John– This is what the household water in Jackson, Mississippi, looked like for the last two months:

An animated gif of a video clip showing dark brown water coming out of a bathroom sink in a resident’s home in Jackson, Mississippi.

The crisis left the majority-Black city of nearly 200,000 residents without clean, running water. This is water folks depend on for drinking, cooking, bathing, and washing clothes and dishes – and it’s been completely unusable for nearly two months.

First residents were forced to buy their own bottled water, a huge cost burden to the mostly working class city.

When the state government proved slow to respond, the community rallied and organizers collected and distributed water directly to people in need

A collage of four photos of students from Jackson State University, who organized a group called Mississippi Students Water Crisis Advocacy Team. In the top left photo a young woman unloads packets of water from a truck to be distributed. In the top right photo, three young women hold packets of water they are carrying out of a storage unit where water distribution was staged. In the bottom left photo, a young woman lifts a large bottle of water over the balcony railing of a resident’s home. In the bottom right photo, two young women are seated in a car with packets of water in their backseat, checking their phones to coordinate their next drop off location. The caption reads: “Mississippi Students Water Crisis Advocacy Team in action.”

It took more than a month for the governor and President Biden to declare a federal emergency, freeing up funds and mobilizing FEMA and the National Guard to respond.

Not a federal disaster – a federal emergency. That distinction is important. A federal emergency declaration is limited in scope and doesn’t authorize long-term federal recovery programs that come with a Major Disaster Declaration.

This is a temporary patch job on a long-term, systemic problem. The bottled water distribution sites are already closing up shop and the media is reporting the crisis is over. But we have yet to address the root cause.

To understand what happened in Jackson, and what we need to do about it, we need to understand that this crisis did not start in July, or even 2021 when “boil water notices” were first on the rise. It was decades in the making.

A graphic of a headline from PBS News Hour which reads: “Decades of systemic racism seen as root of Jackson Mississippi water crisis.” Included is a photo of Jackson residents seen unloading packets of bottled water.

“The legacy of racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining have ultimately led to the isolation, separation and sequestration of racial minorities into communities (with) diminished tax bases, which has had consequences for the built environment, including infrastructure.”

Prof. Marccus Hendricks
University of Maryland

This institutional neglect left people vulnerable when the city was hit by devastating floods – the kind of extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and severity under the climate crisis.

Jackson is one of thousands of communities of color particularly vulnerable to the climate crisis because of decades of neglect and divestment.

That’s why BNC Reps. Cori Bush, AOC, and Jamaal Bowman introduced the Green New Deal for Cities last year. Can you pitch in $25 today to reelect all three of them and send even MORE climate champions to Congress in November?

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A photo of BNC Representative Cori Bush (pictured in the front and on the left, wearing a black dress) and BNC Representative AOC (pictured in the front and on the right, wearing a black Abolish ICE t-shirt and a light green jacket, while speaking into a microphone and holding her hand up with 3 fingers). Behind them is a large crowd of protesters affiliated with the Sunrise Movement protesting in front of the White House for climate action.

Fixing these problems is not a question of money, John, it’s a question of priorities.

While Mississippi governor Tate Reeves claimed the state couldn’t afford to fix the city’s infrastructure, he somehow found the money for a $524 million dollar tax break for the wealthiest 1% of Mississippians earlier this year.

In 2020, the U.S. federal government spent an estimated $444 billion subsidizing the extremely profitable fossil fuel industry – the root cause of the climate crisis that creates the problems we see in Jackson today. By contrast, we only spent $127 billion developing renewables that could actually halt climate change.

While many in the media balked at the proposed $1 trillion budget for the Green New Deal for Cities (a cost distributed over the course of four years), none of them batted an eye at the nearly trillion dollars we spend on the U.S. military EVERY year.

The bottom line is, we can’t afford NOT to have a Green New Deal. We have the collective ingenuity, the tenacity, and most of all – the money – to solve these problems.

To do that, we need representatives in office who can’t be bought by climate destroyers like ExxonMobil or Koch Industries. We need representatives who come from the communities most affected by infrastructure neglect and disinvestment.

We need representatives who understand and have lived the pain that working class communities feel every day.

We need a Brand New Congress. This November we have the chance to DOUBLE (or more!) our BNC caucus of unbought, unbossed, working class, progressive fighters who will stand up for climate justice, racial justice, labor justice, and healthcare justice.

Clean water is a human right, John, and so is safe and sustainable housing. We can have that.

Will you join us with a contribution to elect climate champions today?

In solidarity,

Brand New Congress

Since 2016 BNC has led the way in advancing popular policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal and electing bold progressive fighters. We recruited and elected AOC in 2018 and Cori Bush in 2020. With seven BNC Reps currently in office, we are growing progressive power in Congress.

This November we’re working to flip multiple red seats, fill open seats with bold progressives, and elect our first BNC Senator by defeating Rand Paul.

Pitch in today and join us as we take over Congress and return power to the people.

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