McKinney & Clemente: Black, Brown, Green and True
by BAR executive editor
Glen Ford
"The overarching necessity for Black
America - and therefore, for the entire nation - is the rebirth of a Black-led
mass movement for peace and fundamental social change."
"The Green Party was against the war when it started, is
against the war now, and is against any military action against Iran that might
take place tomorrow," declared former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, accepting
the Green Party's presidential nomination, in Chicago, this weekend. "The
Green Party is a peace party. A Green vote is a peace vote."
McKinney's statement is unequivocally true, a verity beyond
question, as is her own deep commitment to social justice, tested and
manifested during her 12-year sojourn in Congress. The 53-year-old activist and
educator, whose last act as a U.S. Representative was to submit Articles of
Impeachment against George Bush, not only speaks "truth to power" (or, as she
puts it, "truth to empower), but demands that truth be the essential
element of all American political discourse.
There is nothing quaint or convenient about The Truth. In a
nation ruled by the raw power of money, the Lords of Capital market their own
versions of truth designed to make wrongs seem right, and criminality appear
normal. The corporate casting couch supplies political actors to mouth
attractive untruths as required by the imperatives of Capital. Some of these
actors are extremely talented, compounding the dangers they present to society.
At every opportunity, they stomp on truth as if it were vermin - and for each
vanquished truth they are paid a bounty in parceled power and prestige. U.S.
presidents are manufactured in this way.
"The corporate casting couch supplies political actors to
mouth attractive untruths as required by the imperatives of Capital."
Truth thus becomes a precious commodity in 21st
Century America. At the Green Party podium, Cynthia McKinney reached back to
the year 1851, when Black abolitionist Sojourner Truth asked a white crowd a
rhetorical question for which only one answer was conceivable: "Ain't I a
woman?" Having focused her audience on a simple truth, Sojourner proceeded to explicate
the burning issues of the day: "Well children, where there is so much
racket, there must be something out of kilter."
Truth is compelling, in any epoch. "In 2008, after two
stolen Presidential elections and eight years of George W. Bush, and at least
two years of Democratic Party complicity, the racket is about war crimes,
torture, crimes against the peace; the racket is about crimes against the
Constitution, crimes against the American people, and crimes against the global
community," said Cynthia McKinney, relating well-known but relentlessly
suppressed truths. "The racket is even about values that we thought were
long settled as reasonable to pursue, like liberty and justice, and economic
opportunity, for all. Yes, Sojourner, there's a lot out of kilter now,
but these two women, Rosa and me, joined by all the men and women in this room,
are going to do our best to turn this country right side up again."
The truth alone cannot set you free, but it will at least
tell you what time it is.
"The only
way I can even begin to accept this nomination is that I must understand that I
am just a vessel, a representative of the work of an entire generation, and the
Hip-Hop radical activist movement," said
vice-presidential nominee Rosa
Clemente, a South Bronx native of Puerto Rican parentage. The 36-year-old
journalist was a key organizer of the 3,000-strong, 2004 Hip
Hop Political Convention, in Newark, New Jersey. The delegates, all of whom
paid their own way, drew up a Hip Hop Political Agenda that remains eminently
compatible with the Green
Party and "Power
to the People" platforms under which Clemente and McKinney are currently
campaigning. (A second Hip Hop Political Convention took place in Chicago in
the summer of 2006.)
"The racket is about war
crimes, torture, crimes against the peace; the racket is about crimes against
the Constitution, crimes against the American people, and crimes against the
global community."
"I
stand on the shoulders of a generation of young people of color that are
united, that clearly understand that we are suffering form structural racism, institutional
racism and capitalism," said Clemente. These are truths that Barack Obama, the
corporate Democrat, would rather end 20-year friendships than accept. Obama
allows the celebration of his candidacy to serve as a vindication of historical
and contemporary racist rule. In fact, his ascension is fully endorsed (and
financed) by the overwhelmingly white Lords of Capitol.
No
recess of reality is safe from corporate sanitization. In this election cycle,
conducted amid overlapping, terminal crises of late-stage capitalism, the
heroes are those who challenge the corporate media's endlessly looped lies -
key elements in the structural supports that keep the evil edifice from
crumbling outright. Heroines like McKinney and Clemente.
"I don't see the Green Party as an alternative," said
Clemente. "I see it as an imperative."
A True Choice
"We are in this to build a movement,"
McKinney told her jubilant Chicago crowd. "A vote for the Green Party is a
vote for the movement that will turn this country right-side-up again."
Had she chosen to do so, McKinney could have remained
in the Democratic Party and attempted to recapture her House seat, outside
Atlanta, as she did in 2004 after a two year absence. But the overarching
necessity for Black America - and therefore, for the entire nation - is the
rebirth of a Black-led mass movement for peace and fundamental social change.
Without a movement, the corporate version of reality triumphs by default - not
just through the two-business-party electoral racket, but in all aspects of
life in which human beings must somehow locate themselves in the real world.
Much more is at stake than the Green
Party's goal of garnering five percent of the presidential vote, which would
make the Greens eligible for federal election funds next time around. Corporate
hegemony is the enemy of the self-determination of peoples and individuals. It
seeks to subdue every relationship except those of corporate ownership and
control, and capriciously alters the terms of even those shrunken arrangements,
at will. The current multiple crises afflicting humanity are all rooted in the
commodification of the Earth's resources - including human beings. There is no
choice but to resist the crushing grip, at every level of human activity.
"National Black politics has effectively
disintegrated, stripped of all issues other than Obama's own fortunes."
In Black America, which is the vital
epicenter of any progressive national politics, the Obama phenomenon - a
species of seductive invading organism that feeds on centuries of pent-up Black
aspirations - has already dangerously disrupted the African American political
consensus on peace, social justice and the validity of the Black historical
narrative, itself (the Obama-Rev. Wright clash). Obama has caused Blacks to
suspend the disbelief (healthy distrust) that has been at least a partial
defense against white snake oil salesmen over the years. National Black
politics has effectively disintegrated, stripped of all issues other than
Obama's own fortunes. It is as if an entire people were reduced to the property
of one, thoroughly dishonest man - in the service of another Man.
Obama's cynicism, his deliberate ambiguity and outright
manipulation of ALL people - but especially African Americans - debases the morals of his desperate
followers. In a remarkably short period of time they have come to accept
half-lies as clever, and well-crafted untruths as things to be admired. To
justify Obama's behavior, Blacks accept that all "politicians" say whatever
they must in order to win office, and attach no moral onus to that, even when
it is Blacks who are the ones being
lied to and defamed.
Obama has sanctioned - sanctified! - opportunism of the
most base kind. He has brought corporate and anti-Black values into the African
American house, in ways that no combination of previous scoundrels could have
dreamed.
"Those who delivered us into this mess cannot be trusted
to get us out of it."
The McKinney-Clemente message is one of struggle, not blind
hope and amorphous change. In the presidential candidate's words:
"Today's reality is harsh.
But what's even harder for many to accept and admit is that our quality of life
today is the making of the Democratic and Republican Parties. What our
country has become through their public policy is reflective of their
values. We will never get a United States that is reflective of different
values if we continue to do the same thing. Those who delivered us into
this mess cannot be trusted to get us out of it. That's why I signed up to do
something I've never done before so I can have something I've never had
before: My country, made in the likeness of the values of the Green
Party."
That party is now headed by two Black women, one a Latina,
who consciously seek to transform it into a vehicle for 24-7 movement politics
PLUS effective electoral activity. That is the historic opportunity. The
Democrats would have you waste your vote on an actor employed by corporations.
As Rosa Clemente reminded the Greens in Chicago: "We must remember the words of the
great abolitionist Frederick Douglass: 'I prefer to be true to myself, even at
the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false.'"
BAR executive editor Glen
Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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