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The State of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream in 2010
Over 40 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, his words still speak to the social conditions that so many Americans face. Our unemployment rate is hovering at 10 percent, and the wealthiest 10 percent of us control over 70 percent of the nation's wealth. Economic inequality remains a barrier to greater racial equality. The national commemoration of King's birthday, therefore, is more for reflection than celebration.
During one of the worst economic crises seen in this country, black/white economic inequality is still a vast and greatly under-recognized challenge for this country. Two generations past the 1960s civil rights movement, African Americans make less than 60 cents on every dollar of income for whites. Their unemployment rate stands at 150 percent of the national average.
As King fought to end this country's racial divisions, he recognized that economic inequality was as great a barrier to his vision of a more racially inclusive America as Jim Crow segregation laws. Many forget that the March on Washington, where King delivered his famed "I Have a Dream" speech, was actually called the "March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs." When one of the last great symbols of political hope, President John F. Kennedy, was in the White House, King called hundreds of thousands to come to the nation's capital to fight for an America that would reflect its best values rather than its greatest fears. "We called our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, were confronting," he told Look Magazine in 1968.
In 2010, after the first challenging year of the presidency of another man who came into office riding a wave of hope, Americans can honor King's legacy by advancing a contemporary agenda of jobs, wealth building, and peace.
King and other civil rights leaders advocated progressive economic reforms with such proposals as the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged and the Freedom Budget of 1966. A new report from United for a Fair Economy that I co-authored builds on that work by advocating bold and progressive economic reforms to meet today's challenges. Reforms proposed in this report, titled "State of the Dream 2010: Drained," include a major jobs creation program, strong investment in job training, an equity assessment of federal spending, and returning the tax system to one where those with the most concentrated wealth provide greater investment in the public good.
A rededication to King's vision can redirect the United States back to the path of greater equality, and a stronger economy for the middle and working classes. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't believe in the trickle-down philosophy that has run our economy for the past three decades. Instead, his "liberation theology" analysis called for siding with and addressing specifically the challenges of the most disenfranchised to advance society as a whole.
History witnessed this strategy's success with the results of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. All Americans-women, immigrants, the disabled, the elderly, the young and the poor-benefited from the vast social programs and protections that resulted from that struggle. As the nation continues to heal from an economic and financial crisis caused by unregulated greed, we'll find racial inequality unchanged and overall economic inequality at unprecedented heights. It's time to finally make a unified thrust to bridge racial and economic inequality.
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Show AllDefinitely in SNAFUBARack's Bush Shadow!
Race, gender, and economic disparities can all be rectified in one fell swoops. This really isn't complicated.
It won't happen by giving people Bill Cosby/Dr. Phil/Anthony Robbins/Bob Kiyosaki talk. It won't happen with a "culture of achievement" either. Nor will identity politics do the trick either.
Leaders can inspire or oppress, but mostly they get people killed for their cause. No one dies in a direct democracy.
The State of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream in 2010
Barack Obama, the black version of George Wanker Bush, is president. This is the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement. MLK is not happy; he is spinning like a top.
An equitable distribution of wealth is something Democracies would strive towards.
The United States of America is not and has never been a democracy.
The vaunted "Civil Rights/Voting Rights" acts of '64-'65 were NEUTRALIZED by around '68 with enough loopholes so that you will die of old age and bankrupt before you receive any Justice under those acts. They were the ONLY TOTALLY COST FREE things the White Majority would allow to regain face in our Cold War after global pictures of Terrorist white folks killing children in churches, fire bombing Black people's homes, armed civil uprisings by white males requiring Federal Troops (belatedly supplied), and cops turning fire hoses on Black teenagers and on and on and on. That's why when everything STOPPED DEAD IN IT'S TRACKS after '64-'65 White America told Black and Brown America, "Shut the fuck up and go away. We've done all the 'reforms' you're going to see in this century." Black and Brown America didn't like that very much and the cities of America BURNED in '67, '68, '69, '70. It didn't stop there. Malcolm X had reminded us well years before, there are no 2nd Class humans. There are Free People and there are Slaves. Holding major segments of the society as 2nd Class Humans (including females of all 'races') is a full time occupation as every slave holder has always known, even our Founding Daddies.
So, COINTELPRO was authorized and affirmed by the majority White population (87%) in '68 when they overwhelmingly elected RMN in 49 States to "put those people in their place." We had been murdering dissidents in this country back to Haymarket and the Palmer Raids and lynching Black men had been entertainment for 200 years, but now those programs of ritual defamation, false imprisonment, and extrajudicial execution were placed on steroids. Within a decade of the execution of MLK by gov't agents in Memphis, there were NO National Leaders and NO Mass Movements for Economic and Social Justice. Oh, yeah, I forgot, there ain't been any since either.
The Civil Rights Movement has died while the Oligarchy and our oppressive police state has risen. Why? Simpler than most might think: The Oligarchy is the glue that binds (White) Male Supremacy; Gender Slavery; and Constant War together in a malign, malodorous shit-cake that is the New Roman Slave Republic. "We don't ask why. We just obey so they'll feed us."
As a sign my words are true: Debt-Bondage is going to make a comeback here and given the native proclivities of the cannibalistic white majority, they'll probably start with Black and Brown folk, "to put them in their place" and then start doing their own, you know, the white folk who constitute 80% of the poverty of America. Master gets to eat them. Master calls it "PROFITS".
We're still waiting for "upwardly mobile" liberals to join humanity in true solidarity, rather than relying on philanthropy and pretending that their empire taxes fund social programs.
Martin Luther King's Buried Legacy ... His Anti-War Fight !
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
By 1967, King had become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm
The Anti-War Legacy of MLK has been buried by the PTB ...
MLK was a socialist too. That gets buried also since class is such a taboo.
We won't see CNN do a "Poor In America" or "Working In America" since race is juicier, more emotional, and serves to divide us all.
Soledad O'Brien might be too uncomfortable reporting on that considering her background.
Remember when I suggested looking up famous people on Wikipedia under the "Personal life" or "Early life" heading to see what their parents did for a living, so as to gauge what kind of economic bracket they grew up in?
Here's O'Brien's...
"O'Brien's parents, both immigrants, met at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1958.
My parents were both immigrants—my mother from Cuba, my father from Australia. Both attended daily Mass at the church near campus. Every day my father would offer my mother a ride. Every day, she declined. Finally she said leave me alone. One year later, the day after Monday, the two of them were married.[3]
O'Brien's parents married in 1959 in Washington, D.C. Her father Edward, an Australian (from Toowoomba, Queensland)[4] of Irish descent, was a mechanical engineering professor.[5] Her mother, Estella, who is Afro-Cuban, was a French and English teacher.[5] O'Brien is the fifth of six children, who all graduated from Harvard University; O'Brien attended Harvard from 1984 to 1988, but did not obtain a degree until she returned in 2000.[6] Her older siblings are law professor Maria (b. 1961); corporate lawyer Cecilia (b. 1962), businessman Tony (b. 1963) - who heads a documents company;[4] eye surgeon Estela (b. 1964); and anesthesiologist Orestes (b. 1967).[5][7]
At the time, interracial marriage in Maryland was illegal, so O'Brien's parents married in Washington, D.C. where marriage laws were less restrictive. The newly wedded O'Briens then moved to the Long Island community of St. James, on the affluent North Shore, where O'Brien was born and raised. On the NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, O'Brien explained that in Spanish her full name means, 'The Blessed Virgin Mary of Solitude'. When she started working in TV, many people recommended that she change her name, but she refused."
And these are the people telling poor and working people to simply work hard and be talented in order to achieve "success" and happiness.
So I guess all we need to do is send Dr. Phil on a speaking tour through the Appalachias and Eric Bailey around to the projects?
What you never hear is that before MLK became a national hero he was demonized as a "communist" and many other perjorative names by the MSM. If you want to know what kind of country you live in, just ponder: Why after over 40 years after Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated, have the people that murdered him gotten away with it and have never been brought to justice in any court of law!
The only thing left of MLK's dream is rapid eye movement by Obama.
Dedrick is a nice guy and his heart is in the right place, but he errs when he invokes the "dream" imagery as a remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As Julianne Malveaux, President of Bennet College, cogently observed once in an address on Dr. King's birthday, "Martin Luther King Jr. didn't die dreaming, he died doing". The brilliant eloquence, the strong will, and even the throngs who followed him were not his real power--they were merely servants to his real power.
The real power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in his capacity to mobilize tens and even hundreds of thousands of people to pecefully and lawfully demand that "business as usual" should not, could not, must not continue.
In America it is no sin to be eloquent, radical, or even revolutionary. It is no sin to advocate the most outrageous of things--just so long as you don't interrupt "business as usual". For that you can and will be jailed, for that you can and will be publically hummiliated or censored, and if you still don't "get the message", for that you can and will be killed by some lone, crazed, misfit, patsy set up to take the fall for the true assassins who authorized and committed the crime.
The enduring legacy of Dr. King, (along with Malcolm X, and John and Bobby Kennedy) is how their lives and violent deaths revealed the gangster nature of the state security apparatus which serves the monied elites for whom the unpardonable sin of any citizen is to interrupt "business as usual".
That is the "teachable moment" nobody much wants to examine. So we talk and write about racial and economic justice (which are important concepts) and have no charismatic leader to rally us to take action against our oppressors.
Poet