What’s Wrong Today:

Yesterday, we wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision in Town of Greece, NY vs. Galloway. Since then, Interwebs have been ablaze with comments both supporting and hating the decision.

Here for your review are three letters to the editor in today’s NYT in response to their front page article on the decision:

To the Editor:

Politick in public, pray in silence; either way, say whatever you want.

ERNEST F. IMHOFF
Baltimore, May 6, 2014

To the Editor:

It always seems that the very same people (and justices) who believe that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct have no trouble meddling with the First. I have no doubt that if our country’s founders could see the unending string of tragedies resulting from a dogmatic interpretation of the Second Amendment and the repeated trashing of the First, they would make some changes to the Bill of Rights.

The Second Amendment would be dumped and replaced with the following: “Please reread the First Amendment!”

BOB ROSENBLUTH
Lincolndale, N.Y., May 6, 2014

 

And below is the Wrongologist’s favorite. Emphasis is by the Wrongologist:

To the Editor:

As recognized in the Constitution, the proper exercise of government does not require ties to religious practice. Nor is there a need to establish a certain tone before a town government meeting other than to call the meeting to order and to get down to business. Why should an American have to listen to a government-sponsored prayer before taking up issues such as zoning and other town laws and regulations?

When the Supreme Court defers to allowing a prayer to open town meetings, the court itself is in violation of its constitutional duty to protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans. If we have to pray, let’s pray that doesn’t happen again.

BRUCE NEUMAN
Sag Harbor, N.Y., May 6, 2014

Amen, brother Bruce!

What’s
Wrong Today:

From Ben
Casselman at 538:
(brackets by the Wrongologist)

Among all
16- to 24-year-olds, college enrollment experienced its biggest decline in at
least two decades. The report echoes other evidence that college enrollment has declined after
surging during the recession:

Enrollment was on a
general upward trend, but peaked in 2012 and has since dropped in each of the
last two years. The fact that this is a two-year drop suggests that it isn’t
just a one-time fluke in a volatile series. The drop in college attendance by recent high
school graduates is concentrated among groups most likely to be
deciding between going to school and joining the labor force: Part-time and
community college enrollments saw the sharpest decline. Meanwhile, the
enrollment rate increased for four-year colleges, where costs have been rising
the fastest. For-profit colleges, which have been subject to mounting criticism over their high costs and
inconsistent educational value, have also seen enrollment decline.

Many
analysts have attributed the slowdown in college attendance to the rapidly
rising cost of a higher education. That may be true, but the decline in
enrollments may have as much to do with obverse, the perceived value of the degree. Charles
Hugh Smith has looked at the rapid growth in student loans vs. the growth
in median income for people with bachelor’s degrees:

Higher education is busy turning students into debt-serfs via student
loans, while our economy provides a diminishing return on the investment.

Despite
the recent downtick, college enrollment remains above pre-recession levels. In
1982, 26.6% of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college; in 2012, that
figure stood at 41%. In some ways, America’s higher education model reflects
supply and demand: The more demand for a degree, the higher its cost. The
greater the supply of degreed graduates, the lower is the market value of the
degree.

According
to Heidi Shierholz of EPI:

According
to Ben Casselman, the recent decline
was concentrated among women. Women still attend college at a higher
rate than men, as they have for decades. But the gap is narrowing: In 2013,
68.4% of female high school graduates enrolled in college, versus 63.5% of male
grads. In the class of 2009, by contrast, 73.8% of women attended college,
versus 66% of men.

Less than
60% of African-American and Hispanic members of the class of 2013 were enrolled
in college last fall, compared to 67% of white graduates. The numbers are
volatile from year to year, but neither gap has narrowed meaningfully over the
past 20 years. Moreover, young black and Hispanic Americans also have a higher
unemployment rate than whites, suggesting they aren’t choosing to skip college
because of strong job prospects.

Choosing
not to go to college can have long-term consequences. The unemployment rate for
16- to 24-year-old high school graduates with no college education was 18.9% in
2013, versus 8.3% for college graduates.

And those
who do manage to find jobs earn less than their college-educated peers: Among
25 to 34-year-olds employed full-time, year-round, college graduates earn 50%
more than those with a high school diploma.

Despite
the lifetime earnings argument, increasing costs and decreasing benefits of a
college degree pose a barrier for many kids from families with lower incomes,
who are going to college in lower numbers than those in the higher income
distributions.  

What’s
Wrong Today:

A
few quick notes regarding yesterday’s column about exporting
natural gas. Blog reader and commenter extraordinaire, Terry McKenna said:

Bloomberg
echoed Terry’s worry when Russia invaded Crimea:

So here
comes the manufactured threat by speculators that attempts to boost prices. We’ve been
warned.

As Terry indicates, gas has been a cheap source of energy for us. But,
given the situation in Europe and the push by Republicans to export it, how
much longer will it be cheap?

According
to the CME
Group an energy consultancy, not for long: (emphasis, brackets and
parenthesis by the Wrongologist)

And
wouldn’t that be just grand for the energy industry?

As Terry commented, natural
gas is what is called a stranded asset.
That means it doesn’t travel well or cheaply. Until recently, pipelines were
the only transport method, so exporting was impossible. That changed about 30
years ago, as LNG became more available, and the energy industry began to build
infrastructure for it.

But
the cost of liquefying natural gas is very high. And the entire supply chain
for exporting LNG is expensive to build and maintain. You need to liquefy it,
pipe it into a special, pressurized tanker to transport it to Europe. You need a specialized
facility at the European port to take it off of the tanker and store it, and a
facility to de-liquefy (called re-gasification) the LNG, and distribute in
Europe’s existing pipeline infrastructure.

It
makes the “landed” cost of LNG in Europe very high. That will attract gas
supply to Europe, and thus cause gas prices domestically to increase, as demand
for our available supply will go to overseas buyers who will pay the most. Winter heating costs will go up for those Americans who heat with natural gas.

Now,
liquefying natural gas (LNG) for export sort of works, if there is a cheap
supply (as in Qatar) that doesn’t have to travel very far. But the farther
natural gas goes, the more of it burns off along the way, meaning a portion is
lost to evaporation, which adds to the cost (it also adds to the gasses that cause
climate change).

Even
without converting natural gas into LNG, a little over 8% of US natural gas is used up in processing and getting it to US customers.
Converting it into LNG, exporting it across the ocean (while some more burns
off), and re-gasifying uses up even more of the product.

Perhaps
the best outcome FOR AMERICA would be if virtually none of this natural gas
export capacity ever gets built. If it is really possible to get the natural
gas out of the ground, we need it here instead.

But
that would go against the basic energy policy of the Republicans and the business
media, which is “Drain America First”.

Otherwise,
prepare for higher natural gas prices.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The Wall Street Journal reported
last night that Mr. Putin met Wednesday with the CEO of Siemens, the German
industrial firm. Siemens recorded €2.17 billion ($2.99 billion) in sales to
Russia for the 2013 fiscal year. That equaled 2.9% of the company’s total
revenue.

Mr. Putin met Siemens
CEO Joe Kaeser at his official residence outside Moscow on Wednesday. The men
posed for the cameras and talked up Germany and Russia’s special economic
relationship. Siemens began conducting business in Russia 161 years ago, when
it built the Czar’s telegraph network. Kaeser said:

While this meeting
was going on, the WSJ also reported
that Mr. Obama spent
much of Wednesday telling US allies that they need to “step up” their
commitments, particularly on sanctions and military security.

Despite
those exhortations, German industry has been hard at work under the radar of
official diplomacy to establish an informal channel, shuttling between Berlin
and Moscow to prevent an all-out economic war. But the Siemens meeting wasn’t simply
an emergency response to the current sanctions spiral; it had been planned
during their prior meeting in October 2013.

This shows
how connected German industry and Russia are, since regular powwows are de rigueur. This time,
Kaeser explained
to Putin that Siemens, which has already invested €800 million in Russia,
wanted to continue its long-term involvement and localization strategy in
Russia. A Siemens spokesman said:

CEO Kaeser
said to (Russian News Agency) Tass:

According
to Wolf Richter at Testosterone
Pit, Siemens, employs more than 3,500 people in Russia. It partners with
state-owned Russian Railways, (whose president, Vladimir Yakunin is on the US
sanctions blacklist) to provide high-speed trains.

Richter
reports that 6,200 German companies are trading with Russia, and that German
companies have invested €20 billion in Russia, with about 300,000 jobs in
Germany depending on the economic relationship with Russia.

Yesterday
we wrote about Nord
Stream, the Russian gas pipeline company that provides a pathway for Russian
gas to get to Germany. One little-known fact is that Gerhard Schröder, German Chancellor
from 1998 to 2005, (succeeded by Angela Merkel) had pushed Germany into the
Nord Stream deal. It was signed in October 2005, shortly before he left office.
He immediately joined Nord Stream AG as Chairman of the
Board. Thanks to Schröder’s foresight, the Nord Stream system has increased
Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas.

The interlocking
directorates continue: Gazprom, the Russian semi-public gas company, owns a
controlling 51% of Nord Stream. The remaining 49% are owned by German utility E.on, German chemical company BASF, and
Gasunie, a Dutch natural gas infrastructure company. Gazprom Chairman Alexei
Miller, who Kaeser also met while in Moscow, is Deputy Chairman of the Board of
Nord Stream.

It’s good
to have Gerhard Schröder on board, bringing all of these people together. Reuters reports that, in Schröder’s new book, “Klare Woerter”
(Straight Talk), that Putin is fluent in German and knows Germany very well. Schröder speaks about his
personal relationship with the Russian leader, who worked as a KGB spy in East
Germany in the 1980s:

Putin
lived here for a long time and has a very close relationship to Germany…That
made it easier to work with him than with other leaders

Chancellor
Merkel has seen the handwriting on the wall. She has been very
vocal in condemning Putin’s actions, but on Wednesday, she commented (to Tass) that the Ukraine
situation:

So she clearly
forgot to check in with President Obama on the sanctions thingy.

Anyway, her
statement may not be a surprise, given the intricate and convoluted
relationships between Germany and Russia. Consider this quote by another former
German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, on Wednesday:

Mr. Obama
ought to consider why the EU, already in a fragile economic state, would want
to create more regional tension and revive the Cold War?

From
the Eurozone’s perspective, it may need to stay the course in the absence of strong
leadership and the need of the 18 Eurozone members to act unanimously:

• Angela
  Merkel is probably the most popular Euro leader and has to govern through a domestic
  coalition. Also, she won the latest election by winning a large majority of the
  German women’s vote.

• David
  Cameron also leads a coalition, but is outside the Eurozone, and has some capacity
  for independent action vs. Russia.

• Francois
  Hollande also leads a coalition, but is recovering from his party’s disastrous result
  in local elections, as the far right did better than expected, while he is also
  battling a poor economy.

How did we
get to this place where Europe now appears to be a satellite of US foreign
policy when 11 years ago, it was deeply skeptical of the US desire to invade
Iraq? Why would Merkel act against the self-interest of her country in order to
follow Obama like Tony Blair followed George W. Bush? It is unlikely that she
will.

What has changed
in ten years?

Ooh,
Putin.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Low literacy is a persistent problem
among adults in the US. Results from the National Assessment of Adult
Literacy (NAAL), available through the National Center for Education Statistics, found that more than 32 million adults have “Below Basic”
literacy skills. That means they can’t read. This translates to nearly
1 out of every 6 adults, age 25 and older. 

The methodology used to determine reading
levels measures the percentage of adults who perform at each of four
achievement levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient. 13%
percent of adults were at or above Proficient (indicating they possess the
skills necessary to perform complex and challenging literacy activities) while
22% of adults were Below Basic (indicating they possess no more than the most
simple and concrete literacy skills).

This has profound implications for our
economy, both in its impact on social safety net costs, and on long-term unemployment
in America. Here are a few facts about illiteracy in America:

• Percent
  of US adults who can’t read: 14%
• Number of US adults who can’t
  read: 32 Million
• Percent
  of US adults who read below a 5th grade level: 21%
• Percent
  of high school graduates who can’t read: 19%
• Percent of prison inmates who
  can’t read: 63%

According
to Begin
to Read, there is also a linkage between illiteracy and poverty. 43% of
adults at the Below Basic literacy skills level live in poverty compared to
only 4% of those at the Proficient skill level. Moreover,
3 out of 4 food stamp recipients perform in the lowest 2 literacy
levels, while 90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts. Consider that
49% of 4th graders eligible for free
and reduced-price meals scored below “Basic” on the NAEP reading test,
while 40% of 8th graders eligible for free and reduced-price meals scored below
“Basic” on the test.

It gets
worse. Illiteracy is highly correlated with criminal behavior:

• 85%
  of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally
  illiterate. (Functional illiteracy
  is reading and writing skills that are inadequate to manage daily living
  and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level)

• More
  than 60% of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate

• Inmates
  who receive literacy help have a 16% chance of returning to prison, while 70%
  who receive no help are recidivists. This equates to taxpayer costs of $25,000
  per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders

• Over
  70% of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level

Finally, we
are not improving. The
US is the only country among 30 OECD free-market countries where the current generation is less well
educated than the previous one. Consider these facts:

• More than 1.2 million people drop
  out of high school each year

• 16
  to 19 year old girls at the poverty level and below, with below average reading
  skills, are 6 times more likely to have out-of-wedlock children than their
  reading counterparts
• Among 4th graders, 53% of African
  American students, 52% of Hispanic students, and 48% of American Indian
  students scored below the “Basic” level on the NAEP reading test
• Among 8th graders, 44% of African
  American students, 41% of Hispanic students, and 37% of American Indian
  students scored below the “Basic” level on the NAEP reading test
• The number of high school seniors
  who read at or above “Proficient” has been declining since 1992

According to Reading is Fundamental:

According to Begin to
Read, 66% of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of the 4th
grade will end up in jail or on welfare. 78% of them will not catch up by the
time they graduate.

The problem isn’t
simply that the Internet and TV have supplanted books in the lives of children
and adults. To a great degree, this is
a class and income inequality problem. If not fixed, the government will feed
40+% of Americans for the rest of their lives, since in the 21st
century economy, there are no jobs for people who cannot read. A more literate (and
better educated) population will improve our standard of living. Solving illiteracy also offers
other benefits:

• Higher rates of employment and
  better wages
• Increased voter participation,
  volunteerism and civic engagement
• Better health and more effective
  healthcare, since more people will be able to read and follow doctors’
  instructions and prescription directions

Many organizations,
both government and non-government, are working the problem, but are falling further
behind each year. It’s time to realize there is a linkage among illiteracy, income
inequality and low economic growth, all of which disproportionately impact the
poor. These factors are part of a negative feedback loop, reinforcing each
other, while sustaining a huge drag on our economy, our international
competitiveness, and our standard of living. If you compare and contrast our struggles with data from websites similar to upskilled.edu.au you can see that more needs to be done to improve the education system in the US.

It’s time we move aggressively
to solve income inequality as part of solving illiteracy.

What’s
Wrong Today:

James
Surowieki in The
New Yorker:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

And
here is Krugman writing yesterday about Surowieki’s
article: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

How
much social mobility occurs in a society if politicians think the only goal is “equal
opportunity for all”? In America, not much, and that hasn’t changed in 40
years, according to a study by a team of economists from
Harvard and Berkeley led by Raj
Chetty. According
to Chetty:

A
time-honored meme is the Horatio Alger story, the American dream that anyone
can, through dedication and a can-do spirit, climb the ladder of success. But,
according to Surowieki: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Horatio
has a smaller chance of making it big here than in say, France, since we have had the
same amount of economic mobility for the past 40 years. When politicians emphasize
mobility as opposed to decent living standards for all, or economic security, it becomes
easy to blame the “victims”, that is, the very poor, the unemployed, the fringe
members of society: What’s the matter with you, why aren’t you upwardly mobile
in this, the land of opportunity?


But today in the US, the pressure on mobility is mostly downward, not upward. That
is due to the confluence of several trends:

• Corporate
  influence on our tax and labor laws to the advantage of the few

• The
  mass movement of skilled, labor-intensive jobs to low cost countries

• The
  rapid development in computer-assisted manufacturing and design that has
  radically reduced the availability of solid middle class jobs

• The
  huge growth in liquid assets employed in foreign tax havens, not in US businesses

Then,
the Citizens United decision sealed the deal for those entrenched at the top. Today,
most Americans don’t even know if
there could be a better way to build the economy.

Ironically,
these trends have been sold to voters as the next stage of the American free
enterprise system. Thus, the upward wealth transfer has been institutionalized
and accepted by many as necessary to keeping our country strong and for ensuring future
job growth.

It
has done neither. When 40% of Americans can’t buy anything other than food and
gas, that hurts all of us.

What made
the US economy so remarkable for most of the twentieth century was the fact
that even if working people never left their economic class, over time they saw
their standard of living rise sharply. Median
income doubled in the US between the late 1940’s and the 1970’s. The
chart below shows that income growth has stagnated since the early 1990’s:

That’s
what has really changed in the past forty years. The economy is growing more
slowly than it did in the postwar era, the average workers’ share of the pie
has been shrinking, and fewer people are working today than in 2007. It’s no surprise that people in
Washington prefer to talk about mobility rather than about this basic reality.

Raising
living standards for ordinary workers is hard: you need to get wages growing,
or to “prime the pump” with infrastructure jobs. Talking about things like
“redistribution” and “more taxes” scares politicians, but austerity will not
improve economic growth, or lower our deficit.

Most
of us want a decent
society for everyone, including for the less talented and less fortunate. We
will always have some inequality, some people whose living standard is too low,
so there should be a decent floor which people can’t fall below.

We
call that the safety net and we can agree or disagree with where the floor
should be established, but without a concept of how to make our economy benefit
more of our citizens, we risk political upheaval.

Today there are rumblings of change,
but nothing coherent has emerged. People know something isn’t right, but they
can’t put their finger on it, and there is no organized push to develop a
coalition around modifying our capitalism to improve living standards for all
in the working classes.

The fact that the working
poor have flat screen TVs at home, or have iPhones does not mean that they have
a good standard of living. Many people
in the third world have those devices, along with the same food and job
insecurity we have here in America.

The next financial/economic
crisis will toss more people out of the middle class. The ladder of opportunity
will be shorter, excluding even more people.

 

We need to create a unifying
message that people will understand and rally behind, one that will cause them to stop voting
against their economic interests.

 

What’s
Wrong Today:

The New York Times reports
that employees at the Chattanooga, TN Volkswagen plant voted 712 to 626 on
Friday against joining the United Automobile Workers Union.

The NYT quotes Mike
Jarvis, a VW employee who works on the finishing line:

His belief was that the
UAW had hurt Detroit’s automakers and killed Detroit. He may have been persuaded by Republican
politicians in Tennessee as well as some outside conservative groups, who made
sure that the plant’s workers heard plenty of anti-union arguments.

• Governor
  Bill Haslam, (R), warned that auto part suppliers would not locate in the
  Chattanooga area if the plant was unionized

• Sen.
  Bob Corker (R-TN) said Volkswagen executives had told him that the plant would
  add a new production line, making SUVs, if the workers rejected the UAW

• State
  Senator Bo Watson (R), who represents a suburb of Chattanooga, warned that the
  Republican-controlled legislature was unlikely to approve further subsidies to
  Volkswagen if the workers embraced the UAW, a threat that might discourage the
  company from expanding. Mr. Watson also attacked Volkswagen for taking a neutral-to-positive stance
  toward the UAW saying its approach was:

• Grover
  Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, helped underwrite a new group, the Center for
  Worker Freedom that put up 13
  billboards in Chattanooga, warning that the city might become the next Detroit
  if the workers voted for the union

Perhaps this pressure
made the majority of workers believe that they were voting in their own interest
by rejecting union membership. Mr. Corker had asserted that a union victory
would make Volkswagen less competitive and hurt workers’ living standards.

Volkswagen said that
it was neutral on the union vote, although they wished to implement a German-style works
council, a committee of managers and blue-collar and white-collar workers who
develop factory policies, on issues like work schedules and vacations.
Volkswagen, which has unions and works councils at all of its 105 other plants
worldwide, views such councils as crucial for improving morale and cooperation
and increasing productivity.

US Labor law experts say it would be illegal for VW to have a works council
unless workers first voted to have a union.

What we have here is the triumph
of political marketing over union marketing. Did the politicians interfere with
what is arguably an internal company issue; whether to organize a company
union? That will be decided over the next few weeks as the UAW looks at whether
it can file and win an NLRB complaint alleging improper influence over the
voting process.

Perhaps Charles Pierce
summed up the Tennessee situation best when he tweeted:

Broadening
this out, the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening in
America is a big cop-out. Who is responsible if we as individuals are not
responsible? Should we simply blame the moneyed interests? Ian
Welsh observed last December that the reason America can’t have nice things
is, well, Americans:

We are in a
slow-motion collapse. While
it is still theoretically possible we can save our society, the odds are low. The
fight is not yet pointless, but it is clear that since 1980, the center has
collapsed. It is difficult to organize dissent, it is difficult to fund a
campaign that will succeed against the big interests that dominate our culture
and economy. If this doesn’t change, soon, everyone will be on their own, doing
what they can for themselves. Who wins if that happens? Corporations, the 1% and the political entrepreneurs.

And our
political entrepreneurs continue to apologize for the American public, making the
case that that Americans both individually and as a group are not complicit in
America’s decline. “It’s not your responsibility” really means “don’t pay
attention, don’t try and change it, get whatever you can.”

Instead, blame
the immigrants, the liberals, the poor, and the undereducated. They are the
reason America is failing, not you. Well, that’s simply Bullshit.  

Those
people standing behind the cash registers, just trying to get by are as much to
blame for the state of our country as those of us who think we know better.

The
Economist had an article
in 2011 about Earnest Dichter, the Austrian immigrant who revolutionized marketing
in the US:  

Most
of the theory behind this practice of helping Americans work against our
interests comes from Dichter. Dichter observed in 1960, in his book “The Strategy of Desire”:

Welcome
to the wild west of capitalism.

From
Ronald Reagan to Karl Rove to Corker in Chattanooga, we have been encouraged to mislead
ourselves, regardless of how smart we think we are.

Super Bowl Sunday!! Also Groundhog Day…this is the first time they occur on the same day:

Whether Punxsutawney Phil sees
his shadow or not, we will have 6 more weeks of Super Bowl commercials. And 6
more weeks of posturing by Democrats and Republicans about the Minimum Wage,
unemployment and inequality. Oh, and the
Debt Limit increase should take 6 more weeks of something. So, here comes 6 more weeks of frozen
politics.

Safer than football:

SOTU reveals issues in the family:

Republicans engage in endless debate, still get wrong answer:

Plutocrats position to negotiate with Obama on Minimum Wage:

Pete Seeger’s song about the 1%:

Today
as we remember Martin Luther King, let’s move beyond his “I have a dream”
speech and consider his stance on the other divisive issue of the day, the War
in Vietnam. Dr. King made two speeches in April, 1967 about the war in Vietnam.
For some context, we had 485,000 military in Vietnam in 1967, and 11,153 would
die in action in that year. Lester Maddox became Governor of Georgia, and the 1st
Super Bowl took place.

Here
are a few quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. on the subject of the Vietnam War:

From Dr. King’s speech at Riverside
Church in New York City, April 4, 1967: (text and audio here).
(Emphasis by the Wrongologist)

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right
side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values. We must
rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a
“person-oriented” society. When
machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and
militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

“As I have
walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that
Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked —
and rightly so — what about Vietnam?
They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve
its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home,
and I knew that I could never again
raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today — my own government.”

From
his April 30th speech
in Atlanta: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

“There
is…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 that there was a real promise
of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There
were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam.
And I watched the program broken as if it was 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. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is
estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend
only $53 for each person classified as poor, and much of that $53 goes for
salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see
the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.”

“There
is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would
praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark, [sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama
who was one of the officials responsible for the violent arrests of civil
rights protestors during the Selma to Montgomery marches] but will curse and damn you
when you say: ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There is
something wrong with that press.”

 “A true revolution of values will
soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous
indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the
West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to
take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the
countries, and say, ‘This is not just’…This business of burning human beings
with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of
injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of
sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Once again, our country needs another person with social
conscience to lead us away from what Dr. King suggests in our approaching spiritual
death.

So today, remember Dr. King not simply for his eloquence
on civil rights, but also for his social conscience.

 

No break for the homeless on Xmas:

It’s too big an ask even for Santa:

Old beliefs die hard:

Wisemen don their gay apparel:

Unpacking Fox’s White Santa:

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