Tuesday, January 22, 2019
What Activists Today Can Learn From MLK’s Bold Anti-War Stance
JAN 20, 2019
In the year leading up to his
assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. became a prominent member of the movement
against the Vietnam War. His
April 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” was so
bold that it was condemned by 168
major newspapers and ended his working relationship with President
Lyndon B. Johnson.
He could not have known the
extent of the atrocities committed in the conflict. Weeks before the civil
rights leader’s death, American soldiers killed hundreds of civilians at My Lai
in what is now
thought to be just one of many massacres during the war. King, facing
public pressure to support the war, set an example for progressives by doing
just the opposite.
“The March on Washington was a
powerful speech,” said Georgia congressman and civil rights activist John
Lewis. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New
York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.
I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”
After his Beyond Vietnam
speech, King and Robert Scheer, now Truthdig’s editor in chief, spoke at a
press conference together about the anti-war movement’s Vietnam Summer. The
plan, according
to The Harvard Crimson, had three steps: canvassing door to door, forming
discussion groups to learn more about the war, and then carrying out political
actions such as “pressing congressmen to hold open hearings on the war in the
community or petitioning to place a statement opposing the war on the ballot in
local elections.”
Today, King’s powerful
anti-war legacy endures. At Time
magazine, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen endorsed King’s “ever expanding moral
solidarity” and argued that the most radical part of King’s Beyond Vietnam
speech was the idea that moral conviction should not be limited by race, class
or nationality. That solidarity should even extend to the supposed enemy.
Nguyen wrote:
In his speech, which he
delivered exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King foresaw
how the war implied something larger about the nation. It was, he said, “but a
symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore
this sobering reality … we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen
concerned’ committees for the next generation … unless there is a significant
and profound change in American life.”
King’s prophecy connects the
war in Vietnam with our forever wars today, spread across multiple countries
and continents, waged without end from global military bases numbering around
800. Some of the strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that
the American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass
bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of gruesome images
from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence of soldiers.
Nguyen also told
Scheer that the Vietnam War, as well as the U.S. military presence in
current-day Cambodia and Laos, finally shattered illusions about the purpose of
American wars: “[All] of the typical set of patterns and beliefs that Americans
have always used, finally started to fall apart, started to—the contradictions
within them started to be exhibited,” he said.
King’s unwavering perspective
amid backlash is inspiration for New York Times opinion columnist Michelle
Alexander’s perspective on another pressing human rights
issue—Palestine. Finding parallels in an incredibly divisive topic in the U.S.
today, Alexander argued that King’s ideas teach activists to vocally support
the Palestinian people and question U.S. military funding to Israel:
[Opposing the Vietnam War] was
a lonely, moral stance. And it cost him. But it set an example of what is
required of us if we are to honor our deepest values in times of crisis, even
when silence would better serve our personal interests or the communities and
causes we hold most dear. It’s what I think about when I go over the excuses
and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral
challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.
She continued:
Reading King’s speech at
Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his
teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human
rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity
of the issues. King argued, when speaking of Vietnam, that even “when the
issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful
conflict,” we must not be mesmerized by uncertainty. “We must speak with all
the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
The Green New Deal is happening in China
from Dean Baker
One of the Trump
administration’s talking points about global warming is that we’re reducing
greenhouse gas emissions, while the countries that remain in the Paris accord
are not. Well, the first part of this story is clearly not true, as data for
2018 show
a large rise in emissions for the United States. The second part is
also not very accurate, as most other countries are taking large steps to
reduce emissions.
At the top of the list is
China. The country has undertaken a massive push to convert to electric powered
vehicles and clean energy sources.
China’s progress in this
effort is truly extraordinary. In the case of electric cars, it has used a
carrot-and-stick approach where it offers consumers large subsidies for buying
electric cars while also requiring manufacturers to meet quotas for electric
car production as a percent of their total fleet of cars. It has also invested
in the necessary infrastructure, ensuring that there are a large number of
charging stations widely dispersed across the country so that drivers don’t
have to worry about being unable to recharge their cars.
The result has been a massive
increase in the sale of electric cars. Electric car sales are
projected to be 1.1 million this year, almost equal to sales in the
rest of the world combined. The country expects sales to continue to rise
rapidly, with annual sales hitting 11.5 million in 2030. By comparison,
electric car sales are expected to be just 480,000 in the United States this
year, less than half the number in China.
There is a similar story with
solar and wind energy. China added more
solar capacity last year than the rest of the world combined. In 2018 it
already surpassed the
goal it had set for 2020. It is now looking to double its capacity over the
next two years.
China also has almost as much wind
power capacity as the rest of the world combined. Its capacity is more than
three times as great as in the United States. However, even with the
extraordinary growth in clean energy, wind and solar together still account for less than 20 percent
of China’s generation capacity and less than half the amount of electricity
produced by burning coal.
Nonetheless, China’s enormous
progress in promoting electric cars and clean energy should tell us a great
deal about the potential in these areas in the United States. While China’s
economy has grown rapidly over the last four decades, on a per person basis its
income is still less than one-third that of the United States.
This means that a relatively
poor country was able to make massive gains in reducing greenhouse gas
emissions compared with its baseline growth path. The focus on electric cars
and clean energy also did not impair the country’s growth in any obvious way.
Over the last decade, China’s
GDP growth has averaged
7.9 percent annually. Perhaps there is a story where China’s economy would
have grown even more rapidly without the subsidies and other measures to
promote green growth, but obviously, these measures could not have been very
serious impediments if the country could still sustain one of the fastest
growth stretches the world has ever seen.
If China could make such
enormous progress in a short period of time, surely the United States could
make comparable gains with the resources at its disposal. This doesn’t mean
that the necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will be costless:
People will have to change lifestyles. This means doing without SUVs
and eating much less meat. But China’s success is an impressive example.
This brings up another issue
directly related to Donald Trump’s trade war with China. One of the biggest
complaints that Trump has is that China is “stealing” our technology. Most
media commentators have widely endorsed this complaint.
China already spends almost as
much as the United States on research and development. With a much
more rapidly growing economy, China is virtually certain to pass the United
States in research and development spending in the very near future, if it has
not already done so.
Rather than spending so much
effort worrying about what China is taking from us, we should be thinking about
what we can get from China, especially in the area of green technologies where
it has made such enormous progress. Rather than looking to lock up our
technologies to maximize the profits US corporations get from their patent and
copyright monopolies; a modern trade deal would look to maximize the flow of
technology across national borders.
That would be the focus of a
trade deal if we were concerned about economic prosperity and the future of the
planet. Unfortunately, that is not likely to be the agenda of the people
involved in trade negotiations.
World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam
Charity calls for 1% wealth
tax, saying it would raise enough to educate every child not in school
The growing concentration of
the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest
billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the
poorest half of the planet’s population.
In an annual wealth check
released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the
development charity Oxfam said
2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer.
It said the widening gap was
hindering the fight against poverty, adding that a 1% wealth tax would raise an
estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year – enough to educate every child not in school
and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths.
Oxfam said the wealth of more
than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or
$2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted
with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.
As a result, the report
concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s
population fell
from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.
Among the findings of the
report were:
In the 10 years since the
financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.
Between 2017 and 2018 a new
billionaire was created every two days.
The
world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune
increase to $112bn. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health
budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.
The poorest 10% of Britons are
paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%)
once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.
Oxfam’s director of campaigns
and policy, Matthew Spencer, said: “The massive fall in the number of people
living in extreme poverty is one of the greatest achievements of the past
quarter of a century but rising inequality is jeopardising further
progress.
“The way our economies are
organised means wealth is increasingly and unfairly concentrated among a
privileged few while millions of people are barely subsisting. Women are dying
for lack of decent maternity care and children are being denied an education
that could be their route out of poverty. No one should be condemned to an
earlier grave or a life of illiteracy simply because they were born poor.
“It doesn’t have to be this
way – there is enough wealth in the world to provide everyone with a fair
chance in life. Governments should act to ensure that taxes raised from wealth
and businesses paying their fair share are used to fund free, good-quality
public services that can save and transform people’s lives.”
The report said many
governments were making inequality worse by failing to invest enough in public
services. It noted that about 10,000 people per day die for lack of healthcare
and there were 262 million children not in school, often because their parents
were unable to afford the fees, uniforms or textbooks.
Oxfam said governments needed
to do more to fund high-quality, universal public services through tackling tax
dodging and ensuring fairer taxation, including on corporations and the richest
individuals’ wealth, which it said were often undertaxed.
A global wealth tax has been
called for by the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has said action is
needed to arrest the trend in inequality.
The World Inequality Report 2018 –
co-authored by Piketty – showed that between 1980 and 2016 the poorest 50% of
humanity only captured 12 cents in every dollar of global income growth. By
contrast, the top 1% captured 27 cents of every dollar.
Oxfam said that in addition to
tackling inequality at home, developed nations currently failing to meet their
overseas aid commitments could raise the missing billions needed to tackle
extreme poverty in the poorest countries by increasing taxes on extreme wealth.
China’s rapid growth over the
past four decades has been responsible
for much of the decline in extreme poverty but Oxfam said World Bank
data showed the rate of poverty reduction had halved since 2013. In sub-Saharan
Africa, extreme poverty was on the increase.
Oxfam said its methodology for
assessing the gap between rich and poor was based on global wealth distribution
data provided by the Credit Suisse global wealth data book, covering the period
from June 2017 to June 2018. The wealth of billionaires was calculated using
the annual Forbes billionaires list published in March 2018.
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