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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Today, January 20, 2025, we honor the vision and compassion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his bravery in confronting a system in the 1950s and 1960s that condemned people of African descent who worked ceaselessly for “the man” with ever-shrinking access to the American Dream, to poverty, discrimination and being fodder for the overseas wars of the military-industrial complex.
On this day set aside to celebrate his legacy, most Americans understand that his voice was not only raised to call attention to the inequity of being Black in America but also to the troubles facing the poor and otherwise disenfranchised members of society at the time.
We extol his courage in expanding social justice beyond the boundaries of color and race and into the consequences for all people facing discrimination, be it in work, in housing, in entitlements, in the ability to vote, and in how young men were selected to be sent off to fight other people’s wars in other countries.
However, many of the injustices we face today had not even been given a label back then.
Enter “food deserts” – no, not the lands devastated by climate change where farms can no longer thrive.
These are core sections of American cities and rural areas where food profiteers are making a killing.
The philosophy adopted under Reagan, and driven to ridiculous extremes by plutocrats ever since, is that the invisible hand of the market will cure all economic ills.
Perhaps correct if you are Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk. But it has been a disaster for many Americans, especially those in low-income areas.
As the Walmarts and Costcos and Amazon forced the closure of over 100,000 small businesses across the country, food deserts – whole communities with no purveyors of affordable, healthy food – arose and multiplied.
The reason? Good American ol’ boy greed.
As epitomized by the billionaires the presumptive president has assembled to run this country. The egoistical emperor who would disrespect Jimmy Carter, for whom flags across the country were to fly at half-mast for the code-regulated 30 days honoring his hundred years and selfless contributions to the nation; by demanding they fly at full height for the peanut-brain’s inauguration. The putative president who cares not for those for whom MLK toiled and died.
As epitomized by plutocratic profiteers such as Bezos and the Bushes, Zuckerberg and his Wall Street cronies, Musk and the private equity manipulators, who leaned on our government to allow big retailers to leverage secret deals denied to smaller rivals, previously prohibited under a law called the Robinson-Patman Act.
At one point, this act was the most frequently enforced antitrust law at the Federal Trade Commission but our elected officials, enticed by the potential augmentation of their personal fortunes through judicious infestment – oops, investment – in those big box companies which perceived Robinson-Patman as an annoying hinderance to escalating profit.
Today forces wishing to revive Robinson-Patman in the name of the people face vociferous criticism. Beneficiaries of its non-enforcement insist it will raise prices and promote inefficiency – although not a whisker of evidence supports such a claim.
To the contrary, the country has seen prices escalate spectacularly in lockstep with the dramatic rise in CEO and C-suite pay packages while lack of competition inspires poor service.
Basics of life are food and water, shelter, health, and love.
The last can’t be legislated but is certainly easier when the other four needs are met. And they are all interconnected as well as being in the bullseye of ongoing profiteering at a time when the wealthy and powerful pull the puppet strings of elected officials with impunity.
MLK knew those needs could be met if the laws were made by the people for the people.
Instead, almost 60 years after his murder, the wealthy and powerful are increasing their stranglehold over those in government and continuing to oppress ordinary people.
Most Americans think that the economy is rigged against them, and they aren’t wrong.
When the wealthy and powerful – both people and companies – break the laws of the land, all too often officials find it in their best interests to look the other way.
And, even if indicted, prosecutors bend over backwards to excuse inexcusable behavior and offer a mere slap on the wrist for executive decisions that knowingly lead to mass suffering and murder by corporate disregard like in the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Whereas a black teen from the projects might languish for decades in a squalid prison cell if a shoving incident results in a single accidental death.
Decades after most developed nations instituted healthcare that cared on the assumption that a healthy population is a thriving population, the United States still excludes a significant portion of its population from accessible and affordable medical attention.
Excessive profits for health coverage conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies, and the insurance industry directly contribute to Americans working and attending school while sick and infecting others, the use of Emergency rooms as the only and last resort at a far greater cost ultimately to be shouldered by taxpayers, significantly lower life expectancies, through-the-roof birth complications, and a ridiculous number of bankruptcies.
Too often disproportionately borne by the people of color and the poor in general i.e. Martin Luther King’s core constituency.
Affordable housing in this country? Safe and well-maintained rental units? In an America where landlord lobbyists buy off all attempts at regulation? Enough said.
The MLK Freedom Center advocates for water justice in California pointing out that more than a million Californians in hundreds of towns and cities – most with a preponderance of low-income populations and communities of color unable to fight off the abuses of Big Ag and corporate profiteers draining the water table – lack access to safe drinking water.
It calls for identifying water injustices and aggressively addressing them at local, state and national levels. Access to affordable potable water for drinking, cooking, and bathing should be a human right in the wealthiest country in the world. Today it isn’t.
Affordable food? Robinson-Patman was passed so that small retailers and their customers could have equal access to low prices as their bigger competitors. Its salient point being that the same rules should apply to everyone.
It is time to enforce that law again.
So that the real wealth of the United States, which was built on tens of thousands of tiny businesses serving their communities, can be reinvigorated and the American economy once again flourish despite the ebb and flow of greed on Wall Street and in Washington.
Right now, wholesalers for independent grocers in economically-deprived neighborhoods must as pay much as 50 percent more for items than the big-box stores’ everyday low prices. And such stores are increasingly concentrated in affluent neighborhoods where corporate behemoths can suck up the big bucks.
Which leaves the poor who have limited access to transport dependent on local emporia without the leverage to negotiate reasonable prices for basic necessities. If even those stores can survive.
Even, ironically, in rural swathes of the country where factory farms churn out the food for the nation.
And the more the poor are forced to pay for those basic necessities, the less they have for health and housing… and the ability to buy themselves off the island.
These are veritable deserts, ones of corporate America’s making. Deserts where the average resident’s life span is years shorter than the national average.
Bulk purchasers may try to secure the best prices for independent grocers but, because of back-room deal-making, can never get anywhere close to the same low prices from suppliers automatically granted buyers from big-box stores.
If he were alive today, Martin Luther King would be out in front demanding change. Demanding fairness for the people, all people suffering in these deserts. He would be there insisting on the enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, that more must be done to lead his people out of the quagmire of institutionalized corporate greed.
MLK’s greatest appeal was his ability to reach out beyond his own community – poor, black rural and religious – to touch the lives of the working poor, the disenfranchised, and oppressed people everywhere.
Today is the day to honor him by taking up the flag and pursuing the dream. The dream that all men – and, yes, women and non-binary Americans as well – are created equal and deserve to be treated equally under the law. And that our representatives in capitols across the country take affirmative action to enforce the laws and green those deserts until there is no longer a need to protest.
Let us give thanks.
(Liz Amsden resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
