The reality of poverty amid plenty has also grown more widespread and evident because our national priorities have increasingly shifted ever more toward a militarized and toxic war economy. Today, out of every federal discretionary dollar, 53 cents go to our military, while only 15 cents go to anti-poverty programs. This sort of spending has been mirrored in our communities, too, where there has been a tenfold increase in spending on prisons and deportations over the past 40 years. In other words, the criminalization of the poor that began in earnest half a century ago is now in full bloom. To cite one indicative figure that sums this up: since 2000, 95% of the rise in the incarcerated population has been made up of people who can't afford bail.
In 1967, the year before he was assassinated, while organizing the poor across the country for the Poor People's Campaign, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., offered a powerful insight that couldn't be more relevant today. "We are called upon," he said,
"to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, 'Who owns the oil?' You begin to ask the question, 'Who owns the iron ore?' You begin to ask the question, 'Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?' These are the words that must be said."
Indeed, when it comes to who are the poor and why they are poor, it's time to reject the hateful theories of old and instead answer questions like those.
Copyright 2022 Liz Theoharis
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