“Brother Martin would not be invited to the very march in his name" [View all]

[HomerRamone]

http://www.popularresistance.org/popular-resistance-newsletter-ironies-push-resistance-forward/

One of the strange ironies of the upcoming week is the events around the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. The event has been turned into a Democratic Party pep rally with people like Representatives Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi invited to speak. The irony is, as Cornell West says, “Brother Martin would not be invited to the very march in his name, because he would talk about drones. He’d talk about Wall Street criminality. He would talk about working class being pushed to the margins as profits went up for corporate executives in their compensation.”

As Ajamu Baraka writes: “Obama is the living negation of everything, from his domestic to foreign policy, that Dr. King and the movement stood for in 1963.” The president will be speaking on the anniversary of the event despite being at odds with what Dr. King worked for. Baraka adds, the rally “reduces the range of acceptable discourse related to the plight of African Americans to reforms within the existing order.” An alternative to the pep rally will be held Friday night beginning at 8 PM at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC and ending at the MLK memorial.

Dr. King, who was a victim of government surveillance, certainly would be on the opposite side of President Obama when it came to the NSA spying. This week we learned there are no real checks on NSA spying.

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Manning’s actions were obviously moral and patriotic, but will President Barack Obama do the moral and just thing and pardon Manning? History will pardon Manning, and when it does, what will that do to the reputation of Obama? There is another potential irony of history, the law breaker, convicted felon will be the moral actor in this drama, while the president, a constitutional lawyer, so far, has not.