Martin Luther King

There was and still is a Martin Luther King who is lionized, memorialized, and fossilized.  And there was and still is a Dr. King who was something else again.  DJ Sese's mixtape liberates Martin Luther King by restoring him to his context in the truly revolutionary environment of the Freedom Movement of the 50s and 60s.

by Pascal Robert

Ella Baker, the consummate organizer, “was very critical of the hot shot Black preachers who would seem to mesmerize their audience with soaring oratory, then leave and expect others to implement an agenda.” She put forward a grassroots critique of overwhelmingly male Black leadership, and showed “more wisdom, courage, and vision then almost all of them.”

by Raymond Nat Turner

Baptist, baritone strains:

"I've been to the mountaintop,

But this is not the mountaintop”

Year 2042 Will Bring Non-White U.S. Majority and Apartheid Economy

Thirty years from now, the United States will have a non-white majority largely mired in poverty under an “apartheid” economy, said Tim Sullivan, co-author of a new report titled “State of the Dream: The Emerging Majority.” By 2042, the report predicts, Blacks will earn 61 cents for every dollar paid to whites – which is about the same racial earnings ratio that has existed since 1980. Hispanic workers will be even worse off, earning just 45 cents on every white dollar. “We simply won’t be able to sustain our standard of living, our place in the world” with such widespread poverty among the non-white majority, said Sullivan, of Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. Black and Latino wealth is projected to shrivel to pennies compared to white household wealth dollars.

MLK Fought Against Rule of the Wealthy

“Dr. King talked about concrete steps to challenge this Darwinian culture that we live in, where the corporations run the government and we are no longer governed by the rule of law,” said South Carolina Black activist and author Kevin Alexander Gray. “If Black folks are content to be quiet while they wait for President Obama” to tackle the multiple oppressions against African Americans, “then they are mad.” Gray is repulsed by “the idea that Black folks are supporting the idea of preventive war and preventive assassination.” Gray is author of The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.

“Phase Two” for Occupy Movement

“The occupy movement is about more than just occupying a tent in a public park,” said Kevin Zeese, an organizer of the Occupy Washington DC encampment at Freedom Plaza. The purpose is “to organize, mobilize and educate people, and start a debate about the wealth divide.” In what Zeese calls “Phase Two” of the movement, in addition to maintaining the encampment on Pennsylvania Avenue, organizers will operate out of two DC area houses. The “Peace House” will focus on mobilization of a national occupation of the nation’s capital, beginning March 30, while another house is dedicated to “occupying the economy” – creating alternative economic solutions so that people can “create their own jobs and their own wealth.”

UN Occupation of Haiti is “Mission Without a Cause”

Two years after a killer earthquake and eight years after the U.S. invaded Haiti, MINUSTAH, the United Nations “peacekeeping” force in the country, is a “mission without a cause,” said Dan Beeton, of the Center for Policy and Economic Research. Why is MINUSTAH still there? “There is no real justification for their presence…except that the international community, especially the United States, doesn’t want to see the Haitian people take control of their own destiny.”

MINUSTAH soldiers from Nepal brought cholera to Haiti, which has killed 6,000 people and sickened half a million. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti sued the UN, but the world body has yet to admit responsibility for the epidemic, blaming Haiti’s poor infrastructure for allowing the disease to spread. “That’s like me going into a field of dry grass and lighting a fire, and when it turns into a forest fire, blaming the wind,” said Institute director Brian ConCannon, Jr.

McKinney: U.S. Troops Lurk Near Libya

Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate, is alarmed at reports that 12,000 U.S. troops are temporarily stationed at Malta, an island nation in the Mediterranean Sea that has historically been a jumping off point to Libya. McKinney led a number of fact-finding delegations to Libya, before and during the U.S.-NATO bombing campaign that overthrew Col. Moammar Gaddafi’s government. “There is no real control by the National Transitional Council,” which recently signed an agreement allowing foreign troops to be stationed on Libyan soil, said McKinney. “The country has been ripped apart, the people are desperate for jobs, they need work,” in the absence of the Gaddafi government’s generous social welfare structures.

U.S. Guilty of “Ecological Genocide”

Michael Dorsey, a professor of environmental science at Dartmouth University who recently returned from a global climate conference in Durban, South Africa, denounced the Obama administration for refusing to seriously discuss measures to halt planetary warming. “That kind of brinksmanship diplomacy is really best characterized as a kind of apartheid for the planet, and particularly for Africa, where we know the unfolding climate change process will have catastrophic effects. It’s already playing out,” said Dorsey, director of the Climate Justice Research Project.

Lumumba Assassination Anniversary

Friends of Congo hold a rally and teach-in in Washington on Tuesday, January 17, to mark the 51^st anniversary of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the popularly elected prime minister of newly independent Congo. Belgium, the former colonial power, apologized for its role in Lumumba’s death in 2002, but the U.S. “hasn’t even gotten close” to expressing remorse. Formerly classified records show President Dwight Eisenhower ordered a CIA hit on Lumumba in 1960. The murder “stifled the democratic aspirations of the Congolese people,” said Kambale Musavuli, of Friends of Congo, just as U.S. support for last November’s rigged elections that kept President Joseph Kabila in power has stifled those aspirations. “I firmly believe that the United States government is supporting a dictatorial regime in the Congo,” said Musavuli.

by Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Ph.D and Kevin Berends

Dr. Martin Luther King was a whistle-blower for justice. In contrast, Barack Obama has been more aggressive in punishing whistle-blowers than his predecessors. “Is it likely that the administration that recently announced psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists will be deployed throughout the federal bureaucracy to ferret out potential whistleblowers would treat Dr. King any differently than it has treated Julian Assange?”

by Benjamin Woods

The real Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remains quite accessible to us, through his writings and a wealth of other material. However, King’s political likeness is not to be found among the current Black leadership class. Therefore, “it is on those who believe in his vision today to build a real social movement for a revolutionary transformation of human society.”