.
Excerpts are quoted below:
“The treatise, it is claimed, was published on page 76 of the August, 1967 edition of Saturday Review, and supposedly can also be read in the collection of King's work entitled, This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That the claimants never mention the publisher of this collection should have been a clear tip-off that it might not be genuine, and indeed it isn't. The book doesn't exist. As for Saturday Review, there were four issues in August of 1967. Two of the four editions contained a page 76. One of the pages 76 contains classified ads and the other contained a review of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album. No King letter anywhere.
“Yet its lack of authenticity hasn't prevented it from having a long shelf-life...
“In truth, King appears never to have made any public comment about Zionism per se; and the only known statement he ever made on the topic, made privately to a handful of people, is a far cry from what he is purported to have said in the so-called `Letter to an Anti-Zionist friend'. In 1968, according to Seymour Martin Lipset, ... a young man apparently made a fairly harsh remark attacking Zionists as people, to which King responded: `Don't talk like that. When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking Anti-Semitism.' Assuming this quote to be genuine, it is still far from the ideological endorsement of Zionism as theory or practice that was evidenced in the phony letter.”
Zionism is inherently racist, and ever will be so.
Ted McTaggart
Detroit Michigan, USA
[Abridged.]
Something's rotten
With budget taxes and disbursements affecting us all, surely we should expect our politicians to dish it up a bit more honestly.
For starters, they skite about their “tax cuts” as if it were “their” money they're giving away, when it's really only returning minuscule amounts from too-much tax already paid, within their overall high-tax regime.
Then there's their absurd claim that “every Australian will benefit” - but how can students, the unemployed, welfare recipients, non-waged housewives or drought-stricken farmers possibly benefit?
And there's their nauseating self-praise about doing this, rather than directing these funds to where they're really needed, to drought-stricken farmers (relief already cut), dentists, doctors, nurses and finance-starved hospitals, teachers and under-resourced schools.
And there wasn't a single word on the massive Goods and Services Tax, proclaimed in the last budget as the elixir of all future life. What is going on - how much is it raising, and how's it being spent?
Similarly, not a word about a million of our people unemployed, producing nothing and paying no tax, but necessarily sustained from overall taxation revenue. (Nothing from Simon Crean either.)
Similar distortions of our real needs occurred when John Howard alone took us into the disastrous Iraq war, as if this little nation was our greatest enemy, and when he assured that troop despatches there were only for acclimatisation.
So perhaps if that mighty king of truthful expression, Shakespeare, were with us today, might he not, paraphrasing from Hamlet, be saying “There's something rotten in the state of this wide brown land today”?
Ken O'Hara
Gerringong NSW
Treasury and employment
In his post-budget speech, Treasury secretary Ken Henry called for higher employment. Involuntary unemployment is certainly a problem but is involuntary employment necessarily desirable?
Australia has, and will continue to have, enough people employed to raise sufficient tax to meet the needs of those unable to work and finance public services.
People who are not underprivileged and can make a significant contribution via a job without significant distress may have a duty to seek work. But the prime target of Dr Henry, and the federal government, seems to be underprivileged Centrelink clients with limited skills and atypical obstacles to congenial employment - not comfortably off early retirees or people supported by an employed spouse.
Why do the already disadvantaged have an obligation to make sacrifices via involuntary employment?
Economists should concentrate on improving productivity (the key to economic growth) in ways which do not reduce quality of life or fairness rather than aspiring to boost employment by coercing the less-well-off and providing inequitable tax cuts.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere NSW
Outraged
As a student in my final year of VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), I am naturally interested in the changes of the education system by the federal budget. As an anti-war activist, I am also naturally interested in changes to the “defence” department in the federal budget. The budget presented on May 13 severely disappointed me. No, “disappointment” is an understatement. Something along the lines of “outraged” would be closer to the truth.
Treasurer Peter Costello has deregulated the education industry further, giving universities more power to charge more fees to their students, and increase their intake of more full-fee paying students. He has also increased the “defence” budget, giving our forces an injection of better equipment to carry out wars such as the illegal Gulf War 2.
The government has committed only $1.5 billion extra funding over the next four years, as it continues to shift the cost of higher education from the community to students and an increasingly corporatised university sector.
The changes in education as outlined by the budget:
- Students will now pay up to 30%, depending on what each university wants to charge.
- Partial deregulation will allow universities to set the student contribution from $0 to a maximum set by the government, and increase their intake of fee paying students from 25% to 50% of domestic undergraduates students in a course.
These changes are despicable. Students, some of whom already experience harsh living conditions while in university, will have an extra burden set upon them for years afterwards while paying off their HECS. Not only does this put a huge burden on the poor, the government has insulted the “less fortunate” further by allowing the increase of richer, fee paying students, who can afford to pay for university without the HECS scheme. This increase will lead Australia down the road towards America, where parents start saving up for a “college education” from the time their child is born - if this is an actual possibility, which is rarely the case.
The government's gradual deregulation of education policy shows us the long-term intentions of the capitalist class are clearly to make “higher education” a monopoly for the rich and their lackies.
This cut in education is no doubt to allow for the increase of our “defence”. Altogether an extra $2.5 billion is to be spent over the next five years with total “defence” spending to rise to $15 billion in 2003-04. The bill for the illegal Iraq campaign is to be paid from this amount and has been calculated at $645 million.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) receive more than $42 million over the next four years for surveillance and intelligence gathering.
It is up to the people to voice their strong opposition to this recent budget. Free education has become a thing of the past, and we are fast becoming a police state with the extra military spending that is cutting into taxpayer's money. Extra burden is being put on the average “battler”, while ensuring the funding for further unjustified wars premeditated by George Bush and followed, with doggy fidelity, by Prime Minister John Howard.
Dimitrov Kyriakov
Melbourne
Hollingworth's supporters
How unsurprising that a jumbled “defence” of the outgoing Governor-General by a trio of white-shoe stumblebums from state Liberal and National parties has utterly backfired.
Given the signal to smear by the Prime Minister, a failed Queensland National Party leader, a tragi-comic New South Wales National Party figure and a NSW Liberal with form for dubious parliamentary “revelations” wobbled into action. Their behaviour had been pre-empted by a pair of pre-deployed right-wing newspaper commentators of the self-parodying variety, but the PM's hit-squad brought new depths of Heffernanesque abuse of parliamentary privilege.
All that was missing was the tabling of forged Commonwealth documents. The fearless trio failed and their bodgie campaigns have only brought further ignominy on those who so avidly chose Bishop Hollingworth as Head of State precisely because, like them, he would brush aside issues of child abuse.
The response of the NSW and Queensland premiers was reminiscent of circus ringmasters interrupted mid-show by three heavily grease-painted clowns staggering through the sawdust straight into the lions' cage.
Peter Woodforde
Melba ACT
From Green Left Weekly, June 4, 2003.
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