Know your BFEE: Social Security is a Side Show while Banksters Walk and You Pick Up the Tab

[Octafish]

3. What Dr. King was going to do: March and Camp Out on the National Mall. EVERYBODY.

Just before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was organizing something that must've scared the heck out of the Have-Mores, the Poor People's Campaign:

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign

ZNet Commentary
January 18, 2005
By Stephen Bezruchka

We all know about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's. civil rights work and his famous I have a dream speech delivered in Washington in 1963 because of the power of the media to shape what we think. I want to discuss what the mainstream media doesn't cover on Dr. King, his thinking and action in the last few years of his life.

Consider what Reverend King was working on at the time he was assassinated in Memphis in April 4 1968. The United States of America, was at that time committing atrocities in Vietnam similar to those we are doing in Iraq today. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out a year before his death in his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church in New York. He called the US "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." The Enron's Bechtel's and Haliburton's of that era were not pleased by his efforts. Public opposition could end the free-flowing profits they had enjoyed. Time magazine called his speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Dr. King saw that economic segregation was not limited to skin color. The people going off to fight in Vietnam were poor people, whether they were poor blacks or whites. Those of greater means found ways of avoiding service. The administration had declared a war on poverty, but like our never ending war on terrorism, it eventually became a war on the poor. To King our invasion of Vietnam was a war against the poor. He felt Congress demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness." Sound familiar? To Martin Luther King Jr. the increasing gap between rich and poor at that time was the key battle. He formulated the Poor People's Campaign to culminate in an encampment of 500,000 of the nation's poorest and most alienated citizens who were to erect a tent city near the Washington Memorial in DC in the spring of 1968. They would then lobby their elected officials for legislation to oppose the war on the poor and draft an economic bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

How would the rich and powerful react when faced with the possibility of 500,000 people camping in DC to protest the social and economic injustices that so many Americans were exposed to then? King, a man recognized around the world, and honored with a Nobel Prize now was turning his attention toward poverty. If he were unknown, he could be deemed a terrorist threat to national security and quietly banished to Guantanamo.

With half a million poor people camped on the Mall in DC, the other millions of poor people would act in solidarity, all around the country and the world. To restrain them, the rulers would have to mobilize a large army, but that would be difficult as most troops were over in Vietnam. Other tactics were necessary.

CONTINUED...

http://dazcomment.blogspot.com/2005/01/martin-luther-king-jrs-poor-peoples.html

Not talking vigilante justice, talking about People Power -- what caused the USSR to finally collapse.