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At this time of year, I usually find myself in an emotional and mental torment. I love Martin Luther King, Jr. I don’t love what we have done to him. He has a secure place in my pantheon of heroes, next to folks like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, Patricia Hill Collins, and Sojourner Truth. Yet, I am always troubled by the narrow portrayal of King, often reflected in the repeated airing of a sound-bite from his “I Have A Dream Speech.” I am even more dismayed that, in nearly every year since his death, America has been at – or preparing for – war on his birthday. I also am saddened by the fact that I have not done everything that I could do to correct this. I have never confronted an elected official at some MLK Day gala and declared “Never invoke the man’s name until we have peace!” Nor have I gone to Washington on Inauguration Day and shouted that the incoming warmonger should stop jabbing Dr. King with his rattling saber. We’re all actors in this, I suppose.
I cannot trace the fullness of Dr. King within the confines of this blog. However, we can follow one particular thread across four decades. Cary Fraser, like other intellectuals, reminds us that the “celebrity” King we so often see feted on network and cable television is nothing like the historical King; the powerful, inspiring community organizer who used non-violent protest as a means of direct confrontation with the pillars of American power.
In a March 2008 op-ed piece in the Trinidad & Tobago Review, Fraser wrote about the then-envigorated Obama presidential campaign, placing it in the context of King’s call for a new type of political leadership. In the article, Fraser reflected upon King’s stance against the war in Vietnam and compared it to Obama’s rejection of the invasion of Iraq. Fraser quoted from King’s famous speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan, given about a year before his murder. In the speech “Beyond Vietnam,” King listed seven reasons for his opposition to the war. Fraser highlighted the very first:
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
A year after this speech, King died as he supported the efforts of workers to organize for better pay and working conditions. Some say King foretold his death in the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech of April 1, 1968. When I was a teenager, others suggested that King had foreseen the humbling of the United States in the Fall of Saigon and the Iranian Revolution. Perhaps, but in our day I am convinced is that Dr. King prophesied that the War on Terror is a tool of class warfare.
The Bush administration has taken the class warfare that quietly rages in the United States and accelerated it over the last eight years, extended it several thousand miles. Consider that Warren Buffet said – in response to the Bush tax cuts, among other things – that “[t]here’s class warfare all right…but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war and we’re winning.” If we start with Iraq, we see the terrifying prescience of Dr. King.
The Bush administration – through its colonial governor Paul Bremer – reformed Iraqi society to benefit foreign, mainly American, corporations. Recall that in the first year of the occupation, among other things, Bremer changed Iraqi law so that American firms could swallow up Iraqi businesses, rather than partner with them; Bremer exchanged Iraq’s existing corporate tax structure for a 15% “flat tax”; Bremer eliminated the Iraqi government’s preference for doing businesses with Iraqi companies; Bremer eliminated the regulation that prevented foreign ownership interests in Iraqi banks – now foreign banks can simply buy up Iraqi banks. Concurrently, the private contractors who took Iraqi reconstruction money hired Filipino and Nepalese workers to increase profits. All of this was done, by the way, without consulting the Iraqi people.
Of course, the haggling over the new “Iraqi oil law” and the recently signed Status of Forces Agreement fit into this deregulatory milieu. In addition, Bremer redesigned Iraqi trademark and copyright law and created a rule which allows foreign corporations the option of circumventing the Iraqi legal system and taking any disputes to international tribunals – kinda like the “extraterritoriality” the British “won” after the Opium Wars. You remember the Opium Wars, right? Well, that’s another story for another time but, in many ways, “extraterritoriality” was a hallmark of 19th and 20th century White Supremacy. Bremer’s radical reforms are a new-age version of that system, especially when juxtaposed with the Bush administration’s disdain for international law. More importantly, they reflect the destruction of the social safety net that the Iraqis had erected for themselves. We can only wonder which social services Iraqis will lose as their tax revenues diminish. We can only guess which schools, fire departments, or hospitals will be shuttered so that the government can “balance the budget.” We can be certain, however, that not many Iraqis will have the resources to pursue justice against foreign corporations if it means having to leave their country and fly to New York, London, or the Hague. And what of America?
The Bush administration’s piracy simply intensified the deregulatory fervor pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike over the past three decades. At the beginning of this decade, we witnessed Enron deliberately influence public utilities in California to shut down power grids to provoke an energy crisis from which they could profit. Of course, the hardest hit were the poor and working class residents of the state and neo-conservative commentators placed the blame on immigrants.
Recently, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author Linda Bilmes have estimated that the total cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq will, conservatively, reach $3 trillion. This figure alone might not convince you of the class war being fueled by the invasion but the stories Bilmes and Stiglitz recount certainly will. The book, entitled “The Three Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict,” details how Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon charged wounded soldiers for gear lost in combat and forced wounded soldiers who could not serve their full contractual term to pay back a pro-rata portion of their signing bonuses. Bilmes and Stiglitz also address the future costs of the Bush administration’s lack of support for disabled veterans who will become disabled workers, as well as the administrations’ flagrant use of “supplemental funding measures” and no-bid contracts. In critical ways, the War on Terror has been a huge ponzi scheme for which thousands of Americans – mostly poor and working class – have died. Across the nation, people are experiencing the worst economic recession in memory, budgets are being cut, social services eliminated, jobs lost. All the while, Bush, Cheney, and their political donors have Madoff (get it, “made off”) with billions as they try to re-write history and tell the world that they were only following their consciences.
Dr. King warned us that “[t]he Vietnam War is but a symptom of a far greater malady within the American spirit.” The continuation of the War on Terror is as much a slap in the face to King’s legacy as the fraud and deception surrounding his murder. It is worse than the time Ronald Reagan repeated the slander of King initiated by his conservative Christian contemporaries. As Reagan finished signing the legislation to create the King holiday, a reporter asked the President if he believed that Martin Luther King was a communist. Reagan slammed his pen down on his desk and said in a stern voice, “well I guess we’ll know in 75 years,” or words to that effect.
If we are to truly honor the man, then we must challenge the malady that he identified, even if it manifest itself in ways he could not have imagined. Dr. King taught us that “[t]he great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.” To honor the man, we should heed his elegy, think, and act. We can live accordingly or we can die as fools.
Tags: Bush, class war, Martin Luther King, Rumsfeld, Vietnam, War on Terror
george white, jr.
george white, jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at York College, CUNY. He is the author of the book Holding the Line: Race, Racism, and American Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 1953-1961 and the article “Little Wheel Blues: John Lee Hooker, the Eisenhower Administration and African Decolonization” in the French interdisciplinary journal Cercles.
I appreciated George White’s recitation of the measures that US Overseer Paul Bremer instituted to enable multinational corporations to have their way with Iraq and its natural resources. But in an article whose title references “class war,” I was disappointed at a glaring oversight.
When Viceroy Bremer reviewed the Iraqi legal code and dispensed with or modified most of it, he found one law he really liked, kept and rigorously enforced: the 1987 law instituted by Saddam Hussein that made it illegal for workers in public enterprises (like the Iraqi Oil Cos.) and the public sector to organize unions and attempt to bargain over the terms of their labor. Bremer passed that little gem on to the Interim Governing Authority, which passed it on to the newly elected Iraqi government. And the Maliki regime continues to enforce it to this day, notwithstanding a provision in the new Iraqi constitution that calls for the enactment of a basic labor law.
Iraq’s labor movement has continued to organize despite the fact they cannot do so legally and the government has frozen their bank accounts and arrested, imprisoned, tortured and in some cases assassinated their leaders.
With all the Bush administration’s blather about bringing democracy to Iraq, there was not one word about the right of workers under international law and ILO conventions to freely organize into unions of their choice and negotiate over the terms of their labor. There is not a single country anywhere in the world where there is no a free labor movement that can credibly claim to be a democracy. A free labor movement independent of government control is a cornerstone, if not precondition of any true democracy. But that fact and the principles underlying it escaped our president and his propagandists.
It should not, however, escape those in the academy who study and write about places like Iraq, Colombia, Egypt, Mexico . . . and the United States itself.
Michael Eisenscher
National Coordinator
U.S. Labor Against the War