45th Anniversary of MLK's Asassination

[Amskeptic]

I remember the instant that I heard Martin Luther King had been shot on April 4th 1968. I was nine years old. I felt sad because I believed he was a good man.

Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Contrary to the sanitized saccharine version of Martin Luther King most school children are force fed, stands the real man. A radical. A democratic socialist. A man truly despised in the circles of power. Who, in the last campaign before he was struck down, expanded the search for justice beyond nondiscrimination into the realm of true empowerment.

Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis working for the Poor People’s Campaign. He was told by numerous friends and colleagues not to go to Memphis. After a historic speech against the Vietnam War President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to to the White House and pulled his support. King and the Poor People’s Campaign were already being subjected to a covert disruption campaign by the FBI apparently based on the threat of “black militancy.”

The Poor People’s Campaign would eventually yield a committee that demanded an Economic Bill of Rights with five planks:

“A meaningful job at a living wage”
“A secure and adequate income” for all those unable to find or do a job
“Access to land” for economic uses
“Access to capital” for poor people and minorities to promote their own businesses
Ability for ordinary people to “play a truly significant role” in the government
The “secure and adequate income” or a guaranteed annual income was wholeheartedly endorsed by King who thought it was the surest way to end poverty. Which, from a technical standpoint, it is.

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. - MLK"

Redistributing income from the rich to the poor would, in essence, remove poverty. It is also, without a doubt, socialism. It seems past time for the real Martin Luther King to be celebrated. To remember what he died for.

Yet, another headline on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's asassination . . .

Poverty Hits Record Levels As Washington Debates More Austerity
Firedoglake
By: DSWright
Wednesday April 3, 2013 5:50 am
While Washington debates cutting Social Security and Medicare the facts are in on the “recovery” – it’s a bust. Not only has unemployment remained historically high – 7.7% officially, 23% by the old metrics – but poverty has spiked to historic highs.
The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels not seen since the mid-1960s when President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the federal government’s so-called War on Poverty. As President Barack Obama began his second term in January, nearly 50 million Americans — one in six — were living below the income line that defines poverty, according to the bureau. A family of four that earns less than $23,021 a year is listed as living in poverty. The bureau said 20 percent of the country’s children are poor.

There is record childhood poverty as the rich get richer thanks to bank bailouts from bought and paid for politicians. That’s right, it’s not education or productivity or innovation that has propelled the 1% to the commanding heights of the American economy and society – it’s government checks, welfare. The redistribution of wealth up.

Of course after Washington was finished bailing out its campaign contributors, suddenly, there was a realization that Washington had a spending problem. Two wars, tax cuts, and TARP yet now every dime is sacred, every dime is great. If a dime gets wasted, God gets quite irate. It is almost as if the rich ran up a massive debt paying themselves in war profiteering, tax cuts, and bank bailouts and now want to stick the bill for their subsidies onto the middle class and poor. Actually, that is what happened.

So back to Washington where there is an emerging bi-partisan consensus (like the Iraq War, TARP), ironically spearheaded by a Democratic President, to cut social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare.