15th annual MLK march update-- Frank Skartados, Shaleah Patterson, Nubian Directions, Oakwood, et. al.!...

Hi all...


Please join Assemblyman Frank Skartados, Rev. H. Dwight Bolton, Bishop Debra Gause and Ann Perry from Holy Light Pentecostal Church, Rev. Gail Burger, Poughkeepsie Councilwoman Gwen Johnson, Robert Wright and Karmen Smallwoood (and many others from Nubian Directions), Julie Okoniewski (and many students from Oakwood Friends School), Literacy Connections Ex. Dir. Marge Pfaff, et. al.-- this coming Monday morning at 9 am in Poughkeepsie!...
[FB event page-- http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=290020524866&ref=ss ]


...for our 15th Annual Mid-Hudson Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. March for Social and Economic Justice Monday (Jan. 18th)!...with special guest performers/musicians Shaleah Patterson, Chris Ruhe, Pat Lamanna, Creek Iversen, Daniel "Zenote" Sompantle, and Nora from Fleet Irresistiblé!...
[see: http://www.Facebook.com/ShaleahMusic ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztDGBLHqxF8 ;
http://www.PatLamanna.blogspot.com ; http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ruhe ]


We'll first be gathering at 9 am for songs and speeches inside at Smith Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church at 124 Smith St. in Poughkeepsie, then walk to the Dutchess County Office Building at 22 Market St.-- then finally end up at Holy Light Pentecostal Church at 33 South Clover St. for discussion...


Rev. King: "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. There must be a better distribution of wealth. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American whether he is a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis getting part-time income. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life. We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage. A living wage should be the right of all working Americans." [amen, MLK!]
[see http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0114-25.htm ]


Join 90+ other Dutchess folks signed on to endorse my http://www.PetitionOnline.com/MLKToday ...


[also see http://www.petitiononline.com/livwage; http://www.LetJusticeRoll.org; http://www.LivingWageCampaign.org; http://www.DrumMajorInstitute.org ]


Fact: The richest 5% of American households now literally own 50% more wealth than the other 95% of us.
[ http://hudson-valley.chronogram.com/issue/2009/11/News+&+Politics/Larry-Beinhart-s-Body-Politic ;
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/01/michael-moore/moore-says-top-1-percent-owns-more-financial-wealt/ ]


[...what do you think MLK might have had to say about that today if he were here with us now?...]


Pass it on...


Joel
242-3571/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net

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Recall this from Oct. 21st The Nation-- "Dem Doldrums in Gotham" from Theodore Hamm:


"Democratic NYS Mayoral Candidate William Thompson most certainly could take cues from other cities. San Francisco and Santa Fe have passed a city living wage with no adverse effect on their economies. In Los Angeles, living-wage jobs and affordable housing are required components of any economic development project that receives public funding. Security guards in Washington, DC, now receive a living wage plus benefits, while San Francisco's successful universal healthcare program has helped lift the growing financial burdens on urban working people."
[see http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/hamm ]


Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might have had something to say today about these three facts:


Fact: Millionaires now pay only a 35% federal income tax rate-- but they used to pay over a 90% rate back in the 50's under GOP President Eisenhower. [sign: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ILikeIke ]


Fact: Middle class New Yorkers now pay a much higher percentage of our income (over 11%) in state & local taxes than millionaires do (only 7%)-- when property and sales taxes are also considered.
[see: http://www.itepnet.org/wp2009/ny_whopays_factsheet.pdf ]


What do you think Dr. King would have said and done after reading this recent Bob Herbert column?...


"An Uneasy Feeling" from yesterday's Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05herbert.html

"Staggering numbers of Americans are still unemployed and nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it.


As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, the entire past decade 'was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times.' There was no net job creation - none - between December 1999 and now. None!


The Post article read like a lament, a longing for the U.S. as we'd once known it: "No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent."

Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. The data for 2009 are not yet in, but you can just imagine what happened to those families in that nightmarish downturn. Small children over the holidays were asking Santa Claus to bring mommy or daddy a job.
One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans, according to an article in The Times on Sunday, have said that food stamps were their only income."


Join 111 other Dutchess folks for tax fairness now-- at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/SaveDuCo .
[post comment there for local income tax-- to slash property taxes and fully fund county services-- recall how 2010 county budget has left county services far too underfunded-- and far too many laid off; see:
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/12/cut-county-property-taxes-in-half-with.html ]


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>From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. ...

On March 29, 1968, King went to Memphis, Tennessee in support of the black sanitary public works employees, represented by AFSCME Local 1733, who had been on strike since March 12 for higher wages and better treatment. In one incident, black street repairmen received pay for two hours when they were sent home because of bad weather, but white employees were paid for the full day. On April 3, King addressed a rally and delivered his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" address at Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ. King's flight to Memphis had been delayed by a bomb threat against his plane. In the close of the last speech of his career, in reference to the bomb threat, King said the following:

"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."


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[more current now than ever-- "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence"
MLK's Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam- April 1967 Riverside Church:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm ]

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More from http://www.MLKOnline.net/quotes.html ...

"Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
[Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967]

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death...The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."
[Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967]

"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."
[Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964]

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More from http://www.MLKOnline.net/quotes.html ...

Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1963.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.

When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions of civil services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them, but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison.
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963.

I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons--who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man.
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967.

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From http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Martin%20Luther%20King/MLKing_quotes.html ...

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.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between 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."
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just."
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world
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All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that (Adolph) Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows?
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If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
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History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
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The profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.
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The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
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One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly ... and with a willingness to accept the penalty.
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Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
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Most people ... are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority of opinion, not thermostats that transform or regulate the temperature of society.

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
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Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is force to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
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Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.
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Those who assert that evil means can lead to good ends are deceiving themselves.
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Something about evil we must never forget, namely, that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of a persistent, almost fanatical resistance.
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To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.
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Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
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History is the struggle between good and evil.
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To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor.
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It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.
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I have come to see that America is in danger of losing her soul, Something must happen to awaken the dozing soul of America before it is too late.
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The willingness to accept the penalty for breaking the unjust law is what makes civil disobedience a moral act and not merely an act of lawbreaking.
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Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
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The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.
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The habits, if not the hearts of people, have been and are being altered by legislative acts, judicial decisions, and executive orders. Let us not be misled by those who argue that segregation cannot be ended by force of law.
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One may well ask: How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that
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there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
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How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that l is out of harmony with the moral law.
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An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself.
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Laws only declare rights; they do not deliver them. The oppressed must take hold of laws and transform them into effective mandates.
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Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
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... A genuine leader doesn't reflect consensus, he molds consensus.
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If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.
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Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
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... we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
and the end represents the tree.
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It is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.... It is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
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The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
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... middle-class values were less important than human values.
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Middle-class values stress the importance of career and money. These were not the values which led to the civil rights movement; these are not the values which lead to positive social transformation.
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They (the young blacks who made history in the early 1960s) abandoned those (middle class) values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role. When they cheerfully became jailbirds and troublemakers, when they took off their Brooks Brothers attire and put on overalls to work in the isolated rural south, they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them.
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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
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... The trailblazers in human, academic, and religious freedom have always been in the minority.
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"I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed by the white moderate," he wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action,' who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.''
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Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil.
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For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing. Right and wrong are relative to likes and dislikes and the customs of a particular community.
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Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.
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True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.
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... truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before the false gods of nationalism and materialism.
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In order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.
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We are a nation that worships the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice. It is not simple to adopt a credo that moral force has as much strength and virtue as the capacity to return a physical blow; or that to refrain from hitting back requires more will and bravery than the automatic reflexes of defense.
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Non-violent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression.
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Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it.
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One of the most persistent ambiguities we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal, but among the wielders of power peace is practically nobody's business.
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True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice.
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The only real revolutionary ... is a man who has nothing to lose.
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The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor, both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.
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It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.
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There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it.
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... power without love is reckless and abusive and ... love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
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I'm not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.
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Power and morality must go together, implementing, fulfilling and ennobling each other.... Power at its best is the right use of strength.
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We need a radical reordering of our national priorities.
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Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
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He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
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We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
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Any religion which professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a dry-as-dust religion.
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A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions.
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A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.
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Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.
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When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.
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One of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self-criticism.
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Evil is not driven out, but crowded out ... through the expulsive power of something good.
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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 to being conquered.
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We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.
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The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.
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To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion.
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We must use our vast resources of wealth to aid the undeveloped countries of the world. Have we spent far too much of our national budget in establishing military bases around the world and far too little in establishing bases of genuine concern and understanding?
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We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic colonialism.
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Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
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Freedom is ... the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.
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The plea for unity is not a call for uniformity. There must always be a healthy debate.
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It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-anti-revolutionaries.