“FREE AT LAST?”

Like other media outlets, this website has been observing Martin Luther King, Jr. day for many years – long enough to see major changes in the status of race relations in the United States. Unfortunately, those changes have only moved America backward – no matter the color of your skin.

Last year we chose to address MLK day from a purely economic perspective – assessing whether the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, had fulfilled the hopes and dreams of those black voters who monolithically elected him, reelected him and unswervingly still support him today.

He has not. Based on the overwhelming economic evidence cited in our column, it is abundantly clear blacks are less prosperous today than they were when Obama took office – i.e. further away from the true “promissory note of freedom” King spoke of in his most famous oration.

Obama brought the hope, he just didn’t bring the change – and after eight years in office he has no one else to blame for his failure (especially given the extent to which he took power into his own hands to press various radical agendas).

And what of black “freedom?” As we noted on King Day four years ago, the federal government’s ongoing Orwellian assault on American liberty has not discriminated on the basis of race.

“The freedoms King fought so courageously to obtain for black Americans are currently being eroded for all Americans,” we noted as the U.S. spy state cast its increasingly lengthy, ominous shadow over individual liberty.

Similarly, Americans of all races have seen their blood and treasure drained on multiple, costly foreign interventions – none of which have made any of us any safer. Obama’s fact-challenged saber-rattling against Russia is just the latest foreign policy disaster, one final attempt to needlessly escalate global tensions in the name of the military-industrial complex (a.k.a. more government).

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