 Hello and welcome to Newsclick. We have with us today Shelly Gupta-Bhans, an activist associated with Poor People's Campaign of USA. Hello Shelly, welcome to Newsclick. Hello. Thank you for having me. To begin with, can you give us a little background and history of the Poor People's Campaign? What is it all about? Sure. So the Poor People's Campaign is picking up on a kind of radical history of the United States when Reverend Martin Luther King, after the Civil Rights Movement, was making a transition to how he said, moving from an era of civil rights to an era of human rights, an era of reform to an era of revolution. And that was in 1965 to 1968. He was making that transition. And as part of that transition, he was trying to, he and many other kind of leaders from grassroots organizations of the poor, were trying to build relationships across different, across poor people of many races and geographies and issues so they could come together on a common basis. So making relationships among poor black, poor white, poor Latino, poor Puerto Rican, poor Native American, making all of these come together. And he was assassinated in 1968, 50 years ago. And so we, 50 years later, have studied that history. We understand, we've kind of been following different trends as they've been changing over these 50 years and found that there was more of a need almost for a Poor People's Campaign today than there was 50 years ago. And so we're picking up from that history and trying to bring different communities together in the United States, again, around a common agenda, common understanding, a common basis so we can, so we can cure the ailments that we're facing today. For people like me, or a lot of us who are sitting in India, we have this impression that U.S. is a very prosperous country and everybody wants to go there. So when you talk about a Poor People's Campaign, what are these different facets of poverty there? How, like, what is the extent of poverty and what are the issues involved in poverty in U.S.? It's a very good question because the issue of poverty in the U.S. has always held at a kind of different place, both kind of internally among the U.S. and then around the world. It's been a way to kind of divide, I think, the poor of the whole world from making these connections. And so what we're facing today really is that there are currently in the United States about 3.3 million people who live at the same standard of extreme poverty as what you hear around the rest of the world, less than $2 a day, about 3.3 million people. There are another 40 million people who live at below the poverty line, the official poverty line of the United States. And that poverty line, just like many kind of economic measures of poverty, is very minimal. It doesn't take into account the rising costs of food, utilities, housing, since it was first measured, since it was first developed. So if you take into account these other measurements, there are actually more, you know, actually 43 percent of the U.S. population is poor or low income, meaning that's about twice the poverty line, which some of these numbers income-wise sound very large compared to the rest of the world. But what it means in the U.S. is that people are facing, they can't pay for medications or they have to decide between paying for medications or paying for gas in their car. It means that people are working multiple low-wage jobs but then still unable to make rent. It means that there are about 13, between 13 and 14 million households in the U.S. where water has become too expensive. So water is unaffordable. It means that there are 13 million children living in food insecure households. And so it's really, it's really something that's been deepening, a crisis that's been deepening over many years. And the face of poverty is all colors, all ages, all genders, all religions, all kind of geographies. It's very diverse. And so this is something we're also trying to raise awareness of both inside the United States so we can start to have frank and open conversations about what is poverty today? How is it different than it was before? But then also start to build relationships with other poor communities, poor movements throughout the world. Again, after Trump or even maybe before that, there seems to be an increasing racial polarization within the U.S. We hear of these incidents of such extreme violence against blacks by police and the state and the rise of these neo-nazi groups. And in that context, how successful or like are you the poor people's campaign in mobilizing people of all races and all identities behind you? Isn't it difficult? It is. It is very difficult, especially in an environment where racism is not just kind of, it's kind of tolerated, but it's also been institutionalized in a certain way. So, you know, there are voting rights have been so restricted that they've targeted specifically poor communities and poor communities of color to restrict their abilities and access to vote. And so you kind of marginalize a specific community, but then the agendas that get passed affect much broader communities and just the ones who can't vote. But it starts with racism and then it gets institutionalized so that, you know, an institutional attack on the voting rights of poor black communities ends up having an impact on poor communities of all color when your social welfare benefits are slashed, right? And so it is very difficult at the same time to build those relationships. But what we found is that people also know and are willing to take those steps together when the option is presented. And when you have a space where people can come together and express, you know, I've been facing, you know, let's say as a young, you know, student coming out with crippling debt and living with their parents and unable to kind of get their feet on the ground and move out, you know, for this person to then find a community of people who are facing similar crises. And then, you know, so the desire to build those relationships is there, but sometimes the kind of issue and geographic isolation prevents it. So we're actually trying to make the space for people to begin to get to know each other. And out of that, we're seeing that people are very willing to come together on the ground. The leadership of this campaign is in 30 different states across the country, and it is incredibly diverse. It is white. It is black. It is Latinx. It is native. It is Asian. You know, it is young. It is old. It's incredible. Yeah. What is a specific charter for poor people's campaign with like specific demands to the state? We haven't yet issued the demands in part because we are in the middle of doing an assessment of what's changed over the past 50 years. And out of that assessment and kind of deeper conversation and engagement with impacted people and grassroots organizations on the ground, then we'll develop the demands. But those will also be coming out. So we're preparing all of this kind of the campaign is building towards 40 days of coordinated action and nonviolent, nonviolent direct action and across the country and in Washington, D.C. And that'll start on May 13th. And so the demands and this kind of kind of empirical assessment of these years will be prepared for before then. And so that's, you know, we're in the process of doing that. But we know we know we'll have to take on certain fundamental rights that have been taken away from people. How does poor people's campaign situate itself in American politics at the moment? You have the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. How do you negotiate your way in the politics? We are nonpartisan. We have no political actor, whether it's a local council person or a large national party is allowed to speak at any of our events. We've been saying for many months that this isn't about right or left. It's about right or wrong. And we've found that that's actually the way to both be attracting people across these political parties, but also people who aren't affiliated with any party in the 2016 election. If the people who are eligible to vote and who didn't vote voted as one single block, that whoever they voted for would have won the election. So we're trying to also appeal to people who don't see their interests reflected and provide a different understanding of what's been happening and then the path towards a different solution that's independent, really, of the politics that exist right now. And does the poor people's campaign have an engagement with the rest of the world or popular movements in the rest of the world or the poor people of the rest of the world? We do, and yet we also need to do more. We understand that, given the nature of both the economy today, but also the role of the U.S. in the global economy, that our campaign has to be linked very closely, in fact, with poor people's movements and poor people's organizations all across the world. So this is something that we're seeking to develop and encourage very broadly. So what are the specific themes that poor people's campaign addresses within USC? So in 1968, Martin Luther King and the Poor People's Campaign at that time identified three evils he called them, racism, militarism, and economic exploitation. And he said, and what the campaign said at that time is that a poor people's campaign, the poor sit at the middle of all of these. The Achilles heel of each of these is actually the unsettling kind of force of poor people coming together, understanding the relationship among all of these three. And so we've taken from that analysis, we've kind of looked at what's happened today. And the four themes we've actually seen that today still, systemic racism, poverty, and militarism, a rampant war economy really, have continued to kind of deepen all of the economic and social issues that we're facing today. And we've added to that a fourth evil, which is ecological devastation. This was something that in the 1960s hadn't yet emerged as something around which specific organization and movements were building as such in the United States. But what we found over the past years of engaging deeply with poor communities is that we can't have a conversation about systemic racism or a war economy or poverty unless we're also talking about water, unless we're also talking about climate change, and we're talking about resource extraction and air pollution. And so all of these then we found, so these are the four kind of major themes of the campaign, systemic racism, poverty, militarism, war economy, and ecological devastation. And we take these up to really challenge the national morality and where we're at. And then under each of these, we take up specific issues to look at more deeply. So under racism, we're looking at voting rights, incarceration, immigration, employment and education disparities. Under poverty, we're looking at wealth inequality, housing and homelessness, which is a rising problem in the 1980s. Structural homelessness emerged, not just temporary, but structural homelessness is a problem in the United States. The criminalization of the poor, which is something that every country faces, and who is poor, who is kind of facing the brunt of all of these issues, the cuts to social welfare and social programs. Under war economy, we're looking at how resources get spent, the rising, the rising, how our budgets are allocating more and more resources to war, less and less to social programs, also the criminalization, sorry, the militarization of communities. And then under ecological devastation, we're kind of focusing on the issues of water and air and digging deep into these issues and as best as possible. Thank you, Shelley, for giving us your time. Thank you. Thank you for watching NewsClick. Please keep watching us at newsclick.in.