Respectfully to @POTUS, @TheBlackCaucus, and others: voting rights is not the most important fight. When we say that we separate issues, that should never be. If you have voting rights but don’t have an agenda that takes us forward, it’s not enough.
If you have voting rights, but lose the planet? If you have voting rights, but poverty is destroying the lives of millions, you still have an impoverished democracy. If you look at voting rights only through the lens of race, it becomes a Black issue rather than a democracy one.
We have three fights we must see as non-negotiable and inseparable if we are going to address the issue of racism, poverty, militarism, etc.:

1) The infrastructure of our democracy, voting rights, redistricting, etc.
2) The infrastructure of our daily lives—human rights, health care, living wages, climate, education, etc. and

3) The infrastructure of our roads, bridges, technology. All three are important, not one more than the other. In fact, each informs the others.
And just in case you want to critique my point, let me share with you who taught me: John Lewis in 1963. He refused to speak at the March on Washington on only one issue, because he knew that’s not a winning civil rights strategy.
Therefore, he said: “We march today for jobs AND freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. For they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all.
“While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than $3 a day, 12 hours a day. … It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill. We support it with great reservations, however.
“As it stands now, the voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of Black people who want to vote. We must have legislation that will protect the Mississippi sharecropper who is put off of his farm because he dares to register to vote.
“We need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired ...”
We must recover this kind of ethic. Which is why, no matter what happens this December, the deadline for the movement is when we win.

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More from @RevDrBarber

18 Dec
I’m just watching the clip of @VP Harris on @cthagod’s show. I’m glad he asked the question, and glad she answered the way she did. Brother Charlamagne, keep raising the hard questions.
Dems need to be very clear who the President is! The President should go to West Virginia and Arizona and then to the well of the Congress, and be very clear that the fight for voting rights, Build Back Better, living wages, etc. is all connected.
And Madame @VP, that fire and firmness you showed toward Charlamagne is the very fire and firmness you should show towards Manchin and Sinema. How dare they keep you from casting the final votes on BBB and voting rights, key steps to saving this democracy!
Read 5 tweets
18 Dec
Congress is choosing to spend more on guarding the world’s oil supply (at least $81 billion a year) than on the Build Back Better proposal for fighting climate change ($55 billion a year).
Congress is spending more on a single military contractor, Lockheed Martin ($75 billion last year), than on the Build Back Better proposal for preschool and child care ($40 billion a year).
Congress has authorized spending an extra $25 billion next year on weapons the Pentagon didn’t even ask for, rather than the $20 billion a year Build Back Better proposal for poverty-busting tax credits for families and workers.
Read 5 tweets
14 Dec
WATCH: #PoorPeoplesCampaign Press Conference in front of Sen. Manchin's office at the Hart Senate Building twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
Sen. Joe Manchin’s inaction and lies about scarcity are a form of political violence against 140 million poor and low-wealth people in America and his delay on voting rights is allowing a political coup to sweep through state legislatures, threatening our democracy.
Manchin, who met virtually w/ the #PoorPeoplesCampaign earlier this yr, has offered to talk again w/ the activists, but has been unavailable at every subsequent request. Meanwhile, he’s continued to stall BBB & #votingrights, despite his support for For the People Act in 2019.
Read 6 tweets
13 Dec
We are gathered here today to declare our independence from the corporate lobbyists who control the narrative about what is possible here on Capitol Hill.
For too long we have heard promises during campaigns that fade into disappearing dreams at the end of each Congressional session because somebody somewhere says it’s just not possible to get it done.
Read 22 tweets
8 Dec
The BBB will pay for itself if Manchin would stop pushing tax cuts! As @POTUS said, “17 Nobel Prize winners in economics have said my plan will ‘ease inflationary pressures.’ And my plan does this w/o raising taxes on those making less than $400K or adding to the federal debt.”
Manchin is just a coward and a liar. Why won’t he just say, “I don’t care about the poor and low-wealth people in my state or the nation. I’m owned by my corporate funders, and I follow whatever the Wall Street Journal says”?
If Manchin had integrity, he’d sit w/ the 17 Nobel-winning economists, but he won’t b/c he’s a man of weak character who tries to fashion himself as a savior of the ppl. But like his dad & uncle before him, he’s a WV con artist politician who’ll let poor of his own state suffer.
Read 6 tweets
5 Dec
I heard a person on TV recently say, “I’m from Mississippi, & we’re last in a lot of things, but at least with the case against abortion our leaders are first in defending life & preserving life, despite all the other negatives.” Really? People are in such delusion. Help us, God.
52% of people in Mississippi are poor or low-income—a total of 1.5 million residents. This includes 59% of children (437,000), 53% of women (816,000), 67% of people of color (843,000), and 40% of White people (668,000).
Of the 19,192 people imprisoned in Mississippi, almost 65% are people of color. Black residents are incarcerated at three times the rate of White residents.
Read 7 tweets

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