TWO days before its welcome end, the Trump regime’s “1776 Commission” released a new report, designed, said a White House statement, to counter efforts “to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”

With consistent insensitivity, it chose Martin Luther King Jr Day to disseminate its “patriotic education curriculum,” which, among other things, justified the hypocrisy of the founding fathers for holding slaves while criticising the institution of slavery.

It also took a pointed shot at Marxism which it described as a “radical rejection of human dignity.”

Widely panned by actual historians, the report was immediately deleted by the new White House, part of a pile of detritus which the administration of President Joe Biden will now have to expend precious time binning.

But a page has turned. The inauguration of Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris ushered in a new White House team replete with Native American, black, Latino and gay and transgender members. 

And one day after the inauguration, it was the Reverend William J Barber II who delivered the homily at the traditional inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral.

Even for the non-religious among us, the choice of Barber is a bold and significant one. 

Barber leads The Poor People’s Campaign, an initiative begun by Dr King himself but considered “unfinished work.”

Launched in the summer of 2018, the Poor People’s Campaign aims “to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.”

Quoting the prophet Isaiah, Aretha Franklin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jnr, and even “the old chitlin’ circuit comic, Moms Mabley” during his homily, Barber was at his most powerful when he concluded in his own words: “Grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour until, together, we make sure there is racial justice and economic justice and living-wage justice and healthcare justice and ecological justice and disability justice and justice for homeless and justice for the poor and low-wealth and working poor and immigrant justice — until we study war no more, and peace and justice are the way we live.”

It’s a tall order, even as President Biden, on day one, signed more than a dozen executive actions to undo some of the more heinous of the Trump White House’s decisions.

Under pandemic conditions, the US poverty rate, which had been on the wane, has been increasing, hitting a 17.3 per cent high last August. 

Almost 11 million children are affected, experiencing the highest rate of poverty of any age group in the country.

Researchers at Columbia University predict that this month, 5-12 million more US citizens will be living in poverty than a year ago. 

That could mean there are as many as 62 million US citizens in poverty right now.

Although poverty rates among blacks and Hispanics in the US had been falling before the pandemic hit, even in 2019, “the share of blacks in poverty was 1.8 times greater than their share among the general population,” according to the US census.

“The share of Hispanics in poverty was 1.5 times more than their share in the general population.”

Every third Saturday in my suburban Washington DC neighbourhood, a line of cars forms on our street, snaking around the block as their occupants, almost all black, wait to pick up free food at the distribution centre set up at the local primary school. 

They are there, waiting, at five in the morning. Sometimes the queue does not dwindle until two in the afternoon. 

Ours is far from the poorest of counties in this region and certainly not in the US. 

But that line of desperate souls, the hungry and poor of the United States, those who have lost their jobs or their breadwinners to the pandemic, serves as a chilling wake-up call. 

Here, in the US, we had not thought that the pandemic had undone so many.