RELEASE: Progress MO Hosts National Bus Tour in Kansas City to “Stop the Billionaire Giveaway”
Local organizers, health care workers and advocates speak out against the GOP budget bill.
Progress MO hosted the national “Stop the Billionaire Giveaway” bus tour in Kansas City on Monday, July 7. Organized by Fair Share America and Unrig Our Economy, the tour stop highlighted the urgent impact of the recently passed federal reconciliation bill on Missourians.
The sweeping legislation, signed into law by President Trump on July 4, enacts a massive wealth transfer from working class people to the ultra-rich by favoring corporations and the wealthy while slashing vital public services, including Medicaid and SNAP, hurting rural economies and increasing costs for everyday Americans.
The Kansas City press conference featured powerful voices from throughout the community, including Hartzell Gray, a KC Tenants organizer, Kat Stewart, a CNA and SEIU Healthcare member, and Dr. James Fleming, a physician with the Committee to Protect Health Care, as well as Fair Share America’s Executive Director Kristen Crowell.
Crowell criticized Senator Josh Hawley for vocally opposing the bill’s cuts to Medicaid, only to then vote in favor of the legislation, thereby abandoning Missourians. “Now, more than ever, we are standing shoulder to shoulder, coast to coast to say, ‘never again.’ Never again will we let the billionaires hijack our politics…take our money and run for the hills, when we know folks at home, right now, depend on all of us to stand together,” she said. “We’re going to make sure Senator Hawley stays on the run. He’s gotten good at saying one thing and doing another, and we’re going to keep calling him out.”
Gray called the bill a devastating betrayal of working people. “Last week should not have been so easy to sentence our brothers and sisters to death. This isn’t just bad policy — it’s a war on the working class,” he said. “This big, brutal betrayal takes away everything we fought for. Our elders, our children, our neighbors — they all deserve better. And we won’t stop until they get it.”
The Kansas City stop is part of the “Stop the Billionaire Giveaway” bus tour’s three-week, 14-state journey, which started in New York and ends in California. The tour is uniting communities across the country to organize and oppose the harm caused by the new law while continuing to demand accountability from lawmakers who voted in favor of the bill.
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