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

[Cynthia McKinney is a Candidate for the Green Party Nomination]


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.



---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Global Research Articles by Cynthia McKinney

 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=listByAuthor&authorFirst=Cynthia&

amp;authorName=McKinney