The following statement issued by Cynthia McKinney requires widespread distribution and discussion.
John McCain and Barack Obama are already manipulating to squeeze other candidates like McKinney and all others out of the mainstream.
McCain has proposed "Town Hall Forums."
We should all be concerned that voices like McKinney's will be blocked out and silenced.
If the arrest of a guy passing out leaflets at the Obama event at the Xcel Center in St. Paul is any indication, even passing out leaflets to those selectively chosen to participate in these town hall forums will not have access to these ideas; much less the listening and viewing public.
This is what passes for democracy in the United States.
I think every blogger in the United States owes it to democracy to post this and other ideas coming from Cynthia McKinney on their blogs.
Real democracy requires all views be put before the American people.
We know the corporate media moguls will argue they just don't have the space or time for these views. Just like they never have space in their newspapers, on radio or television for our problems.
There is always room and time for advertising for Viagra with Bob Dole talking about how it helps him get it up as if the world turns on whether or not Bob Dole can get a hard.
When will we start to see views from Cynthia McKinney in the mainstream media?
Why hasn't Barack Obama insisted Cynthia McKinney and other candidates receive media coverage?
Barack Obama may have as his mentor Frank Marshall Davis, who was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA; but, Cynthia McKinney has Frank Marshall Davis' vision.Rita
Cynthia McKinney is seeking the Green Party endorsement for President.
Statement by Cynthia McKinney,
Power to the PeopleCandidate for U.S. President,
On the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's Presidential
Candidate in 2008
(statement issued June 9, 2008)
On Saturday, June 7, 2008, Hillary Clinton announced
that her 2008 presidential bid is over, making Barack
Obama the first-ever Black presidential nominee of a
major party in the history of the United States.
Congratulations to Senator Obama for achieving such a
feat!
When I was growing up in the U.S. South in the racially
turbulent 1960s, it would have been impossible for a
Black politician to become a viable Presidential
contender. Nothing a Black candidate could have done
or said would have prevented him (or her) from being
excluded on the basis of skin color alone. Many of us
never thought we would see in our lifetime a Black
person with a real possibility of becoming President of
the United States.
The fact that this is now possible is a sign of some
racial progress in this country, more than 40 years
after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But it
is also a sign of the deep discontent among the
American people, and particularly among African
Americans, with the corporate-dominated,
business-as-usual politics that has prevailed in
Washington for too many years.
Coming from Barack Obama, the word "change" did not
appear as just another empty campaign slogan. It
galvanized millions of people --mostly young people--to
register to vote and to get active in the political
system. The U.S. political system needs the energy and
vision of all is citizens participating in the
political process. Citizen participation is always the
answer.
Senator Obama called for healing the wounds inflicted
on working people and the poor in our country after
eights years of a corrupt and criminal Bush-Cheney
Administration. Just as in November 2006, people full
of an expectation for change, including those the
system has purposefully left out and left behind,
flocked to the polls to vote for Senator Obama. Across
a broad swath of the people of this country, and from
those who are impacted by U.S. foreign policy, there is
a real expectation, a real desire, for change.
While congratulating Senator Obama for a feat well
done, I would also like to bring home the very real
need for change and a few of the issues that must be
addressed for the change needed in this country to be
real. First of all, a few of the more obvious facts:
United for a Fair Economy (UFE) produces studies each
year on the anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. entitled, State of the Dream reports.
UFE has found that on some indices the racial
disparities that exist today are worse than at the time
of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For
example, infant mortality, where the overall U.S. world
ranking falls below Cuba, Israel, and Canada. They
also have found that, without a public policy
intervention, it would take over 5,000 years to close
the home ownership gap between blacks and whites in
this country, especially exacerbated because of the
foreclosure crisis disproportionately facing Blacks and
Latinos today. They have found that it would take 581
years, without a public policy intervention, to close
the racial gap in income in this country. UFE has
found unacceptable racial disparities extant on
economic, justice, and security issues. After
analyzing the impact of the Democratic Party's "First
100 Hours" agenda upon taking the Congressional
majority, UFE concluded in its 2007 report that Blacks
vote in the Blue (meaning, they support Democrats in
the voting booth), but live in the Red (they do not get
the public policy results that those votes merit). And
UFE noted that Hurricane Katrina was not even mentioned
at all in the Congressional Democratic majority's 2007
First 100 hours agenda.
United for a Fair Economy is not the only organization
to find such dismal statistics, reflecting life for far
too many in this country. In a study not too long ago,
Dr. David Satcher found that over 83,000 blacks died
unnecessarily, due to racial disparities in access to
health care and because of the disparate treatment
blacks receive after access. A Hull House study found
that the racial disparity in the quality of life of
black Chicagoans and white Chicagoans would take 200
years to be eliminated without a public policy
intervention. The National Urban League in its annual
"State of Black America" publication basically
concludes that the United States has not done enough to
close long-existing and unacceptable racial
disparities. The United Nations Rapporteur for Special
Forms of Racism, Mr. Doudou Diene of Senegal, just left
this country in an unprecedented fact-finding mission
to monitor human rights violations in the United
States. Dr. Jared Ball submitted to Diene on my
behalf, my statement after the Sean Bell police
verdict. The United Nations has already cited its
concern for the treatment of Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita survivors and the extrajudicial killings taking
place across our country, that especially target Black
and Latino males, and especially at the hands of law
enforcement authorities.
I hope it is clear that the desire for change is so
deeply felt because it is deeply needed. Politics,
through public policy, can address all these issues and
more in the favor of the people. We do not have to
accept or tolerate such glaring disparities in our
society. We do not have to accept or tolerate bloated
Pentagon spending, unfair tax cuts, attacks on our
civil liberties, and on workers' rights to unionize.
We don't have to accept or tolerate our children
dropping out of high school, college education
unreachable because tuition is so high, or our country
steeped in debt.
The 21st Century statistics for our country reflect a
country that can still be characterized as Dr. King did
so many years ago: the greatest purveyor of violence
on the planet.
It doesn't have to be that way. And the people know
it.
I have accepted as the platform of the Power to the
People Campaign, the 10-Point Draft Manifesto of the
Reconstruction Movement, a grouping of Black activists
who came together in the aftermath of Hurricanes
Katrina and Rita to advocate for public policy
initiatives that address the plight of Blacks and other
oppressed peoples in this country.
Among its many specific public policy planks, the Draft
Manifesto calls for:
* election integrity, if our vote is to mean anything
at all, all political parties must defend the integrity
of the votes cast by the American people, something
neither of the major parties has done effectively in
the past two Presidential elections;
* funding a massive infrastructure improvement program
that is also a jobs program that greens our economy and
puts people to work, and especially in New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast, Hurricane survivors, treated as
internally displaced persons whose right to vote and
right of return are protected, play a meaningful role
in the rebuilding of their communities;
* recognizing affordable housing as a fundamental human
right, and putting a halt to the senseless destruction
of public housing in New Orleans;
* enacting Reparations for African Americans, so that
the enduring racial disparities which reflect the U.S.
government's failure to address the reality and the
vestiges of slavery and unjust laws enacted can be
ended and recognition of the plight of Black Farmers
whose issues are still not being adequately addressed
by USDA and court-appointed mediators despite a US
government admission of guilt for systematic
discrimination;
* acknowledging COINTELPRO and other government spying
and destabilization programs from the 1960s to today
and disclosing the role of the US government in the
harassment and false imprisonment of political
activists in this country, including Mumia Abu-Jamal,
the San Francisco 8, Leonard Peltier, including
restitution to victims of government abuse and their
families for the suffering they have long endured;
* ending prisons for profit and the "war on drugs,"
which fuels the criminalization of Black and Latino
youth at home and provides cover for U.S. military
intervention in foreign countries, particularly to our
south, which is used to put down all social protest
movements in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Peru,
Ecuador, and elsewhere;
* creating a universal access, single-payer, health
care system and enacting a livable wage, equal pay for
equal work, repealing the Bush tax cuts, and making
corporations and the rich pay their fair share of
taxes;
* establishing public funding for higher education--no
student should graduate from college or university tens
or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt;
* ensuring workers' rights by 1) repealing Taft-Hartley
to stop the unjust firing of union organizers, ban
scabbing, and enable workers to exercise their voices
at work and 2) enacting laws for U.S. corporations that
keep labor standards high at home and raise them
abroad, which would require the repeal of NAFTA, CAFTA,
the Caribbean FTA, and the U.S.-Peru FTA;
* justice for immigrant workers, including real
immigration reform that provides amnesty for all
undocumented immigrants;
* creating a Department of Peace that would put forward
projects for peace all over the world, deploying our
diplomats to help resolve conflicts through peaceful
means and overseeing the orderly withdrawal of U.S.
troops from the more than 100 countries around the
world where they are stationed, and an immediate end to
all wars and occupations by U.S. forces, beginning in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and slashing the budget for the
Pentagon.
The Power to the People Campaign has visited 24 states
and I believe there is already broad support across our
country for these policy positions. The people deserve
an open and honest debate on these issues and more. I
encourage the Democratic Party and its new presumptive
nominee, Senator Obama, to embrace these important
suggestions for policy initiatives.
About Frank Marshall Davis...Frank Marshall Davis
Frank Marshall Davis was born on December 31, 1905, in Arkansas City, Kansas. His parents divorced one year after his birth. At the age of seventeen, he moved to Wichita to attend Friends University and soon thereafter he transferred to the school of journalism at Kansas State Agricultural College. He began to write poems as the result of an assignment in college.
In 1927 Davis moved to Chicago, where he wrote articles and short stories for magazines and newspapers. In 1930, he moved to Atlanta to become an editor of a semiweekly paper. Under Davis's editorship, the Atlanta Daily World became the first successful black daily newspaper in America. He continued to write and publish poems, and his poetic work caught the attention of Frances Norton Manning, a bohemian intellectual, who introduced Davis to Norman Forge. Forge's Black Cat Press brought out Davis' first book, Black Man's Verse, in the summer of 1935.
Black Man's Verse was a critical success. The book brought together Davis's interest in jazz and free verse with a condemnation of racial oppression. Sterling A. Brown stated that Davis "at his best is bitterly realistic." One section of the book, "Ebony under Granite," chronicles the lives of various black people buried in a cemetery. For this reason, it has been compared to Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. In 1937, Black Cat Press released Davis's second book, I Am the American Negro. As with his earlier volume, this book presents a strident critique of racism. The title poem, a "docudrama" in free verse and prose, is an attack against "Jim Crow" laws.
Between 1935 and 1947, Davis was Executive Editor for the Associated Negro Press in Chicago. He also started a photography club, worked for numerous political parties, and participated in the League of American Writers. With the encouragement of authors such as Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, Davis completed what many consider to be his finest collection, 47th Street. 47th Street was published in 1948 and chronicles the varied life on Chicago's South Side. Whereas his earlier work focused exclusively on black life, this book presents a "rainbow race" of people, united more by class than color.
In 1948, Davis's vacation to Honolulu, Hawaii, turned into a permanent residence. He stayed on to raise five children, operate a small wholesale paper business, and write a weekly column for the Honolulu Record. Although his work fell slightly out of favor, it was rediscovered during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, and in 1978 he published his final volume, Awakening, and Other Poems. Frank Marshall Davis died in 1987. Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002) and Livin' the Blues: Memories of a Black Journalist and Poet (1992) were published posthumously.
