"The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. To redeem the soul of America—and survive a pandemic—we must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides."

"This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America’s deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. They’re the ones who are least likely to have health care or paid , and the most likely to lose work hours. And though children appear less vulnerable to the virus than adults, America’s nearly forty million poor and low-income children are at serious risk of losing access to food, shelter, education, and housing in the economic fallout from the pandemic."

"The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones’ medical bills. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they can’t get unleaded water in their homes. Almost half of America’s workers—whether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolina—work for less than a . And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households."

"This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore."

"The frontlines of this pandemic will be the poor and dispossessed - those who do not have access to healthcare, housing, water, decent wages, stable work or - and those who are continuing to work in this crisis, meeting our health care and other needs. It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources. In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more."

"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. [...] We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting , expanding social welfare programs, ensuring access to water and sanitation, cash assistance to poor and low income families, good jobs, s and an annual income and protecting our democracy. It means ensuring that our abundant s are used for the general welfare, instead of war, walls, and the wealthy. [...] Before COVID-19, nearly 700 people died everyday because of poverty and inequality in this country."

"The overwhelming majority of Republicans think that poor people, who maybe are getting food stamps or some kind of public assistance, are lazy and life is easy for them. It’s like they’re just living in a hammock. Now, anyone who’s actually been poor knows that it’s in fact a lot of work to be poor, just getting the daily subsistence, and often they’re keeping down three part-time jobs. They can’t get full-time hours anywhere, and it’s enormously difficult just to pay for basic necessities."

"In Bentham's vision, the poor should be treated like criminals, forced to labor in prison for the private profit of capitalist entrepreneurs. Such a totalitarian idea might seem remote from purportedly enlightened twenty-first-century practices in liberal democracies. Yet both the criminalization of poverty, and the subjection of the criminalized poor to unpaid labor for corporate profit, exist in the United States today."

"It was [senator] Bernie Sanders who said to me at one stage, look how many colleagues have rallies in very poor areas. They don’t see votes in them. And the overwhelming success of the ideological campaign that supports neoliberal policies is that it has succeeded in convincing people that those in poverty have no one to blame but themselves, while supporting the notion that trickle down policies will address it."

"The United States has the of the richest nations. It has the by far. It has among the highest child mortality rates. It has the highest . It has one of the lowest levels of voter registration in the rich countries. In essence, it scores extremely poorly on almost all of the comparative measures when compared with other developed states. I visited China on one of these missions about a year ago and what I found was a country that has , but in terms of extreme poverty, has made an absolutely concerted and genuine attempt to eliminate poverty and has succeeded to an important extent. By 2020, they will in fact have no one living in extreme poverty, unlike the United States. While I don’t for a minute want to suggest that the political system [in China] is desirable or even compatible with democratic standards, I would very much welcome an American government that shows a determination to lift everyone out of extreme poverty. I think that’s what politics should be all about, and it’s not happening in the United States."

"The United States is a land of stark contrasts. It is one of the world’s wealthiest societies, a global leader in many areas, and a land of unsurpassed technological and other forms of innovation. Its corporations are global trendsetters, its civil society is vibrant and sophisticated and its higher education system leads the world. But its immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live. About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. It has the highest youth poverty rate in the (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States. Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent, and it has the world’s highest , one of the lowest levels of voter registrations in among OECD countries and the highest obesity levels in the developed world."

"I had no car, no money, and it was tough seeing others have what I didn't have even though I was working. I mean the social pressures to have the flyest ride, clothes, and financial mobility started to bear down on me. It’s hard for a person to be without these socially valued possessions and feel like a whole complete human being. [...] Under the influence of illegitimate-capitalist values, I was pursuing the alleviation of social-economic hardship through individual advancement. This is a wholly inadequate remedy to social problems because it doesn’t challenge the fundamental injustice of class-exploitation and class-oppression, which are responsible for creating the socio-economic ills in the first place. Unaware of my class interest, I was perpetuating my own oppression by engaging in competitive capitalist practices that ensure the smooth functioning of the system as the exploiting minority profits in more ways than one off the division and disunity engendered by competition, so prevalent amongst the exploited. Look around: competition, euphemistically called “individuality,” permeates and is systematically promoted to the masses of people while the corporate conglomerations and Fortune 500 are busy “merging and monopolizing.”"

"For millions of more ordinary black Americans, [...] even with more income and more education, they’re stuck in segregated neighborhoods. Yes, there isn’t much mobility for anyone, but that fact is especially true for blacks. Indeed, when someone says that America has a “,” this is what they mean: Whether times are good or bad, blacks remain at the bottom."

"[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder. [...] Just a quick comparison of black and white neighborhoods is enough to illustrate the particular challenges that face black families as they reach for middle class, or try to keep their position. The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty."

"[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing."

"Kyle: [voiceover] "My Final Solution" by Kyle Broflovski. My dad is the smartest guy in the whole wide world. He has taught me that all poor people are actually things called clods. I wanna live in a world of only gods so my idea to make America better is put all the poor people into camps."