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Maybe the blacks will get sufficiently pissed off at the green wienie
that they are getting to<br>
actually rise up and start causing some serious trouble. The Occupy!
movement<br>
really doesn't have the resolve to be any sort of a serious threat to
the status quo.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
On 01/23/13 1:57, David Johnson wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:95AEF3DAB6454DD298A51A2DC64DA11A@owneryr3fp4mcb"
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<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
color="#280099"><font face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>Don’t
You Dare Conflate MLK and Obama</strong></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>by BAR executive editor Glen
Ford</strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="center"><font
color="#2323dc"><font size="4"><strong>“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Had
King survived, his break with Obama would have come early.”</i></font></strong></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font size="4"><strong><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">Back in 1964, under prodding from a BBC
interviewer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted that a Black person
might be </font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku_6hT6gHJM"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">elected president</font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"> “in 25 years or less.” Four years later,
shortly before his assassination, King </font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.scu.edu/ethics/architects-of-peace/Belafonte/essay.html"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">confided</font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"> to actor/activist Harry Belafonte that he
had “come to believe we're integrating into a burning house." We now
see that the two notions are not at all contradictory. At least </font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>some</i></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"> African Americans have achieved deep
penetration of the very pinnacles of white power structures –
integrating the White House, itself – while conditions of life for
masses of Black folks deteriorate and the society as a whole falls into
deep decay.</font></strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font size="4"><strong><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">The fires lit by the “giant triplets of
racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” that Dr. King identified
in his 1967 “</font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://academic.udayton.edu/race/2008electionandracism/raceandracism/race18.htm"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence</font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">” speech are consuming the world, now stoked
by a Black arsonist-in-chief. Domestic poverty hovers only a fraction
of a percentage below the </font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3580"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">levels of 1965</font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">, with “extreme poverty” the highest on
record. Black household wealth has collapsed to one-twentieth that of
whites. Today, more Black men are under the control of the criminal
justice system than were slaves in the decade before the Civil War,
according to Michelle Alexander, author of </font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>The New Jim Crow</i></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">. </font></strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>The intervening years have
shown that Dr. King’s 1960s visions were not in conflict: the rooms at
the top floors of the national house may have been integrated, but the
building still burns. </strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>The deepening crisis of
capitalism, the triumph of Wall Street finance over industrial capital,
the increasing imperial reversion to international lawlessness in a
desperate bid to maintain global supremacy – all this was predictable
under the laws of political economy. Had the assassin’s bullet not
found him, Dr. King would have continued his implacable resistance to
these unfolding evils, rejecting Barack Obama’s invasions, drones and
Kill Lists with the same moral fervor and political courage that he
broke with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. Absolutely nothing in
King’s life and work indicates otherwise.</strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="center"><font
color="#2323dc"><font size="4"><strong>“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>The
very notion of a grand austerity bargain with the Right would have been
anathema to MLK.”</i></font></strong></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font size="4"><strong><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">One school of thought holds that corporate
servants like Obama could not have taken root in Black America if Dr.
King, Malcolm X and a whole cadre of slain and imprisoned leaders of
the Sixties had not been replaced by opportunistic representatives of a
grasping Black acquisitive class. In any event, had King survived, his
break with Obama would have come early. Surely, the Dr. King who, in
his 1967 “</font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/where_do_we_go_from_here_delivered_at_the_11th_annual_sclc_convention/"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">Where Do We Go from Here</font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">” speech called for a </font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">guaranteed annual income would never have
abided Obama’s targeting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in
the weeks before his 2009 inauguration. Forty-five years ago, King’s
position was clear: “Our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full
employment, or we must create incomes.” The very notion of a grand
austerity bargain with the Right would have been anathema to MLK.</font></strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>Were Martin alive, he would
skewer the putative leftists and their “lesser evil” rationales for
backing the corporatist, warmongering Obama. As both a theologian and a
“revolutionary democrat,” as Temple University’s Prof. Anthony Monteiro
has described him, MLK had no problem calling evil by its name – and in
explicate triplicate. His militant approach to non-violent direct
action required him to confront the underlying contradictions of
society through the methodical application of creative tension. He
would make Wall Street scream, and attempt to render the nation
ungovernable under the dictatorship of the Lords of Capital. And he
would deliver a withering condemnation of the base corruption and
self-serving that saturates the Black Misleadership Class.</strong></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif" size="4"><strong>He would spend his birthday
preparing a massive, disruptive action at the Inauguration.</strong></font></p>
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