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The Criminalization of Poverty
The Criminalization Of Poverty
By Sabina Virgo
Sabina Virgo is an activist in the Los Angeles area. The following is an edited version of a speech given in L.A. on International Human Rights Day, December 8, 1990.)
An anonymous poet in the 1700s once wrote, "The law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from off the hillside, but lets the greater robber loose, who steals the hillside from the goose."
Talking about "the greater robber" seemed particularly appropriate in the midst of the biggest financial rip-off in the history of this country. I thought about the billions of dollars the Savings & Loan criminals stole, and about how most of them will get away with it. I thought about the complete insanity of how we define crime in our society.
" Steal $5 you're a thief, steal $5 million - you're a financier." Thirty percent of the wealth of this country is controlled by one-half of one percent of the people. Eighty percent of the wealth is controlled by ten percent of the people. I think that's a crime.
I looked up the word "crime." Crime was defined as "an act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly, the dictionary said, to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good. Crime in one country, it continued, " may be entirely overlooked by the law in another country, or may not apply at all in a different historical period." That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime is social, and is defined by time and by place and by those who have the power to make the definitions; by those who write the dictionaries, so to speak.
The more I thought about that, the more profound it became. The power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to interpret for us the picture we see when we look at the world. It is the power to place a frame around that picture; to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends; the power to create our collective consciousness.
That, after all, is what pictures do. They define what we see. They give us the painter's interpretation of reality. They give us illusion. The difference is that when we look at a painting, we know that we are looking at a painting - and we know that there must have been a painter. But when we are not looking at a painting, when we are looking at society, we've been convinced that the interpretations of society that we've been taught, are not interpretations. We think they are truth.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful, it is also mostly invisible. We can't fight what we don't see. Most of us accept the images and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident, and for always; so that the power to paint the future, to define what is right and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the power to win the battle for our minds. And to win it without ever having to fight it.
In the 1830s, England defined the state of poverty as a criminal state. England created special prisons and called them debtor's prisons. In England, in the 1800s, not having enough money to pay to live was a jailable offense.
When we look at England during the Industrial Revolution, we see that an entire class of human beings was poor. An entire class of human beings who were created by the Industrial Revolution were both exploited and defined as criminal by the owners of technology, owners who had the power to both define crime and create poverty.
People went to jail, not for exploiting, but for being exploited. Then, as now, definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, are defined by those who make the rules and control the economy and the institutions of the country.
Though some of us may question the system's fairness in applying its rules, most of us don't question the basis of the system itself. That is, we don' t question the relationship between those who own and those who don't. Though most of us vote every four years on who governs, we never vote on and rarely question "what governs." We don't challenge the legitimacy of the system, we accept it. We don't step outside of the frame around the picture. We don't disconnect the dots.
If we look at any downtown urban center, if we look at the lines of humanity waiting for food or for a bed at the missions, if we look at the faces of people living in cardboard boxes on the streets of the cities - we must know that a crime has been committed. When we look at the faces of dispossessed people, we see faces that look like people who lived here when California was part of Mexico. We see faces of people who fled here from Haiti and from Central America. We see the faces of people whose great great grandparents were abducted and brought here from Africa.
One-half of all African people born in this country live in poverty. That is a 69% increase in the last 25 years. One out two children born to African American parents is born in poverty, and one of every three seniors live in poverty. The life expectancy for a Black man in Harlem is less than for a man in Bangladesh. If we know that, we must know that a crime has been committed.
Bertolt Brecht, a German anti-fascist poet and playwright asked, "Which is the greater crime, the robbing of a bank, or the founding of a bank" That is not a question that was given to most of us in our homework assignments from school. The men who own the banks run the country. They run it to protect their interests and maintain their power.
In America, in 1990, it is a crime to be poor. If we're poor, the poorer we are, the more criminal we are. If we are so poor that we have no place to live, if we live on the pavement, or sleep in a car, or in a park, we have committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep.
The political decisions of the government, the investment decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50's to remove industry from communities of color, were decisions about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers about redevelopment are decisions about who will be homeless.
Those decisions affect each of us. But we have no say in them. We have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect our lives. That, somehow, is not part of our "democracy." And never has been. Because we have no say, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is. Runaway plants and plant closures are legal, but vagrancy is a crime.
And the definition of crime is limited. In the "victims bill of rights" the victim is someone who has suffered an individual act of violence. But when the act of violence is not committed by one person against another person - when it is committed by a government, when it is committed by multinational corporations, and when the victim is not a person - but is "the people" - then, not only is there no "victims bill of rights" - there is not even a trail. Because there has been no crime.
Because the criminals are in charge, they commit the crimes, capital crimes, every day. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help - because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the boardrooms and in the White House.
Under their misleadership, over five million of us are homeless, 37 million of us have no health insurance, 30 million of us are illiterate, 30 million more of us are functionally illiterate, one million of us are in prison, 20% of us live in poverty.
Under their misleadership we live in a world where the air and water are polluted, the earth is toxic and the chemicals that are poisoning us keep being produced.
Most of us don't feel safe or valued. Most of us are afraid, but we don't talk about it. We don't trust each other. We don't feel powerful. For most of us in America, the world we live in is out of control and threatening.
There is no reason our world and our lives have to be this way, but if we want it to change, we have to do it. We have waited hundreds of years for the people in power to change it and they haven't and they won't, because they created it and it serves them.
So the question before us is how to be more than a witness to crime. The question before us is how to paint a new, beautiful painting: how to build a powerful, caring, movement for change - an independent movement that can challenge power and can win. A movement that, if it won, would have a clear vision and a plan for transforming America; a plan to reindustrialize and rebuild, a plan for employment and education, for housing and for the environment. A concrete plan to deal with racism. And sexism. And addiction and pollution. So that we would know, concretely, what tomorrow could look like and would have no idea of how we would get there and how we would pay for it.
But before that kind of movement can be born, we need to reach out to each other and evaluate our work and learn the lessons it has to teach us. We need to talk to each other and find out what has kept us apart and how we can change that.
The time seems right for that. We seem ready to talk about why our movement is fragmented. To talk about why we have many organizations but little unity and few victories. Why we have individual leaders but no collective leadership. The time seems right to see why we are waging a piecemeal attack on a giant. Time maybe even to put the idea of winning back in our vocabulary.
We need to take time to talk so that we can build a movement that is focused enough and strong enough to create a human society that loves us. There is no more important work that we could do than to help bring that world to birth.
The Criminalization Of Poverty
By Sabina Virgo
(Sabina Virgo is an activist in the Los Angeles area. The following is an edited version of a speech given in L.A. on International Human Rights Day, December 8, 1990.)
An anonymous poet in the 1700s once wrote, "The law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from off the hillside, but lets the greater robber loose, who steals the hillside from the goose."
Talking about "the greater robber" seemed particularly appropriate in the midst of the biggest financial rip-off in the history of this country. I thought about the billions of dollars the Savings & Loan criminals stole, and about how most of them will get away with it. I thought about the complete insanity of how we define crime in our society.
" Steal $5 you're a thief, steal $5 million - you're a financier." Thirty percent of the wealth of this country is controlled by one-half of one percent of the people. Eighty percent of the wealth is controlled by ten percent of the people. I think that's a crime.
I looked up the word "crime." Crime was defined as "an act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly, the dictionary said, to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good. Crime in one country, it continued, " may be entirely overlooked by the law in another country, or may not apply at all in a different historical period." That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime is social, and is defined by time and by place and by those who have the power to make the definitions; by those who write the dictionaries, so to speak.
The more I thought about that, the more profound it became. The power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to interpret for us the picture we see when we look at the world. It is the power to place a frame around that picture; to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends; the power to create our collective consciousness.
That, after all, is what pictures do. They define what we see. They give us the painter's interpretation of reality. They give us illusion. The difference is that when we look at a painting, we know that we are looking at a painting - and we know that there must have been a painter. But when we are not looking at a painting, when we are looking at society, we've been convinced that the interpretations of society that we've been taught, are not interpretations. We think they are truth.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful, it is also mostly invisible. We can't fight what we don't see. Most of us accept the images and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident, and for always; so that the power to paint the future, to define what is right and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the power to win the battle for our minds. And to win it without ever having to fight it.
In the 1830s, England defined the state of poverty as a criminal state. England created special prisons and called them debtor's prisons. In England, in the 1800s, not having enough money to pay to live was a jailable offense.
When we look at England during the Industrial Revolution, we see that an entire class of human beings was poor. An entire class of human beings who were created by the Industrial Revolution were both exploited and defined as criminal by the owners of technology, owners who had the power to both define crime and create poverty.
People went to jail, not for exploiting, but for being exploited. Then, as now, definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, are defined by those who make the rules and control the economy and the institutions of the country.
Though some of us may question the system's fairness in applying its rules, most of us don't question the basis of the system itself. That is, we don' t question the relationship between those who own and those who don't. Though most of us vote every four years on who governs, we never vote on and rarely question "what governs." We don't challenge the legitimacy of the system, we accept it. We don't step outside of the frame around the picture. We don't disconnect the dots.
If we look at any downtown urban center, if we look at the lines of humanity waiting for food or for a bed at the missions, if we look at the faces of people living in cardboard boxes on the streets of the cities - we must know that a crime has been committed. When we look at the faces of dispossessed people, we see faces that look like people who lived here when California was part of Mexico. We see faces of people who fled here from Haiti and from Central America. We see the faces of people whose great great grandparents were abducted and brought here from Africa.
One-half of all African people born in this country live in poverty. That is a 69% increase in the last 25 years. One out two children born to African American parents is born in poverty, and one of every three seniors live in poverty. The life expectancy for a Black man in Harlem is less than for a man in Bangladesh. If we know that, we must know that a crime has been committed.
Bertolt Brecht, a German anti-fascist poet and playwright asked, "Which is the greater crime, the robbing of a bank, or the founding of a bank" That is not a question that was given to most of us in our homework assignments from school. The men who own the banks run the country. They run it to protect their interests and maintain their power.
In America, in 1990, it is a crime to be poor. If we're poor, the poorer we are, the more criminal we are. If we are so poor that we have no place to live, if we live on the pavement, or sleep in a car, or in a park, we have committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep.
The political decisions of the government, the investment decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50's to remove industry from communities of color, were decisions about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers about redevelopment are decisions about who will be homeless.
Those decisions affect each of us. But we have no say in them. We have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect our lives. That, somehow, is not part of our "democracy." And never has been. Because we have no say, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is. Runaway plants and plant closures are legal, but vagrancy is a crime.
And the definition of crime is limited. In the "victims bill of rights" the victim is someone who has suffered an individual act of violence. But when the act of violence is not committed by one person against another person - when it is committed by a government, when it is committed by multinational corporations, and when the victim is not a person - but is "the people" - then, not only is there no "victims bill of rights" - there is not even a trail. Because there has been no crime.
Because the criminals are in charge, they commit the crimes, capital crimes, every day. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help - because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the boardrooms and in the White House.
Under their misleadership, over five million of us are homeless, 37 million of us have no health insurance, 30 million of us are illiterate, 30 million more of us are functionally illiterate, one million of us are in prison, 20% of us live in poverty.
Under their misleadership we live in a world where the air and water are polluted, the earth is toxic and the chemicals that are poisoning us keep being produced.
Most of us don't feel safe or valued. Most of us are afraid, but we don't talk about it. We don't trust each other. We don't feel powerful. For most of us in America, the world we live in is out of control and threatening.
There is no reason our world and our lives have to be this way, but if we want it to change, we have to do it. We have waited hundreds of years for the people in power to change it and they haven't and they won't, because they created it and it serves them.
So the question before us is how to be more than a witness to crime. The question before us is how to paint a new, beautiful painting: how to build a powerful, caring, movement for change - an independent movement that can challenge power and can win. A movement that, if it won, would have a clear vision and a plan for transforming America; a plan to reindustrialize and rebuild, a plan for employment and education, for housing and for the environment. A concrete plan to deal with racism. And sexism. And addiction and pollution. So that we would know, concretely, what tomorrow could look like and would have no idea of how we would get there and how we would pay for it.
But before that kind of movement can be born, we need to reach out to each other and evaluate our work and learn the lessons it has to teach us. We need to talk to each other and find out what has kept us apart and how we can change that.
The time seems right for that. We seem ready to talk about why our movement is fragmented. To talk about why we have many organizations but little unity and few victories. Why we have individual leaders but no collective leadership. The time seems right to see why we are waging a piecemeal attack on a giant. Time maybe even to put the idea of winning back in our vocabulary.
We need to take time to talk so that we can build a movement that is focused enough and strong enough to create a human society that loves us. There is no more important work that we could do than to help bring that world to birth.
By Sabina Virgo
Sabina Virgo is an activist in the Los Angeles area. The following is an edited version of a speech given in L.A. on International Human Rights Day, December 8, 1990.)
An anonymous poet in the 1700s once wrote, "The law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from off the hillside, but lets the greater robber loose, who steals the hillside from the goose."
Talking about "the greater robber" seemed particularly appropriate in the midst of the biggest financial rip-off in the history of this country. I thought about the billions of dollars the Savings & Loan criminals stole, and about how most of them will get away with it. I thought about the complete insanity of how we define crime in our society.
" Steal $5 you're a thief, steal $5 million - you're a financier." Thirty percent of the wealth of this country is controlled by one-half of one percent of the people. Eighty percent of the wealth is controlled by ten percent of the people. I think that's a crime.
I looked up the word "crime." Crime was defined as "an act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly, the dictionary said, to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good. Crime in one country, it continued, " may be entirely overlooked by the law in another country, or may not apply at all in a different historical period." That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime is social, and is defined by time and by place and by those who have the power to make the definitions; by those who write the dictionaries, so to speak.
The more I thought about that, the more profound it became. The power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to interpret for us the picture we see when we look at the world. It is the power to place a frame around that picture; to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends; the power to create our collective consciousness.
That, after all, is what pictures do. They define what we see. They give us the painter's interpretation of reality. They give us illusion. The difference is that when we look at a painting, we know that we are looking at a painting - and we know that there must have been a painter. But when we are not looking at a painting, when we are looking at society, we've been convinced that the interpretations of society that we've been taught, are not interpretations. We think they are truth.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful, it is also mostly invisible. We can't fight what we don't see. Most of us accept the images and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident, and for always; so that the power to paint the future, to define what is right and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the power to win the battle for our minds. And to win it without ever having to fight it.
In the 1830s, England defined the state of poverty as a criminal state. England created special prisons and called them debtor's prisons. In England, in the 1800s, not having enough money to pay to live was a jailable offense.
When we look at England during the Industrial Revolution, we see that an entire class of human beings was poor. An entire class of human beings who were created by the Industrial Revolution were both exploited and defined as criminal by the owners of technology, owners who had the power to both define crime and create poverty.
People went to jail, not for exploiting, but for being exploited. Then, as now, definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, are defined by those who make the rules and control the economy and the institutions of the country.
Though some of us may question the system's fairness in applying its rules, most of us don't question the basis of the system itself. That is, we don' t question the relationship between those who own and those who don't. Though most of us vote every four years on who governs, we never vote on and rarely question "what governs." We don't challenge the legitimacy of the system, we accept it. We don't step outside of the frame around the picture. We don't disconnect the dots.
If we look at any downtown urban center, if we look at the lines of humanity waiting for food or for a bed at the missions, if we look at the faces of people living in cardboard boxes on the streets of the cities - we must know that a crime has been committed. When we look at the faces of dispossessed people, we see faces that look like people who lived here when California was part of Mexico. We see faces of people who fled here from Haiti and from Central America. We see the faces of people whose great great grandparents were abducted and brought here from Africa.
One-half of all African people born in this country live in poverty. That is a 69% increase in the last 25 years. One out two children born to African American parents is born in poverty, and one of every three seniors live in poverty. The life expectancy for a Black man in Harlem is less than for a man in Bangladesh. If we know that, we must know that a crime has been committed.
Bertolt Brecht, a German anti-fascist poet and playwright asked, "Which is the greater crime, the robbing of a bank, or the founding of a bank" That is not a question that was given to most of us in our homework assignments from school. The men who own the banks run the country. They run it to protect their interests and maintain their power.
In America, in 1990, it is a crime to be poor. If we're poor, the poorer we are, the more criminal we are. If we are so poor that we have no place to live, if we live on the pavement, or sleep in a car, or in a park, we have committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep.
The political decisions of the government, the investment decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50's to remove industry from communities of color, were decisions about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers about redevelopment are decisions about who will be homeless.
Those decisions affect each of us. But we have no say in them. We have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect our lives. That, somehow, is not part of our "democracy." And never has been. Because we have no say, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is. Runaway plants and plant closures are legal, but vagrancy is a crime.
And the definition of crime is limited. In the "victims bill of rights" the victim is someone who has suffered an individual act of violence. But when the act of violence is not committed by one person against another person - when it is committed by a government, when it is committed by multinational corporations, and when the victim is not a person - but is "the people" - then, not only is there no "victims bill of rights" - there is not even a trail. Because there has been no crime.
Because the criminals are in charge, they commit the crimes, capital crimes, every day. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help - because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the boardrooms and in the White House.
Under their misleadership, over five million of us are homeless, 37 million of us have no health insurance, 30 million of us are illiterate, 30 million more of us are functionally illiterate, one million of us are in prison, 20% of us live in poverty.
Under their misleadership we live in a world where the air and water are polluted, the earth is toxic and the chemicals that are poisoning us keep being produced.
Most of us don't feel safe or valued. Most of us are afraid, but we don't talk about it. We don't trust each other. We don't feel powerful. For most of us in America, the world we live in is out of control and threatening.
There is no reason our world and our lives have to be this way, but if we want it to change, we have to do it. We have waited hundreds of years for the people in power to change it and they haven't and they won't, because they created it and it serves them.
So the question before us is how to be more than a witness to crime. The question before us is how to paint a new, beautiful painting: how to build a powerful, caring, movement for change - an independent movement that can challenge power and can win. A movement that, if it won, would have a clear vision and a plan for transforming America; a plan to reindustrialize and rebuild, a plan for employment and education, for housing and for the environment. A concrete plan to deal with racism. And sexism. And addiction and pollution. So that we would know, concretely, what tomorrow could look like and would have no idea of how we would get there and how we would pay for it.
But before that kind of movement can be born, we need to reach out to each other and evaluate our work and learn the lessons it has to teach us. We need to talk to each other and find out what has kept us apart and how we can change that.
The time seems right for that. We seem ready to talk about why our movement is fragmented. To talk about why we have many organizations but little unity and few victories. Why we have individual leaders but no collective leadership. The time seems right to see why we are waging a piecemeal attack on a giant. Time maybe even to put the idea of winning back in our vocabulary.
We need to take time to talk so that we can build a movement that is focused enough and strong enough to create a human society that loves us. There is no more important work that we could do than to help bring that world to birth.
The Criminalization Of Poverty
By Sabina Virgo
(Sabina Virgo is an activist in the Los Angeles area. The following is an edited version of a speech given in L.A. on International Human Rights Day, December 8, 1990.)
An anonymous poet in the 1700s once wrote, "The law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from off the hillside, but lets the greater robber loose, who steals the hillside from the goose."
Talking about "the greater robber" seemed particularly appropriate in the midst of the biggest financial rip-off in the history of this country. I thought about the billions of dollars the Savings & Loan criminals stole, and about how most of them will get away with it. I thought about the complete insanity of how we define crime in our society.
" Steal $5 you're a thief, steal $5 million - you're a financier." Thirty percent of the wealth of this country is controlled by one-half of one percent of the people. Eighty percent of the wealth is controlled by ten percent of the people. I think that's a crime.
I looked up the word "crime." Crime was defined as "an act which is against the law." Crime applies particularly, the dictionary said, to an act that breaks a law that has been made for public good. Crime in one country, it continued, " may be entirely overlooked by the law in another country, or may not apply at all in a different historical period." That was interesting. What that really said was that concepts of "crime" are not eternal. The very nature of crime is social, and is defined by time and by place and by those who have the power to make the definitions; by those who write the dictionaries, so to speak.
The more I thought about that, the more profound it became. The power to define is an awesome power. It is the power of propaganda. It is the ability to manipulate our ideas, to limit our agenda, to mold how we see, and to shape what we look at. It is the power to interpret for us the picture we see when we look at the world. It is the power to place a frame around that picture; to define where it begins and ends. It is, in fact, the power to define where our vision begins and ends; the power to create our collective consciousness.
That, after all, is what pictures do. They define what we see. They give us the painter's interpretation of reality. They give us illusion. The difference is that when we look at a painting, we know that we are looking at a painting - and we know that there must have been a painter. But when we are not looking at a painting, when we are looking at society, we've been convinced that the interpretations of society that we've been taught, are not interpretations. We think they are truth.
That kind of social propaganda is not only tremendously powerful, it is also mostly invisible. We can't fight what we don't see. Most of us accept the images and definitions that we have been taught as true, neutral, self-evident, and for always; so that the power to paint the future, to define what is right and wrong, what is lawful and what is criminal, is really the power to win the battle for our minds. And to win it without ever having to fight it.
In the 1830s, England defined the state of poverty as a criminal state. England created special prisons and called them debtor's prisons. In England, in the 1800s, not having enough money to pay to live was a jailable offense.
When we look at England during the Industrial Revolution, we see that an entire class of human beings was poor. An entire class of human beings who were created by the Industrial Revolution were both exploited and defined as criminal by the owners of technology, owners who had the power to both define crime and create poverty.
People went to jail, not for exploiting, but for being exploited. Then, as now, definitions of right and wrong, legal and illegal, are defined by those who make the rules and control the economy and the institutions of the country.
Though some of us may question the system's fairness in applying its rules, most of us don't question the basis of the system itself. That is, we don' t question the relationship between those who own and those who don't. Though most of us vote every four years on who governs, we never vote on and rarely question "what governs." We don't challenge the legitimacy of the system, we accept it. We don't step outside of the frame around the picture. We don't disconnect the dots.
If we look at any downtown urban center, if we look at the lines of humanity waiting for food or for a bed at the missions, if we look at the faces of people living in cardboard boxes on the streets of the cities - we must know that a crime has been committed. When we look at the faces of dispossessed people, we see faces that look like people who lived here when California was part of Mexico. We see faces of people who fled here from Haiti and from Central America. We see the faces of people whose great great grandparents were abducted and brought here from Africa.
One-half of all African people born in this country live in poverty. That is a 69% increase in the last 25 years. One out two children born to African American parents is born in poverty, and one of every three seniors live in poverty. The life expectancy for a Black man in Harlem is less than for a man in Bangladesh. If we know that, we must know that a crime has been committed.
Bertolt Brecht, a German anti-fascist poet and playwright asked, "Which is the greater crime, the robbing of a bank, or the founding of a bank" That is not a question that was given to most of us in our homework assignments from school. The men who own the banks run the country. They run it to protect their interests and maintain their power.
In America, in 1990, it is a crime to be poor. If we're poor, the poorer we are, the more criminal we are. If we are so poor that we have no place to live, if we live on the pavement, or sleep in a car, or in a park, we have committed a crime. It's against the law to sleep on the streets or in a park. If we have no home, it's against the law to sleep.
The political decisions of the government, the investment decisions of the bankers are decisions about who will be poor. Corporate decisions made in the late '50's to remove industry from communities of color, were decisions about who would be unemployed. Decisions by developers about redevelopment are decisions about who will be homeless.
Those decisions affect each of us. But we have no say in them. We have no say in most social and economic decisions that affect our lives. That, somehow, is not part of our "democracy." And never has been. Because we have no say, creating homelessness is not criminal, but being homeless is. Runaway plants and plant closures are legal, but vagrancy is a crime.
And the definition of crime is limited. In the "victims bill of rights" the victim is someone who has suffered an individual act of violence. But when the act of violence is not committed by one person against another person - when it is committed by a government, when it is committed by multinational corporations, and when the victim is not a person - but is "the people" - then, not only is there no "victims bill of rights" - there is not even a trail. Because there has been no crime.
Because the criminals are in charge, they commit the crimes, capital crimes, every day. The jails are overflowing, but that doesn't seem to help - because the real criminals aren't in jail. They're in the boardrooms and in the White House.
Under their misleadership, over five million of us are homeless, 37 million of us have no health insurance, 30 million of us are illiterate, 30 million more of us are functionally illiterate, one million of us are in prison, 20% of us live in poverty.
Under their misleadership we live in a world where the air and water are polluted, the earth is toxic and the chemicals that are poisoning us keep being produced.
Most of us don't feel safe or valued. Most of us are afraid, but we don't talk about it. We don't trust each other. We don't feel powerful. For most of us in America, the world we live in is out of control and threatening.
There is no reason our world and our lives have to be this way, but if we want it to change, we have to do it. We have waited hundreds of years for the people in power to change it and they haven't and they won't, because they created it and it serves them.
So the question before us is how to be more than a witness to crime. The question before us is how to paint a new, beautiful painting: how to build a powerful, caring, movement for change - an independent movement that can challenge power and can win. A movement that, if it won, would have a clear vision and a plan for transforming America; a plan to reindustrialize and rebuild, a plan for employment and education, for housing and for the environment. A concrete plan to deal with racism. And sexism. And addiction and pollution. So that we would know, concretely, what tomorrow could look like and would have no idea of how we would get there and how we would pay for it.
But before that kind of movement can be born, we need to reach out to each other and evaluate our work and learn the lessons it has to teach us. We need to talk to each other and find out what has kept us apart and how we can change that.
The time seems right for that. We seem ready to talk about why our movement is fragmented. To talk about why we have many organizations but little unity and few victories. Why we have individual leaders but no collective leadership. The time seems right to see why we are waging a piecemeal attack on a giant. Time maybe even to put the idea of winning back in our vocabulary.
We need to take time to talk so that we can build a movement that is focused enough and strong enough to create a human society that loves us. There is no more important work that we could do than to help bring that world to birth.
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