Today is the celebration of the heritage and message of the Reverend Dr. Luther King, Jr, who was assassinated in 1968; had a national holiday established in his honor in 1986; and whose 90th birthday would have been last week on January 15.
King spent his life trying to unite people, and promoted the civil rights movement, but sadly, in the age of Donald Trump, the reality is one of racial, ethnic and misogynistic division, which is daily encouraged by the 45th President, who revels in dividing people, and disrupting society.
It is highly discouraging to see the kind of hatred that includes the murder of black churchgoers in South Carolina; the murder of gay men in Orlando, Florida; the death of a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia at a white supremacist rally; the slaughter of Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue; and the rampant antisemitism, Islamophobia, and misogyny being exposed daily of prominent public figures.
We are more divided now than we have been since the 1960s, and this after an eight year period where many thought there had been great progress in race relations and civil rights, and something must be done to defuse this dangerous situation which now exists in America.
We owe it to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. to do the best we can to bring down the temperature of the stresses and tensions which are destroying all internal civility in America.
Birthers are at it again, this time attacking Kamala Harris.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/01/23/prepare-for-birtherism-2-0-the-kamala-harris-edition/
‘The Revolutionary Socialism of Martin Luther King Jr.â€
By Dan Wright (01.16.2017)
https://shadowproof.com/2017/01/16/revolutionary-socialism-martin-luther-king-jr/
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the establishment (and their media) like to celebrate MLK’s love of imperial America and centrist economic doctrine. The symbol celebrated bares little resemblance to the actual man and his ideas.
There is a reason the FBI orchestrated a well-resourced campaign to destroy King that ultimately culminated in J. Edgar Hoover having a letter sent to King to push King to commit suicide.
The reason is Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed capitalism and the American empire.
In the last campaign before his assassination, King campaigned for a democratic socialist agenda. Called the Poor People’s Campaign, demands included a guaranteed job, retribution of land and capital, and more inclusion of the poor in state decision-making.
Yes, taking land and money from rich people and giving it to poor people was part of King’s dream.
King’s own views of capitalism are often sanitized in textbooks and mainstream media stories, but he could not have been for explicit:
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then,†King declared. “You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.â€
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