http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040407R.shtml
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors
Wednesday 04 April 2007
It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate
Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about
"the slain civil rights leader."
The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several
years - his last years - are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory
hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King
battling segregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial
harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in
Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in
Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to
1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact,
he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown
today on TV.
Why?
It's because national news media have never come to terms with what
Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial
discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV
and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips
and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote
or [the right] to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began
challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil
rights laws were empty without "human rights" - including economic rights.
For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King
said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white,
King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between
rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our
society" to redistribute wealth and power.
"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a
beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring."
By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of
the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US 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." (Full text/audio here.)
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the US was "on
the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with
the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the US was suppressing
revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World,
instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining
about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa
and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the
social betterment of the countries."
You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news
retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -
and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that
sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that
"King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his
life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a
multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington - engaging in
nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be - until Congress
enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an
"insurrection."
King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs
programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a
Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" - appropriating
"military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds
with miserliness."
How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on
behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's
bullet.
In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in
Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign
wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds
for education and health care and environmental cleanup.
And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No
surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther
King's life.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures
in Corporate Media."
Norman Solomon's book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death," is out in paperback. For information, go to:
www.normansolomon.com.
***
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/opinion/02krugman.html?th&emc=th
Distract and Disenfranchise
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: April 2, 2007
I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now,
finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising
income inequality.
Let me explain.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed
to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class
nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social
injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its
appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to
convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were
being taxed to provide social programs for other people.
Since then, however, we have once again become a deeply unequal society.
Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the
richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the
rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the
political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking
shape.
And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income
distribution tables, but they do know that today's rich are building
themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not
read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren't going anywhere:
according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that
it's harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue
when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that "some of our
citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working
people behind."
But today's Republicans can't respond in any meaningful way to rising
inequality, because their activists won't let them. You could see the
dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P.
presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club
for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and
privatization.
The Republican Party's adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big
problems. It can't offer domestic policies that respond to the public's real
needs. So how can it win elections?
The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and
disenfranchisement.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential
distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn't the
moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy
with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further
distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could
denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based
on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004
Democratic National Convention?
But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was
disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for
the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the
voting booth.
Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida "felon
purge," which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in
the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what
much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about.
Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue
allegations of voter fraud - a phrase that has become almost synonymous with
"voting while black." Former staff members of the Justice Department's civil
rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected
to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's
Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise
African-American voters.
The good news is that all the G.O.P.'s abuses of power weren't enough to win
the 2006 elections. And 2008 may be even harder for the Republicans, because
the Democrats - who spent most of the Clinton years trying to reassure rich
people and corporations that they weren't really populists - seem to be
realizing that times have changed.
A week before the Republican candidates trooped to Palm Beach to declare
their allegiance to tax cuts, the Democrats met to declare their commitment
to universal health care. And it's hard to see what the G.O.P. can offer in
response.
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