7:26 p.m. ET, June 21, 2021
Biden: Covid-19 pandemic has caused "devastation" for the nation's most vulnerable
From CNN's Betsy Klein
President Biden addressed the Poor People’s Campaign, praising their “urgent work” in brief, pre-recorded remarks to the group’s assembly.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been together at time of such opportunity to deliver dignity for our nation’s poor and low-wage workers, and make ending poverty not just an aspiration, but a theory of change,” Biden said in a video.
The President acknowledged that the pandemic caused “devastation” for the nation’s most vulnerable, and touted provisions in the American Rescue Plan, which, he said, “cut hunger by a quarter” and are “on track to cutting child poverty in half.”
He also made a push for his sweeping physical and social infrastructure agenda and renewed calls for a $15 minimum wage, currently stalled in Congress.
“We have to build back better than before with millions of jobs that deliver dignity, a $15 minimum wage, affordable housing, universal pre-K, tuition-free community college. We need to build worker power through organization and collective bargaining, and heed the cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making,” he said.