq., North Carolina NAACP
Avery Brook, Vermont Workers’ Center
Catherine Flowers, Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise
Fernando Garcia, Border Network for Human Rights
Justin Jones, Moral Mondays Tennessee
Luis Rodriguez, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural
Shailly Gupta Barnes, Esq., Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary
Ben Wilkins, Fight for $15
Rev. Claudia de la Cruz, Popular Education Project
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Red Letter Christians
Cherri Foytlin, Bold Louisiana
Rev. Dr. James Forbes, Drum Major Institute, Riverside Church of New York
Rev. Dr. Traci Blackmon, The United Church of Christ
Rev. Nelson Johnson, Faith Community Church
Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR
Rev. Shawna Foster, Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist Church
Sister Simone Campbell, NETWORK
Maureen Taylor, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization
Roz Pelles, Repairers of the Breach
Penda Hair, Esq., Forward Justice
Gina Belafonte, Sankofa.org
MoralmovementStatementsRevwilliambarbePoorpeoplescampaignTaxreform

[Control-Z]

1. Wow, great letter.

Pretty much covers it.

[G_j]

2. Its Time. The New Poor Peoples Campaign wants to change how society defines morality

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-new-poor-peoples-campaign-wants-to-change-how-society-defines-morality/2017/12/05/d4524b68-d90d-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html?utm_term=.efb871c8a393

By Katrina vanden Heuvel
December 5 at 8:03 AM

Fifty years ago this week, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced the Poor People’s Campaign. Calling for a cross-racial coalition of Americans living in poverty to demand better living conditions, King described the need for the campaign in terms that feel particularly timely in the Trump era. “All of us can feel the presence of a kind of social insanity which could lead us to national ruin,” King declared.

Half a century later, as Republican leaders ram through a ruinous tax bill that will exacerbate economic inequality, a coalition of faith and social justice organizations is bringing King’s vision into the 21st century. Led by Rev. William J. Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is planning 40 days of coordinated action in the spring of 2018 at statehouses across the country. Like its predecessor, the modern Poor People’s Campaign is focused on what King described as the “triple evils” of racism, poverty and militarism — with the addition of ecological devastation, a global crisis that disproportionately affects people living in poverty.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) details why it’s so critical at this moment to not merely commemorate the anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign, but also to reengage with King’s crusade to organize and build the power of people who are too often marginalized in our society.

Beyond the emergence of increasingly emboldened white nationalists, who have existed on the fringes of society for years, the scourge of systemic racism continues to affect large segments of the population. As the IPS notes, “More than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, people of color still face a broad range of attacks on their voting rights, including racist gerrymandering and redistricting, felony disenfranchisement, and a variety of laws designed to make it harder to vote.” Mass incarceration and the failed war on drugs have wreaked havoc on communities across the country. The state and federal prison population has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 in 1968 to nearly 1.5 million in 2015, while the proportion of non-white inmates has jumped from less than half to more than two-thirds.

..more..

[bdamomma]

3. Thank you Rev Barber

[G_j]

4. k