Carolina QuotesOur military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more than fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar to pay for wars abroad and pushing our ability to pay for health care for all, for a Green New Deal, for jobs and education, and infrastructure, further and further away. The wars that those military budgets fund continue to escalate. They don’t make us safer, and they’ve led to the deaths of thousands of poor people in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and beyond, as well as the displacement of millions of refugees, the destruction of water sources, and the contamination of the environments of whole countries. The only ones who benefit are the millionaire CEOs of military companies, who are getting richer every year on the more than $350 billion—half the military budget—that goes directly to their corporations. In the meantime 23,000 low-ranking troops earn so little that they and their families qualify for food stamps.
William Barber II Connected to the Carolinas
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“Our military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more tha…” William Barber II. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D2692E3204. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d2692e3204
More from William Barber II
We're in a nation where 140 million people live in poverty, 43 percent of this nation... So when [the coronavirus disease] COVID-19 hit, America had all these wounds, these fissures. And pandemics, by their nature, exploit fissures and expand themselves through fissures. So it might hit the people in the fissures: the poor, the low wealth, black, brown, poor white communities, native communities, first nation communities. But it doesn't stay in the fissures. The pandemic might be in the fissures among the homeless for instance, in the fissures among poor black communities, but that same pandemic will make its way eventually to the White House and to the palace.
With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor.
Don't you come talking to me about Jesus, unless you're standing with the poor. If we don't address this issue of poverty... we will never energize the 100 million Americans who stayed home in 2016. If you mobilize 2 to 10% of the poor around an agenda, you can fundamentally shift every election in this country... it's better to die having fought for justice than to live and stay on the sidelines and to watch injustice have it's way without a challenge.