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.
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, and no more dramatically than on the Vietnam War and on the question of class in America. In the Gandhi Memorial Lecture at Howard University, King pointed out that "We are grappling with basic class issues between the privileged and underprivileged."
Two weeks ago in Rockford, a locked out iron pourer named Scott Henderson told me that "corporate greed is killing this county," and that Henry Kravis (CEO of the private equity firm KKR that bought his company) making fifty-one thousand dollars an hour last year is, well, not quite what Jefferson had in mind when he wrote that all men are created equal.
In a mid-60s speech before his Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff, King summed up a central dilemma of the nation, "Now this means that we're treading....in very difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with the economic system of our nation. It means that something is wrong with capitalism."
In Ardmore, Oklahoma Mary Lou Lowery, who works for in a Dollar General factory owned by the private equity firm KKR, presented her own analysis of our difficult waters: "It's kinda like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, Mary Lou noted wryly, "The rich people, they're not like us. They're different." Mary Lou laughed big at that last sentence, then continued with a remark about the New York firm that owns her company: "The KKR executives...they have the politicians, they know they will back them because they can support them. They only look to us because they know we make the money. We know that the workers in the warehouses we make the money. They don't make it. We do the physical work and we make it work."
In a speech to the Negro American Labor Council, Martin Luther King said "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
A laid off worker from a KKR-owned tech firm in Florida told me, "I think greed plays a primary role in all of this. I think greed is the main reason that hundreds of people have lost their jobs, that hundreds of lives have been disrupted simply for the, the gain of a very few. It's about gluttony, excess to the greatest degree. It's absurd that so many people's lives can be ruined for the sake of more money for a select few."
When he was murdered in Memphis, Martin Luther King was in the midst of SCLC's Poor People's Campaign, and he was in that city to support striking sanitation workers who carried signs declaring "I am a man!" By the end of his life Martin Luther King was thinking deeply in class ways as much as in race ways, and the combination of the two made his view of America much more radical than anyone who left out either of the two lenses when looking at our society.
But class talk today, now trivialized by our talk-show sociologists as playing the populist "card," goes back into the deck after elections are settled, dismissed as too unsightly in the United States of classlessness. But if that illusion has a future, it is not because a good majority of the population is unwilling to point out to the wealthy minority that owning a time-share of Baltic Avenue doesn't quite match the power and influence, the lovely cache, of having Boardwalk and Park Place in one's possession.
So class inequality remains America's dirty little secret, and the notion that throughout American history there might have existed something called class conflict, waxing and waning by the decade or epoch, is even dirtier.
It may be bad form to focus on class politics today, rude in fact, given that the "working class" has exited the building some time in the latter part of the New Deal, replaced by the cleaner cut and gussied up "middle class," to which all politicians now pay ritual homage. But Martin Luther King was not polite enough to turn his eyes away from the social suffering that accompanied class disparity. His conscience was not for purchase, his speech was not for hire, the clarity with which he saw the United States of his time not swayed by special pleading from groups whose vision was often more cramped and sectarian. Class inequality counted in a big way for Martin Luther King, and he told us about it in increasingly radical tones from 1963 to 1968.
Especially on this day, the commemoration of his life and on every day that the ever-bending arc of justice has not reached its place of rest, class should count. For the game has not yet been won by those who, in King's words, "blindly believe their right to uncontrolled profits is a law of the universe." Almost,but not yet.
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Kerry Candaele, a producer for Brave New Films, is currently interviewing workers laid off as a result of private equity takeovers for BNF's second short documentary in its "War on Greed" series.