US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6576

THE REVEREND MARTIN Luther King Jr. is celebrated annually on a federal holiday on the third Monday of January. Politicians across the political spectrum put out statements praising his life’s work, and children in classrooms across America are told the tale of a man who stood up defiantly against racism and helped changed civil rights law.

But what they don’t mention is that King was not just a fighter for racial justice, he also fought for economic justice and against war. And as a result, he spent the last years of his life, before being assassinated in 1968, clashing not just with reactionary Southern segregationists, but with the Democratic Party’s elite and other civil rights leaders, who viewed his turn against the Vietnam War and the American economic system as dangerous and radical.

This “Santa Clausification” of King, as scholar Cornel West calls it — the portrayal of King as a celebrated consensus seeker asking for common sense racial reforms rather than as an anti-establishment radical — downplays the risks one of America’s most revered activists took to live according to conscience.

The Backlash Against King’s Opposition to the Vietnam War

While working alongside Democratic President Lyndon Johnson on civil rights issues, King was also increasingly disturbed by the war in Vietnam, and he would raise the issue privately with Johnson in White House calls and meetings. In April 1967, King decided to publicly denounce the war and call for its end. He gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City where he called the U.S. government the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and denounced napalm bombings and the propping up of a puppet government in South Vietnam. He also called for a total re-examination of U.S. foreign policy, questioning capitalist exploitation of the developing world.

Many in the civil rights community warned King to focus on black civil rights and ignore the war so as not to alienate the Democratic Party. His Riverside Church speech explicitly rejected that demand, arguing that what America was doing across the world could not be morally segregated from what it was doing to African-Americans:

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. […] Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

The reaction from the American political establishment — much of it traditionally associated with American liberalism — was swift and harsh. The New York Times editorial board blasted King for linking the war in Vietnam to the struggles of civil rights and poverty alleviation in the United States, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that he was doing a “disservice” to both causes. It concluded that there “are no simple answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.” The Washington Post editorial board said King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” In all, 168 newspapers denounced him the next day.

King had long considered himself a socialist, In 1966, he told staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that “there must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.”

The last years of King’s life saw him escalate his campaign against economic inequality. He campaigned against the Oklahoma right-to-work referendum and warned that increased economic competition between whites and blacks would undermine civil rights — calling instead for a “Grand Alliance” between working-class whites and blacks.

He sought to use many of the same tactics he deployed in the South — boycotts, sit-ins, blockades — against economic injustice in inner cities in the North where African-Americans were trapped in endemic poverty. An article from the August 15, 1967, issue of The New York Times writes up King’s desire to “dislocate” large cities to force them to address these needs

On January 17 2017 06:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!



Source

EDIT: Happy Robert E. Lee day for all the racists

On January 17 2017 13:24 Nyxisto wrote:
Shouldn't neglect the billion people or so that the dreaded globalisation has lifted out of absolute poverty

+ Show Spoiler +

The more genuine interpretation I think would be to say that the 1% are cashing in the dividends, not the lion's share. I mean pretty much the only group that really suffers is the industrial boomer generation in the developed world.

On January 17 2017 13:53 LegalLord wrote:

Say that the trouble of Westerners really is to the benefit of billions of third worlders. Here's a callous question: why should we care about them? Such is the question anyone who sees "our people" and "their people" as a reality would be asking. And nationalism certainly isn't going anywhere.

Especially the US was always an outward looking society both on the conservative and liberal side. There's really not much to argue, if you reject that there's value in bettering the lives of a billion people. Seems just self-evident to me, I don't think there's anything you could possibly say.

I think it is important though at least as far as globalization criticism from the left is concerned, because they usually don't attack it on tribalist grounds.

On January 17 2017 10:01 Blisse wrote:


Found this neat gradient of the news. Would move a bunch of things like Slate left and down, Huffington down, Vox left and down, WSJ left, WaPo left, AP up, Reuters up, etc. etc. but yeah doesn't look too off. Maybe you could argue that you should move Breitbart up a bit but I'm not reading any more of their content and giving them traffic or ad money.

It's not so much that the MSM was/is against Trump so much as lots of "normal" people are against Trump. And I would say being specifically anti-Trump is different from being anti-Republican and that spectrum.