More Saturday TV

Friday was the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Assassination. The Bill Moyers show this week looked at King and the struggle for economic equality. Below is a segment where Moyers interviews theologian James Cone and historian Taylor Branch. The conversation returns several times to just how much more severe today is the problem King was training his movement on just before his death.

BILL MOYERS: Let’s listen again to Dr. King, from the speech he made to those striking sanitation workers in Memphis just weeks before he was shot to death. What he said about poverty still rings true.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen. And it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.

BILL MOYERS: Could anything be more current right now?

TAYLOR BRANCH: No. It's hard to imagine, and of course, it's chilling to think what the distribution of wealth was when he made that indictment compared to what it is now. It is much more skewed now than it was then and it was bad then.

Here's the rest.


Meanwhile, not helping at all is President Barack Obama who, one day after the anniversary of the abrupt ending to King's Poor People's Campaign, became the first Democratic President to propose cuts to Social Security. Nice going, there. And great timing, too.