The following remarks were given April 5 at a Hands Off! rally in Albany, N.Y. It is estimated that 6,000 people attended the rally, one of 1,200 held throughout the country that day to protest federal cuts and attacks on services. I sought to use my comments to raise class consciousness and expose the deeper nature of our crises, beyond opposition to or support for a single political party.
Hello, Everyone, my name is Rev. Joe Paparone. I’m an organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign, the National Union of the Homeless and the Nonviolent Medicaid Army.
Yesterday was April 4, and that happens to be the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, back in 1968. We should pay close attention to what he was doing that last year of his life, because what he was doing was needed then and continues to be needed now.
Dr. King had begun organizing a Poor People’s Campaign — moving from civil rights to human rights — uniting poor people across every line of division to struggle together for a fundamental transformation of society. A “revolution of values,” he called it.
He said the dispossessed of this nation, the poor of all skin colors, live in a cruelly unjust society. He said society had the means to address poverty but was refusing to do so.
He talked about the cruel manipulation of the poor, a vicious kind of solidarity — poor Black and White soldiers fighting side by side to kill poor Vietnamese, but those Black and White soldiers wouldn’t live on the same block in our cities.
He observed all this under a Democratic administration that was supposedly engaged in a “War on Poverty.” But Dr. King saw past the surface of things. He said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
He saw that the war, the real war, was a war on the poor. This war continues today, and it is being waged by a dictatorship of the rich. The dictatorship of the rich is multiracial, includes people of every gender and has no problems with queer people like billionaire Peter Thiel or immigrants like Elon Musk.
Our opponents are united. Perhaps we can learn something from them.
Make no mistake: This war on the poor is a bipartisan affair. Every single tool Donald Trump is using to attack our immigrant neighbors was expanded and sustained by successive Democratic administrations.
Despite their words that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, Democratic leaders can’t race across the aisle fast enough when it comes time to send more weapons to Israel, to commit a genocide against some of the poorest people on the planet in Gaza.
Democrats and Republicans came together in 2023 to end the Pandemic Health Emergency, kicking 25 million people off of Medicaid. This is the context in which we are fighting new threats to Medicaid and Medicare.
Just as the ruling class is united, we must also be united. Dr. King showed us what was necessary. The poor and dispossessed must come together, across every line of division, around our shared struggle for human rights. It is the only way forward.
As my friend Nijmie Zakkiyyah Dzurinko says, “Every day that we are not uniting our class, as a class, we are losing ground.”
Some members of our class work here, in the Capitol, on State Street. Some members of our class sleep here, near the Capitol, on State Street. If we don’t figure out a way to build a movement that can unite every segment of our class against this dictatorship of the rich, we haven’t got a chance.
The rich try to keep us divided, wielding White supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia, antisemitism and islamophobia. But despite all those tactics of division, we must love our class enough to build true solidarity.
So do not be misled. Do not be tricked by those who claim to speak on behalf of the poor and working class and then sign our death warrants in the next breath. Stand by the dignity of your class. Love your class enough to struggle together, to talk with and organize with people who aren’t already just like you, who don’t already think just like you, who sometimes say the “wrong” things, who maybe voted differently than you, or not at all, as most poor people did.
The politicians are not coming to save us, no matter what they say. It’s time to pick your side.
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