As the Democratic wing of America's permanent ruling party convenes in Denver, Democrats have dominated the Congress for almost two years. There are more US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan than in 2006 but no Democratic deadline to end these useless, predatory wars. 1.1 million African Americans languish behind bars while the dispossession and exile of hundreds of thousands of blacks from the Gulf Coast begins its fourth year. The convention will be a media circus and will culminate with the co-branding of Barack Obama with Dr. King's 1963 "I Have
A Dream" speech is intended to establish deep symbolic references between the two in the minds of voters, despite their diametrically opposed politics.

Hope is a powerful drug indeed.[...]

Even though Dr. King died supporting a black union in the midst of a militant citywide strike, the media-endorsed versions of his life, of the Freedom Movement, and of “the Dream” (probably trademarked) which the election of Barack Obama will supposedly “fulfill” are never about collective action, or democracy in workplaces. They never mention the right – won and held by people in most other nations around the world --- to organize and strike without being fired or penalized. Despite Dr. King's prescient warnings that if we did not swiftly end the war in Vietnam and turn our energies to peace abroad and justice at home we would be marching against US wars here, there and everywhere, we will be told in Denver, on the 45th anniversary of “I Have A Dream” that his legacy is being satisfied by the elevation of a black candidate who celebrates empire, who endorses the so-called worldwide “war on terror”, who has assured us he will not end the war in Iraq while he, co-signs the Bush threats to Iran and escalates the conflict in Afghanistan, perhaps extending it to nuclear-armed Pakistan. [more]