Honor M.L. King; Fight for Democracy

Martin Luther King Jr. Day arrives this year amid a deliberate effort to rewrite American history and a wholesale assault on civil rights in America. It has been one year since Donald Trump was inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It felt cruel and grotesque that a man who represents so much of what Dr. King stood against could rise to power on a day meant to honor the struggle for racial justice and democracy. Over the last year, we have seen a devastating, sustained attack on nearly every facet of the civil rights architecture in America. We have seen the gutting of civil rights enforcement; high-profile purges of Black federal employees and a drive to functionally resegregate the federal workforce; the rewriting of history in official documents and even in Smithsonian museums; and vicious attacks on Black refugees from Haiti, Somalia, and other African countries.  As I write this email, we are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that could potentially gut the final remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act -- part of an overarching campaign to suppress Black voters and Black political power across the country. It is important to name what we are facing. This is a dedicated, organized campaign to eradicate civil rights, erase history, and enshrine white supremacy as a central governing principle. While the scale and speed of the onslaught are immense, the project itself is not new. Today’s MAGA movement is the modern heir to the racial authoritarian regime that has shaped American governance since the nation’s founding. When we look for inspiration and lessons, we often turn to struggles for democracy abroad. But the truth is that the United States has been engaged in an unfinished fight for democracy for most of its history. In a very real sense, this country did not begin to function as a democracy until civil rights organizers created the conditions for the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That is why the first, and most important, lessons for today’s fight for democracy come from the civil rights movement here at home. In fact, many of the international movements we cite for inspiration trace their own lineage back to Dr. King and the Birmingham Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, and the Selma march. From successful economic campaigns like the Birmingham Bus Boycott, to the disciplined use of nonviolence, to the strategic leveraging of repression so that state violence backfired, to mass mobilization and noncooperation -- so many of the tactics and strategies we talk about today were forged by leaders like Dr. King, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and countless unnamed organizers who refused to accept injustice as inevitable. The fight for racial justice in America has always been the fight for democracy in America; it’s crucial that we recognize them as inseparable. And as we honor Dr. King and his legacy, we do so not by sanitizing or reducing it, but by recognizing the fullness of his vision -- for racial justice, economic justice, and ending war and imperialism. So on this MLK Day, we ask you to do more than post a quote or take the day off. We ask you to learn and reflect on the legacy of Dr. King and the civil rights movement, and to recommit to the fight for a just, inclusive, and equitable democracy. We ask you to support organizations leading the fight today, such as our friends at the Transformative Justice Coalition and Black Voters Matter Fund, who are each organizing to protect and advance Black political power and voting rights in this crucial moment. And we ask you to commit to sustained, collective action in the months and years ahead. The arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own. It bends because people organize, resist, and refuse to comply with injustice -- again and again, even when the path is hard. Honoring Dr. King today means continuing that work. In solidarity, Leah Greenberg Co-Executive Director, Indivisible View video; MLK> https://www.democracynow.org/2026/1/19/mlk_day_special_dr_martin_luther

 

If You Don't Think Sanders Can Win ?

Don’t Think Sanders Can Win? You Don’t Understand His Campaign

There was a time in America when being called a socialist could end a political career. Not anymore.

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Dr. Taylor is the author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.”

·       Dec. 10, 2019

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As the Democratic primary elections get closer, the party leadership has begun to fret in public about universal health care and other ambitious proposals. Even former President Barack Obama tried to assuage donors’ fears in November when he said that the “average American” doesn’t think we need to “tear down the system and remake it.” His comment captured the essence of tensions that have roiled the party for months. Party elites believe focusing squarely on President Trump’s record will end his presidency, while others counter that the Democrats also have to champion bold policies. 

The surprising resilience of the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vindicates the latter approach. Mr. Sanders’s improbable rise to Democratic front-runner began in 2015 when he organized his campaign for president around a redistributive agenda of universal health care and free college, along with a number of other progressive reforms. Party insiders dismissed this as fanciful and out of touch, but Mr. Sanders aggressively challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination while picking up 13 million votes.

Martin Luther King Jr. - Economic Justice for Our Times

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their existence.

That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in  Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s  riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.

Martin Luther King Jr. Economic Justice and Workers' Rights

by Thomas F. Jackson

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their existence.

That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Economic Justice

Martin Luther King, Economic Justice, Workers’ Rights,

and Multiracial Democracy

by Thomas Jackson

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300

municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for

black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant

and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They

demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their

existence. That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support

Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.

King’s assassination—and the urban revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis settlement that furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage, a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.

We are not broke. We were robbed !

DSA is a part of the Coalition on Human Needs. ( See list at end of post).  We ask that each of you contact your Senators and Congress people to preserve essential  human needs from Republican budget cuts.   Sample letter below.  Do not allow the Corporate CEO's who are funding the Fix the Debt campaign to cut the budgets for poor and working people.

1. NO tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans.

2. NO benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare or

Medicaid.

SAVE for All

Strengthening America’s Values and Economy for All

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear (Representative or Senator):

Last year, organizations from across the country came together to endorse basic principles to address America’s short- and long-term economic and budgetary problems. These are the imperatives of Strengthening America’s Values and Economy (SAVE) for All: to protect low-income and vulnerable people; promote job creation to strengthen the economy; increase revenues from fair sources; and seek responsible savings by targeting wasteful spending in the Pentagon and in other areas that do not serve the public interest.

We call on you to follow these principles as you face budgetary decisions of immediate and long-lasting national consequence. To achieve sustained growth, fiscal stability, and economic security for all our people we must invest in job creation, ensure that job seekers have the opportunity to work, and protect vulnerable people from hardship. We cannot promote the common good by cutting more and more services and jobs. But we can meet our nation’s needs responsibly by ending tax reductions benefiting the wealthiest two percent and by seeking savings that do not compromise human or military security.

Putting the most vulnerable people at risk is the wrong response to our nation’s fiscal situation. Automatic cuts to domestic programs that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013 under the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act will inflict devastating harm. Estimated conservatively, a year of sequestration cuts1 will deny WIC nutrition aid to 750,000 mothers and young children, prevent more than 413,000 adults and youth from getting job training and deny education and training to more than 51,000 veterans, eliminate reading and math help to more than 1.8 million low-income public school children, deny child care to the low- to moderate-income families of 80,000 children, stop nearly 34,000 women from being screened for breast and cervical cancer, prevent nearly 27,000 infants and toddlers from benefiting from special education early intervention services, force 185,000 households to lose rental assistance vouchers, and stop 734,000 households from receiving home heating and cooling aid. These are only a few examples of the impact of the scheduled cuts. They threaten children’s healthy development, deny security to seniors, throw roadblocks in the way of a competitive labor force, and allow preventable disabilities to hold back our children.

These and other cuts have steep costs, among them hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, lagging productivity, and escalating medical expenditures in the years to come. Coming on top of cuts written into law through FY 2021 they will drop domestic and non-military international appropriations to their lowest levels in 50 years as a share of the economy. Allowing such a wholesale abandonment of investments in education, preventive health, housing, public infrastructure, and nutrition is an affront both to conscience and to common sense. We urge you to avert these sequestration cuts.

Teachers and the escape from poverty

Anthony Cody.

Last night in President Obama's State of the Union address, he repeated a familiar refrain about the importance of teachers.

A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.

But it seems that it is those in power who are actually using teachers to escape from the realities of poverty these days.

President Obama offered as evidence a citation from a recent Harvard report:

We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.

He went on to say,

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

There are several problems with this. As others have pointed out, if you take a classroom of 25 students, and spread $250,000 over their 40 years of earnings, this amount comes to a grand total of $250 a year per student. This is unlikely to represent an escape from poverty. (see more thorough responses to the Chetty report here, and here.)

President Obama makes economic sense

Osawatamie, Kansas. Dec.6,2011.

Angus Wright explains the issues

The Fire Next Time is Now: Environmental Historian Angus Wright’s Call for a Planetary Patriotism

  (Angus is a friend) 

By Robert Jensen

Angus Wright has a way of saying things we may not want to hear in a way that’s hard to ignore.

An example: During a meeting of environmentalists about shaping the public conversation on our most pressing ecological crises, folks were wrestling with how to present an honest analysis in accessible language -- how to talk about the bad news and the need for radical responses, without turning people off. During the discussion about the effects of climate change, Wright offered a simple suggestion for a slogan: “No more water, the fire next time.”

Those words from a black spiritual, made famous by James Baldwin’s borrowing for his 1963 book “The Fire Next Time,” are usually invoked metaphorically. Wright was suggesting that we might want to consider the phrase literally. After a summer of drought and forest fires in Texas where I live, Wright’s comment reminded me that climate disruption isn’t part of some science-fiction future, but is unfolding around us in ways that are both complex and hard to predict, but devastating simple: We’re in deep trouble, ecologically and culturally, as we try to face up to unprecedented planetary problems in a society in denial.

Wright is one of our most astute observers of these troubles. His willingness to face these issues, and his ability to grasp the interplay of complex systems, is no surprise to readers of his book The Death of Ramon Gonzalez: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma, first published in 1990 and revised for a 2005 edition. Looking at one region in Mexico, Wright explains how political and economic power, combined with the arrogance of experts who believe they have all the answers, have radically changed people, communities, and land -- mostly for the worse.

Its hard to believe

Former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg made $18.1 million while the corporation got a $705 million federal tax REFUND.

Of last year’s 100 highest-paid U.S. corporate chief executives, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal corporate income taxes, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

As IPS puts it:

Corporations don’t dodge taxes, the people who run corporations do. And these CEOs are reaping awesomely lavish rewards for the tax dodging they have their corporations do.

“Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging“ shows the 25 tax-dodging CEOs the IPS report spotlights averaged $16.7 million in pay last year, well above the $10.8 million Standard & Poor’s 500 CEO average. Most of their companies registered substantial profits. Yet these same companies actually came out ahead at tax time. They collected, on average, $413 million in refunds from the IRS.

At Verizon, where CEO compensation totaled $18.1 million, the corporation got a federal $705 million federal income tax refund.

In addition to handing their CEOs big dollars, 20 of the 25 corporations in the study spent more on lobbying lawmakers than they paid in corporate taxes.

Rise Up !

We must fight back.

The Peasants Need Pitchforks

The Peasants Need Pitchforks/By Robert Scheer

A “working class hero,” John Lennon told us in his song of that title, “is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.” 

That is the harsh reality obscured by the media’s focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty—which smartphone to purchase—for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused. 

Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.