Dr. King Spanks Obama: Part 2
By David Kendall
15 May, 2009
Countercurrents.org
At the 23rd Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Holiday Celebration in San Francisco attendees were asked to answer the question, "What would Dr. King want to say to Barack Obama?" But Dr. King actually provides the best answers to this question in his book, "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" For example, in chapter 3 he states:
"The Washington Post has calculated that we spend $332,000 for each enemy we kill. It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives could transform if we were to cease killing. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. [1]
But this is data from 1967. Has anyone performed more recent calculations with regard to Iraq, Gaza or Afghanistan? With his great interest in "transparency", perhaps Barack Obama has already posted these statistics on his Web site. How many American jobs does it cost to kill one "enemy" in Iraq? How many American homes does is cost to kill one "enemy" in Afghanistan? Has anyone checked? I haven't yet. But this does promise to be a very interesting study in terms of -- "free trade".
Meanwhile, I must confess to a recent error in suggesting Obama's commitments lie outside the democratic process. [2] While it is true that Obama's choices don't seem to align with the interests of most Americans (or most other life forms), this does not indicate he is operating outside the democratic process. Such misinterpretations are quite understandable, and as outlined below I appear to be in good company. After all, we're constantly taught to believe that we live in a democratic society -- and to some extent we certainly do. The problem is that more than 99-percent of the US population is deliberately excluded from active daily participation in the democratic process.
"Through two centuries, a continuous indoctrination of Americans has separated people according to mythically superior and inferior qualities while a democratic spirit of equality was evoked as the national ideal." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. [1]
Though typically aimed at racial segregation, most of Dr. King's observations also extend to the more general problems of economic and political segregation. King’s ultimate goal was racial equality to be achieved through the eradication of global poverty. His obvious ability to organize the masses in this regard, his suggestion of a Basic Income Guarantee and his vocal opposition to the Vietnam war seem the most likely reasons Dr. King was assassinated by his own government. He connected the dots between war and poverty and he was able to effectively organize the masses against both -- so they shot him. [3]
What does this tell us about our democratic system? What does this tell us about our government's agenda? What does this tell us about Dr. King’s approach to "democracy" versus Barack Obama's? Peace activist Cindy Sheehan suggests Obama is "a sell-out in opposition to King's legacy, not a fulfillment":
"Besides filling his cabinet with militarists and members of the white establishment, he has selected very few persons of color. His support for a trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street shows that he has sold out himself, and the nation's poor to be a tool of the bankers. Obama's devotion to war ('I am not against war, I am against dumb wars') is not only demonstrated by his words, but by his actions, as well. While pledging to withdraw 'combat troops' from Iraq, he also promises to dramatically increase troop level in Afghanistan and also increase overall troop levels by almost 100,000 warm bodies. Obama recognizes Israel's right to 'defend' itself by bombing the prisoners of Gaza." [4]
Regarding Obama's first 100 days in office, John Pilger concurs:
"Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in', it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared... In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not 'persons', and therefore had no right not to be tortured... All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up... In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office... In Afghanistan, the US 'strategy' of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the 'Taliban') has been extended... Perhaps the biggest lie is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq... According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain 'for the next 15 to 20 years'..." [5]
As a result, Pilger says a growing number of Americans believe they have been "suckered" -- especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Sheehan describes Obama as a "sell-out", and geniuses like me suggest that he's committed to forces "outside the democratic process". But Americans have been suckered for much longer that a mere 100 days. It's actually been more like 230 years. If we think of democracy as a distribution of decision-making power, we see that the democratic process is alive and well in the United States and that Barack Obama tends to operate well within its boundaries. But the democratic process in the US is also monstrously skewed in favor of wealth derived from the passive ownership of capital.
So, as Noam Chomsky suggests, most Americans are passive spectators ("ignorant and meddlesome outsiders") in the democratic process. [6] It's no coincidence that those same people are also the most active daily participants in the economic process of generating wealth -- for somebody else. The passive claimants of all that wealth are the owners of capital -- and it's no coincidence that those people (less than 1-percent of the US population) also happen to be the most active daily participants in the democratic process. Moreover, the interests of workers and the interests of passive ownership are directly opposed. [7] After more than 200 years "Americans" are finally beginning to see that something is terribly wrong with this picture. [8] But it's not a new problem. This is actually a manufacturer's defect.
The United States was not founded on the principle that "all people are created equal". It was founded on the principle that "all MEN are created equal". The term "men" denoted white male property owners. The term "property" denoted land and slaves. Much like a factory recall, the American Civil War eventually replaced slavery with capitalism as a new and improved way for passive ownership to siphon wealth and income away from the active participants (workers) who produce it. Black slaves were literally tossed to the wolves as the exploitation of labor was extended to every human being who was not an owner of capital.
Meanwhile, the right to vote in the US is controlled at both the state and federal levels, and its history is replete with legislation intended to discriminate against certain (especially ethnic) groups. But in general, only white male property owners (about 10 to 16 percent of the US population) had the right to vote at the time the US Constitution was written. By the beginning of the Civil War, the property-ownership requirement had finally been dropped, and most white male citizens could vote. Women and Native Americans achieved the right to vote in the 1920s, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally guaranteed blacks the right to vote in the United States without racial discrimination. [9] [10]
But the right to vote in no way guarantees either the right or the opportunity for active daily participation in the democratic process. As Dr. King laments, the laws have changed, but the democratic process hasn't improved at all. In fact, the exclusive control of US democracy has shrunk from 10- to 16-percent of the population in 1787 to less than half of a percent today. So despite our many historic struggles for the right to vote, our democratic process is now more heavily skewed than ever before in favor of property ownership and wealth accumulation. The decisions that most deeply affect our daily lives are being made for us by others. According to Dr. King, "someone or some system has already made these decisions for me, and I am reduced to an animal". [1] David Chandler's "L-Curve" is the best graphic representation I've found for illustrating the aggressive assault on US democracy: [8]
"The horizontal spike [on the curve] has the votes. The vertical spike [on the curve] has the money. Who wins, when it comes to electoral politics? Who has influence? Whose interests are being represented in Washington? Can democracy meaningfully exist where the distribution of wealth, and thus the distribution of power, is this concentrated? We recently went through an economic boom where people on the horizontal spike showed little if any improvement in their condition while those in the vertical spike showed huge gains. Can this be considered "prosperity"? Do we really want to gear up our national policies to repeat this performance?" [8]
Less than half of a percent of the US population are passive economic claimants and active political participants. The rest of us are active economic generators and passive political spectators. Does this suggest that Barack Obama and his corporate puppet-masters are operating outside the "democratic process"?
No. In fact we, the people, are imposters in our own democratic system -- deliberately excluded from an economically skewed distribution of "democracy". The good news is that this problem can be corrected. The bad news is that correcting the problem involves something called "cooperation". Dr. King calls it "cooperative alliance", and it is the very foundation of genuine democracy: "For an alliance to have permanence and loyal commitment from its various elements, each of them must have a goal from which it benefits and none must have an outlook in basic conflict with the others." [1] Thus, the antagonistic relationship between workers and passive ownership cannot exist in any truly democratic society. While Dr. King's work might have helped make it possible for a black man to become President of the United States, Barack Obama is in no way a fulfillment of Dr. King's dream. To "normalize" our democratic process, the extreme influence of unearned income derived from passive ownership must be removed from the distribution.
Here's more from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr:
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
Excerpts from chapter 3:
Since the institution of slavery was so important to the economic development of America, it had a profound impact in shaping the social-political-legal structure of the nation. Land and slaves were the chief forms of private property, property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and determined politics. In the service of this system, human beings were reduced to propertyless property. Black men, the creators of the wealth of the New World, were stripped of all human and civil rights. And this degradation was sanctioned and protected by institutions of government, all for one purpose: to produce commodities for sale at a profit, which in turn would be privately appropriated.
It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable was morally justifiable. The attempt to give moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy. Religion and the Bible were cited and distorted to support the status quo. Logic was manipulated to give intellectual credence to the system of slavery. Academicians eventually climbed on the bandwagon and gave their prestige to the myth of superior race. Even natural science, that discipline committed to the inductive method, creative appraisal and detached objectivity, was invoked and distorted to give credence to a political position. A whole school of racial ethnologists developed using such terms as "species," "genus" and "race." It became fashionable to think of the slave as a "species of property." It was during this period that the word "race" came into fashion.
Generally we think of white supremacist views as having their origins with the unlettered, underprivileged, poorer class whites. But the social obstetricians who presided at the birth of racist views in our country were from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical science, historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of the nation. With such a distinguished company of the elite working so assiduously to disseminate racist views, what was there to inspire poor, illiterate, unskilled white farmers to think otherwise? Soon the doctrine of white supremacy as imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit. It became a structural part of the culture. Virtually all of the Founding Fathers of our nation, even those who rose to the heights of the Presidency, those whom we cherish as our authentic heroes, were so enmeshed in the ethos of slavery and white supremacy that not one ever emerged with a clear, unambiguous stand on Negro rights. Morally Lincoln was for black emancipation, but emotionally, like most of his white contemporaries, he was for a long time unable to act in accordance with his conscience. But Lincoln was basically honest and willing to admit his confusions. He saw that the nation could not survive half slave and half free.
With all the beautiful promise that [Frederick] Douglass saw in the Emancipation Proclamation, he soon found that it left the Negro with only abstract freedom. Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads. It was like freeing a man who had been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discovering his innocence sending him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial compensation to atone for his long years of incarceration and to help him get a sound footing in society; sending him out with only the assertion: "Now you are free." What greater injustice could society perpetrate? All the moral voices of the universe, all the codes of sound jurisprudence, would rise up with condemnation at such an act. Yet this is exactly what America did to the Negro. In 1863 the Negro was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric. But in an agrarian economy he was given no land to make liberation concrete. After the war the government granted white settlers, without cost, millions of acres of land in the West, thus providing America's new white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But at the same time its oldest peasantry, the Negro, was denied everything but a legal status he could not use, could not consolidate, could not even defend. As Frederick Douglass came to say, "Emancipation granted the Negro freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time." The marvel is, as he once said, that Negroes are still alive.
In dealing with the ambivalence of white America, we must not overlook another form of racism that was relentlessly pursued on American shores: the physical extermination of the American Indian. The South American example of absorbing the indigenous Indian population was ignored in the United States, and systematic destruction of a whole people was undertaken. The common phrase, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," was virtually elevated to national policy. Thus the poisoning of the American mind was accomplished not only by acts of discrimination and exploitation but by the exaltation of murder as an expression of the courage and initiative of the pioneer. Just as Southern culture was made to appear noble by ignoring the cruelty of slavery, the conquest of the Indian was depicted as an example of bravery and progress.
Thus through two centuries a continuous indoctrination of Americans has separated people according to mythically superior and inferior qualities while a democratic spirit of equality was evoked as the national ideal. These concepts of racism, and this schizophrenic duality of conduct, remain deeply rooted in American thought today. This tendency of the nation to take one step forward on the question of racial justice and then to take a step backward is still the pattern.
The civil rights measures of the 1960s engraved solemn rights in the legal literature. But after writing piecemeal and incomplete legislation and proclaiming its historic importance in magnificent prose, the American Government left the Negro to make the unworkable work. Against entrenched segregationist state power, with almost total dependence economically on those they had to contend with, and without political experience, the impoverished Negro was expected to usher in an era of freedom and plenty. When the war against poverty came into being in 1964, it seemed to herald a new day of compassion. It was the bold assertion that the nation would no longer stand complacently by while millions of its citizens smothered in poverty in the midst of opulence. But it did not take long to discover that the government was only willing to appropriate such a limited budget that it could not launch a good skirmish against poverty, much less a full-scale war.
There is a tragic gulf between civil rights laws passed and civil rights laws implemented. There is a double standard in the enforcement of law and a double standard in the respect for particular laws. With all of her dazzling achievements and stupendous material strides, America has maintained its strange ambivalence on the question of racial injustice. The value in pulling racism out of its obscurity and stripping it of its rationalizations lies in the confidence that it can be changed. If America is to respond creatively to the challenge, many individuals, groups and agencies must rise above the hypocrisies of the past and begin to take an immediate and determined part in changing the face of their nation. As a first step on the journey home, the journey to full equality, we will have to engage in a radical reordering of national priorities.
Are we more concerned with the size, power and wealth of our society or with creating a more just society? The failure to pursue justice is not only a moral default. Without it social tensions will grow and the turbulence in the streets will persist despite disapproval or repressive action. Even more, a withered sense of justice in an expanding society leads to corruption of the lives of all Americans. All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.
Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums. On what scale of values is this a program of progress? In the wasteland of war, the expenditure of resources knows no restraints; here our abundance is fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered. The recently revealed misestimate of the war budget amounts to $10 billion for a single year. The error alone is more than five times the amount committed to antipoverty programs. If we reversed investments and gave the armed forces the antipoverty budget, the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust. The Washington Post has calculated that we spend $332,000 for each enemy we kill. It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives could transform if we were to cease killing. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.
A considerable part of the Negro's efforts of the past decades has been devoted, particularly in the South, to attaining a sense of dignity. For us, enduring the sacrifices of beatings, jailings and even death was acceptable merely to have access to public accommodations. To sit at a lunch counter or occupy the front seat of a bus had no effect on our material standard of living, but in removing a caste stigma it revolutionized our psychology and elevated the spiritual content of our being. Instinctively we struck out for dignity first because personal degradation as an inferior human being was even more keenly felt than material privation.
But dignity is also corroded by poverty no matter how poetically we invest the humble with simple graces and charm. No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society. The Negro is no longer ashamed that he is black -- he should never have permitted himself to accept the absurd concept that white is more virtuous than black, but he was crushed by the propaganda that superiority had a pale countenance. That day is fast coming to an end. However, in his search for human dignity he is handicapped by the stigma of poverty in a society whose measure of value revolves about money. If the society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach for all.
Meanwhile, any discussion of the problems of inequality is meaningless unless a time dimension is given to programs for their solution. It is disquieting to note that President Johnson in his message to Congress on the Demonstration Cities program stated, "If we can begin now the planning from which action will flow, the hopes of the twentieth century will become the realities of the twenty-first." On this timetable many Negroes not yet born and virtually all now alive will not experience equality. The virtue of patience will become a vice if it accepts so leisurely an approach to social change. Conflicts are unavoidable because a stage has been reached in which the reality of equality will require extensive adjustments in the way of life of some of the white majority. Many of our former supporters will fall by the wayside as the movement presses against financial privilege. Others will withdraw as long-established cultural privileges are threatened.
What is freedom? It is, first the capacity to deliberate or to weigh alternatives. "Shall I be a doctor or a lawyer?" "Shall I be a Democrat, Republican or Socialist?" "Shall I be a humanist or a theist?" Second, freedom expresses itself in decision. The word "decision," like the word "incision," involves the image of cutting. Incision means to cut in, decision means to cut off. When I make a decision I cut off alternatives and make a choice. The existentialists say we must choose, that we are choosing animals, and that if we do not choose, we sink into thinghood and the mass mind. A third expression of freedom is responsibility. This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decisions. No one else can respond for him. He alone must respond, for his acts are determined by the totality of his being.
The immorality of segregation is that it is a selfishly contrived system which cuts off one's capacity to deliberate, decide and respond. The absence of freedom imposes restraint on my deliberations as to what I shall do, where I shall live or the kind of task I shall pursue. I am robbed of the basic quality of manness. When I cannot choose what I shall do or where I shall live, it means in fact that someone or some system has already made these decisions for me, and I am reduced to an animal. Then the only resemblance I have to a man is in my motor responses and functions. I cannot adequately assume responsibility as a person because I have been made the victim of a decision in which I played no part. Nothing can be more diabolical than a deliberate attempt to destroy in any man his will to be a man and to withhold from him that something which constitutes his true essence. [11]
David Kendall lives in the state of Washington and is concerned about the future of our world.
Notes:
[1] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?". New York, NY: Beacon Press, pgs 80, 86, 99, 151. ISBN 0807005711
[2] Kendall, David. (April, 2009). "Dr. King Spanks Obama: Part 1". Oped News.
http://www.countercurrents.org/kendall240409.htm
[3] Douglass, James W. (March 15. 2000). "The King Assassination: After Three Decades, Another Verdict". Christian Century. http://www.precaution.org/lib/09/prn_king_
assassination_another_verdict.000315.htm
[4] Sheehan, Cindy. (January, 2009). "The Legacy of Dr. King". Workers Action.
http://www.workerscompass.org/mlk_sheehan.html
[5] Pilger, John. (April, 2009). "Obama's 100 Days: The Mad Men Did Well". World News Daily: Information Clearing House. http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22514.htm
[6] Chomsky, Noam; Carlos Peregrín Otero. (2003). "Chomsky on democracy & education". Routledge. pg 249, ISBN 0415926327.
[7] Kendall, David. (2009). "Natural Adversaries". Oped News.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Natural-
Adversaries-by-David-Kendall-090324-854.html
[8] Chandler, David. (2009). "Tour of the US Income Distribution: The L-Curve". David Chandler. http://www.lcurve.org/
[9] infoplease. (2009). "U.S. Voting Rights". infoplease.
http://www.infoplease.com/timelines/voting.html
[10] Wikipedia. (2009). "Right to vote: History of suffrage in the United States". Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_vote#History_
of_suffrage_in_the_United_States
[11] King, Dr. Martin Luther (1968). "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos Or Community?". New York, NY: Beacon Press, Excerpts from chapter 3. ISBN 0807005711
