The Martin Luther King Legacy and the Global Economic
Crisis: Can One Influence the Other? 

by Danny Schechter

Published on Monday, April 4, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/04-2

Before he went over that mountain top in that week in
an April like this one back in 1968, Martin Luther King
Jr.  said he had already seen the other side, as he
spent his last days on earth fighting for the garbage
men of Memphis while speaking out about the twin evils
of war and poverty.

A few days ago, a great black American essayist and
historian, Manning Marable, died suddenly just before
his new and definitive book on Malcolm X came out
showing how America's best known Muslim martyr had
moved from a focus on the domestic politics of racial
confrontation to the international politics of global
revolution.

(Among his findings: The US government spied on Malcolm
as he globe-trotted linking up with like-minded
activists. This was offered up as a new revelation. I
had to smile since I did an investigative report for
Ramparts Magazine in 1967 on how the CIA was trying to
discredit him in Africa.)

We live in a world of constantly redrawn battle lines
where new generations displace the old ones and some of
yesterday's leaders move to higher levels of
consciousness unlike many others like Libya's human
rights abusing leader Gadaffi, along with some civil
rights leaders who, years ago, secretly joined
Washington's crusade against Malcolm.

Washington is now crusading against Libya. The war
there was first declared a humanitarian intervention
before it turned into a military intervention in a
civil war and is on its way to becoming a stalemate.
Already NATO has bombed the rebels in one of those
mistakes all too common in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US has apparently decided it no longer wants to
throw good money after bad--perhaps because it has
finally dawned on the White House that we are running
out of money. So, we are declaring victory and moving
on.

Even imperial projects have to be tempered as our wars
abroad turn into follies and our economic turnaround at
home is also not what it has been advertised to be.

As the AFL-CIO noted while the Administration was
celebrating a downtick in unemployment:

"While the official unemployment rate is 8.8 percent,
it's 15.7 percent if unemployed, underemployed and
those who have given up looking for work are
included--more than 24 million people...

Young people and people of color continue to experience
the worst jobless rates which have remained high, with
24.5 percent of teenagers out of work and 15.5 percent
of black workers and 11.3 percent of Hispanics jobless.
Some 7.9 percent of white workers are jobless, as are
7.1 percent of Asian workers."

At the same time, better paid government jobs are being
chopped leaving workers in lower wage private sector
jobs that pay less money for more work. Many of those
workers say their salaries don't cover their expenses. 
Foreclosures are up even as bank profits (and CEO
salaries) soar.

We are just learning the full extent of the Federal
Reserve Bank's loans to banks the world over, while a
promised crackdown on fraud has yet to come. A bailout
costing trillions was kept secret until a reporter's a
lawsuit just forced a disclosure.

Still hidden is the role government plays in
manipulating markets or pumping them up through the
Plunge Protection Team, a shadowy agency I discuss in
more detail in my book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinfo
Books.)

Wall Street's "swinging dicks," as they are called, are
back in the saddle. They have neutered financial reform
and seem to have silenced the President who seems to
want to cheer up the people rather than inform them
about what's really going on as food and gas prices
rise while inflation begins to rear its ugly head.

Veteran investor Jim Rogers told the Daily Bell: "It's
already happening; prices are going higher. Now the
blame game starts and the government will blame it on
drought or crop failure or whatever. Politicians will
do and say anything to avoid explaining that inflation
is a monetary problem. Their reactions are always the
same and it's always astonishing to me. As President
Ford said, 'there is no problem' - and even if there
is, it's not his problem. Well there are always people
who are in denial; then the problem gets worse not
better."

Wall Street's Hedge Funds are having a field day. The
New York Times reports that wealth among execs in that
part of the financial labyrinth is so concentrated that
25 Hedge Fund managers "pocketed a total of $22.07
billion...At $50,000 a year, it would take the salaries
of 441,000 Americans to match the sum."

Who is speaking out against this? Not the Republicans
for sure. Not many Democrats either. Not even the
President or his 'more wealth for the wealthy' booster
Treasury chief Tim Geithner.

Wall Street is stronger than ever. Its "reforms" are
proving to be a joke. No big execs who profited from
pervasive mortgage fraud have gone to jail as
prosecutions dwindle.

There has been a respite in Wisconsin as a State Judge
shoots down the GOP's attempt to outlaw collective
bargaining but similar laws have passed in Ohio and New
Hampshire.

In a globalized world, we are all interdependent. What
happens to one part of this web affects us all. That's
why we have to pay attention to the falling economic
dominoes in Europe where Portugal may be next to go
with Spain and Ireland not far behind. So far protests
by hundreds of thousands in Britain have not dented
much less changed the government's cutbacks in the name
of austerity.

Serious critics may have the facts on their side but
are still being marginalized. They are considered
ranters, not reasonable. Journalist Chris Hedges was
honored when he wrote for the New York Times. When he
left, and was finally able to speak his own mind, he
began challenging the false promises of globalization.

He writes, "The refusal by all of our liberal
institutions, including the press, universities, labor
and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian
assumptions that the marketplace should determine human
behavior permits corporations and investment firms to
continue their assault, including speculating on
commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal,
oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative
energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It
permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to
ethanol production and crush systems of local,
sustainable agriculture. '

It permits the war industry to drain half of all state
expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and
profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no
chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the
most basic controls and regulations to cement into
place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who
should be in charge of our food supply or our social
and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick
children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street
speculators."

So, once again, a gauntlet has been thrown down, but so
far activists, advocates, unions and even progressive
journalists stay submerged in fighting partisan wars
and are not taking on the deeper fight for economic
justice.

If we want to walk in the footsteps of Dr King, we need
to broaden our understanding of the scale of what needs
changing and target the banksters on Wall Street as
well as Republican pols that do their bidding. Danny
Schechter

Mediachannel's News Dissector Danny Schechter
investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his
book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and
the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo Books via Amazon).
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