Dr. King Had Other Dreams

Co-written by Tom and Judy Turnipseed

 On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 years old; Coretta had just given birth to their first child.

 E D. Dixon, another Montgomery pastor, asked to host a meeting in King’s Dexter Street Baptist Church—not because of King, but because the church was the closest to downtown--across from the capitol. King attended the poorly planned meeting, was reluctantly drawn in, and his greatness began to emerge. It wasn’t necessarily the perfect time for him--he was young with a new family, not much money or a lot of experience.

He even, at a critical point in his life, hesitated. On our Unitarian Universalist Living Legacy Pilgrimage this past fall, we sat at the very table in his kitchen where he sat, uncertain of himself, discouraged, and frightened for his family by all the threatening calls they had received. He almost called it quits that night. In the middle of his doubts, he had his “Kitchen Epiphany” when he faced down his fears with the conviction that God stands by those who stand for justice. The world doesn’t need a perfect person to do what he did. The world needed him. And this week we celebrate the 84th birthday of this leader of nonviolent protest, freedom fighter and hero in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice.

 He led waves of ordinary, courageous people on the streets of the South from the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, voter registrations drives, to the Freedom rides. In the face of overwhelming odds King knew those ordinary people needed a dream like all people do – one that speaks to our spirits through both our heads and our hearts. And because he knew that, on August 28, 1963, he stood at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington before 125,000 people and delivered one of the most well known and quoted speeches ever made and maybe the greatest.

 ”I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

 I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 I have a dream today”.

 But Dr. King had other dreams.

 We forget that King had a dream beyond racial justice. He also believed that we can overcome war itself, as he hinted at in Oslo in 1964 and later. He dreamed that man would find an alternative to war and violence between nations just as he was finding a way to put an end to racial injustice. The madness must cease.

 President Obama, in his Nobel Prize speech, expressed the view that we’re stuck with war and there’s nothing we can do about it, indeed that it is often justified. Dr. King in his Nobel speech made it clear that he believed our destiny is ours to choose. “World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable,” he said. He knew—as we UU’s know “that we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality and whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” He tells us that we must either “learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

He became more and more convinced that he had to speak out strongly against the war on Vietnam and so in 1967 and '68 he did. He delivered his most famous antiwar speech “Beyond Vietnam” at Manhattan’s Riverside Church exactly one year before he died. It’s hard to understand just how radical it was at the time. His closest advisors tried to talk him out of it because they felt it would dilute his civil rights work. It would alienate President Johnson who was a civil rights supporter, but also pursuing the war. And it did. He would be labeled unpatriotic for his criticism of America’s foreign policy. But he felt that ending discrimination in America and ending the massacre in Vietnam were not separate. As a man of conscience, a man of compassion, he had to speak. And he paid the price for speaking out. All the major media backed the War. He was regularly attacked in national newspapers. The New York Times wrote editorials against him. Many of his supporters turned against him. He was called a traitor and a commie.

 He was attacked for many of the same reason we peace activists who oppose the wars in Iraq, Pakistan Afghanistan, and all our military actions around the world, are attacked today and his answers to them were a lot the same as ours are.

 First he connected the war with racism and the struggle for equality. Far more black men were sent to fight and die than their white brothers, who had the financial means and connections to escape the draft. Young black men denied equal rights in our society were going off to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia. Today, in our voluntary military, there is an economic draft, where those same young black men--faced with lack of jobs and few opportunities--are forced to join the military to survive.

  King was not limited by a narrow nationalistic view--by the idea of our country, right or wrong. He thought of himself as a world citizen. His dedication was not limited to the needs of African-Americans or the cause of civil rights. He was dedicated not just to save the soul of America but to work for the betterment of all, the brotherhood of man. He felt a special need to speak out against our militaristic nature. It was impossible to preach non-violence to young angry black men until he had spoken clearly to the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world of his day”—his own country.

He spoke of the collateral damage of the war and of the suffering of the people we claimed to be liberating—not the soldiers on each side, or the military government, but of the civilians, people who had been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. Even for those we came to support, we poisoned their water, killed their crops, destroyed their families, their villages and often brought death. And in today’s wars waged by our country, the collateral damage continues to grow. In World War I there was one civilian killed for every 10 soldiers on both sides. Nowadays it’s just the opposite. With the technological advances in killing tools, there are at least 5 innocent civilians killed for every one soldier.

And what about the wars’ effects on our own people? Then as now, “This business of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love”.

His strongest response to his critics about his opposition to the war was economic and I agree with that today. He said “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” When we feed the homeless in the park in Columbia every Sunday with Food Not Bombs, we set up our sign. On one side is our logo, on the other, General Eisenhower’s words.

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

 Today the military represents 55% of our discretionary budget. The Afghan war alone costs us $2 billion a week. And the arms manufacturers and war mongers are selling weapons to both sides, getting rich off the blood of our young people. Those who will stand up and speak out fearlessly against such insanity today are needed now more than ever.

 At the end of his life, King was consumed with his dream of ending poverty. He spoke about it as early as 1964 in his Nobel Prize Lecture, but by 1968, he was speaking out strongly about the interrelatedness of racism, war and poverty. He was truly on dangerous ground. He expanded his vision from working to achieve equal rights for African Americans and peacemaking, to bringing an end to systemic poverty and seeking economic justice for all. Before, he was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about race and war; now he was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about power. 

On the day of his death he was in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers’ strike—for fair wages and decent working conditions. On the agenda was the Poor People’s Campaign, a plan to bring thousands of the poor of all races on another march to Washington to demand jobs and, most radical of all, not just a living wage, but a guaranteed income for all. In 1968 he understood economic exploitation and his dream was to end it. Throughout his life, King faced the three great evils of mankind—racism, war, and poverty. His dream was to overcome all three.

The night before he died, King delivered his last great speech of hope, assuring his followers that his dreams would not die. If they, like us today, would continue to pursue those dreams, he knew that someday we would get to the promised land. 

Does Our President Fear the War Complex?

Would Obama Die for His Country?

Obama won the Presidency campaigning as a peacemaker but has approved $40 billion for arms sales to other countries in his first year in the White House compared to the $34.5 billion President G.W. Bush approved in his last year in office according to the US State Department. Bush, who blustered his way into war has been replaced by Obama, a smooth salesman for the US war complex, aka the military, industrial complex or defense industry. Obama has surged the number of troops in Afghanistan; deployed planes, cruise missiles and electronic attacks against Libya; and provided increasing amounts of arms to most of the countries in the Middle East, South Asia and most any other country that wants them.

The war complex relies on war and the threat of war to create their markets. Members of Congress, with defense plants and military bases in their states and districts and war complex contributions in their pockets, put defense spending cuts off-the-table while education, health care and other quality of life programs are cut to the bone. A Commander-in Chief that goes to war, okay sales and gifts of killing tools to almost any country that wants them and takes campaign contributions from the war complex is their kind of President. According to national security analyst Lawrence Korb, the baseline defense budget has grown for 13 straight years. Between fisca
l 1998 and 2011, the budget rose from $271 billion to $580 billion This doesn’t include war costs and the Afghanistan War alone costs us roughly $2 billion per week. The U.S. share of global military spending has jumped from one-third to one-half. If big money is made killing people is anyone exempt from being killed?

A lawyer friend was a White House Fellow assigned as an intern to top officials of the CIA in the late 1970s. A badge wielding agent came to my office and questioned me about his credibility for a top secret security clearance. My friend was in a position among the spooks to hear some inside stuff. Years later after a few drinks one evening he told me what he had heard about intelligence and military officials giving ominous messages to newly sworn in Presidents when they meet their Commander in Chief and explain to him their duty to provide him personal security and intelligence about national security.

Nowadays, national security bigwigs are from the United States Intelligence Community(IC) led by the Director of National Intelligence and includes top officers in military intelligence, the CIA and Secret Service. The IC collects and produces foreign and domestic intelligence, contributes to military planning, performs espionage and provides for the President’s personal security. They gather at the White House to brief the President on matters of national security like how he can authorize a nuclear attack with the black box brief case they present him. Finally, their spokesman lowers his voice in a sinister tone and says something like:

“Mr. President you are our new Commander-Chief and you have a very dangerous job. Four of your predecessors have been assassinated and six more survived assassination attempts. We will protect you but you must listen to us about matters of national security and cooperate with us for your personal safety. This video is about the safety issue.”

The new President is shown a video of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

I learned that war is a killer and money maker as a young soldier in basic training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina in 1955. I enjoyed the running and calisthenics but bayonet and machine gun training made me realize what the military is all about. In bayonet training we attached our bayonets to our rifles and ran and stuck a dummy that was “the enemy”. Our trainers had experienced close up killing in Korea and they made us scream “kill, kill, kill” as loud as we could and stick the dummy as hard as we could. If we didn’t holler loud enough or stick the dummy hard enough we had to do all over again. A trainer shouted, “young soldiers this is what the Army is all about, kill or be killed!” I realized then the Army was not for me because I did not want to kill anyone and damn sure didn’t want to be killed.

Later we practiced shooting 30 and 50 caliber machine guns. When we finished the trainers shot up and wasted several boxes of ammunition. I asked my sergeant why they were wasting the expensive ammunition and he muttered, “Shut up young soldier, it’s the Army way.” Is this Obama’s way?

He has awarded 3 Medals of Honor to families of military personnel killed in
combat and said each “fallen hero…gave his life…his last full measure of devotion for our country.” Obama would be a global hero who risked his life for our country and people everywhere by saying “No” to war and the war complex.

War Steals From the Poor and Unemployed

Military spending is causing huge deficits and wasting money needed for education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and developing clean, renewable energy. 14.9 million Americans are unemployed. 50.7 million Americans did not have health insurance and 43.6 million or 14.3% lived beneath the poverty level in 2009, according to the Census Bureau and the numbers are even higher now. Expenditures for our bloated war complex are about 55% of all discretionary spending. We have spent more than a trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and much more in bribes to government officials, and tribal chiefs and payments to corrupt private contractors. According to the Democratic Leadership Council, US military spending accounted for 44% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and the military in 2009.Our military spending is as much as all of the next 15 countries combined. The number of people killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is anywhere from 100,000 to a million or more depending on who does the estimates. Statistics on the number of civilians and military personnel killed are often distorted by military propaganda.

Glorification of the mass terrorism of war by media, politicians, weapons makers and other violence peddling war profiteers is depressing. Killing people by war and willful violence is the most demented activity of our species. War is intrinsically evil. Peacemakers like Jesus, Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King are real heroes rather than the war complex hyped “warriors” who “fight for our freedom” by killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan so the US can control their governments and natural resources. Metaphors like the war on poverty seem inappropriate in describing anti-poverty programs, which are diminished by the diversion of resources to make war. Lyndon Johnson took on the pervasive poverty

of the 1960 by promoting broad anti-poverty social programs like civil rights, education, Medicare and Medicaid as part of his Great Society.

Rather than advocate more social programs that provide jobs, Obama wants to tinker with middle class tax cuts and a roll back on tax breaks for the fat cats, but how much will trickle down to poor and unemployed people?

When a reporter asked Obama to discuss his views on the poverty agendas of LBJ and Dr. King, he answered, “I think the history of anti-poverty efforts is that the most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy. It’s more important than any program we could set up. It’s more important than any transfer payment we could have.” Economic growth and tax cuts that increase corporate profits will not eliminate poverty. Such praise of Reagan’s supply side economics isn’t new for Obama.

During the presidential campaign in 2008, Obama said, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Does Obama model his super smooth style after Reagan’s slick salesman act?

Reagan was a mediocre movie actor when he became the host of the General Electric Theater on NBC. General Electric launched his political career by sponsoring a national speaking tour for their handsome, look-um-in-the-eye, all-American guy, who promoted their conservative philosophy. He was the ideal political huckster for corporate America's unbridled greed. Reagan put a nice face on the mean-spirited politics of fear and greed, blaming welfare mothers, social programs, government regulations and the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” as causes for America's troubles. Scapegoating poor people and criticizing government programs enabled him to deliver a giant tax break for the rich, roll back health and safety regulations, and push through a gigantic military buildup for corporate defense contractors like General Electric. His racially charged attacks on affirmative action hurt racial minorities and women.

Obama’s smooth rhetoric can’t conceal his role in bailing out Wall Street, cutting deals with corporate interests to dilute the healthcare reform bill, and developing financial regulations in closed-door meetings with bankers.

Rather than praising Reagan, Obama should make Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt his role models and work to establish social programs which provide jobs for poor and working class people. LBJ can also teach Obama that endless wars won’t work. We should end tax cuts for the rich and transfer funds from war and Wall Street to social programs that put people to work and reduce poverty.

Secrecy Sucks

Spooky, Snoopy Spies Run Amuck

Since 9/11, a collection of secret intelligence groups called the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has become a monstrous, overlapping hodge-podge of spooks with some 850,000 people having top secret clearances, according to the Washington Post. The clandestine tangle of CIA spooks and related “national security” groups like military intelligence, civilian contractors and mercenaries has grown so much that its actual cost, or size, is unknowable and out-of-control according to the Post’s series of articles. The mainstream media icon is publishing Top Secret America after a two year investigation of the huge US intelligence complex. The expose paints a troubling picture of turf wars in a disconnected spy network that can’t “connect the dots”. It is especially disturbing because the Post is an establishment and neo-liberal oriented paper. It is usually supportive of a rather hawkish foreign policy and expenditures for the military industrial complex. The articles reveal a vast and unmanageable assortment of spooky, snoopy spies.

According to their websites the United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a cooperative federation of 16 separate US government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities they consider necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States.Member organizations of the IC include military intelligence, civilian intelligence and analysis offices in federal executive departments. The IC is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who is said to be subject to the authority, direction and control of the President and is responsible for overseeing and directing national security by serving as the head of the sixteen-member IC.

The DNI website says the Washington Post’s series of articles “do not reflect the Intelligence Community we know. We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day.” Actually, the fact is, spooky infighting at enormous expense.

Obama’s first intelligence chief was Admiral Dennis Blair who had friction with the White House and turf fights with CIA Director Leon Panetta. According to media reports, one of Blair’s senior aides said they were frustrated with a lack of guidance from the White House and likened their situation to an invisible dog fence. The aide and Blair joked with each other that they never knew where the no-go lines were “until we got zapped.”

I don’t know much about spooks thwarting attacks, or their turf fights, but I did stand in a line of anti-war protestors and got zapped for it by the spooks in 2004. Dick Cheney came to my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina in 2004 to a fund-raiser for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign at the home of an insurance company bigwig. Along with about 30 other peace activists I stood in a line across the street from the event holding a hand painted sign proclaiming “Dick Cheney is a War Criminal.” Local police on duty at the event who knew me were friendly, but I was photographed and asked to identify myself by a grim-faced spook with Cheney’s entourage.

About three months later my wife and I were waiting to board a flight at the Columbia airport when one of the security officers who was my friend told me he was required to meticulously search through my baggage. I asked him why and he said, “You are on the search list”.

Retired Air Force General James Clapper has been nominated by Obama to be the fourth chief spook since the DNI was established. Pledging to increase trust with Congress, Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee he would be candid with lawmakers, if confirmed as the next director of national intelligence.

Senators at Clapper's confirmation hearing voiced skepticism about the ability of the next overseer of the nation's 16 spy agencies to manage the sprawling intelligence community which the last three directors struggled with, mainly because of turf fights between the National Security Council and the CIA.

Clapper insisted he would be able to exercise the necessary authority using the powers the DNI already has, rather than "going through the trauma," of another reorganization and “would not agree to take the position if I was going to be a titular figure or hood ornament."

During his confirmation hearing he also said his 46 years' experience working in the intelligence field makes him uniquely qualified for the job.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California praised Clapper after the hearing. Feinstein is the committee chairwoman and said she thought Clapper would be "a strong DNI...whose will was going to prevail." She also said Clapper's friendship with CIA Director Leon Panetta meant clashes between the two were less likely. I reckon we should clap for Clapper, a spook for 46 years who learned how to lie with a straight face a long time ago.

Democracy dies when government lies. Secrecy sucks. How many of us are on the lists of suspects with so many spooks and spies running amuck?

Chaos and Blowback

General McChaos is Canned;

Times Square Bomber Blowback

Faisal Shahzad pled guilty to all ten counts of charges stemming from his failed terror attempt to detonate explosives in crowded Times Square on May 1. He said, “It’s a war” and that he was avenging the deaths of innocent Muslim women and children killed by US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. The guilty plea was heard in Federal District Court in New York on June 21. Shahzad was referring to the deadly drone attacks which have been doubled by President Obama over the number of attacks made by the Bush administration. The attacks were carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command which was headed by General Stanley McChrystal from April 2003 to August 2008 with the help of the CIA. Obama removed McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan on June 23 and replaced him with General David Patraeus.

Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Biden, General Patraeus and other top military brass and “regretfully” accepted General McChrystal’s resignation. Obama said he did so because snide and derogatory remarks from the general and his staff about senior administration officials in a Rolling Stone article were contemptuous. Among many other disparaging comments, McChrystal told a Rolling Stone reporter that he felt the new President looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” while meeting with senior military officers just after Obama was inaugurated. In the chaotic turn of events, Obama summoned McChrystal to the White House from Afghanistan where he has been commander of the increasingly unpopular war. A recent ABC / Washington Post poll revealed that people felt the war was not worth fighting by a 53 to 44 margin. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had 62% of the American people saying the country was going in the wrong direction and Obama’s approval rating at 45% with 48% disapproval.“War is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general or president,” Obama said. “As difficult as it is to lose General McChrystal, I believe it is the right decision for national security.” “I welcome debate among my team,” he said, “but I won’t tolerate division.”

McChrystal’s first controversy in the Afghanistan war was in 2004 when he tried, amid the chaos, to cover up the fact that former NFL star Pat Tillman was killed by “friendly fire”.

Obama stressed that this was a change in personnel, but not a change in policy and did not signal a shift in his overall war strategy in Afghanistan, which was designed by McChrystal and adopted by Obama. Under it, 30,000 new American troops have been arriving in recent months, but US and NATO are suffering the most casualties since the war began.

Even people who approve killing of innocent civilians by drone attacks paid for by our tax dollars should have some understanding of Shahzad’s motives for his failed act of terror which will result in his serving a mandatory sentence of life without parole. When the judge asked “You wanted to injure a lot of people?” Shahzad replied that he wanted “to injure people or kill people.” “One has to understand where I’m coming from.” He considered himself “a Muslim soldier,” and that United States had attacked Muslim lands. The judge interjected: “But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?”

Shahzad answered, “Well, the people select the government; we consider them all the same.”

Including the children?” the judge asked.

Shahzad replied, “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq…don’t see children; they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children. They kill everybody. It’s a war. And in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims: I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And … I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

Mr. Shahzad was unapologetic. “I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over, because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,…and stops the drone strikes and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”


Shahzad also answered the judge’s questions about his background and even his family. “I had a wife and two beautiful kids.” They have returned to Pakistan to be with his parents.

US officials portray the missile strikes as attempts to kill leaders of al Qaeda. US media quote unnamed intelligence officials who claim the victims of the missile strikes are all “militants,” without any validation of who were killed.

A Pakistani newspaper reported that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes carried out since January 2008. More than 30 drone attacks have been launched since and the number of Pakistani civilians killed may be more than a 1,000 by now.


General McChaos is canned and Shahzad is going to spend his life in jail, but how many more casualties from the longest war in US history and blowback from avenging terrorists will we tolerate?

Drill baby , drill (change you can believe in?)

In a 2008 press conference in Florida, candidate Obama rejected calls to open new areas of the coastline to drilling. He said, “It would have long-term consequences for our coastlines but no short-term benefits, since it would take at least 10 years to get any oil.”

“Offshore drilling would not lower gas prices today, it would not lower gas prices tomorrow, it would not lower gas prices this year, it would not lower gas prices five years from now.”

“When I'm president, I intend to keep in place the moratorium here in Florida and around the country that prevents oil companies from drilling off Florida’s coasts.” This was one reason I voted for Obama.

Reversing his campaign rhetoric, Obama now calls for off-shore drilling saying, "...as we transition to cleaner energy sources, we've still got to make some tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.."

Remember the "Drill Baby, Drill" chant at the Republican National Convention led by their chief cheerleader, Sarah Palin" Now Mr. "change you can believe in" Obama has flip-flopped once again and wants to "Drill Baby Drill".

The US keeps the "two party system" in perpetuity because it is easier for the big money boys, like the big oil companies, to buy off two parties than more than 2. The big corporate interests hire the lobbyists and finance the campaign industry to keep this incestuous relationship continuing on and on and on. Finally, everyday citizens keep getting drilled by the corporate interests who really run our country.