The King Years Then and Now

        In 1968 when Martin Luther King came to Memphis three years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, his support of the Sanitation Workers’ strike signaled growing awareness of evidence that the key to racial justice would have to come from more income equality. Planning for poor people’s marches was already on the drawing boards of the NAACP and the SCLC.  Dr. King plunged into the Memphis strike to bring along his own inherently conservative church folk and local unions. The day after his assassination Coretta Scott King led 40,000 people on a silent march through Memphis streets. The Mayor finally folded, granting Sanitation Workers union recognition and wage gains, literally over Dr. King’s dead body.

        The road has been mostly down-hill since then. Fifteen years after Selma the economic heart of U. S. cities with the largest African American populations was destroyed by investment banking decisions to shift assets into the more profitable global economy.  African Americans and Latinos who had migrated North for the better factory jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago and L.A. found themselves  suddenly out of work. As U. S. Steel mills, machine tool and manufacturing industries were allowed to go without modernization, most closed forever. This began today’s repeating cycles of broken families, causing a new meandering migration. Skilled workers re-trained for jobs that did not appear; or moved their families repeatedly from one temporary job to another. Divorce often overtook them or they learned to scrape by in broken families.  The Wall Street banking system made billions from its global investments, but economic opportunities vanished for tens of millions of working people. Many of the same workers were further ravaged by more recent mortgage fraud caused by the same banks. .

         During the recent Great Recession starting in 2008, new policies to support public works and regulate control of wealth by corporate capitalism did not prevail as the TARP bailout moved forward and the Obama justice department declined  to prosecute the bankers who made millions homeless. 

         This is why President Obama’s oration last Sunday in Selma is more like a bouncing ground ball through the gap between 2^nd and 3^rd base. No one scored, no runners advanced.    

        Sadly neither the President’s hopeful oratory nor the speeches of candidates to replace him from either party reach as far as today’s growing gap between rich and poor. As democratic participation by people pre-occupied with just scraping by diminishes, the wealthiest one percent owns 80 percent of the nation’s wealth.  The President has preferred to appeal to the nation’s historic values rather than jailing the bankers.  

“What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this?” the President asked: “what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

        Words without meaning seem now more abundant in the President’ rhetoric. In our last blog we wrote about the rise of fascism in the early 1900s as a consequence of the vacuum left by religion’s loss of political power and moral credibility.  When the Great Depression of 1929 followed WW I some political leaders in the U. S. and abroad began to think that democracy was too unwieldy, too subject to corruption and petty leadership fights. The answer, they thought, would have to be militarily authoritarian governance that would permit decisive decision-making, disciplining the unruly masses, and controlling even their corporations and bankers. In Europe, despairing of either faith or a reliable democracy, Italian and German fascism and Russian Stalinism emerged to replace democratic dreams. In the U.S. after 1900 a progressive movement blossomed for decades but has now faded under the impact of global corporations.

         We appear to be at the fascist-style juncture once again, with the Republicans determined to abstain from democratic negotiation and compromise while the Democrats continue unwilling to sternly regulate banking in the public interest.  People are now in the streets being shot by Police and shooting back. Such chaos calls for credible moral leadership.  It can’t begin with Mrs. Clinton’s email files. More on this next week.