Why Martin Luther King Day Should Matter

By Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Originally published at TomDispatch.

2020 will go down as the deadliest year in American history, significantly due to the devastation delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, count in nearly two trillion dollars in damage from climate events (many caused by, or heightened by, intensifying global warming), a surge of incidents of police violence inflicted on Black and Native peoples, and millions more Americans joining the ranks of the poor even as small numbers of billionaires soared ever further into the financial heavens. And it’s already obvious that 2021 is likely to prove another harrowing year.

In the first weeks of January alone, Covid-19 deaths have risen to unprecedented levels; record turnout elected Georgia’s first Black and Jewish Senators in a runoff where race-baiting, red-baiting, and voter suppression were still alive and well; and a racist, white nationalist mob swarmed the Capitol emboldened by the president, as well as senators, representatives, and other officials, in an attempt to subvert and possibly take down our democratic system. The January 6th attack on that building was by no means a singular event (in a country where local officials have in recent years been similarly threatened). It did, however, highlight dramatically the growing menace of illiberal and anti-democratic forces building in power. And one thing is guaranteed: its impact will hit the poor and people of color most strikingly. Social media and news reports suggest that, with an emboldened white supremacist movement on the rise, more such attacks are being planned.

Many have claimed that those rioters (and the president’s infamous “base” more generally) were all, in essence, poor, working-class white people. In reality, however, among those who have led such racist attacks are business leaders, executives, and multimillionaires. As author Sarah Smash writes, “’Poor uneducated whites’ are neither the base/majority nor the explanation for Trumpism: stories now abound of middle-class and even affluent white insurrectionists leading and joining the hateful charge at the U.S. Capitol.”

Indeed, it would be better to take a more careful look at the rich and powerful, as the storming of the Capitol on January 6th once again exposes the Make America Great Again movement for the sort of fake populism that has, in these years, served elites all too “richly.” And the more we learn about that coordinated astroturf assault, the more the dark money that lay behind its origins all these years comes to light.

Questions Must Be Raised

Eleven months into the pandemic, we are living through the most unequal recession in modern American history. For the poor and precarious, this last year was a nightmare that dwarfed the 2007-2008 recession. Between March and October, nearly 67 million people lost work. This month alone about 20 million of them are collecting unemployment. By the end of 2020, one in five adults with children reported that, at times, they didn’t have enough to eat, while one in five renters were behind on their payments and faced the threat of eviction during the winter months of a still rampant virus.

At the same time, the wealth of America’s 651 billionaires increased by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of the year, he was joined by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk — and just last week Elon Musk passed Bezos as the richest person in the world.

A look at the wealthiest of wealthy Americans reveals a cross-section of industry — from the leaders of tech companies like Amazon and Facebook to the top executives of financial institutions like Berkshire Hathaway and Quicken Loans to those heading retail giants like Walmart and Nike, all of which collectively employ millions of workers. At Amazon, where the median pay is about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made in the last pandemic year to his own endangered workers and he would still have had well more than $100 billion left.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness put it this way:

“Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands. As tens of millions of Americans suffer from the health and economic ravages of this pandemic, a few hundred billionaires add to their massive fortunes. Their profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major Covid relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches.”

This last point is especially damning since the first and largest Covid-19 relief bill, the CARES Act, handed out billions of dollars worth of benefits to the upper-middle-class, the rich, and corporations. Most of us will only remember the $1,200 checks that went to some of those in need, but the bill also included provisions that favored the already well-off, including higher corporate interest deductions, flexible corporate loss rules, increased charitable tax deductions, and big tax breaks for the super-rich. Other parts of the CARES Act like the Paycheck Protection Program, as well as significant allocations to universities and hospitals, gave generously to large corporations and the wealthiest of institutions.

Direct payments and other measures in that bill did help many everyday people for a short period of time and yet Senate Republicans stonewalled long after those benefits had expired. When they finally relented in December, Mitch McConnell, knowing full well all that he had secured for the rich in the spring, craftily shot down proposed $2,000 checks for individuals as “socialism for the rich,” even though they would have disproportionately benefited low-and-middle-income Americans. Now, as the Biden transition team lays the groundwork for another major relief bill, conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already threatened that he would “absolutely not” vote for such $2,000 checks.

Of course, the acceleration of inequality and tepid policy solutions to poverty are hardly unique to the United States. This year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded a 31% increase in wealth among the 500 richest people in the world, the largest single-year gain in the list’s history. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme projected that the long-term effects of Covid-19 could force 207 million more people across the globe into extreme poverty. That, in turn, would bring the official U.N. count of those making less than two dollars a day to more than a billion, or a little less than one-seventh of the world’s population — and, mind you, that’s at the onset of a decade that promises escalating economic dislocation, mass migration, and climate crisis.

A World of Superfluous Wealth and Deadening Poverty

This week, President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn into office and inherit a crisis that demands bold action. He has already said that on day one he will commit his administration to confronting the pandemic, the recession, systemic racism, and climate change. Four months ago, during an event with the Poor People’s Campaign, he also told an audience of more than a million people that “together we can carry on Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which is based on a simple, moral truth: that we’re all created in the image of God and everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.” He concluded by promising that “ending poverty will not just be an aspiration, it will be a theory of change to build a new economy that includes everyone.”

For this to be possible, however, the Biden administration will need to reject the supremacy of austerity and the ideology of scarcity. It will instead have to invest in an economy that guarantees health care, housing, food, water, and decent work for all its citizens. This will, of course, require imagining the sort of restructuring of our society that would, no doubt, be the work of a generation or more. But it could at least begin with an honest accounting of the actual abundance so unequally hoarded in the bank accounts, stock, and real estate holdings of this country’s richest people and the coffers of the Pentagon and the industrial complex that engulfs it, followed naturally by a plan to share it all so much more fairly.

On the anniversary of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (who, had he not been assassinated, would have been 92 years old this January 15th), it is only fitting to share these still timely and prophetic words of his:

“God has left enough (and to spare) in this world for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate superfluous wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. And somehow, I believe that God made it all… I believe firmly that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. I don’t think it belongs to Mr. Rockefeller. I don’t think it belongs to Mr. Ford. I think the earth is the Lord’s, and since we didn’t make these things by ourselves, we must share them with each other. And I think this is the only way we are going to solve the basic problems and the restructuring of our society which I think is so desperately needed.”

Exchange Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos for Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Ford, and King’s words couldn’t be more timely, could they?

Honoring Dr. King

After all, every January, students, workers, and community members sign up for service projects to celebrate King’s birthday. In fact, MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service, when people paint schools, clean up trash, serve lunch to the hungry, and so much more. Over the last few decades, the spirit of volunteerism has become inextricably linked in the American imagination to King’s life and this year will be no exception. Today, amid unprecedented social, political, economic, and health upheaval, and the need to mask and social distance, even President-elect Biden’s inaugural committee is organizing a day of service.

In October 1983, as Congress considered the creation of MLK Day, Meldrim Thompson, Jr., the former Republican governor of New Hampshire, privately pleaded with President Ronald Reagan to veto any such legislation, calling Dr. King a “man of immoral character” with “well established” communist connections. Reagan (in what today would be true Trumpian fashion) replied, “On the national holiday you mentioned, I have the reservations you have, but here the perception of too many people is based on an image, not reality. Indeed, to them, the perception is reality.”

Reagan’s noxious remarks remind us that Dr. King was once considered a profound threat to the established order. The reality of Dr. King’s radical life has over time been almost unrecognizably smoothed over into an image that, so many years later, even Reagan, even Trump, might applaud. By casting Dr. King as an apolitical champion of charity, however, Americans have whitewashed not just his legacy, but that of the Black freedom struggle he helped lead, which broke Jim Crow, thanks to the most militant kinds of organizing.

Through a wicked transmutation of history, those with the most money and power in society are now allowed to use his name as a bulwark against the collective action of poor and dispossessed people, propping themselves up instead. Today, with carefully excerpted texts like “everyone can be great, because everyone can serve” as proof, King’s words are all too often manipulated to sanctify a truly superficial response to the burning crises of systemic racism, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and so much more. Yet even a cursory glance at the historical record should remind us all that King represented an incendiary reality in terms of the America of his time (and, sadly, of ours, too) and that there was nothing corporate-friendly about his image.

Fifty-three years ago, in his sermon “Where Do We Go from Here,” he spoke clearly to the question of corporate service, charity, and the kind of truth-telling action he had committed his life to:

“We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’ These are the words that must be said.”

On the anniversary of his birth, may others keep asking such questions and remind us, as the Biden era begins, that the Earth does not belong to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or the white supremacists who laid siege to the U.S. Capitol. The nation must have the moral courage to carry on the work of Reverend King. After all, the best hope of successfully navigating the crises of 2021 and beyond must involve King’s dream of building a multi-racial fusion movement to reconstruct society from the bottom up.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

17 comments

  1. BillS

    Unfortunately, M. L. King’s “Three Evils of Society” speech is as pertinent today as it was 54 years ago.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sT9Hjh0cHM

    He describes such ugliness in his characteristically beautiful language. This speech condemning an oligarchy that already existed then seems to have got lost over the years.

  2. Alex Cox

    Excellent article. Not so sure about the digression on volunteering, though. Dr King wasn’t looking for band-aid fixes. At the end of his life he was calling for systematic social change and an end to the Pentagon’s war machine.

    “Either we will learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”

  3. John Emerson

    I suspect that the surge in police violence is a function of the availability of cameras on almost every phone. Police violence became a huge issue because evidence of it became widely available.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      Which is why simply outright-banning social media would drive police terrorism and murderism back under the Cloak of Invisibility out from under which social media and the video cell phone have ripped it.

      Surely there can be a way to exterminate Facebook while leaving some beneficial social media still standing.

  4. LowellHighlander

    Regarding Ms. Theoharis’ statement here: “Many have claimed that those rioters (and the president’s infamous “base” more generally) were all, in essence, poor, working-class white people. In reality, however, among those who have led such racist attacks are business leaders, executives, and multimillionaires,” let me point readers to a great book I read a few years ago, The Plot to Seize the White House, by Jules Archer. The coup, organized and financed by plutocrats of that time, was to use General Smedley Butler to convince former Marines, soldiers, and sailors to overthrow FDR because the President, to finance the New Deal, was effectively taking the dollar off the gold standard. Of course, the coup’s plotters would remain in the shadows while former servicemen would once again risk their lives for the plutocrats such as Wall Street banksters.

  5. Carolinian

    a multi-racial fusion movement to reconstruct society from the bottom up.

    Is that what’s on offer from the upcoming Biden administration? Or is it about dividing the races via critical race theory and an assertion–as the author does here–that anyone opposed to one faction of our duopoly is racist? Here’s suggesting that King’s goals–inclusion not division–were not at all the same as the goals of the current establishment left and I wonder what King really would have thought of Barack Obama. The original civil rights movement goal of integration was correct and here in the South, where it was court mandated, I’d say it has made a big difference in race relations from when I was young. The long ago American goal of the “melting pot” may have wanted everyone to melt into a standard WASPy model, and definitely at the time didn’t include blacks, but the unity goal was correct if we are ever going to get anywhere. A new Civil War only benefits the powerful. Biden is threatening one with his “domestic terrorism” talk. We’ll soon know whether he really means it.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      I noticed that last paragraph too. It appears to call for TAR United ( Trash of All Races United). Which is exactly opposite to Critical Racist Wokeness.

      Which is the whole point of Critical Racist Wokeness. To divide and destroy every effort to unite people as coalition partners by dividing them into Special Victims and Worshipful Allies.

      1. JBird4049

        This is only akin to every effort of the ruling elites in America to maintain their own privilege; four centuries worth, which works most times, and when it doesn’t you get actions like the Wilmington, North Carolina coup. That Wokeness is gaining strength at the same time as a resurgent economic Left and is also being used to replace the previous social Left including liberalism (not neoliberalism) is not happenstance. The entire left is being weakened, as well as threaten with destruction and impotence (again) by this evil ideology.

  6. Synoia

    Many have claimed that those rioters (and the president’s infamous “base” more generally) were all, in essence, poor, working-class white people. In reality, however, among those who have led such racist attacks are business leaders, executives, and multimillionaires.

    That is very true. Any coup or uprising needs the managerial class to strategize, organize and direct. That is it needs management or it just a mob of people easily flattened.

    1. Yves Smith

      I know you are trying to be provocative. The Populist Movement didn’t have any managerial class minders but it did have leaders/proselytizers.

  7. hdude

    Change MLK day to November to become Martin Luther King Jr Voting Rights Day, also to be known as Election Day. I argue that the date we honor Martin Luther King Jr need not be set to coincide closely with his birthday in January. This change would strongly bind Voting and Martin Luther King Jr together.

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