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While Touting Commitment To MLK’s Values, JP Morgan Chase Moves To Foreclose On 78 Year-Old Civil Rights Activist

By Pat Garofalo on Feb 7, 2012 at 5:30 pm

Last month, JP Morgan Chase — the largest bank in the United States — launched a project to digitize the documents of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, making them available on the internet. “It’s important for JPMorgan Chase to support Dr. King’s legacy because of the important values he committed his life to promoting, such as equality, equal opportunity, and quality education for all. People like Dr. Martin Luther King are what made America what it is today. The values he espoused are the values that JPMorgan Chase also tries to stand for around the world,” said JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

But at the same time, as Change.org has noted, the bank is on the verge of foreclosing on a 78 year-old former civil rights activist:

Helen Bailey is a 78-year-old grandmother who participated in the civil rights movement, worked as a childcare provider for autistic children, and was a community volunteer. She has paid her mortgage since 1999, but now she can’t keep up the payments. All she wants is to stay in her home until she dies, in the neighborhood where she feels safe and has lived for nearly quarter of a century. She could have refinanced with a company willing to let her live in the house for free until her death, but Chase Bank would not reduce her principal by $9,000. She’s been paying 7% interest, well above most rates, so Chase could have decided they had made enough. Instead, they have started foreclosure…While Chase tries to tie itself to the incredible legacy of Martin Luther King, who really did believe in communities, Chase tries to throw a grandmother who marched for civil rights out onto the street.

“JP Morgan Chase must practice what it preaches,” said Gary Flowers, Executive Director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, Inc. “On one hand, the bank cannot earnestly invoke the values of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., while devaluing the very principles for which he lived and died.”

This is not the only mortgage-related issue JP Morgan has brought upon itself recently. Last year, JP Morgan found itself in hot water for overcharging members of the military on their mortgages, eventually agreeing to a $56 million settlement. The bank even sold off the home of a military member on the very day that he returned from Iraq.

One former JP Morgan banker told Reuters, “I don’t say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization.” And evidently that exploitation extends to touting the bank’s commitment to civil rights with one hand while foreclosing on a former civil rights activist with the other.

NEWS FLASH

Martin Luther King III: Alabama’s Immigration Law Is Like ‘Jim Crow’ | Calling it “Jim Crow Revisited,” Martin Luther King III and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka lay out similarities between the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King, Jr. helped lead in Alabama and the draconian anti-immigrant law in the same state. “The passage of Alabama’s anti-immigrant legislation, HB 56, invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South,” they write. “And the police state it has created is equally cruel.” In the op-ed, King and Trumka call on President Obama to stop immigration programs that lead to racial profiling, “including collaboration between state and local law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.” After a New York Times editorial compared HB 56 and the civil rights movement, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) said earlier this week that it was an “insult” to compare the law and the movement. However, it’s more likely that Martin Luther King Jr.’s son is the more authoritative source on if the two struggles are similar.

Politics

Rep. Allen West: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Would Not Have Backed’ The 99 Percent Movement

By Tanya Somanader on Oct 19, 2011 at 5:55 pm

At the dedication of the national Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial last Sunday, the Rev. Bernice King said her father Dr. King would support the 99 Percent Movement: “I hear my father saying what we are seeing now all across the streets of America and the world is a freedom explosion.” She reminded the nation that civil rights leader worked not just for racial justice, but for economic justice as well. “We should never adjust to the one percent controlling more than 40 percent of the wealth,” she said.

Florida Rep. Allen West (R), however, was “born and raised” in the same town that Dr. King grew up in. Therefore, he asserted as a fact today in a Newsmax interview that “Martin Luther King, Jr. would not back these types of protesters”:

WEST: I was born and raised in the same town that Martin Luther King, Jr. grew up in. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have backed these type of protesters. First of all, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a focus, he had a message. He was divinely inspired. I don’t know what the inspiration is for these individuals.

Watch it:

Unfortunately for West, geographical proximity clearly did not provide West any insight into the man himself. Like the 99 percent movement, King consistently called for economic justice. He critiqued unregulated free marketism as a system that permits “necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few.” He envisioned a “Poor People’s Campaign” in which a multiracial coalition would march through the capital to “demand that President Lyndon Johnson and Congress help the poor get jobs, health care, and decent homes.”

King was assassinated just weeks before the march on May 12, 1968. Rev. Ralph Abernathy carried his legacy to DC, stating, “We come with an appeal to open the doors of America to the almost 50 million Americans who have not been given a fair share of American’s wealth and opportunity, and we will stay until we get it.” This, incidentally, is what the 99 Percent Movement is about.

This, however, is also what West sees as “contradictory to the foundational principles and values that we have in the United States.” If West grew up anywhere near Dr. King and his legacy, he has now turned his back on him.

Politics

MLK’s Daughter: My Father Would Have Supported The 99 Percent Movement

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Oct 17, 2011 at 9:40 am

Speaking at the dedication ceremony for a new monument to her father, the Rev. Bernice King said Martin Luther King Jr. would have been heartened by the Occupy Wall Street protests and larger 99 Percent Movement. “I hear my father saying what we are seeing now all across the streets of America and the world is a freedom explosion,” she said, adding that we should move beyond or conception of King’s work as just about “racial justice” to include “economic justice”:

“We are being pulled from the familiar place and comfort place of “I have a dream” to focus on another aspect of Dr. King’s life. Perhaps, the postponement [of the original dedication] was a divine interuption to remind us of the King that moved us beyond the dream of racial justice to action and work of economic justice.

Perhaps, God wanted to remind us that when our father was taken from us, he was in the midst of starting a poor people’s campaign where he was galvanizing poor people from all walks of life to converge on this nation’s capital and stay here and occupy this place until there was change in the economic system and a better distribution of wealth. [...]

In fact, we told us we must become maladjusted to certain social ills. We should never adjust to the one percent controlling more than 40 percent of the wealth.”

Watch it:

She added that we should “never adjust” to record-high unemployment, people lacking health care because they can’t afford it, “a judicial system that allows to take a life when guilt is yet in question,” and other miscarriages of justice. But she called on protesters to conduct themselves on a “higher order” in the quest for justice.

Alyssa

‘True Blood’ Open Thread: Malcom v. Martin

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 29, 2011 at 1:36 pm

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 28 episode of True Blood, “Burning Down the House.”

If True Blood had no pretensions to political meaningfulness, it might be possible to enjoy it as a dopey, campy soap opera, to ignore some of the larger plausibility gaps (like the fact that Sookie just never got around to figuring out her faerie abilities since the writers appear to have forgotten about them) in favor of the pretty people. The problem is that Alan Ball appears to have some ambitions for the show. True Blood was, at one point, a decent little metaphor for gay rights and broader sexual liberation. But by shifting it into a riff on the African-American Civil Rights movement, the show’s gotten disastrous in a way that ought to cast doubt on the accepted narrative that Ball is an important and clear-thinking artist.

It’s one thing to do a story featuring several black characters, to have good intentions about it, and to handle it badly out of a lack of ability or sensibility. It’s entirely another to badly misappropriate the Civil Rights movement in the service of a shallow metaphor. If I thought last week’s episode of True Blood, in which two literally Magical Negroes worked together to bring peace to a white family, I might even be more offended by the crassness of the conversation between Bill and Nan this week after the massacre at the tolerance festival. “Remember the civil rights movement. Sweeping social change inevitably accompanied by violence and the appearance of chaos, yadda yadda,” Nan declares. “That’s the spin we’ll give it.” But Bill isn’t having any of it. “We are going after the Necromancer and we are taking her out,” he shoots back, pulling a weak white man’s ghost of Malcolm. “By any means necessary.”

There is a really important story, or stories, to be told about the way that movements have learned from each other, and the ways that the gay civil rights movement has failed to learn from the black civil rights movement — and the ways it couldn’t have replicated that movement. A story that was more tightly focused on Nan Flanagan and her efforts to build vampire narratives, networks, and allies, might be a way to explore that dynamic, which is an important one for American politics. Even a narrower focus on the witch-vampire storyline that took a broader look at anti-vampire sentiment and splits within the vampire community might be a powerful way to explore the tension in civil rights movements between separatists and assimilationists, to illustrate the broad-based roots of events like Jason and Jessica’s failed tryst, which leaves her walking away declaring, “I am not going to glamour you just because you don’t want to feel guilty. What about my guilt? Who’s going to make me forget? Fucking humans. I’m going to go find someone to eat.”

There is a way to make this metaphor work. This is not a function of vampires being tapped out as a topic. It’s a function of carelessness and lack of imagination, of blood and guts and sex trying to stand in for racial and sexual sensitivity. And it’s something that the folks involved ought to be embarrassed about.

Politics

MLK Jr. Memorial Statue Completed Using Unpaid Chinese Laborers

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Aug 26, 2011 at 11:30 am

Chinese sculpter Lei Yixin working on the MLK Memorial

The opening ceremony for the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial has been postponed as Hurricane Irene closes in on the East Coast, but when it does open, the monument will do so under a different cloud as some point out that the way it was constructed violates some of the core principles for which King fought and died. While often overshadowed by his civil rights legacy, King was an outspoken defender of labor rights and was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he was assassinated. But his memorial was built, in part, using free labor imported from China.

The foundation behind the memorial, which deserves tremendous praise for successfully pulling off the monumental project, controversially selected Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin — known for his bust of Mao Zedong — to be the lead sculptor on the project. Couldn’t the foundation have “chosen a black American, let alone an American,” critics ask?

More egregiously, despite promises from the organization to use local unionized labor for the project, the sculpture was completed using workers imported from China working for nothing but “national pride.” Last September, the foundation promised in a statement:

“[We] will employ skilled craft workers from the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC) to work with Master Lei Yixin, Sculptor of Record, to complete the assembly and installation,”

They eventually reneged on that vow, despite a plethora of unemployed skilled stonemasons in U.S. “Why do they need to come over to do the work when there are so many people here who can do it?” Scott Garvin, president of the Washington area union asked the Washington Post’s Michael Ruane. “It’s kind of a thumb in the eye,” he added. The local BAC chapter’s “membership has dropped in the past three years from 2,000 to 850 because of a decline in building projects.”

The fact that the Chinese workers were not being paid was only discovered when the BAC sent an investigator to determine if they were being exploited. While they were given room and board and hoped to be paid upon returning to China, using free labor to construct Kings monument seems to fly in the face of what he stood for. “It is a crime for people who live in this rich nation to receive starvation wages,” King told the Memphis workers.

The foundation has largely avoided commenting on the issue. And Harry Johnson, CEO of the MLK memorial foundation, “said there has been NO scandal, no drama in building” of the monument.

When confronted by the union over this fact, the foundation seemed to cynically use King’s principles as a shield, saying, “We strongly believe that we should not exclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs, social background or country of origin.”

A request for comment from the foundation was not immediately returned.

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