Happy MLK Day.

After 3 books and close to 40 years of research, US lawyer and civil rights activist William Pepper has conclusively proved that MLK was not assassinated by “lone gunman” James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving the Memphis PD, “Dixie Mafia,” FBI, and President LBJ.  This inconvenient truth, unknown to most Americans and ignored by the vast majority of US “news” outlets who diligently work to craft public memory, and thus, collective “reality,” is best understood in the larger context of 21st century US imperial realities, and it helps explain why Martin Luther King may have moved towards political decentralism if he had not been gunned down in his prime.

To wit. The most compelling US national political reality of the past two years is not Donald Trump’s grotesque presidency. Rather, it is the fact that POTUS DJT has amplified the same imperial policies amplified by POTUS BHO for eight years before him, and that BOTH major political parties – the globalist Democratic party and the nationalist Republican party – are carrying out the SAME imperial US policies that threaten not only ordinary US citizens, but the world as a whole.

As we wrote here two years ago, during the eight years of his presidency, President Obama continued the same imperial policies of the Bush/Cheney regime. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. is now at war in EIGHT countries, surveillance over all Americans has deepened, the drone program has dramatically expanded, U.S. arms sales to despotic regimes has increased, and whistleblowers have been more harshly persecuted than ever before. Even Mr. Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement – the Affordable Care Act, now threatened by Republican majorities in Congress and Mr. Trump – was written by the insurance and pharmaceuticals industries, after Mr. Obama threw the single payer discussion under the bus shortly after taking office. What would MLK say?

MLK’s intertwined trio – racism, materialism, and militarism – are alive and well in the 21st century U.S. of Empire. During the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement relied on the federal government to ultimately do the right thing to protect civil and voting rights through federal laws for ALL Americans.

But what of the 21st century?

People of color in the United States have been systematically denied their voting rights by new federal laws that have turned over our electoral system to proprietary for-profit corporate interests. People of color are being incarcerated in record numbers. People of color are being systematically targeted by over-exuberant law enforcement policies, officers who are being more and more heavily armed by Pentagon hardware. We could go and on.

One wonders if MLK, if he were alive today, might have advocated for a more decentralized approach to a more compassionate world. Would Martin, in short, have become a secessionist?

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” King famously observed, “but it bends towards justice,” and we would argue, decentralization.

Happy MLK Day 2019.

Free Vermont, and long live the UNtied States.