Dr. Martin Luther King Jr spent what would be his final months organizing a Poor People's Campaign. This campaign put together a Bill of Rights that included income support, jobs programs, healthcare and affordable housing. Responses from many law-makers led Dr. King to accuse Congress of hostility towards the poor. That was in 1968. Unfortunately, we see signs of hostility towards the poor in today’s debates about healthcare, support for homeowners, proposals to create jobs and proposals to regulate Wall Street.

In a previous blog, I noted that conservatives once again are using red-baiting in their attempts to discredit progressive ideas for solving the financial crisis. Today’s red-baiting has been updated with a special emphasis on bashing the poor and any group that organizes in poor communities (with a lot of appeals to racism thrown into the mix). Going after ACORN was just the beginning. The Right is casting a wider net, naming and slandering other community-based groups and networks, as well as faith-based organizations and unions that organize low-income workers and immigrants.

Conservative law-makers are taking their cue from right-wing pundits who are re-writing the history of the past eight years. In right-wing narratives, the mortgage crisis gets blamed on community organizers who insist that low- and moderate-income neighborhoods have access to loans; the healthcare crisis gets blamed on unions who insist that employers should provide health benefits (they also like to name undocumented immigrants as part of the problem); the banking crisis is the fault of both community organizers and unions who are in bed with ‘big government bureaucrats’; high unemployment also is the fault of unions, big government and community groups that fight for living wages (and, of course, undocumented workers are named as part of the problem). These stories get run through the conservative echo chamber until they show up in mainstream media (not just Fox) as credible sources of information and analysis.

Corporate sponsors of the Right are getting more than their money’s worth. Pundits who claim to care about the 'common man’ are defending unaccountable corporations and Wall Street by trying to shift the blame onto poor people and ‘big government,’ even though our nation's financial problems intensified during a time when anti-government conservatives were in charge. Anti-government conservatives stood by while Wall Street raided our savings, our home equity, our economy’s productive capacities. Now, they’d rather go after poor people (and the groups that poor people have formed) than stand up to Wall Street. We must unmask their real intent: shifting the focus off of Wall Street by driving a wedge between low and middle income people. They know that when low income, working class and middle class people come together, we are an unstoppable force for change.

We must do a better job of making the links between peoples’ daily-life concerns and our policy proposals, such as real healthcare reform, re-regulation that includes caps on CEO salaries and bonuses, real support for struggling homeowners, renters and subsidized housing resident and targeted stimulus that creates jobs and opportunities for every community.

If more lawmakers will stand with us and show that they are no longer in the back pocket of Wall Street, the insurance industry and oil companies, then together we can steal the Right’s thunder, and take the bite out of their attacks on the poor. A few thousand community organizers and leaders will be sending this message to lawmakers October 25-27 in Chicago. See the Showdown In Chicago site for more information. 

--Sandra Hinson