Cynthia McKinney
I have to say thank you to World Can’t Wait for
having this event and really being on target. From the very moment
that I first met Debra Sweet in New York City, she asked me to get on
board with World Can’t Wait and, of course, the issue then was
impeachment. We needed it then like we need it now. And so I feel as
if I’m a part of World Can’t Wait. I’m a part of all of these new
organizations that have come to me during this time of my travails in
and out of Congress and my absolute determination to stand against this
administration and, of course, I stood against the Clinton
Administration as well when they deserved it. They deserved it too
much.
{xtypo_rounded_right2}Phil Aliff
Jeremy Scahill {/xtypo_rounded_right2}So I don’t really want to say a whole lot but I want to start off by saying thank you to everyone who has accepted me because I did make a gross mistake. I started out my political career as a Democrat. I really believed in the Democratic Party. How silly I was! What I saw inside the Democratic Party was really the way this nation of empire works. So, Sunsara, when you say radical means getting to the root, I can say to you that I am radical and because I’m radical I’m free. And I don’t have to apologize one bit for being free. So I thank you all for helping me to find my freedom.
Inside the belly of the beast, however, I was able to see this phenomenon of hollow women of the hegemon. I supported Nancy Pelosi as she sought to rise in the ranks of the House of Representatives and I had thought that my suppport for Nancy Pelosi was a reflection of the values that I had. Maybe they were a reflection of the values — but what I learned is that women don’t automatically share the values that we all think are the values that ought to be prevailing in our public policy. So Nancy Pelosi has become one of these freaks of these hollow women of the hegemon. But we’ve got right here in this audience Cindy Sheehan, a woman who has stood up, an accidental Congresswoman, as I was an accidental Congresswoman, but Cindy Sheehan can walk the halls of Congress representing us because Nancy Pelosi does not deserve to be there.
These hollow women of the hegemon, these women like Madeleine Albright and Condoleeza Rice, whom at first we thought were going to represent the nobler ideals of this country, and then they sought to betray them and they actively betrayed them when Madeleine Albright said that the price is worth it — half a million Iraqi children dead. The price was worth it. And Condoleeza Rice prancing around on the international stage, an African-American woman, a betrayal of everything the Civil Rights Movement stood for, a betrayal of all the people of color and of all the people who had confidence in her. A hollow woman of the hegemon.
We’ve got another hollow woman who sits in the halls of Congress representing the state of California, Jane Harmon, whose idea it was to come up with a piece of legislation — The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. This is a piece of legislation that sees the intimate as the source of all this radicalization of organizations like World Can’t Wait and so they seek a legal means to control the intimate as a result and to prevent this radicalization from taking place.
But, actually what happens is that inocent lives are affected in very negative ways when the empire chooses to produce a piece of legislation and then use an example from the community. What was the community example to justify such a piece of legislation coming from Jane Harmon? It was the Liberty City Seven case. Seven young men, mostly poor, mostly Haitian, in the city of Miami. They were accused of being Muslims, acting strange and wearing turbans. And that in and of itself was justification for their arrest. They were arrested and charged with planning to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago. This was the face of homegrown terrorism, a justification for this piece of legistlation. But when the Liberty City Seven went to court they were not found guilty by a jury in Miami. And guess what happened? Your government decided to try them again. And then when they were tried a second time, guess what happened? They were found not guilty. And so our givernment now is trying to try them for a third time — in very much the same way that the Holy Land Foundation has also been targeted out of Texas. Found not guilty of supporting terrorist organizations one time and now they find that they are going to be tried again.
These people who sit in the halls of power in Washington, DC make rules and regulations and laws that affect all of us in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our communities as well as the global community. We cannot afford to allow them to reside in those halls of power one more day. We have to take them all out.
So, I hope that if there’s any lesson to be learned from what I’ve done by leaving the Democratic Party and joining what I hope to soon become the oppostion party in this country, the imperative party, I hope that other people will look at what I’ve done and say that that Democratic party that’s meeting over there no longer reflects my values, it is incapable of reflecting our valiues, it is incapable of producing change, it is incapable of producing public policy and our values for the people of this country and the global community. It is even incapable of providing for its own grass roots activists the values of the public polciy that even they believe in. I hope that they will leave that party and join in independent thinking, become independant voters and do something that they”ve never done before so that we all can have something that we’ve never had befoe and that’s government made in the brightness of our values.
I am happy to represent Cindy Sheehan and her campaign, to be honorary co-chair because I want to sweep the entire Congress clean starting with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We can paint the White House green too.
Phil Aliff
Um, I just wanted to say, seeing the actions -seeing what was happening today- I mean, if people in Denver didn’t know we were here, they know that we”re here now.
But I”d like to begin by going back forty years, to 1968: a year that saw the world catch fire, as millions of workers and students fought back against war and repression. The global working class began to burst into struggle, with one of the most iconic memories of that time being the brutal state repression of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As thousands of activists converged on Chicago, many “Went Clean for Gene” and placed their hopes in a long-shot senator running from Minnesota who, in his own words, wanted to “restore belief in the American political process among those who made threats to support third parties or other irregular political movements.” But as activists attempted to reach the convention center in Chicago, they were brutally beaten by the Chicago Police. By the end of the DNC, these young people had transitioned from electoral politics to demanding radical change. The Chicago Police Riot threw the illusions of the Democratic Party out the window.
I am here tonight to say that we must be sober and honest, as a movement, in order to understand the radicalization of that political period, while at the same time learn from its lessons. The four years leading up to Chicago saw a liberal presidency that brought about “The Great Society,” a series of reforms that included the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson went from being “the last great liberal” to being the most hated man in America, primarily because of his escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, and the resulting cutbacks of his poverty programs. LBJ’s disastrous presidency shattered the illusions of many in liberalism, and made the groundwork for the showdown in Chicago. Without LBJ-that is, without a president who was able to expose the actual brutality of the Democrats” foreign policy and willingness to chip away at social programs at home-there may not have been thousands of activists crashing the party’s convention in 1968 in a way that inspired millions around the world.
However, instead of being four years into a liberal presidency today, we are eight years into a Bush administration that has become more unpopular than Richard Nixon, with an approval rating that-eh-hovers around 30 percent on a good day. This, I think, is important to assess the weak state of the current anti-war movement. And let’s be honest: I don’t think this week will bring about mass radicalization that will immediately end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that’s okay. I think our movement has to relearn the lessons gained by the generation of 1968, and that lesson is that there are no shortcuts in this process.
That’s why I believe that an Obama presidency has the potential to expose the true aims and ambitions of the Democratic Party, just as LBJ’s presidency did. That’s because I think many of Obama’s supporters would be surprised to learn that he’s actually not for immediate withdrawal and that he hasn’t ruled out using more mercenaries in Iraq to help substitute for a troop draw-down. Thank you, Jeremy Scahill, wherever you are, for that fact! In fact, Obama talks about the need to refocus our attention on the broader Middle East and the fight in Afghanistan. So we”re likely to see some troops now in Iraq shifted toward the occupation of Afghanistan and also toward possible new interventions in the region, including Iran. That is, we are likely to see an adjustment in the tactics of the war, or perhaps even the strategy, but not an end to the war. To be frank, seeing an Obama presidency in action may produce a different kind of “Audacity of Hope,” and may produce a radicalization by people whose hopes and expectations are shattered by a Democratic administration that will continue the politics of seeking to dominate and control the Middle East, and Western and Central Asia, its people and its resources.
Let me be clear, though: I believe this presidential race is historic, and is raising expectations and hopes of millions in this country. People who never believed that they could be part of changing society are taking the first steps this year to becoming involved in politics. When Obama came to Powder Springs, GA-which is right outside Atlanta-he gave an incredibly populist speech to voters in the Deep South. Think about that for a moment: a Black man winning support in the south with-guess what, CNN-white voters. He gave this speech because his campaign realized he needed to sound populist in order to win in the south. This is a very important development, as the south has always been the Achilles Heel of the working class due to the division of race.
Instead of working against the grain by either warping our message or discounting voters entirely, we must build political relationships with those people based on principles and by articulating a political landscape to them. When expectations are shattered by an Obama presidency that fails to end the war in Iraq, and escalates the war in Afghanistan, people can either be led into demoralization, or be won to struggle. Without organizations moving with the current, the movement will be set back in ways similar to the 2004 elections. We must remember it took the bravery and resolve of Cindy Sheehan in order to pull anti-war sentiment out of demoralization. [applause]
That, to me, is the key question: will there be pressure on Obama if he is elected, or will people in the anti-war movement succumb to pressure to “give him time” and “not to rock the boat?” [Shouts from the crowd: “No!”] The experience after the 2006 mid-term elections is not encouraging. Democrats took over the House and Senate, yet continued to fund and prolong the occupation of Iraq. Many groups in the anti-war movement, rather than build large demonstrations to challenge the Democrats, have started to campaign for them in 2008. This is leading to an infinitely receding”..that troops will ever leave (?)
As the situation in the Middle East and the nation worsens, we must be clear with people on where we stand. As Mario Savio once said, “There is a time when operation of the machine makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you”ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, upon the wheels, and upon the leavers, and you”ve got to make it stop. And you”ve got to indicate to the people who run it, that unless you”re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Jeremy Scahill
Thank you all for coming out tonight. I guess this is the ninth convention I”ve done with Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow! It’s always kind of strange when you walk into the convention centers. Today I was just in, is it the Coke or the Pepsi Center? [laughter] It’s kind of hard to keep all the brands straight. It’s sort of like, Barack Obama is sort of like a Nascar now. [laughter] And John McCain is going to wear an American Flag, but it’s gonna be shaped like a Nike “swoosh.” [laughter] And they”re spending fifty million dollars, just in federal money alone, on the so-called security operation. I’m sure many of you who were out in the streets today saw just a small portion of it, when Ron Kovic led people to the gates and actually blocked access and shut down journalists from going into the convention center. [applause]
They also have a fusion center that they have set up that has representatives of every law enforcement agency in the United States, all the intelligence agencies in the United States, and all of this is coordinated. In fact, I overheard police officers today identifying some random young guy in the crowd who had a skateboard, and they were obsessing over this one kid, making sure they could get his picture. So a female police officer was coordinating this, and she got these two guys to go around and take photos of some young guy with a skateboard (if I see him I”ll tell him that’s what they”re doing-it’s sort of a melee what’s going on).
The reason I bring all of this up is because, what we”re seeing here in Denver, and as we”re going to see in St. Paul is a microcosm of how this war operates and how this society operates. The corporations are in total control. The corporations are driving the agenda. When it comes to war and political conventions, there is not a Democratic Party or a Republican Party, there is a corporatist party which represents both of the constituencies.
And as much as the rhetoric of the Obama campaign is about “Hope” and “Change,” he put the nail in the coffin of any honesty to that statement when he selected Joe Biden as his running mate. Joe Biden is not just one of those Democrats who now turns around a says, “Oh, I made a mistake in my vote to authorize the war.” Some won’t even go that far, to admit that their vote was a mistake. But for Biden to simply end his involvement by simply saying, “Well, it was a mistake and I’m going to join Barack and we”re going to end the war” is to whitewash his entire history in cheerleading this war.
You see, Joseph Biden was the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, the Democrats were in control of the Senate at the time the invasion and occupation of Iraq was supposedly debated. Now, Joe Biden refused to call any witnesses to testify at those crucial hearings that he chaired that would say anything outside of the parameters that were defined as such: bomb the hell out of Iraq, or bomb them and invade them. Those were the parameters set by Joseph Biden in the Senate. There were some of us that were in contact with former weapons inspector Scott Ritter as well as the former Deputy Secretary General to the UN Hans von Sponeck at that time. As we were calling Joe Biden’s Foreign Relations Committee and saying to them, “you should have Scott Ritter testify in front of this committee to talk about the fabricated allegations that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. You should have Hans von Sponeck, thirty-two year veteran of the UN, who has just returned from Iraq. I was on a speaking tour with him at the time, where he had met in the north of Iraq with Ansar al-Islam guerillas called an al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, and you know who they were, they were the U.S. controlled section of Iraq in the North and they were reporting skirmishes with Saddam Hussein’s military. This was not a “radical leftist;” this was a thirty-two year veteran of the United Nations, the former head of the Iraq program for the United Nations who could have revealed to the American people, the people of the world, that when the Bush administration says that there is a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, that in fact the only connection is Washington! [applause]
Biden, and I’m not going to harp on him for a long time, I just will say this about him: Joseph Biden has been in the Senate longer than all but four other senators. You tell me what kind of “change” that represents! To have Joseph Biden, the dean of the Democrats” foreign policy in the Senate, who has pushed for NATO expansion, who has pushed for war against Yugoslavia, who pushed for war against Iraq and then stamped with the stamp of Senate legitimacy the Bush administration’s war-this is the man, now, who is going to be in Barack Obama’s ear all the time. In fact, Obama slipped up the other day when he introduced him, he said “the next president of the United States.”
But it’s not just Biden. After Barack beat Hillary Clinton in the primary, you saw all of the old guard Democrats, the people who brought us all of the wars of the 1990s, all the Patriot-precursor to the Patriot Act, all the wars and sanctions, jump over to the Obama team: Madeline Albright, Toby Lay, Susan Rice-it’s the same people who mercilessly punished Iraq for the eight years Bill Clinton was President of the United States, he initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against the people of Iraq, presided enthusiastically over a devastating regime of economic sanctions, signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act that was pushed by the neocons, both Democrat and Republican. These are now the people who are around Obama. So when we talk about what is at stake in this election, this isn’t about one man, and if you believe in him, and if you have hope in him. This is, in Obama’s own words, about judgment: and the judgment that he has shown is to take this old guard of warmongers and put them front and center of his campaign right now.
Now I’m not saying, don’t vote for Barack, or vote for Barack. Cynthia McKinney is here tonight; she is running for President on the Green Party ticket. Ralph Nader is also running as an Independent for President. These issues, and I know because I was talking to Cynthia about this today, they go well beyond this election. This elections is an important moment in our history, but let’s be clear: it is not as important as the broader struggle to end this one-party system in this country that is intent on maintaining empire, on maintaining policies of aggression and invasion, both at home and abroad (and I’m talking about New Orleans as one example). They have unleashed these corporate mercenaries around the globe, yes in Iraq where they have killed innocent civilians, repeatedly over the years of this occupation, but also armed and dangerous on the streets of New Orleans (Cynthia investigated this, she was one of the only congresspeople who investigated Blackwater’s involvement in the aftermath of the flooding of New Orleans, where they showed up, not on the orders initially of the Bush administration, but Eric Prince, the radical right-wing Christian owner of Blackwater, bankroller of Bush’s campaigns, decided that he was going to send 184 men with M-4 assault rifles onto the streets of an American city to “stop looters and confront criminals” Those were the exact words of the Blackwater men that I interviewed on the streets of New Orleans.
Now, after being there for a week, the Bush administration gave them a no-bid contract, where they billed U.S. taxpayers $950 per Blackwater operative, per day in the hurricane zone. Blackwater made $70 million off Hurricane Katrina and the definition of their contract, Cynthia got their documents, was to “protect FEMA.” Has FEMA even arrived yet in New Orleans? [laughter] But the mercenaries from Blackwater were there. And it wasn’t just Blackwater: all these corporations that made a killing off the occupation of Iraq descended on that city. It was like Baghdad on the Bayou: you had the Halliburtons and the DynaCorps and all these companies swooped in on the place. And so, when I interviewed Barack Obama’s senior foreign policy advisor recently, and I was trying to be clear on what Senator Obama’s position would be on these companies, because he has been somewhat critical, and they said “Senator Obama cannot and will not rule out using Blackwater and other mercenary companies in Iraq.”
The reality is the Republicans could run a head of lettuce for president, and that head of lettuce would be enthusiastically embraced by those so inclined to vote for lunatics like John McCain and George Bush. They”d talk about how, “Head of Lettuce is a patriot,” how, “Head of Lettuce is going to lead us.” [laughter] And they managed to find a man who is slightly less charismatic than a head of lettuce as their actual candidate. [more laughter] But on the other side of this, today when I was talking to Mutulu-M1 of Dead Prez-to him and Stic.Man, are you going to vote? Mutulu started to say “no,” then Stic.Man said, “I’m gonna vote. I’m gonna vote with my struggle. I’m gonna vote by being in the streets. I’m gonna vote”” [interrupted by applause]
That’s the whole question. It’s not about being vegetarian between meals, any more than you can be anti-war between wars. You need to always be against it. You need to be consistent in your opposition, all of us do. And so it’s not just about the election, because if it’s just Barack Obama or it’s John McCain, the occupation will still be there and it’s going to escalate, Latin America is going to be systematically targeted, and these companies are going to continue to have this major holiday that they”ve had for far too long.
The duty is ours to end it. The duty is ours to confront it. The reason I feel it’s so important in the struggle for all of us to support independent media outlets, independent programs like DemocracyNow! Which broadcasts two hours of programming from here every day. I encourage all of you to go to DemocracyNow.org and see where the broadcast is available, if your local broadcaster as well as watch the webstream.
I”ll see you all on the streets. Thank you.