Cynthia McKinney's election night remarks
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney Remarks
Election Night: Tuesday, August 8, 2006
(After Listening to Pink's "Dear Mr. President")
I wanted you to hear this song because it says so much about why this election in Georgia was so important.
In the film American Blackout, you saw that I say that my district needs jobs. And so, in partnership with faith-based organizations and labor, I put together a program to train my constituents to acquire the skills for jobs that won't be outsourced overseas, and that pay more than a living wage, with health and retirement benefits. Last month, we took in 500 students. Who at the end of their training will have transportable skills, internationally-recognized certification, and a chance to live the American dream, supporting their families and our community.
The news media didn't tell you about that because they wanted you to focus on my hair!
I first got into trouble when I was compelled in 1991, while serving in the Georgia Legislature, to speak against George Herbert Walker Bush's war against Iraq. And during a point of personal privilege, I declared that I could not support any of George Bush's reasons for war.
My colleagues got up and walked out on me, I was vilified in the press, and compared to Julian Bond, who too had spoken out against an unjust war.
Ladies and gentlemen, there comes a time when people of conscience are compelled to dissent.
Bobby Kennedy said, "The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country."
We love our country, and that is why we dissent: because we care.
We care about the dignity of all the world's people.
We care about minimum wage workers; we care about no wage workers;
we care about the homeless--too many of whom are veterans;
we want a healthy future for all our children;
we want our seniors to live in dignity.
Our country is too rich to tolerate such poverty in our midst.
We have more to give to our people and the world than DynCorp, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group.
We care about the air and the earth and the water. And so we reject George Bush's science lessons that distort the facts and justify policies that support drilling for oil in Alaska; exacerbate global warming; and allow more human consumption of known toxins and pollutants.
We care about the projection of US power around the world. Either we can be a force for good in the world; or we can rely on force and upset the world.
Sadly, this Administration has chosen the latter.
At a time when this country has failed to train enough certified teachers to educate our children, George Bush is spending billions, nearly one trillion, dollars for war. And in a point of personal privilege right now I echo what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "A time comes when silence is betrayal; we are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls 'enemy.'"
One year to the day before Dr. King was murdered, he declared that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own country.
With Israel's invasion of Lebanon, there might even be a call for more US or UN troops to be stationed in the Middle East, we -- here tonigh t-- say to our Commander-in-Chief: Sir, No Sir.
And so, before we engage in yet more war, I declare tonight that we stand with the families of our hurt soldiers and the hundreds of thousands of innocent hurt and dead Iraqis.
We stand with the homeless Vietnam and Gulf War veterans.
We stand with the Agent Orange victims and the 160,000 sick Gulf War veterans.
We stand with the 37,000 green card soldiers, not even citizens, but willing to trade their lives for a chance to live and work in America because our foreign policy has failed to uplift their hopes and aspirations in their own countries.
Dr. King told us that in order to stop the madness we would have to match actions with words. Mario Savio before that told us that we have to put our very bodies against the wheels and the gears and the levers of the machine and we have to say to those who own it, that they must stop it, or we will stop it.
Tonight I am joined by noted men and women activists who have put their bodies against the wheels and the gears and the levers of the machine and they are trying to stop it. They are not tricked by red herrings that the corporate media throw to us. They are focused on our objective to make America a better country.
Something is happening around the world: countries with little or nothing are standing up, rising up against the utter and complete domination.
Thank goodness for the people in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Venezuela, Malaysia, all standing up and speaking for the weak and the voiceless in their countries. A change is sweeping the world. And America must not be left out.
So my new friends are the mothers who have lost their sons in George Bush's war and we say to them hold fast to your faith -- your suffering will not be a stumbling block for us. We will make this stand with you -- you are not alone.
Denise Thomas, daughter went to Iraq once and when they tried to send her a second time, Mama got political. She's now the founder of the Georgia Chapter of Military Families Speak Out. First told her story at a prayer vigil organized by Ann Mauney. Prayed at by Reverend Timothy McDonald.
Then one mother who wasn't so lucky. She couldn't save her son from the War Machine. The first Georgia soldier to die in Iraq came from the 4th District. Patricia Roberts, Jamal Addison's mother, now politically active and my new friend.
Another mother, lost her son, Casey, and decided to take her case directly to President Bush. Cindy Sheehan.
There's something special about these women. Their names aren't Deborah, or Esther, or Ruth. But they are women for these times. Women, called to make peaceful revolution.
President Kennedy warned us that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
So let the word go out: we aren't going to tolerate any more stolen elections; we're watching you. And we want our leaders back -- or we will become the leaders.
And not only do we want our country back, we want our Party back.
There is a growing force for peace in this country. And the peace movement that we are building is backed by millions of young people. I want to thank the hundreds of people who volunteered in our campaign, especially the young people who were excited about getting involved in something good.
Thank you all for a lot of hard work, thank you for the thousands of volunteer hours, thank you for helping to make a stand in Georgia.
I wish the new representative for the 4th Congressional District well.
Comments
I liked an earlier article so read on. I have to say I have big problems supporting the Democratic party. I don't live in the USA but I just don't see a huge amount of difference between the more open fascism of Bush and the more concealed imperialism that was Clinton. If I was living in the USA I would have to say I would be trying to build some sort of party which stood outside these two capitalist parties. The workers need an independent voice. It doesn't have to be specifically marxist but it should be unrelentingly socialist and egalitarian. It mightn't even run in elections for a while but should try to engage in non-electoral political struggle. It should certainly encourage debate and discussion on historical marxism and other forms of socialism. I like what this person says but they play this 'nice cop, nasty cop' everytime to buy workers into the con that there's a change going to happen to the system 'if we regain control of our party'. The only way we're going to have a change is if the working people really have a party. The structures that are out there will forever prevent that. There is a risk of growing fascism to contend with but will an emboldened Democratic party actually achieve that? No. The answer is to be seen in Britain. The British labour party is (as far as I know) much more integrated and reflective of the British labour class. Indeed, it has a very powerful union and communist party lobby inside it. Yet, it is Labour which has pushed forward the drive to more fascistic imperialism rather than the hated Tories. I'm sorry to say it but the task is creating a new party which stands outside business interests which takes a firm anti-imperialist and anti-racist approach and which talks more about downsizing an army than about defending the USA. I have other thoughts about the class nature of the working class in the USA and other imperialist centres (in summary I think that they are partially bought-off with the super-exploited profits from the the third world - this is the material basis of their class collaborative tendencies) but I won't go into them in detail. What's important is that with the impact of globalisation these tendencies will become less significant over time as the differential between the living standards of those in the imperialist centres and those in the colonies decreases.
Posted by: doc | August 23, 2006 09:51 AM
"doc" -- Your approach to electoral strategy in the US is formalistic, mechanistic, fetishistic and moralistic.
It is misleading to talk about "the" Democratic Party as if it were some unitary entity. The Democrats are not a membership organization as parties often are in parliamentary systems; any registered voter can register as a member of the "party" and thereby become a Democrat. There are elected Democratic committee people, but they are only one interest group among many at the activist core of the Democratic Party, and they are not anywhere near the most powerful: primary voters regularly buck the endorsements of the committee when they are convinced to vote for someone else. There are permanent armies of professional campaigners and other consultants, there are fundraisers and donors, there are the elected officials themselves, all of which have factions among them that are warring not only on ideological but on sectoral, sectional, and even purely personal bases -- and then there are the organized interest groups of the people, whether you're talking about the organized women's movement or the unions. There are shifting alliances among all of these, and the interests of anti-people sectors indeed predominate, but as you have admitted yourself, this is not so very different from other countries where formally social-democratic and "labor" parties have themselves (a) adopted imperialism and (b) adapted to the status quo, barely if at all willing to push the limits of capitalism.
"The" Democratic "Party" is a party only semantically. Its closest parallel in a country with a parliamentary electoral system would be a coalition, not a party. The Olive Tree in Italy or the coalition around Congress in India, for instance, are both multi-party coalition formations. To complicate things further, they are also "supported from the outside" by left-wing parties when they get close to a parliamentary majority, so that the comparable right-wing coalition (around Berlusconi's "Forza Italia" or around the Hindu fascists of the BJP) does not take power. These smaller left-wing parties (Rifondazione in Italy or the CPI[M] and CPI in India) do not actually join the cabinet, but they support the governing center/left coalition in votes of confidence and so on.
The Democrats vs. Republicans electoral struggle in the USA basically operates in this fashion. Primary elections are essentially power struggles inside the contending coalitions, where forces that would be organized into formal political parties in other countries fight it out with other members of the same coalition. Among Democrats, this can be a war between people's forces and business forces -- union-backed candidates or black-supported candidates against Democratic Leadership Council candidates, for instance. In the Republican party, big business is more clearly dominant, but sometimes also ends up in electoral tangles with elements of the petty-bourgeois right (Christian right, xenophobic groups, etc.). The general election -- once the primaries have been decided -- is roughly equivalent to a "runoff" in most other countries: in other countries, the voters from minority parties inevitably line up behind the coalition candidate closest to their views even if they do not find that candidate ideal, because it is necessary to defeat the worse alternative. This happens regularly in other countries, and most people understand the process well, but formalistic leftists get caught up on the semantics of what a "party" is in the United States and therefore fall into the misleading trap of American exceptionalism, believing that the United States is uniquely bereft of a mass people's party. This is where you end up with the calls for a "third party."
This is ludicrous, because if candidates like Cynthia McKinney can't make it among Democratic primary voters, they cannot make it among the general electorate. It is also ludicrous to say that Cynthia McKinney and Bill Clinton are the same because they are part of the same "party." In any other country, they would not be. McKinney was a rare genuine leftist who just happened to be an elected official, and she has now been defeated twice through a combination of Republican crossover voters (in Georgia, Republicans can "cross over" and vote in the Democratic primary -- diluting the idea that the Democrats are a "party" even more) and official Democrats who found establishment candidates to defeat her. For leftists to abstain from this struggle is to throw McKinney and her constituency to the wolves. There is nothing stopping left strategists from engaging in the electoral struggle in Democratic primaries in a way that advances the people's interests; of course there is an establishment among Democrats that will not take nicely to this, but they are going to have to be defeated at some point anyway, so it makes perfect sense to defeat them in the Democratic primary, because if you cannot defeat them there, then you cannot defeat them in the general election.
There may be situations where a third-party or independent effort makes some sense, but they need to be taken on a case-by-case basis. In most cases, they are tactically and strategically stupid efforts that isolate the left from the base, because they increase the chance that the right-wing coalition (Republicans) will defeat the left-to-center/right coalition (Democrats) in the general election. This kind of tactical incompetence and strategic cluelessness is something that the masses recognize as a joke, and those who engage in it are not taken seriously by the people. It is especially silly when people who have no connections to a mass constituency and no record of credible mass organizing engage in it. Precisely because there is not much of an organized, extra-electoral mass constituency for the left at this moment, little vanity candidacies of marginal leftists are at best a pointless and at worst a destructive and wrecking exercise.
In short, then, the concrete analysis of concrete conditions serves us far better than ill-informed abstraction any day.
Further, I should say something about doc's comments on the nature of the US working class. That is a complicated discussion, and I don't think we can get into it fruitfully here. But no matter what your analysis of the working class is, you have to work with what you have. You do not get to dissolve the people and elect another. And what doc is suggesting here is essentially a moralizing approach in fighting imperialism -- one in which the left abstains from concrete struggles in favor of setting up a marginal "saving remnant" that "speaks the truth" about the nature of the system. That is a losing strategy and a recipe for sectarianism. The responsibility of the left is not to think up the "correct" line and then try to win people to it through ideological hectoring and persuasion. The job of the left is to develop a strategy that mobilizes people in the millions and builds lasting organizational power for the working class and oppressed, thereby setting the stage for a real challenge to capitalism. To do that, you need to meet the actually-existing people where they are and base your assessment of what to do next on the way things actually are, not the way you'd like them to be.
Posted by: John Lacny | August 23, 2006 10:00 PM