Pass the biscuits
I know of at least five middle class families that will be loosing their homes in the next months, just giving them back to the bank and moving on. My own family has suffered disastrous loss with the housing bubble and stock turn-down. Many of our seniors have hit their “mid-mark” on drugs and gone into the Medicare “hole” where they will have to belly up for full-price meds. Here in the Pea Patch, milk is almost $4 a gallon and grocery prices are soaring. Even the Widget’s [my dear, old miniature Doxy] beloved biscuits are up .26 a pound, that’s a 25% increase in doggy yummies — he’ll have to do with fewer.
I’d feel as though I could lift my eyes on this issue if we still weren’t focused, on this occasion of King’s birthday, on issues of claptrap and the inevitable wrangles of the two establishment candidates about who’s “blacker,” while Edwards is all but ignored and Kucinich can’t even find slots to debate. That “crunch time” we knew was coming is here — “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and their emotional inability to vote in their own self interests is obsolete; Kansas gets it. It’s Washington DC that doesn’t get it — and the DNC — and the Republicans, as a whole — and the MSM, making fires to put out and draw ratings.
The assault on race and class is, virtually, the same thing these days; people of color have been suffering it so long it defines them, but it’s a bigger nut to crack. I say that with painful awareness of how much “more” prejudice and historical victimization the black community has carried in our brief years as a nation — but the larger picture of political “use” of those who are trapped in dire circumstance will spread now to include all shades and hues.
The [r]evolution is here, if not in the streets than surely on the blogs, and in hearts and minds across the nation — it had to get personal, and trust the pocketbook issues to do that for all of us.
Here’s Herbert, Rich, Dowd and more — last, a moving tribute to the morality of the civil rights movement from Bill Moyers. I’ve put Obama’s speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church prior to that — Barack is a gifted and inspiring orator. He’s got the “vision thing” going on — he’s got the dream. But, as a president, when he’s facing down the Enron’ites that surround him like sharks in bloodied water, I’d like him to have another message besides “unity.”
As Moyers points out, and beautifully, Martin needed LBJ to push through the walls of resistance [and nobody … NOBODY, not even Tom DeLay … twisted arms as charmingly and effectively as did Lyndon Johnson.] Politics is still a cut-throat game for all the marbles, and unless we understand that, no amount of “polite” is gonna get it done.
Let me be politically incorrect here and say it this way — we don’t need another Martin Luther King … we need another Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was willing to “betray” his own class to break the monopolies, jump start the commonwealth and take a stand against elitist corruption.
If we have no options beside Obama and Clinton, and I’m not willing to give on that as yet, then better Obama who would at least try to change the minds of the power-mongers, rather than cozy up with them to come to handy “compromise,” and blow Blue smoke up the nations bum … making things just good enough for the public to go back to sleep.
Excellent reads today.
Jude
Good Jobs Are Where the Money Is
Bob Herbert, The New York Times
Saturday 19 January 2008
I think of the people running this country as the mad-dashers, a largely confused and inconsistent group lurching ineffectively from one enormous problem to another.
They’ve made a hash of a war that never should have been launched. They can’t find bin Laden. They’ve been shocked by the subprime debacle. They’re lost in a maze on health care.
Now, like children who have eaten too much sugar, they are frantically trying to figure out how to put a few dollars into the hands of working people to stimulate an enfeebled economy.
They should stop, take a deep breath and acknowledge the obvious: the way to put money into the hands of working people is to make sure they have access to good jobs at good wages. That has long been known, but it hasn’t been the policy in this country for many years.
Big business and the federal government have worked hand in hand to squeeze the daylights out of working people, stripping them (in an era of downsizing and globalization) of much of their bargaining power while ferociously pursuing fiscal policies that radically favored the privileged few.
My colleague at The Times, David Cay Johnston, took a look at income patterns in the U.S. over the past few decades in his new book, “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill).”
From 1980 to 2005 the national economy, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled. (Because of population growth, the actual increase per capita was about 66 percent.) But the average income for the vast majority of Americans actually declined during that period. The standard of living for the average family has improved not because incomes have grown, but because women have gone into the workplace in droves.
The peak income year for the bottom 90 percent of Americans was way back in 1973 - when the average income per taxpayer (adjusted for inflation) was $33,001. That is nearly $4,000 higher than the average in 2005.
It’s incredible but true: 90 percent of the population missed out on the income gains during that long period.
Mr. Johnston does not mince words: “The pattern here is clear. The rich are getting fabulously richer, the vast majority are somewhat worse off, and the bottom half - for all practical purposes, the poor - are being savaged by our current economic policies.”
His words are echoed in a proposed stimulus plan currently offered by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. (The plan is available on its Web site, epi.org.) Stressing that any stimulus package should be “fair,” the authors of the institute’s proposal wrote:
“The distribution of wages, income and wealth in the United States has become vastly more unequal over the last 30 years. In fact, this country has a more unequal distribution of income than any other advanced country.”
Economic alarm bells have been ringing in the U.S. for some time. There was no sense of urgency as long as those in the lower ranks were sinking in the mortgage muck and the middle class was raiding the piggy bank otherwise known as home equity.
But now that the privileged few are threatened (Merrill Lynch took a $9.8 billion fourth-quarter hit, and the stock market has spent the first part of the year behaving like an Olympic diving champion), it’s suddenly time to take action.
There is no question that some kind of stimulus package geared to the needs of ordinary Americans is in order. But that won’t begin to solve the fundamental problem.
Good jobs at good wages - lots of them, growing like spring flowers in an endlessly fertile field - is the absolutely essential basis for a thriving American economy and a broad-based rise in standards of living.
Forget all the CNBC chatter about Fed policy and bargain stocks. For ordinary Americans, jobs are the be-all and end-all. And an America awash in new jobs will require a political environment that respects and rewards work and aggressively pursues creative policies designed to radically expand employment.
I’d start with a broad program to rebuild the American infrastructure. This would have the dual benefit of putting large numbers of people to work and answering a crying need. The infrastructure is in sorry shape. New Orleans comes to mind, and the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
The country that gave us the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe ought to be able, 60 years later, to reconstitute its own sagging infrastructure.
There are also untold numbers of jobs and myriad societal benefits to be reaped from a sustained, good-faith effort to achieve energy self-sufficiency. Think Manhattan Project.
The possibilities are limitless. We could create an entire generation of new jobs and build a bigger and fairer economy for the 21st century. If only we were serious. ++
Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead
Frank Rich, The New York Times
Sunday 20 January 2008
Contemplating the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat.
Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.)
Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl. Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party’s election-year chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney, who had been left for dead.
The playing of the race card by Hillary Clinton’s surrogates to diminish Barack Obama was sinister. But the Clintons are hardly bigots, and the Democratic candidates all have a history of fighting strenuously for inclusiveness. By contrast, the Romney victory in Michigan is another reminder of how Republicans aren’t even playing in the same multiracial American sandbox.
The conservatives who hyperventilated about the Democrats’ explosion of identity politics seemed to forget that Mr. Romney also dragged Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into this campaign — claiming that he “saw” his father, a civil-rights minded governor of Michigan, march with King in the 1960s. The point of Mitt Romney’s invocation of the race card was to inoculate himself against legitimate charges of racial insensitivity; he had never spoken out about his own church’s discrimination against blacks, which didn’t end until 1978. Instead, the tactic ended up backfiring. Late last month The Boston Phoenix exposed this touching anecdote as a fraud. George Romney and King never marched together.
I don’t mean to pick on Mitt Romney — though heaven knows it’s a thriving national pastime — but his retro persona exemplifies much of the present Republican dilemma. It’s not just that the old Reagan coalition of social, economic and foreign-policy conservatives has fractured. A more indelible problem for the Republicans in 2008 is that their candidates are utterly segregated from reality as it is lived by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. The G.O.P. presidential field’s lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.
Mr. Romney’s victory in Michigan was most of all powered by a lie far more egregious than his bogus appropriation of King. In a state decimated by unemployment, he posed before auto plants like an incongruously well-groomed Michael Moore, vowing to fight to bring back every last lost job. His plan? He’d scrap the modest new fuel-efficiency standard passed with rare bipartisan unity in Washington last month and give Detroit a $20 billion fund for energy “research” (not to be confused, he claimed, with a bailout).
It’s a poignant measure of Michigan’s despair that some voters willed themselves to believe in Mr. Romney’s preposterous antidote to the decades-long erosion of the American auto industry. It’s a farcical measure of how little the other Republicans have to say about the nation’s economic crunch that Mr. Romney’s con job could pass for substance.
Whatever the merits of the Democratic candidates’ takes on our fiscal crisis, at least they saw the crisis coming. Though Mr. Romney officially kicked off his presidential candidacy in Michigan, he started grandstanding about the misery in that state only after all his other campaign strategies had failed and he needed a Hail Mary marketing gimmick. In his announcement speech in Dearborn last February, the lone economy he mentioned was the fuel economy of the Ramblers his father manufactured at American Motors in a distant past.
Among Mr. Romney’s rivals, Mike Huckabee alone made affinity for economically struggling Americans his calling card. Unfortunately, Huckanomics is more snake oil. All federal taxes would be replaced by a national sales tax that despite its Orwellian name (the Fair Tax) would shift more of the burden to middle- and low-income Americans.
For the other Republicans, the downturn has been an occasion to recycle the mindless what-me-worry optimism of the pre-1929 G.O.P. presidents and Wall Street potentates since relegated to history’s dustbin. When Maria Bartiromo, moderating a CNBC Republican debate in October, asked the candidates if the nation was heading into a recession, Fred Thompson found “no reason” to think so and pronounced both the near and longer-term economic future “rosy.” Rudy Giuliani extolled the glories of freedom and the market before promising that “the sky’s the limit.”
Even the White House halfheartedly acknowledged the home-mortgage fiasco ahead of this crew. Instead, the Republican candidates have largely clung to illegal immigration as Domestic Crisis No. 1, to no particular point beyond alienating Hispanic voters.
The election is more than nine months away, and already this obsession is blowing up in the G.O.P.’s face with non-Hispanic voters, too. Far from proving the killer app of 2008, illegal immigration is evaporating as a national cause. In the nearly identical findings of The New York Times/CBS News and ABC News/Washington Post polls this month, it ranks near the bottom, the top issue for a mere 4 to 5 percent of voters. The economy (at 20 to 29 percent) leads in both surveys, closely followed by the total of those picking some variant of “war” and “Iraq.”
As if it weren’t crazy enough for Republicans to lash themselves to the listing mast of immigration, they are nonplayers on the issues that do matter most to voters. The more the economy tanks and steals Americans’ attention from a relatively less violent Iraq, the more voters learn that the Republicans have little to offer beyond their one-size-fits-all panacea of extending the Bush tax cuts.
To voters who do remember Iraq, the supposed military success of the “surge” does not accrue to the Republicans’ favor either. Quite the contrary. As every poll shows, most Americans still want the troops home ASAP. Republican declarations that we are “winning” merely lead many voters to a logical conclusion: Why not let the Iraqis take over the remaining triage so we can retrieve the $10 billion a month in taxpayers’ money that might benefit us at home? This is why even the poll-driven Mrs. Clinton, who has been the most cautious and ambiguous of the Democratic candidates about a withdrawal timetable, dramatically changed course to expedite her Iraq exit strategy in Tuesday night’s debate.
Thanks in part to the Giuliani campaign’s one triumph — turning 9/11 fearmongering into a running late-night talk-show gag — the usual national-security card is no longer so easy for Republicans to play. Conservatives not in denial see the crackup ahead. “All the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans,” wrote George Will last week, concluding that “Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since Nov. 3, 1964,” when Barry Goldwater lost 44 states.
But might some Republican still win, especially if the Democrats are ultimately divided by race, or by the Clintons, or by their own inane new debate about Reagan? Conceivably, but only if someone besides Ron Paul is brave enough to break out of the monochromatic pack.
That contender would seem to be John McCain. For all the often irrational anger directed at this conservative by his long-time antagonists in his own party, he is the sole G.O.P. candidate who resisted the immigrant vigilantes. He might have done better in Michigan, where he spoke honestly about the grim prospects for the auto industry, had he backed up his prognosis with remedies less glib than a vague pledge to retrain workers at community colleges. Education policy of any kind is M.I.A. on the McCain campaign Web site.
His ardor for the war, however, has not done him in. He handily won the growing Republican antiwar vote in both Michigan and New Hampshire. Apparently many still remember that Mr. McCain was bitterly against President Bush before he was for him.
Exit polls find that among voters in Republican primaries, as many as half have turned against the president. David Frum, the onetime Bush speechwriter, laments in his provocative new book “Comeback” that by 2008 his former boss “had led his party to the brink of disaster” and cost it “a generation of young Americans.”
At the last Republican debate, the candidates invoked Reagan nearly three dozen times and Mr. Bush just once. “I take my inspiration from Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush,” said Mr. Romney on his Michigan victory night, in a typical example of the candidates’ circumlocutions about the incumbent president.
This, too, is laughably out of touch with reality as practiced in most American living rooms. Imagine if Mr. McCain’s Straight Talk Express stopped taking detours around the one figure who unites 60-plus percent of the populace in ire. Imagine if he started talking straight about how he’d clean up the White House mess. That might at least break the ice with the vast majority of voters who look at the G.O.P. presidential field and don’t see Ronald Reagan so much as also-rans for “The Bucket List.” ++
Red, White and Blue Tag Sale
MAUREEN DOWD, New York Times
January 20, 2008
WASHINGTON - When President Bush finished doing his sword dances and Arabian stallion inspections, when he finished making a speech in Abu Dhabi on the importance of freedom that fell flat, when he finished lounging in his fur-lined George of Arabia robe in the Saudi king’s tent, he came home.
Or he came to what was left of home.
A Washington Post cartoon by Tom Toles summed it up best: “Great to be home,” W. enthuses on Air Force One, heading toward the East Coast. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?” Hanging on the skyline of New York is a sign reading: “U.S.A. Now a Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Foreign Investors.”
Wherever he went, W. seemed dazzled by the can-do spirit of the J. Pierrepont Finches of the new Middle East. “It’s important for the president to hear thoughts, hopes, dreams, aspirations, concerns from folks that are out making a living,” he told Saudi entrepreneurs.
In Dubai, he commended young Arab leaders, saying, “The entrepreneurial spirit is strong.”
In Abu Dhabi, he marveled at the royal family’s plans to build a city based entirely upon renewable energy. “Amazing, isn’t it?” W. said.
You know you’re in trouble when your Middle East oil pump is greener than you are.
Even as W. played cheerleader for Arab business, the Arabs were cleaning our clocks — then buying them. Our addiction to oil has allowed our pushers in the Persian Gulf to go on a shopping spree to snap us up.
Hillary Clinton was right when she said it was “pathetic” that President Bush had to beg the Saudis to drop the price of oil.
One cascading rationale he offered for invading Iraq was the benign domino theory, that bringing democracy to Iraq would sway the autocrats in the region to be less repressive.
But when W. visited Saudi Arabia and Egypt last week, he did not have the whip hand. He could not demand anything of the autocrats in the way of more rights for women and dissidents, much less get the Saudis to help on oil production. He needs their help in corralling Iran, which has been puffed up by the occupation of Iraq.
So he was a supplicant in Saudi Arabia. The American economy is a supplicant, too.
Two decades ago, we fretted that Japan was taking over America when Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought a chunk of Rockefeller Center. But they overpaid for everything.
Now, because of Wall Street’s overreaching, our economy depends on foreign oil and foreign loans to stay afloat.
China and Arab countries have a staggering amount of treasury securities. And the oil-rich countries are sitting on so many petrodollars that they are looking beyond prestige hotels and fashion labels and taking advantage of the fire sale to buy eye-popping stakes in our major financial institutions.
Like the president, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch came with tin cups to Middle Eastern, Asian and American investors last week, for a combined total of nearly $19.1 billion, after the subprime mortgage debacle blew up their books.
Citigroup, which raised $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi in November, raised another $12.5 billion, including from Singapore, Kuwait and Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal. Merrill Lynch gave $6.6 billion in preferred stock to Kuwait, South Korea, a Japanese bank and others.
(While the great sage Bob Rubin was advising Hillary Clinton on sound fiscal policy, he seemed to be asleep at the Citigroup switch.)
As Warren Buffett has said, we are giving ourselves a party to feed our appetite for oil and imported goods and paying for it by selling off the furniture, our most precious assets.
When the president got back Thursday night from a trip that made it clear he has no clout overseas, he had to rush the ailing economy into intensive care.
Next to the cool, strong euro, the dollar is a comparative runt in the world’s currencies. The weak dollar lets foreigners snap up real estate in Manhattan.
It is striking that the Bush scion, who has tried so hard to do the opposite of his father, also ends up facing the prospect of a recession in his final year in office.
Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction.
Now it’s a race between Iraq, stupid, or the economy, stupid, to see which one will usher out W.
The country is engaged in a fit of nativism and Lou Dobbsism, obsessing about the millions of Mexicans who might be sneaking across the border when billions in foreign money are pouring into Citigroup. You figure out what might be a bigger problem.
The national boundaries that really matter are the financial ones: Who’s going to own the American economy? ++
MLK on Class, Conscience, and Corporate Buyouts
Kerry Candaele, HuffPo
January 19, 2008
On August 28th, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King told the world about his dream of racial equality in the United States. On that day, and increasingly as he matured as a political thinker by confronting the exigencies of his time, King also articulated a dream of class equality, a fact that more often than not goes unmentioned in our now ritualized and therefore tamed celebration of his life. But remember, the march on Washington that summer was for “Jobs and Justice,” class and race conjoined, with feminists showing us later in the decade that gender must be added to the now familiar analytical troika for understanding how power is wielded and reworked in our daily lives.
But as a recession begins to bite hard, and Wall Street analysts hustle about with canned explanations for our, as George Bush puts it, “sound fundamentals,” class inequality is a question that the country seems willing to confront more forcefully, at least during a moment when political candidates are fishing for votes and talking a “populist” talk.
That discussion should start with a debate about the role of ‘private equity’ firms in the U.S. economy, the Wall Street buyout tycoons that squeeze American workers to turn their incomprehensible profits.
Buyout firms like KKR and Blackstone make their money by purchasing companies, cutting back on wages, benefits and jobs, re-selling them at much higher margins and taking a 20 percent commission for the job.
The buyout industry is gobbling up huge portions of the American economy like Pac-man. The top 20 firms own companies employing nearly 4 million workers. In 2007, buyout firms in the U.S. controlled a $400 billion war chest to acquire yet more. This kind of Wall Street pirate profiteering impacts middle America like a kick in the stomach.
If the opinions I heard while interviewing working people on a recent trip across the country for Brave New Films’ ‘War On Greed’ video series are an indication of the general mood of the country, the question of class and corporate influence on policy-making should be disturbing the public consciousness long after the cameras leave town.
After the promises made by politicians to take corporate power to task have been forgotten by those who are now making them, working women and men will be pondering how class works in the United States, that is, who rides whom and how.
2008 is certainly not 1963, Martin Luther King and most blue-collar workers today don’t speak with the exact cadences or deliberative pathos, but profoundly conflicted times require equally profound and radical solutions to those conflicts, then as now.
Martin Luther King changed as his time changed, and no more dramatically than on the Vietnam War and on the question of class in America. In the Gandhi Memorial Lecture at Howard University, King pointed out that “We are grappling with basic class issues between the privileged and underprivileged.”
Two weeks ago in Rockford, a locked out iron pourer named Scott Henderson told me that “corporate greed is killing this county,” and that Henry Kravis (CEO of the private equity firm KKR that bought his company) making fifty-one thousand dollars an hour last year is, well, not quite what Jefferson had in mind when he wrote that all men are created equal.
In a mid-60s speech before his Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff, King summed up a central dilemma of the nation, “Now this means that we’re treading….in very difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with the economic system of our nation. It means that something is wrong with capitalism.”
In Ardmore, Oklahoma Mary Lou Lowery, who works for in a Dollar General factory owned by the private equity firm KKR, presented her own analysis of our difficult waters: “It’s kinda like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, Mary Lou noted wryly, “The rich people, they’re not like us. They’re different.” Mary Lou laughed big at that last sentence, then continued with a remark about the New York firm that owns her company: “The KKR executives…they have the politicians, they know they will back them because they can support them. They only look to us because they know we make the money. We know that the workers in the warehouses we make the money. They don’t make it. We do the physical work and we make it work.”
In a speech to the Negro American Labor Council, Martin Luther King said “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”
A laid off worker from a KKR-owned tech firm in Florida told me, “I think greed plays a primary role in all of this. I think greed is the main reason that hundreds of people have lost their jobs, that hundreds of lives have been disrupted simply for the, the gain of a very few. It’s about gluttony, excess to the greatest degree. It’s absurd that so many people’s lives can be ruined for the sake of more money for a select few.”
When he was murdered in Memphis, Martin Luther King was in the midst of SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign, and he was in that city to support striking sanitation workers who carried signs declaring “I am a man!” By the end of his life Martin Luther King was thinking deeply in class ways as much as in race ways, and the combination of the two made his view of America much more radical than anyone who left out either of the two lenses when looking at our society.
But class talk today, now trivialized by our talk-show sociologists as playing the populist “card,” goes back into the deck after elections are settled, dismissed as too unsightly in the United States of classlessness. But if that illusion has a future, it is not because a good majority of the population is unwilling to point out to the wealthy minority that owning a time-share of Baltic Avenue doesn’t quite match the power and influence, the lovely cache, of having Boardwalk and Park Place in one’s possession.
So class inequality remains America’s dirty little secret, and the notion that throughout American history there might have existed something called class conflict, waxing and waning by the decade or epoch, is even dirtier.
It may be bad form to focus on class politics today, rude in fact, given that the “working class” has exited the building some time in the latter part of the New Deal, replaced by the cleaner cut and gussied up “middle class,” to which all politicians now pay ritual homage. But Martin Luther King was not polite enough to turn his eyes away from the social suffering that accompanied class disparity. His conscience was not for purchase, his speech was not for hire, the clarity with which he saw the United States of his time not swayed by special pleading from groups whose vision was often more cramped and sectarian. Class inequality counted in a big way for Martin Luther King, and he told us about it in increasingly radical tones from 1963 to 1968.
Especially on this day, the commemoration of his life and on every day that the ever-bending arc of justice has not reached its place of rest, class should count. For the game has not yet been won by those who, in King’s words, “blindly believe their right to uncontrolled profits is a law of the universe.” Almost, but not yet. ++
Kerry Candaele, a producer for Brave New Films, is currently interviewing workers laid off as a result of private equity takeovers for BNF’s second short documentary in its “War on Greed” series.
Obama Addresses Ebenezer Baptist Church
Senator Barack Obama
t r u t h o u t | Speech
Sunday 20 January 2008
Editor’s Note: The following speech was given by Senator Barack Obama to mark Martin Luther King Day at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He gave the speech at the invitation of the church’s minister and congregation. This church is the site where Dr. King began his ministry and where he began his campaign for social justice.
Atlanta - Senator Barack Obama delivered the following speech yesterday at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.
But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram’s horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.
There are many lessons to take from this passage, just as there are many lessons to take from this day, just as there are many memories that fill the space of this church. As I was thinking about which ones we need to remember at this hour, my mind went back to the very beginning of the modern Civil Rights Era.
Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yoke of oppression.
And on the eve of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, at a time when many were still doubtful about the possibilities of change, a time when those in the black community mistrusted themselves, and at times mistrusted each other, King inspired with words not of anger, but of an urgency that still speaks to us today:
“Unity is the great need of the hour” is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome.
What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.
I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.
I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.
We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick.
We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.
We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.
And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.
So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.
Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we’ve come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We’ve come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily - that it’s just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.
All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.
But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes - a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.
It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart - that puts up walls between us.
We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.
For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.
And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.
Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for president, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.
Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.
But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.
The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country’s ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.
And that is what is at stake in the great political debate we are having today. The changes that are needed are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. We will have to fight to fix our schools, but we will also have to challenge ourselves to be better parents. We will have to confront the biases in our criminal justice system, but we will also have to acknowledge the deep-seated violence that still resides in our own communities and marshal the will to break its grip.
That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words - words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.
He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.
That is the unity - the hard-earned unity - that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope - the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.
The stories that give me such hope don’t happen in the spotlight. They don’t happen on the presidential stage. They happen in the quiet corners of our lives. They happen in the moments we least expect. Let me give you an example of one of those stories.
There is a young, twenty-three-year-old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She’s been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.
And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.
And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.
And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America.
And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope - but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.
Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone.
In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.
So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America. ++
Martin Luther King and LBJ
Bill Moyers, PBS - Bill Moyers Journal
Friday 18 January 2008
The following is a transcript from Bill Moyers Journal.
Bill Moyers: If William Shakespeare were around I suspect he might describe the recent flap between the Obama and Clinton camps as much ado about nothing or a tempest in a teapot. Senator Clinton was heard to say that it took a president - Lyndon Johnson - to consummate the work of Martin Luther King by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Almost no one in the media bothered to run the whole quote. Here it is:
Hillary Clinton: Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.”
Bill Moyers: There was nothing in that quote about race. It was an historical fact, an affirmation of the obvious. But critics pounced. THE NEW YORK TIMES published a lead editorial accusing Senator Clinton of “the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change.” Suddenly we had a rhetorical inferno on our hands, with charges flying left and right, and pundits throwing gasoline on the tiniest of embers. Fortunately the furor has quieted down, and everyone’s said they’re sorry, except THE NEW YORK TIMES. But I can’t resist this footnote to the story.
Many, many years ago, I was a young White House Assistant, when President Johnson at first wanted Martin Luther King to call off the marching, demonstrations, and protests. The civil rights movement had met massive resistance in the South, and the South, because of the seniority system, controlled Congress, making it virtually impossible for Congress to enact laws giving full citizenship to black Americans, no matter how desperate their lives. LBJ worried that the mounting demonstrations were hardening white resistance.
He had been the master of the Senate, the great persuader, who could twist your arm with such flair and flattery you thought he was actually doing you a favor by wrenching it from its socket. He reckoned that with a little time he could twist enough arms in Congress to end, or neutralize, the power of die-hard racists - all of them, including some of his old mentors, white supremacists who threatened to bring the government, if not the country, to its knees before they would see blacks eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains, and live in the same neighborhoods as whites.
As the pressure intensified on each side, Johnson wanted King to wait a little longer and give him a chance to bring Congress around by hook or crook. But Martin Luther King said his people had already waited too long. He talked about the murders and lynchings, the churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and women humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as intently as I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on Martin Luther King’s shoulder, and said, in effect: “OK. You go out there Dr. King and keep doing what you’re doing, and make it possible for me to do the right thing.” Lyndon Johnson was no racist but he had not been a civil rights hero, either. Now, as president, he came down on the side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America’s conscience until the cry for justice became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and Johnson maneuvered and Congress folded.
News Coverage: President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what he calls a turning point in history.
Bill Moyers: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.
Marchers: “We shall overcome …”
Bill Moyers: But they weren’t done. King kept on marching, this time for the right to vote, and once again Johnson kept his word, and did the right thing. As one of his young assistants, I stood on the floor of the House that Ides of March when morality and politics converged, and watched the faces of Congress transfixed … mesmerized … knowing they were riding the surf of history as the president of the United States enlisted all of us in the cause.
Lyndon Johnson: It’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
Bill Moyers: As he finished, Congress stood and thunderous applause shook the chamber. Johnson would soon sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and black people were no longer second class citizens. Martin Luther King had marched and preached and witnessed for this day. Countless ordinary people had put their bodies on the line for it, been berated, bullied and beaten, only to rise, organize and struggle on, against the dogs and guns, the bias and burning crosses. Take nothing from them; their courage is their legacy. But take nothing from the president who once had seen the light but dimly, as through a dark glass - and now did the right thing. Lyndon Johnson threw the full weight of his office on the side of justice. Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment - “we shall overcome” - Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too - reminding us that a president matters, and so do we. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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