Break of Day

Last August, right-wing television host Glenn Beck made a bizarre attempt to hijack the spirit of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Freedom March with his own manipulative March on Washington.

Millions of Americans wrung their hands in despair as Beck and his colleagues from Fox News and the Tea Party stood on what was deemed sacred ground and dominated the political discourse, while our own leaders failed to respond to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression or to hold Wall Street accountable for causing it.

Then last fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived.

Although the media tried to ignore them and then proceeded to belittle them, Occupiers tapped into a deep-seated longing, capturing the public imagination with their 21st century take on King’s message: overcome despair, shame and division; organize and dare to imagine; and fight nonviolently for a better society for everyone.

We don’t need a séance to know that for Martin Luther King, the notion that our government would dare to characterize the economy as “in recovery” while black unemployment remains nearly twice the national average would be an outrage, not a footnote.

Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy has avoided electoral politics, preferring to focus, as King did, on empowering the powerless through direct action on the streets. And while some have criticized Occupy for not delivering a more focused message, the Occupiers have clearly picked up the spiritual aspect of King’s call to action, posing profound questions about the kind of society we have become and what kind of society we want to be.

Occupy’s debt to King's non-violence is direct: In Los Angeles, activists are integrating techniques developed in the antinuclear and anti-globalization movements with the techniques taught at free monthly classes with the Reverend James Lawson, one of the men who guided King and taught him about Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolence strategy.

During the last year of King’s life, he expanded the focus of his actions and goals beyond African-American civil rights to building an all-encompassing movement to challenge U.S. militarism and poverty. His last appearance in Memphis was in support of a strike by sanitation workers, opening his arms wide to embrace the cause of what Occupy has forever branded “the 99 percent.”

Beck’s travesty in Washington hit rock bottom for those of us who have been observing and decrying a system that seems designed to benefit those whose values preclude equality and fairness. The assault on the middle class in our country has been brutal. There was—during those dark August days—no loud voice, outside the rarified world of blogs and op-ed pages, crying out in moral outrage.

In September, a small band set up camp in Zuccotti Square. Since that time, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited those cries, on the streets and from a growing number of pulpits nationwide.

These are the spirits that endure and the ties that bind.

For me and for many others, embracing the Occupy movement posed a challenge. As a long-time journalist, I’ve had to find a new kind of voice. Like so many friends and colleagues who had lost faith that we would ever be heard, I’ve had to overcome fear and cynicism, learn to act more boldly, engage more creatively.

The memory of the Reverend Martin Luther King reminds us that whatever our obstacles, we need to link arms and learn to put one foot in front of the other, keeping our eyes on the prize, a prize that belongs to all of us.

King's Longest March

Everybody wants to claim a piece of the spirit of Martin Luther King in support of his or her cause. A Pentagon official even had the nerve to say King, who championed nonviolence, would have supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan.

That’s an especially dubious assertion given that the civil rights leader became an increasingly vocal opponent of the Vietnam war, in a move that cost him some support.

What would King make of the U.S. in 2011?

We don’t need to guess. We have the record of his words and deeds, especially in his final year.

As early as 1957, King was highlighting the disparities between rich and poor, In a speech celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Highlander Center, a grass-roots organizing center in Tennessee, he said: “I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

By 1963 King was moving his fight for strictly civil rights for minorities, like voting and equal access to public facilities, toward a broader struggle for economic rights for the disadvantaged and least powerful, recognizing that civil rights without economic rights couldn’t guarantee the opportunity and justice for all promised that was key to the great democratic experiment “What good is to it have the right to be able to sit at a lunch counter,” he asked, “if you can’t afford a hamburger.”

He gave the “I have a dream” speech that galvanized a nation at a march on Washington that demanded both jobs and freedom.

But it was in the last year of his life that his focus on economic injustice became most acute and profound.

He put in motion an effort to organize poor people, not just to focus on their plight, but also so they could fight for better jobs and decent housing for themselves.

King certainly would have celebrated the historic election of the nation’s first black president, and Obama began his presidency by evoking King’s spirit.

But the civil rights leader- he would have recognized that that election was not a resting place amid the economic suffering of so many.

He would not have abided the bailouts and tax cuts that allowed bankers and the wealthiest to prosper while those without access to the backrooms of power suffer. He would not have abided the widening gulf between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans, knowing the dire consequences of that division, not just for the poor and the middle class but also for the whole country.

He also would not have been surprised how tough it is to fight the entrenched power of corporations brought back from the dead by compliant politicians.

“It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job,” King said in April 1967 at Stanford University in a speech entitled `The Other America' that rings as sadly true today as it did more than 40 years ago, with its reference to "work-starved men searching for jobs that don't exist".

“It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions," King said at Stanford. "It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.”

Tomorrow: King in Memphis

Quotable: Sen. Ted Kaufman

"After a crisis of this magnitude, it amazes me that some of our reform proposals effectively maintain the status quo in so many critical areas, whether it is allowing multi-trillion-dollar financial conglomerates that house traditional banking and speculative activities to continue to exist and pose threats to our financial system, permitting banks to continue to determine their own capital standards, or allowing a significant portion of the derivatives market to remain opaque and lightly regulated."

Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Delaware, March 11, 2010

Back to the Future of Reform with Sen. Chris Dodd

Dodd moves to scale back Consumer Financial Protection Agency plan

In an attempt to lure the Republican votes needed to get a sweeping overhaul through the Senate, the Banking Committee chief is circulating a plan for a less powerful Bureau of Financial Protection.

-- Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2010

Dodd Proposes Financial Protection Committee Housed in Treasury Department

In new attempt to lure the Republican and Democrat votes needed to get semi-sweeping overhaul through Senate, the Banking Committee chief is circulating a plan to create a Financial Protection Committee inside the U.S. Treasury.

-- Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2010

Dodd Proposes Professor of Financial Protection at University of Connecticut

In renewed attempt to lure the Republican and Democrat votes needed to get modest financial fixes through Senate, the Banking Committee chief is circulating a plan to give the University of Connecticut $150,000 to hire a professor to teach the public about financial protection.

-- Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2010

Dodd Proposes Dial 1-900-4Protection Line

In a leisurely attempt to lure the Republican and Democrat votes needed to get itsy-bitsy, not too scary reform bill through Senate, the Banking Committee chief is circulating a plan to set up a 900 number to be answered on weekends by volunteers from credit card customer service departments. Costs of the program will be defrayed by charge of 99 cents per call.

-- Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2010

Dodd Proposes Facebook Financial Protection Page

In further attempt to lure the Republican and Democrat votes needed to get any kind of friggin’ bill through Senate, the soon to retire to the financial industry Banking Committee chief is circulating a plan to create a Facebook page where consumers can share financial protection ideas with each other.

-- Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2010

Dodd Proposes Wall Street Protect Consumers

Fuhghettaboutit.

-- Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2010

Getting a Haircut and a Hotdog

Lawmakers are always looking for a fig leaf when it comes to presiding over a massive public bailout of their friends on Wall Street. So, for example, when Treasury Secretary Geithner appeared on Capitol Hill last March to explain why AIG got one hundred cents on the dollar, which it promptly turned around and handed over to Goldman Sachs and its other Wall Street partners, Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus wanted to know, “Was there any discussion over a haircut – [the Wall Street Banks] taking 95% or 90% as full payment?”

Five or ten cents on the dollar – that’s what Congressman Bachus and his colleagues on Capitol Hill think is a sufficient penalty for having hopped into bed with AIG? 

The real story behind "make him do it"

By now it’s a familiar story: when the legendary labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph met with FDR before World War II to get the president to take action against discrimination, the president boomed back: “I agree with you, now go out and make me do it.”

Lots of people have been retelling the story as a call to action, comparing Obama to the wise, liberal Roosevelt. It urges supporters of everything from Middle East peace to health care and financial reform to keep the pressure on in order to get President Obama to do what he essentially wants to do, but cannot do—on his own because he’s being forced into unpalatable compromises by political pressures.