US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6575

On January 16 2017 18:40 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Sure, Trump has a pure heart and ran a campaign for the good of the american people. He is such a selfless man!

Oh and people like, you know, Obama doesn't believe in anything but his own pocket. The only thing he's done in the last 8 years is to get rich with stuff like the ACA. Unless Obama is anti establishment?

So, is the establishment simply a political elite you resent? When you like someone because he has a populist message, even if he shits in golden toilets and has never done a thing for someone else, he is anti establishment, while the normal politicians from the dnc only care about their own pockets and are therefore establishment.

Well, that's really a weak definition.

On January 17 2017 02:24 mustaju wrote:

A) Without his tax returns, you can't really tell how much money he has. Maybe without the presidential run, he could not afford a yacht. Even his campaign was apparently at least partially refunded, if not profitable.
B) Considering he's advocating channels like InfoWars, and straight up lying repeatedly about the establishment or obfuscating processes, he has not exposed anything of note, but rather spreading misinformation.
C) Condidering the President-Elect called half his country losers on New Years Eve losers and haters, I really doubt you have a leg to stand on in terms of being neutral in coverage.

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 01:22 zlefin wrote:
I don't see how that article demonstrates Obama being polarizing; it just demonstrates a result of polarization which is people writing articles that take a very un- or over- charitable interpretation of one side or another.

mostly it looks similar to the usual haters hating.