On August 28th, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King told the world about his dream of racial equality in the United States. On that day, and increasingly as he matured as a political thinker by confronting the exigencies of his time, King also articulated a dream of class equality, a fact that more often than not goes unmentioned in our now ritualized and therefore tamed celebration of his life. But remember, the march on Washington that summer was for "Jobs and Justice," class and race conjoined, with feminists showing us later in the decade that gender must be added to the now familiar analytical troika for understanding how power is wielded and reworked in our daily lives.
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But as a recession begins to bite hard, and Wall Street analysts hustle about with canned explanations for our, as George Bush puts it, "sound fundamentals," class inequality is a question that the country seems willing to confront more forcefully, at least during a moment when political candidates are fishing for votes and talking a "populist" talk. That discussion should start with a debate about the role of 'private equity' firms in the U.S. economy, the Wall Street buyout tycoons that squeeze American workers to turn their incomprehensible profits.
Buyout firms like KKR and Blackstone make their money by purchasing companies, cutting back on wages, benefits and jobs, re-selling them at much higher margins and taking a 20 percent commission for the job. The buyout industry is gobbling up huge portions of the American economy like Pac-man. The top 20 firms own companies employing nearly 4 million workers. In 2007, buyout firms in the U.S. controlled a $400 billion war chest to acquire yet more. This kind of Wall Street pirate profiteering impacts middle America like a kick in the stomach.
If the opinions I heard while interviewing working people on a recent trip across the country for Brave New Films' 'War On Greed' video series are an indication of the general mood of the country, the question of class and corporate influence on policy-making should be disturbing the public consciousness long after the cameras leave town.
After the promises made by politicians to take corporate power to task have been forgotten by those who are now making them, working women and men will be pondering how class works in the United States, that is, who rides whom and how.
2008 is certainly not 1963, Martin Luther King and most blue-collar workers today don't speak with the exact cadences or deliberative pathos, but profoundly conflicted times require equally profound and radical solutions to those conflicts, then as now.
Martin Luther King changed as his time changed,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-candaele/mlk-on-class-conscience_b_82323.html
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