We had a demonstration of inter-race solidarity with  the Black,
Hispanic, and Anglo/ White community showing up 35,000+  here in the
streets of San Antonio, Texas,  yesterday.     It would be great if
others sent in information about the activities in their cities.
The local and national press conspire to overup these numbers, while at
the same time they piously editorialize about the legacy of Martin
Luther King.    Below is the best commentary I came across,  about the
legacy of MLK.
...............................Tony Abdo...........

If only we would heed King's message
By Mark Weisbrot, 1/17/2000

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would surely
marvel at how far this country had drifted over the last three decades,
that America could gaze upon the vistas of a new millennium with no
vision of ending poverty in the world's richest nation.

How could it be that a nation at peace and with the Cold War 10 years
behind it still has no hope for America's poor? With federal budget
surpluses piling up as far as the eye can see, could it really be that
Congress has committed itself to cutting funds for nutrition, housing,
and education for the poor while increasing military spending and
squandering tens of billions of dollars on weapons systems designed to
fight an enemy that no longer exists?

Worse yet, our largest and most successful antipoverty program - Social
Security - has come under attack for no other reason than the greed of
Wall Street financiers looking to expand their operations into the
public sector.

As for the poor, they are expected to live through these improvements
vicariously through others' joyful accumulations in the soaring stock
market. It goes almost unnoticed that the majority of Americans still
have literally and absolutely no stake in these swelling asset values.

We are told that we should all be grateful for the long cyclical upswing
that has brought unemployment down to 4 percent. But Rev. King, too,
experienced a similar economic expansion with even lower unemployment.
And in sharp contrast to the last quarter century, during which most
wage earners have not shared in the fruits of economic growth, he lived
through a time in which these gains actually did trickle down.
But rather than simply celebrating the advances of economic growth and
technology (yes, there were rapid and futurologist-inspiring
technological changes in the pre-Internet era), King demanded ''the
total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.'' He called for the
government to guarantee employment and income well beyond the poverty
level.

Was King politically naive? Hardly. He was looking at the nation from
the point of view of its potential, and his proposals to eliminate
poverty were well within our economic means.
This is even more true today, as our income per person is more than one
and a half times greater.
King's vision of social and economic justice did not stop at the water's
edge. He called upon Americans to ''help their nation repent of her
modern economic imperialism.''

This economic imperialism is even more pervasive now, with Washington
controlling the destiny of most of the world's poor through the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. How King would have
shamed them for bleeding Africa as they do today, exacting debt payments
from the world's poorest countries that are 10 times as much relative to
income than was considered conscionable to take from Germany after World
War II.

In the last years of his life Martin Luther King spoke out with
increasing urgency against the Vietnam War, calling on young men to
resist the draft. He recounted the history of what he saw as a colonial
war, trying to imagine how the Vietnamese people must have seen their
''strange liberators.''

''They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of
their crops ... So far we have killed a million of them, mostly children
... What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just
as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the
concentration camps of Europe?''

In one of his most powerful speeches, he added: ''The politicians won't
tell you this; the press won't tell you this, but,'' he roared, ''God
told me to tell you the truth!''

And so he did, in oratory filled with passion and thunderous eloquence.
By speaking truth to power, at the same time that he led a movement for
racial and economic justice, he became the conscience of the world's
most powerful nation.

So let us honor King today as he deserves to be honored by telling the
truths that those who sit in the corridors of power do not want to hear,
in the hope that America may one day be able to find its conscience
again.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research and co-author of ''Social Security: The Phony Crisis.''

This story ran on page A13 of the Boston Globe on 1/17/2000.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.




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