Quote of the Day

"I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality, there comes a time when silence is betrayal." - Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967 Riverside Church, New York City...or was it April 4th, 2008?

Nothing Has Changed

On this 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, it is good to recall the speech he gave the previous year on exactly the same date. It should give anyone pause to consider the significance his words delivered that day would cause his assassination the following year. His speech was a damning denunciation of this country's direction. Mainstream press called him a demagogue, liking him to communists leaders and proclaiming him to be unAmerican. You can't help think how prescient his words are today, as he sited a triplet of evil that was upon our country in 1967, namely, racism, economic exploitation and militarism. There surely can't be any doubt that this perniciousness is raging out of control forty years later in 2008.

It is astonishing to think how much more arrogant and mindless this country has become. Racism is alive and well. Witness the Jena6 situation in Jena, La. in which six black students who sat under a "white only" tree on their high school campus were suspended from school while white students who hung nooses from a tree were reprimanded. Witness the Sean Bell trial in New York City in which three New York City detectives are accused of killing Bell, an african american, in a barrage of 50 bullets or the New York City police shooting of unarmed black street peddler Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets. These incidents happened in the last few years. Witness the indifference to the genocides in the Congo where 5.4 million people have died since 1998, most from preventable disease,lack of food, displacement and destroyed health care systems. Witness the current xenophobia of our country and its politicians regarding the immigration issues, installing a fence between our country and Mexico, forgetting how we Americans condemned the building of the Berlin wall by the Russians. And, of course, our current situation in Iraq and Palestine. In Iraq, U.S. soldiers learn that the way to subjugate people is to dehumanize them. This is racism. For Iraqis, the word Haji is an Arabic word for respect and someone who journeys to a sacred place as an act of religious devotion. To U.S. soldiers, Haji is a derisive term meant to degrade and dehumanize - Haji, "the niggers of Iraq", as they are called. So we have gone from "Gooks" to "Hajis" in the last forty years. As long as we can make others second class citizens we can justify their subjugation and indeed their extermination,if necessary. In Palestine the Israeli government have built a wall to keep the Palestinians out of Israeli territory that was taken by force from the Palestinians. The U.S. government has armed Israel to act as their policeman in the Middle East. The self determination of the Palestinians is of no concern to the West despite any false posturing. There are fundamentalist sects from the U. S. who make pilgrimages to Israel, ostensibly to show their support for the state of Israel, when in fact they want to believe that the Israels will see the light and become Christians and be saved at Armageddon. Whereas, the Palestinians are godless and Muslim, terrorists who must be destroyed. The Israels who support a one state solution must view these fundamentalists as arrogant and foolish pawns of the U.S. government.

Regarding the economic exploitation that Martin Luther King cited as the second most threatening aspect of our society, we can heed the clarion warning of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Gen. Powell and who also served 31 years in the U.S. military, when he says. "Frankly, in this country right now, we're confronting a financial and economic crisis that may surpass the one Franklin Roosevelt confronted in the 30's. The country is awash in debt." The National Debt grows $1 million a minute as millions of Americans are one paycheck or illness away from ruin. It has been estimated that the war in Iraq will cost this country three trillion dollars, most of it borrowed. Meanwhile our government negotiated "free" trade agreements with other countries that exploit their citizens as well as ours, where public costs and privatized profits are the standard operating procedures. Enormous profits are reaped by corporations at the expense of the working class. In 1980, American CEO's were paid 40 times the average worker. Today the CEO's realize 400 times more. Nearly 10% of corp. profits go to top executives. The thousands of people losing their homes because of predatory subprime mortgages and many being laid off from their jobs because of the rupturing of the U.S. economy, are of little concern to the top three CEO's in the subprime lending business whose combined take in 5 years was $460 million. This kind of corporate malfeasance, which first came to the public eye with the Enron debacle, continues in Iraq where corporations operate with immunity under no-bid contracts with no accounting for U.S. tax payer dollars. So, the economic exploitation that Martin Luther King rallied against in l967 goes on unabated both for the U.S. citizen and the exploited third world worker.

Militarism is the third onerous yoke, for again the U.S. citizen and all countries which we arrogantly dub as terrorists nations, rogue states or anyone who is not malleable to our position , are being affected. For the U.S. citizen, especially the lower classes and people of color, the only option for upward mobility is to join the military. Other options are no longer available. Higher education is realistically attainable only by the affluent and the once well-paying jobs are outsourced to foreign countries. The United States military budget has risen from 300 billion in 2001 to 700 billion in 2008. Massive increases in U.S. military spending has been one of the factors contributing to the deterioration of the U.S. economy since 2001. The human cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is now over 4000 for the U.S. and 1 million Iraqis dead. Untold numbers have sustained injuries, 10,000 U.S. soldiers have committed suicide, and thousands are coming home with P.T.S.D., post traumatic stress disorder as attested by the "Winter Soldier" account held just two weeks ago in Washington D.C. I urge readers of this blog to go to the testament of these brave men and women who now deplore the recklessness and immorality of this nation initiating this abominable crime against the Iraqi people and the soldiers who were conscripted to serve. WAR COMES HOME.org

War and militarism are perhaps the most pernicious evils that a country can contemplate and as James Madison said, "No nation could preserve it's freedom in the midst of continual warfare." In recalling Martin Luther King's admonishment of this country's direction some forty years ago, the triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism, we do well to heed his warnings, when he said, "A nation that spends more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." He called for a "radical revolution of values." He said we must shift from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society when machines and computers and profit motives and property rights are not more important than people. One of his closing comments was, "tomorrow may be too late."