@Lenzabi

when I hear those TV pundits or other well off types crack on poor people, I get the desire to

..... acquire myself a rocket launcher!

[video:https://youtu.be/O9HFjErMMlA]

Between my disability, and my friend's part time pay, I do believe we fall into that 4 person household issue. He works hard, his wife and I are not doing great health wise(she is applying for disability as well), and their kid make up a 4 person house, and likely between us making barely over 20k a year.

Of course it has to be our own fault for not being better off than we are.
I am disabled, she is but no disability pay yet, and he can only get part time work due to our oh so rosy economy in WV.

when I hear those TV pundits or other well off types crack on poor people, I get the desire to punch them in their smug mouths.

@Lenzabi

Utah's legislators decided to tank the bill for raising minimum wage here and most of the comments were in favor of them doing that. If people aren't making enough money while flipping burgers or other low paying jobs, then they need to get more education and find a different job. Besides, if employers raise it then they will also have to raise their prices. Imagine paying $3 for a $1 happy meal and other such nonsense.

Man, I need to get out of this state.

Oh yeah. Anyone who is getting help from the government are just too lazy to work and are sucking off the system because there are plenty of jobs out there. "I know because I offer people who are panhandling a job and they turn me down."

Between my disability, and my friend's part time pay, I do believe we fall into that 4 person household issue. He works hard, his wife and I are not doing great health wise(she is applying for disability as well), and their kid make up a 4 person house, and likely between us making barely over 20k a year.

Of course it has to be our own fault for not being better off than we are.
I am disabled, she is but no disability pay yet, and he can only get part time work due to our oh so rosy economy in WV.

when I hear those TV pundits or other well off types crack on poor people, I get the desire to punch them in their smug mouths.

@Big Al
speech. It was the famous "triple evils" speech, indicting the web of militarism, capitalism and racism, given at Riverside Church in NYC, one year to the day of his assassination.

Going after the systemic cancer of capitalism had caused a lot of his supporters to flee from him. It was a lonely time. But he write eloquently of being compelled to get to the core of what was really going on in America and the world.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard from Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Remember, at the time of his death he had become very outspoken against the war, was planning a Poor People's Campaign to camp Occupy-style at Capitol Hill and was marching with the Memphis sanitation workers on their strike. Also remember, his closest top aides on the "March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom," were all socialists, that being A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

About Barber, I wasn't sure at first. Though he may be a Dem operative, to be honest. But I heard a speech of his and it struck me as this same kind of firebrand as King. In other words, someone who speaks powerfully about militarism being tied to economic inequality. I hope he stays far away as from the Dems as possible. This must be a People's Movement.

progressed past voter suppression and racist gerrymandering, which are democratic party rallying cries, to challenging the oligarchic nature of this political system.