Corporations, Not People, Are Represented By Our Government

Martin Luther King Jr., Riverside Church, NYC, April 4, 1967

Sharing a copy of remarks I would have made today at a rally in Portland, Maine nationally coordinated with a broad coalition to oppose the incoming administration in Washington. But, because we live in Maine, a snowstorm blowing in overnight and into Monday morning led to postponing the event to next weekend, Sunday January 26 at 2pm. 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate today, was famous for his words. Information control has cherry picked his speeches to present a sanitized version of the ideas animating the civil rights movement. But, we can find MLK's real words for ourselves.

"Beyond Vietnam--A Time to Break Silence," was a speech Dr. King gave at Riverside Church  in New York on April 4, 1967.

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. 

For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Dr. King was silenced by the FBI within the year.

Another quote I find relevant today, often attributed to MLK: “a budget is a moral document.”

Congress recently held a bi-partisan lovefest with their sponsors in the war machine pledging to divert $890 billion – that is, almost one trillion dollars – from the fiscal year 2025 budget.

Divert one trillion dollars from providing health care.

Divert one trillion dollars from providing housing – while homelessness grew an astonishing 18% last year.

Divert one trillion dollars from providing education, food, public transportation, climate mitigation.

If you agree with me that this set of priorities is immoral, join me in telling the billionaires and their servants: SHAME!

The U.S.-Israel war on Gaza continues apace now spreading to Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. We who say we want to stop the genocide are deliberately mislabeled “antisemitic” or “terrorists.”

The U.S. has more than 800 military outposts in other countries. It invests millions each year in operating them at the expense of the safety and health of local populations. 

Here in Maine, it pollutes unceded Wabanaki territories with PFAS. It wastes thousands of gallons of highly polluting fuel for war planes in air shows aimed at recruiting youth into the imperial force projection project. Yet our congressional representatives brag about securing contracts for General Dynamics to build 500 pound bombs to drop on Palestinian babies, and warships to enforce the blockade of Gaza. “It’s a jobs program,” we’re told.

The Pentagon’s newest project is war in space. Insanely expensive (the elongated muskrat gives no discounts), and the planners long ago realized they’d have to raid Social Security and Medicare in order to pay for it.

You don’t agree with this plan? Tough luck because corporations, not people, are represented by our government.

Let us now unite to defeat the billionaires’ agenda! The people united can never be defeated.

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Relevant to these concerns are the indictments delivered by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal at a press conference on MLK's actual birthday. The tribunal spent several months examining the evidence that Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (RTX), General Atomics, and Boeing should be tried for war crimes.

Thirty-five evidentiary videos are available to view and share at Merchantsofdeath.org.

Why Do We Put Up With Endless War? #MLKDay

Every once in a while I stumble across another lamentation about how the people don’t want war but it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along...wait, I am quoting Nazi propagandist Hermann Goering.

How the people get dragged along is the subject of this terrific comic The Good War examining 1990's Hollywood propaganda about WWII. You know, when the U.S. virtuously beat the Nazis after hanging back long enough to let the Holocaust happen. A genocide effected with IBM technology for monitoring and slaughtering Jews. And no Nuremberg trials for the rocket scientists who were whisked away to join the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Source: The Good War by Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes on thenib.com

Maybe dragged is not such a good word here because of the feel-good quality of all those Hollywood movies glorifying WWII as the U.S. lolled in the boom economic cycle of the 1990's.

Dragged is what leaders need to do when the populace looks more like this fellow sleeping under newspapers on a park bench.



Or like this unfortunate woman, obviously traumatized, who was dumped on the street in freezing weather by security[sic] guards for a Baltimore hospital last week. 



Ok, so now we're getting dragged.

An international Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases (also in Baltimore) this weekend examined the 800 or so military bases the U.S. has established in 80 other countries. I say "or so" because they multiply so quickly, and there are so many of them popping up all over Africa and Eurasia at the moment, that it's nearly impossible to keep an accurate count.

The Nib comic explains why people put up with (and pay up for) this. In a nutshell: Terror! Goering again: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Conveniently, the people of Hawaii were terrorized this week by a false report of incoming ballistic missiles (presumably from Russia? maybe from China?) sent via text to all their cell phones. Thirty-eight minutes later the governor of Hawaii announced that it was a human error, that somebody had pushed "the wrong button." This is in the same month that the demagogue with bad hair tweeted from the White House that his nuclear attack button is bigger than the leader of North Korea's nuclear attack button. What a coincidence!

Much of the manufactured consent of U.S. taxpayers for endless war is accomplished, like most everything else these days, by robots. Whittling down the number of "boots on the ground" and turning away from conscription in favor of the poverty draft model ensures that there aren't many families concerned about their loved ones in harms way. And the families that do worry about their son or daughter are for the most part low income and disenfranchised, with few ways to make their voices heard amid the din of glorified militarism.

Mothers who have suffered the loss of a child are a potent force for change.

Mothers who continue to pay taxes supporting the neo-Nazis of Ukraine while being kept ignorant of this fact by corporate media hyping the Russian threat are not a potent force.

I think the corporate state is waiting patiently for us baby boomers to die. We're the last generation to rise up against a war, mostly because we were pursued by the draft and died in droves in the jungles of Vietnam. 



As most warfare today is conducted via the weaponized flying robots most people call drones, it's wicked expensive but seldom results in death for our soldiers. Instead, they quietly suffer the PTSD they get from sitting in front of screens killing people thousands of miles away.

The psyops that is really powerful is the designation of impoverished nations hollowed out by colonialism as "shit hole countries."



The first step in any genocide or war is dehumanizing the targeted people. This is why leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are so galvanizing: he was a brilliant, articulate member of the most dehumanized group in the U.S., the descendants of enslaved Africans. Can't dehumanize that? Assassination is the obvious next step.

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REVISED 1/15 at 1:25pm: Number of U.S. military bases and number of countries they are found in updated on the basis of info shared at the recent Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases.