[William Barber] Why Iowa Matters

What’s the matter with Iowa is what’s the matter with large portions of the U.S. economy: extreme poverty in the presence of extreme wealth. In 1962, Michael Harrington wrote about it in his book The Other America. That America has not gone away. President Johnson’s war on poverty was not won. It was abandoned in the battlefields of Indochina. Today, the United Way estimates almost one in four Iowans live in poverty. And depending on how it is defined, the number of poor people nationwide range from 50 to 140 million. Persistent poverty from coast to coast and growing homelessness are systemic problems. What must be done? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, in his historic Riverside Church speech said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”