But King's concerns did not end with Selma or the March on Washington. His persistence and eloquence advocating the end of racial injustice has become the least controversial of his public commitments, though it takes an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy for most conservatives to claim common cause.
He also became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, which roiled his reputation at the time. But his most controversial concentration that remains a flashpoint (and therefore most ignored) is poverty and more broadly, economic injustice and inequality. That's one reason I led the day with a quote from him on that subject.
It happened that his holiday saw the release of the latest and probably most detailed report on growing "income inequality," this time on a global scale. The report from Oxfam made some headlines, since it found that by next year, the world's top 1% will control more wealth than the other 99% combined.
To be more specific, it's the combined wealth of 80 billionaires versus everybody else on planet Earth combined--all 3.8 billion. This is a change from 2010, when it took 388 billionaires to balance out the rest of the global population. And when the 1% had just 48% of the world's wealth. The incomes of these 80 doubled since 2009. Did yours?
“The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement. “Despite the issue shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”
A summary of this study, with graphs and pie charts, can be found at the end of this article that begins by noting that a lot of these billionaires along with business and political leaders are going to be in Davros, Switzerland this week, talking about all this.
There are a number of even less appetizing details in the study, such as the fact that many of the top billionaires made their money from healthcare and pharma. In other words, they became obscenely wealthy by taking advantage of the sick and dying, their pain and their fear.
It's already been widely reported that in his State of the Union on Tuesday President Obama will again talk about income and economic inequality, and barriers to fairness and opportunity in the U.S., and that he will propose new tax revenues from the very rich and tax breaks for the middle class, and that they have no chance of passing Congress.
But the situation remains, the proposed solutions are clearly inadequate (absolutely no one of prominence I know of is talking about anything like a guaranteed income, as King did) and even these paltry proposals are unlikely to be instituted. People are increasingly afraid. You can tell because they aren't talking about it.
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