@amerpie it hurts so much that speaking plainly and abundantly evident truths like this is considered radical

but I do acknowledge that it is

100% though

@amerpie It's speech like this that got him assassinated by the FBI. They want you to think it was some crazy racist who assassinated him for civil rights, but it was the FBI who killed him because he started criticizing capitalism.

@amerpie he wasn't wrong about capitalism. Things is that we are humans, so no system we ever come up with will ever be anywhere near perfect.

@amerpie

The fundamental error the American Center Left (Democrats) made in the years of the civil rights movement and beyond was just this. They continued to expand personal rights while ignoring the need for economic reform. They ignored anti-trust, allowed the minimum wage to stall, and generally supported US corporate consolidation and the concentration of wealth. They were better than the alternative but abandoned their FDR roots. It's time for a synthesis, a new democratic party.#uspol

@capngloval @amerpie Thing is: we still can come up with something far better than capitalism.

@amerpie I can't see anything wrong with what he said, personally. Then again, I'm not in the pay of multi-billionaires.

@altbot @amerpie eh, good enough.

@amerpie

So weird reading all those comments. I tought most Mastodon users would be anti-capitalist^^

"Capitalism makes tons of people live in poverty" isn't a radical view, just facts.

Americans especially did a really good job at convincing people that the only alternative to capitalism is (a fake representation of) communism.

When in reality there are a ton of other systems (also you can't directly jump from capitalism to communism, there are steps/systems in between)

@amerpie I don't think was as controversial back when it was said.

I don't think there is anything making you inherently evil if you criticize capitalism, so even today, you might come across as naive, but you're not really Stalin, though.

@Ultraverified @amerpie

That IS being a radical. That's why they shot him.

@amerpie We could certainly use him today.

@violetmadder @amerpie

Just being a decent human being is why they murdered Renee Good.

@amerpie Radical in the sense that he believed in the redistribution of economic and political power. He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation’s labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country’s misadventure in Vietnam.

@DirtyAnCom @amerpie As is the case for many of these types of killings, it is fully possible for authorities to be responsible at the same time as they are not actively contracting a murder.

I know far too little about this specific case, but a very plausible hypothesis in general is that authorities lets someone be killed through inaction, stokes antipathy towards the person, or even provides resources to violent people.

There’s a whole spectrum of this, and all could be called ”killed him”.

@Ultraverified @amerpie very true!

@amerpie

And it did not change since then… high time we did that now…

@amerpie Many young people are so angry at the excesses of capitalism that they want to tear the whole thing down. But somehow they fail to appreciate that the right-wing politicians tearing things down are agents of capitalism.

@amerpie I hate this holiday because the hypocrisy is palpable. While alive the government did their level best to literally and figuratively destroy this man. And now that he's dead, they've co-opted and watered down his messages to a kindergarten-level "we should all get along" thing.

@Ultraverified @amerpie In an indecent, uncaring, and thoughtless society, that is radical.

@ahltorp @amerpie What we do have confirmation of is that the FBI sent him a threatening letter demanding that he kill himself or else they would release evidence of his affair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter).

The Trump Regime released thousands of files related to his assassination (as part of the "flood the zone" strategy to distract from everything else), but as far as I know, there's nothing that explicitly admits they were responsible for his assassination, beyond that they saw him as a dangerous adversary. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-releases-fbi-records-on-mlk-jr-despite-his-familys-opposition)

I just firmly believe they were responsible, whether directly or by proxy, like you say.