#Charlottesville: Why ignore Moral Mondays?

There’s no shortage of condemnations when it comes to the hatred in Virginia while just a few miles away, across the border with North Carolina the Moral Mondays movement is gaining traction.

It’s a multi-racial multi-cultural initiative to promote social justice under the leadership of Rev. Dr William Barber II.

There is a link between this movement and the Center on Poverty Work and Opportunity which was forced to close under pressure of a right wing NGO.

• Poverty is North Carolina’s greatest challenge. In one of the most economically vibrant states of the richest nation on earth, 18 percent of us live in wrenching poverty. Twenty-five percent of our kids. Forty percent of our children We have one of the country’s fastest rising poverty rates. A decade ago, North Carolina had the 26th highest rate among the states. Now we’re 10th, speeding past the competition. Greensboro, the federal government tells us, is the hungriest city in America. Charlotte has the nation’s worst economic mobility. Over the last decade, North Carolina experienced the country’s steepest rise in concentrated poverty. Poverty, amidst plenty, stains the life of this Even if our leaders choose to ignore it.

‘The War on the War on Poverty’ describes how the Pope Center takes the stance that poverty does not exist.

• “Its creation was an embarrassment from the beginning and everything since does not disguise its political origins,” says John Hood, president of the John W. Pope Foundation, which “works to improve the well-being of the citizens of North Carolina and the nation through the advancement of individual freedom and personal responsibility.”
• The Pope Foundation’s chairman is Art Pope, a free-market philanthropist and friend of the Koch brothers. According to the Washington Post, the foundation steered over $55 million to conservative think-tanks and advocacy organizations including the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, the John Locke Foundation, and the Civitas Institute.
• Not only did those organizations oppose the creation of the Poverty Center; they viscously denied poverty was even a problem.

As Don McLean put it so many years ago:

“Yes, and we pity their plight as they call in the night and we do all that we can do to hide them”

If I know about this in England, how is it that those for whom it is closer to home, do not?