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**JANUARY 15, 2024**
On the Prospect website
The Left Behind
The cultural rifts between urban and rural America are a constant of our
history. When they also become economic, they become dangerous. BY
HAROLD MEYERSON
[link removed]
Regulatory Fiascos
Shame on Gary Gensler. And the coup against Katherine Tai. BY
ROBERT KUTTNER
[link removed]
President Biden's Speech to Black Americans Won't Bring Them
Home-Yet
Is it time for Biden to be Biden? BY STANLEY B. GREENBERG
Kuttner on TAP
****
****
****
****
****
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**** Connecting Civil Rights to Economic Rights
Dr. King did that superbly. Can President Biden?
We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a crusader for racial justice
in all its forms. He is most vividly remembered for his struggle to
secure voting rights, which is the key to all other rights and social
reforms. And on the day of his assassination in Memphis in 1968, Dr.
King was marching in solidarity with striking sanitation workers,
recognizing that civil rights and economic rights must go together.
In this respect, President Biden could learn from Dr. King.
Biden's two kickoff campaign speeches, near Valley Forge on the
subject of democracy
,
and at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on
racial justice
,
got mixed reviews. The democracy speech was generally praised as finally
and belatedly taking the campaign to Trump and Trump's threats to
democracy. But many commentators, myself included, were critical of
Biden's Charleston speech.
Stan Greenberg, writing last Friday for the
**Prospect**
,
made a compelling case that Biden should be addressing Blacks and others
in the Democratic base, not on the basis of identity but based on their
common interest as workers who are being harmed by Republicans and
helped by Biden, who could do more in a second term. Charles Blow, a
**New York Times** columnist, was even more pointed
:
"The president's speech was a chance to offer a vision for his second
term, but there was hardly any vision in it," Blow wrote. "It was safe,
conventional and uninspiring. It seemed at times to be stuck in a bygone
era in which churches were the primary source of political power and
messaging in Black communities."
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King's life and work connected racial justice and economic justice, in
a way that Biden has not quite managed yet. And when the Republican
reaction set in, its first target was to eviscerate the gains and
protections of the Voting Rights Act-first by failing to enforce it
and then via a conservative Supreme Court declaring major sections of
the act unconstitutional. The assault on trade unions and worker rights
came in tandem.
Now, the Republicans have moved from undermining the right to vote and
have every vote counted, not just by targeting Black voters but by using
extreme gerrymandering, threats against voter registration, rigging vote
counts, dark money, and in 2020 trying to use a coup to overturn the
result.
As Pastor Martin Niemöller might have said
,
first they came for the Blacks, then they came for everyone else. Dr.
King understood and taught that we are all in this together, as citizens
of a democracy and as workers. President Biden gets major pieces of this
right. Now he needs to connect the dots.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
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