[Texgreen] Open Letter from Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney to Barack Obama

[Margaret]

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_12807.cfm

Open Letter from Green Party Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney
to Barack Obama
By Cynthia McKinney
June 9, 2008

Statement by Cynthia McKinney, Power to the People Candidate 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 eight 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. -- "And advanced forms of
biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform
biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful
tool." PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, p. 60.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and
policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a
foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the
American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without
leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. -- Carroll
Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time