I'm with the Poor People's Campaign for my neighbors in North Central Troy: a Puerto Rican family who collects scrap metal to make a living as their house crumbles around them.  They can't get good food for their kids because there's no grocery stores near them and they can't grow any food on their property, because the soil is contaminated with lead and industrial chemicals.

But the struggle is made even harder by the narrative of condemnation that the poor face each and every day.  This immoral narrative says that we are greedy, lazy, sponges that take and take and don’t give anything back.  But that’s not true!  8 out of 10 adult SNAP recipients who are neither disabled nor elderly have worked within in the last year, and more than half of us have worked within the last month.  Many of the poor work multiple jobs at immorally low wages and still can’t pay their bills.  That’s not lazy, that’s not greedy, and that’s not right!  

There is no sugar-coating it. Both of these Supreme Court cases will have negative consequences on real people, in New York State and throughout the country and world.

The scope of those consequences, though, is up to us. We will respond to anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-worker forces the same way that movements for justice have always defeated their opponents: solidarity, organizing, and direct action.