President Barack Obama\u2019s attempt to drape his administration in the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, and the 1963 March on Washington is a grotesque falsification of history.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Obama delivered remarks at the Lincoln Memorial as part of an official celebration of King\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, which was delivered fifty years ago from the same spot to a crowd estimated at 250,000.<\/p>\n
Yesterday\u2019s gathering in Washington recalls Tacitus\u2019s observation that in the Roman Empire\u2019s decline, \u201call things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.\u201d Even as Obama, former presidents Carter and Clinton, and the assembled epigones of the civil rights movement spoke, US warships in the eastern Mediterranean were preparing to rain down bombs on yet another impoverished Arab nation.<\/p>\n
The disgusting hypocrisy of Wednesday\u2019s gathering, epitomized in Obama\u2019s speech\u2013indeed, in his very presence at the event\u2013nearly defies description. King\u2019s power as an orator arose from his ability to articulate the social grievances of the oppressed. He and the organizers of the 1963 march, for all of their political limitations, spoke for a genuine mass movement that mobilized hundreds of thousands of workers and poor in the South and in the cities of the North. This movement was animated by ideals of democracy and equality.<\/p>\n
Obama represents the opposite. He is a creature of the state. He speaks for the military-intelligence apparatus and Wall Street. This was reflected in the emptiness, insincerity and affectation of his speech, which consisted of a litany of clich\u00c3\u00a9s: \u201cfrom every corner of our country,\u201d \u201cthe doors of opportunity,\u201d \u201creignite the embers of empathy,\u201d \u201cthe road will be long,\u201d etc. As usual, Obama evinced no regard for the intelligence of his audience.<\/p>\n
He praised the veterans of the civil rights movement for \u201cwillingly [going] to jail to protest unjust laws, their cells swelling with the sound of freedom songs.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Obama administration is seeking the extradition and prosecution of Edward Snowden for exposing the unconstitutional surveillance being carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA), persecuting Julian Assange for publishing revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and condemning Private Bradley Manning to spend the next 35 years of his life in prison in retribution for his fidelity to the principles proclaimed at the Nuremburg Tribunal after World War II\u2013that soldiers have a duty to defy illegal orders and oppose war crimes committed by their superiors.<\/p>\n
The very principle of civil disobedience that was central to the civil rights movement and praised by Obama on Wednesday is repudiated in practice by his administration, which insists, in the manner of all authoritarian regimes, that any violation of the law for whatever reason is tantamount to treason.<\/p>\n
King, were he alive and holding the same positions he did 45 years ago, would doubtless be targeted by Obama alongside Snowden and Manning. In fact, King was hounded by the FBI.<\/p>\n
He was considered a threat in part because he increasingly opposed American foreign policy, a fact judiciously skipped over by Obama. King called the US war in Vietnam \u201cone of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world,\u201d and one that had \u201ctorn up the Geneva Accord\u201d and \u201cstrengthened the military-industrial complex [and] the forces of reaction in our nation.\u201d He quite accurately called the US government \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
At one point in his speech Wednesday, Obama seemed to acknowledge the growth of social tensions in the US. \u201c[W]orking Americans of all races have seen their wages and incomes stagnate,\u201d he said. \u201cEven as corporate profits soar, even as the pay of a fortunate few explodes, inequality has steadily risen over the decades. Upward mobility has become harder. In too many communities across this country in cities and suburbs and rural hamlets, the shadow of poverty casts a pall over our youth, their lives a fortress of substandard schools and diminished prospects, inadequate health care and perennial violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obama spoke as though these processes had nothing to do with himself or his own actions. But everyone knows his White House has overseen the transfer of trillions of taxpayer dollars to the financial industry, while spearheading the gutting of workers\u2019 wages and savage cuts in jobs and social services. And while he bailed out General Motors, Chrysler and the Wall Street banks, he has lined up behind financial hatchet man Kevyn Orr\u2019s efforts to use the bankruptcy court to slash Detroit workers\u2019 pensions, privatize and gut city services, and sell off the artistic treasures in the Detroit Institute of Arts.<\/p>\n
What accounted for the social decline of the past 50 years outlined by Obama? In his remarks, the president blamed the people themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cLegitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior,\u201d he declared. \u201c[What] had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead,\u201d he continued, \u201cwas too often framed as a mere desire for government support\u2026as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
What Obama dared not raise was the real source of the social crisis\u2013the crisis and decline of American capitalism.<\/p>\n
King in his final years moved toward a broader conception of social equality, launching his \u201cPoor People\u2019s Campaign.\u201d As he did, he gravitated toward class questions and a critique of capitalism. Yet ultimately King and the civil rights movement found themselves in a blind alley. He could criticize capitalism, but he did not break from it. In a 1967 speech in which King criticized capitalism, he acknowledged having read Karl Marx but explicitly rejected socialism, saying that he favored \u201ca higher synthesis.\u201d What King had in mind was not revolution, but the reform of capitalism.<\/p>\n
The implications of this false perspective became increasingly clear after King\u2019s assassination, a tragic event rightly understood by workers and youth all over the world as the price he paid for his opposition to war and social oppression. Within a few years, the civil rights movement had lurched sharply to the right, embracing identity politics, affirmative action, and what Richard Nixon hailed as \u201cblack capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was bound up with the response of the American ruling class to the turbulent, crisis-ridden 1960s, when the mounting contradictions of American and world capitalism began to violently undermine the foundations of the post-World War II economic boom. The Democratic Party repudiated the social reform policies dating from Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal, masking its lurch to the right behind the promotion of racial and gender politics. The trade unions trailed behind, adamantly opposing a political break from the Democrats and an independent political movement of the working class.<\/p>\n
The ruling class cultivated the development of a privileged layer of African Americans in the corporations, the military, academia, and, above all, the Democratic Party. A new generation of self-promoters such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton utilized the symbols of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, including the figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., to integrate themselves into the political establishment and, above all, enrich themselves. They were joined by a parade of corrupt African American politicians, from Coleman Young to Cory Booker, who administered the cities in behalf of the banks and corporations and oversaw the further impoverishment of African American workers and the working class as a whole.<\/p>\n
Barrack Obama is the historical denouement of this process\u2013an individual whose personal background has nothing to do with the bitter struggle for equality of African American workers, a politician who champions war, police state methods and the destruction of the living standards of workers of all races.<\/p>\n