Browsing PBH By Articles

Has America Betrayed The Legacy Of Martin Luther King?

“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell…”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King Memorial is a colossal block of granite, devoid of the emotion of the man it was meant to pay tribute. It’s hard to imagine how it could have been worse or how one of America’s most incandescent souls would have reacted to it. It’s big. There is that.

The last time Dr. King planned to return to the Washington Mall was as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, before his life was cut short on that shabby balcony at the Lorraine Motel. He was in Memphis in the spring of 1968 to support black sanitary public works employees as they demanded equal and fair pay.

Ironically, the MLK memorial was not built by union labor, it appears to have been built by what can only be called slave labor. As detailed by the Washington Post, workers were shipped over from China without pay to back up sculptor Lei Yixin as he chipped away at a giant chunk of rock from Greece.

I very much doubt that King would have minded the ethnicity of those workers. He wasn’t very big on patriotism as Edward Rothstein points out in his excellent critique of the memorial’s flaws. I do think that it’s safe to say that he would have objected quite strongly to the idea that those workers were being paid in “national pride” and cigarettes.

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The Terrorist Threat As A Means To An End

The Article: The Decade’s Biggest Scam by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

The Text: The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic “homeland security” projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of “9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret” to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that — which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all — is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: “undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.” The March, 2011, Harper’s Index expressed the point this way: “Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.” That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

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Thumbing Their Nose At The ‘Facts’

The Article: Republicans Against Science by Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

The Text: Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got peoples’ attention was what he said about climate change: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”

That’s a remarkable statement — or maybe the right adjective is “vile.”

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Propagating Islamophobia In America

The Article: New Report Identifies Organizational Nexus of Islamophobia by Jim Lobe at Antiwar.

The Text: A small group of inter-connected foundations, think tanks, pundits, and bloggers is behind the 10-year-old campaign to promote fear of Islam and Muslims in the U.S., according to a major investigative report released here Friday by the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The 130-page report, “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” identifies seven foundations that have quietly provided a total of more than 42 million dollars to key individuals and organizations that have spearheaded the nationwide effort between 2001 and 2009.

They include funders that have long been associated with the extreme right in the U.S., as well as several Jewish family foundations that have supported right-wing and settler groups in Israel.

The network also includes what the report calls “misinformation experts” – including Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, and Robert Spencer of Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) – who are often tapped by television news networks and right-wing radio talk shows to comment on Islam and the threat it allegedly poses to U.S. national security.

“Together, this core group of deeply intertwined individuals and organizations manufacture and exaggerate threats of ‘creeping Sharia’, Islamic domination of the West, and purported obligatory calls to violence against all non-Muslims by the Quran,” according to the report whose main author, Wajahat Ali, described the group as “the central nervous system of the Islamophobia network.”

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The Weird World Of Muammar Gaddafi

Rebel fighters in Libya made a surprising find after successfully taking over Muammar Gaddafi’s palace: a photo album dedicated to none other than Condoleezza Rice.

Yup, that’s right. Turns out the Libyan dictator was obsessed with the former Secretary of State. For more, check out MSNBC’s photoblog, In the ruins of Gadhafi’s lair, rebels find album filled with photos of his ‘darling’ Condoleezza Rice.