Tag Archives: Martin Luther King Jr.

Sharing MLK events + ID refresh

Sharing MLK events + ID refresh

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Campaigning latest:
Sunday’s MLK event with Adjoa Andoh & Paterson Joseph
This coming Thursday’s film event
Who we are

MLK’s 1967 Christmas Sermon

Dear friends and supporters,

This Sunday we sat in the beautiful St. John’s Church Waterloo and listened to the words of Revd Dr Martin Luther King interpreted beautifully, sensitively and passionately by actors Adjoa Andoh and Paterson Joseph. The sermon was from Christmas Eve 1967, as bombs rained down on Vietnam and Dr. King’s commitment to the anti-Vietnam war movement was at its height.

MLK’s last Christmas sermon can be read here – it reads as if written for today, such is the brilliance of his mind. His writing, his empathy for all humanity and his consummate skill in framing contemporary concerns through the lens of his profound faith are peerless.

Both the performed reading and the brilliant discussion with Adjoa Andoh, Priya Lukka, Dionne Gravesande, Shanon Shah – chaired  by Canon Giles Goddard – were filmed and we will be sharing at Christmas time.

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Anniversaries & films; talks & UN submissions

Anniversaries & films; talks & UN submissions

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Dear friends, supporters and colleagues,

It hardly seems possible but it is 20 years since the world mobilised to speak out and tell their governments ‘Not in Our Name’ – no invasion of Iraq. Marches took place on every continent, including Antarctica.

Did it stop the war? No. Were the arguments made by those against the invasion proven right? Yes. Deborah Burton and Ho-Chih Lin have co-written a blog with Amir Amirani, director of We Are Many to mark this 20th anniversary. One of the core messages of the film – foreign and defence policy-making built upon lies and misinformation can only lead to long term often catastrophic consequences – now remains at the heart of our Transform Defence project.

BLOG: We Are Many – More Than Ever

Reflecting on 20 years since the global anti-Iraq war marches and the invasion that followed  

In the nine years of the Iraq War, according to the Costs of Wars Project, around 300,000 people (including civilians) were killed directly and many more killed indirectly. The invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition was estimated to have released around 250 million tCO2e. Despite this enormous climate impact, there is a shocking lack of transparency and accountability to the UNFCCC for this particular sector. Ever rising military budgets fund the big GHG emitting hardware. The richest countries are spending 30 times as much on their armed forces as they spend on providing climate finance for the world’s most vulnerable countries

Read the blog here.
Watch the film here.

TALK: Military Emissions, Military Spending and Climate Change, Drexel University USA

Post COP27 Deborah was invited to give a webinar as part of a series for Drexel University’s Green Infrastructure, Climate and Cities programme followed by a panel discussion with Prof Franco Montalto and Kristy Kelly PhD, a specialist in gender and development.

Watch the talk here.
Also delighted to have joined CODEPINK in the USA for a webinar on unpacking COP27 – the highs and the lows; what was achieved for the issue of military emissions and spending; and what we might expect from COP28 in Dubai.

FILM: MLK Global

MLK Day 16 January: To mark MLK Day our MLK Global team – Yolande Cadore in NYC, Dionne Gravesande and Deborah Burton – wrote this piece.

March 29th:  We look forward to returning to Union Chapel in Islington, north London, for another screening of the outstanding film: From Montgomery to Memphis. Check Union Chapel website for more information nearer the date.

UN SUBMISSION: Missing Military Emissions

The Global Stocktake is a new UNFCCC process to gather information on GHG emissions with the results to be presented at COP28 this year in Dubai. The stocktake enables the assessment of global collective progress on mitigation, adaptation, means of implementation and support.

Critically, the process needs information about what is not being ‘counted’ and unreported military emissions are just that. We are working to get military emissions on the Global Stocktake and with seven other research and advocacy groups (Europe & USA) we have just made a joint submission based on the recommendations of our June 2022 report on military emissions reporting to the UNFCCC.

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Follow our various activities on social media

@_TPNS
@TransformDef
@MLK_Global

MLK film & Transform Defence at Union Chapel

MLK film & Transform Defence at Union Chapel

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To mark April 4th, the date of MLK’s assassination, TPNS was invited to host a screening of ‘From Montgomery to Memphis’ on 26 March at the  Union Chapel Islington .

‘From Montgomery to Memphis’ was released in 1970, and follows Dr.King’s 13 years of civil rights activism, from his first bus boycotts to his assassination on April 4th, 1968.  In 1967, MLK addressed the ‘triple evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism. His analysis was that they were indivisible. His analysis remains as relevant then as today and is at the heart of our MLK Global project.

Ahead of the screening, and linked to the MLK theme of ‘The Beloved Community’, TPNS was invited to give a talk about its work in general and its Transform Defence project in particular – especially the links between military spending and military emissions. It also includes reference to its MLK Global work.The TPNS programme began with a short COP26 related video, a 20min presentation by Deborah Burton and closed with a video on the topic of the inter-generational nature of campaign and change.  As Nelson Mandela said: ‘It seem impossible until it’s done’.

Presentation:

In times of Coronavirus: UBI is an idea whose time has finally come

In times of Coronavirus: UBI is an idea whose time has finally come

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The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. … We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1968)

We hope this email finds you, and all those you care for, safe and well.

Many of us also have family, friends and colleagues in many different parts of the world and, coupled with the ever rising number of cases here in the UK/Europe/USA, the news about the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) across the global south, for many of us, will be even more worrying.

It is becoming more apparent with every passing day that the Coronavirus pandemic is holding a mirror up to every single aspect of human life and activity and that this scrutiny leaves much of humanity’s 21st century day to day behaviour sorely wanting. The ultimate damning evidence of this is the millions upon millions of our fellow sisters and brothers in the global south who don’t even have access to the basic protective shield of soap and water as this pandemic rages across the globe.

It’s not as if we didn’t know the system was long broken. We did. The evidence has been piling up for years and years. However, global inequality and the unstoppable ascendency of the tax evading greedy 1%; the harm of agribusiness and factory farming at one end and illegal poaching at the other; big pharma’s monopolies and the erosion of the primacy of publicly funded healthcare and research; and finally, ultimately, climate catastrophe; none of this was enough to force the hands of the political class, financial and corporate sectors to change course and ‘do the right thing’.
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King Assassination Project (Working Title)

King Assassination Project (Working Title)

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In summer 2018 we began filming for our ‘King Assassination Project’. The film will look at more than 40 years of controversy surrounding the case. More importantly – and uniquely –offers an opportunity to put the case that King’s assassination was a direct result of the threat posed from his latter years activity(1965-68) as he led the civil rights movement into anti-Vietnam War and Economic Justice coalition building.

We are indebted to the support of our friends and colleagues at Sands Films Studios, our production partners on this film, along with a number of major donors who have underwritten the first phase of production.

In April 2018, the world marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King and in summer 2018 we began filming for our ‘King Assassination Project’. The film will look at more than 40 years of controversy surrounding the case. More importantly – and uniquely –offers an opportunity to put the case that King’s assassination was a direct result of the threat posed from his latter years activity(1965-68) as he led the civil rights movement into anti-Vietnam War and Economic Justice coalition building.

It is the story of King we have never been told. It dives deep into the root causes, planning and aftermath of the assassination of one of the towering political figures of the 20th century; a story of resonance today for African Americans in particular and, in general for all those around the world who are concerned with social justice.

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WHY MLK STILL MATTERS – AND WHY THIS FILM NOW

MLK is a man whose time is now.  His call for an end to poverty, racism and militarism is arguably way more prescient now than in 1967. This film would both bring a thorough and up to date telling of the MLK assassination as well as shed light on MLK’s relevance for today.  This project has grown out of our research on MLK as part of our collaboration with colleagues in the USA to finds ways to internationalise the work of Dr King at the end of his – in particular his Poor People’s Campaign and associated Economic Bill of Rights. Article written to mark 50th Anniversary

https://mlkglobal.org/2018/04/03/if-you-think-you-know-martin-luther-king-think-again/

 

 

The case for Universal Basic Income

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But, after a Conservative government ended the project, in 1979, Mincome was buried. Decades later, Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, dug up the numbers. And what she found was that life in Dauphin improved markedly. Hospitalization rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And researchers who looked at Mincome’s impact on work rates discovered that they had barely dropped at all. The program had worked about as well as anyone could have hoped.

Mincome was a prototype of an idea that came to the fore in the sixties, and that is now popular again among economists and policy folks: a basic income guarantee. There are many versions of the idea, but the most interesting is what’s called a universal basic income: every year, every adult citizen in the U.S. would receive a stipend—ten thousand dollars is a number often mentioned. (Children would receive a smaller allowance.)

One striking thing about guaranteeing a basic income is that it’s always had support both on the left and on the right—albeit for different reasons. Martin Luther King embraced the idea, but so did the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, while the Nixon Administration even tried to get a basic-income guarantee through Congress. These days, among younger thinkers on the left, the U.B.I. is seen as a means to ending poverty, combatting rising inequality, and liberating workers from the burden of crappy jobs. For thinkers on the right, the U.B.I. seems like a simpler, and more libertarian, alternative to the thicket of anti-poverty and social-welfare programs. Continue reading →

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Rights and Peace movement

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King addressed the issue of the relationship between the struggles for peace and civil rights in his Riverside Church speech. He began the speech by addressing the criticisms of those who suggested that it was not his “place” to speak out against the war:

“”Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known my commitment, my calling or me. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.” Continue reading →

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Critiques of Capitalism and Militarism

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America’s celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. typically focus on his civil rights activism: the nonviolent actions that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The last few years of King’s life, by contrast, are generally overlooked. When he was assassinated in 1968, King was in the midst of waging a radical campaign against economic inequality and poverty, while protesting vigorously against the Vietnam War. Continue reading →