As we celebrate Dr. King, let us express our honor on the occasion not only of his 81st birthday, but also toward the brave, heartbroken people of Haiti, and on the one-year-anniversary of the coming to power of a man whose emergence King made possible, Barack Obama. We must also honor Dr. King as we listen to Obama's "State of the Union" address, a speech which will no doubt be a justification for the most serious ideological sell-out in US presidential history, but will also be a primer for the even further drift to the right to come, beginning the Democrats' Year of Wrath. (Beginning last November actually, but with a major turning of the screw with the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat.)Chris Floyd on the commoner's lowest point yet:
Barack Obama's cynicism in placing George W. Bush, of all people, as a figurehead of America's "abiding commitment" to Haiti is jaw-dropping. Not only did Bush preside over one of the most colossally inept and destructive responses to a natural disaster in modern times -- while also inflicting the unnatural disaster of mass murder in Iraq -- it was his administration that engineered the latest coup in Haiti, saddling it with an unpopular, powerless government that simply collapsed in the earthquake. Choosing Bush to spearhead relief for Haiti is like hiring Ted Bundy as a grief counselor for murder victims.King's greatest and bravest speech, his crossing of the Rubicon in connecting the nature of the American system with the evil inherent within it, and inherent within the American evil caused around the world, was his "A Time to Break Silence" address the night of April 4th, 1967, Riverside Baptist Church, Harlem New York. Much like John Kennedy's public turning at American University, June 1963, King's words at Riverside Church mark the moment when a powerful leader within the Establishment jumps it. Exactly one-year to the night of King's address, he would be shot dead in Memphis, as the Restorationists of '68 began full fury.
Bush's co-figurehead, Bill Clinton, is hardly a better choice, of course. As we noted here earlier this week, it was Clinton who imposed a brutal economic and political stranglehold on Haiti as his "condition" for restoring the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1996 -- after Aristide had been ousted earlier in a coup engineered by the first President George Bush.
Both of these ex-presidents bear great responsibility for creating the conditions of dire poverty, ill health, corruption and political instability that have made the effects of this natural disaster so much worse. Yet these are the men that Obama has made the public face of America's humanitarian mission.
The text and most of the audio can be gotten here.
