CORRUPT ELECTIONS R US(a)
INTERVIEW WITH CYNTHIA MCKINNEY
PART THREE
Cs= Cindy Sheehan
Cs: Well let me stop you there, because that’s kind of my question. In 2000 Gore caves, in 2004 Kerry caves with 17 million in his war chest, but here we are all over the country sending our $25, our $40 our $50 our $10s our $5s to the Green Party, to the Libertarian Party, because they’re fighting for election integrity in Ohio, Kerry’s not, the Democratic Party is not. But there are people in the party, and there are progressive people who are fighting, they’re screaming “stolen election,” were fighting for election protection, election integrity. The elite certainly are not, the oligarchy certainly is not, so this goes back to the document in 1965, and in 2008 where was the, in 2008 the Republican didn’t win, why weren’t the Republicans screaming election fraud? And why weren’t they screaming “stolen elections?”
Cm: Well the Republicans were complicit in all of this and that’s what we really have to get down to is that at a certain level there is no difference between Democrat and Republican because my experience, when I ran for Congress, of course people laughed because in Georgia it had never been done before, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to have been done by someone like me, because I’m quote “too black,” and so but the interesting lesson is that when I said “yeah” and I said “yeah, I’m gonna run,” I got treated just like the other candidates, and guess what that was?
I was given the list of Fortune 500 CEOs in Florida and I was told I had to call them and I had to make an appointment with them and I had to ask for financial support. Well, that’s very interesting, because Democrats do that, and Republicans do that, at a certain level if everyone goes to the same people and they’re asking for money from the same people, and they get the money from those people, then, hmmm?
Cs: Right, then who really controls the government and the decision making and the policy making?
Cm: Right, and we’ve seen in the policies that were supposed to have stopped in 2007 in January when Democrats gained control of the Congress, well you know, people began to say, “well, that’s George Bush’s war.” But now that we’ve done what they asked us to do, they told us to make the Congress a Democratic majority, and we did that, now we’re going to get a “peace dividend.” How long have we been waiting for the peace dividend? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’ve been waiting for the peace dividend, and there’re certain people who are always able to find another enemy to suck up the taxpayer’s money, someone else to hate.
The politics of hate, the politics of war, triumph over the politics of common sense, the politics of peace, every time. So, when the Democrats got in and I was summarily kicked out, I was the only democratic incumbent to lose an election in 2006, you know that Cindy because you were with me, the only one. I did not know that I had been deemed by Rahm Emmanuel to not be a “team player.”
I didn’t know that, I did know that my Democrat primary opponent came to me and said, “it’s nothing personal Cynthia, it’s just a business deal.” I did know that, then my replacement, my Democratic replacement, was sworn in on January 20th, the first vote to fund the war came up and guess what? He voted to fund the war. But the importance of that election is this: the war-funding vote passed exactly with the number of votes required, 218. So if I had been there, somebody in the Democratic Party was counting their votes, they were counting the war votes, and they knew that I was a sure no-vote, and they had to get rid of the “no-vote” and replace it with a “yes vote,” and that’s what happened, and that’s why here today, in 2010, we’re still talking about war.
Cs: And that’s why I left the party, I left the party after that vote. So, it’s the oligarchy it’s the corporations that run our country, and we know for 8 years from 2000-2008 we had an absolute horror. Its not like George Bush or Dick Cheney invented anything that they did, they were just very arrogant about it, they were easy to hate, you know by the time their administration was over, when it first started, and when I first started, I was vilified for criticizing that administration, but by the end, it was cool to be anti-bush, anti-Cheney, anti-war, now it’s not so much any more. Now the wars are still going on, but it’s not so cool to be anti-war, we have a new president, he’s a Democrat, he’s a person of color, but I don’t think he’s a person from the people, especially his people.
Cm: I think it’s very clear that the race card was played on the people of the world, and the powers that be, and the oligarchs, when I talk about the oligarchs, I mean those are people with names, those are real people, the current economic team of President Obama is the same group of people that created the ten oligarchs in Russia that stole all of the patrimony of the Russian people…
Cs: They might as well just call it the board of Goldman Sachs.
Cm: President Obama’s economic team is the same people that created the ten oligarchs in Russia who stole the patrimony from the Russian people. Now, what do you think they’re doing to the American people? I think it’s very clear what’s being done to the American people right now. And, so, some people would say now how all of a sudden out of no where do we get a black man as the president of the United States?
Cs: 5 years from state senator to president of the United States?
Cm: Well we can even look at how many times has a person, a black person, walked into the United States senate with only nominal opposition—not that Alan Keyes isn’t a great orator—but in the grand scheme of things it’s nominal.
Cs: Well yeah, they flew him (Keyes) into Illinois to run against him (Obama).
Cm: Well now there are some of us, though, that understand what happened to say "women." There was a time when we would vote for a woman because she was a woman. And we know a woman is going to take care of the community’s needs, and we know that the woman is going to have the family first and foremost in her heart, and she’s going to take that heart into public policy making, whether it’s the school board, the city council, or the United States Congress, or for that matter the Supreme Court of the United States, or for that matter the Secretary of State’s office. But then, those oligarchs, that financial elite, figured something out: that people were voting for women with one idea in mind, but if they could co-opt the woman, then the people could get something else in reality.
There’s a woman, June Terpstra, who wrote a piece called “Beware, the Women of the Hegemon,” and what she says is what we thought about women is really not the case, and now we’ve got a Madeleine Albright, who says it’s “ok” to murder 500,000 innocent children, it’s “ok” for US policy to do that, because the price is “worth it.” Whatever the price is they’re trying to get, it’s “worth it,” So we have these women now, who look to us as if it’s progress, it’s a special mark that now we’re going to have people who are sympathetic, we’re not going to have warmongerers in these offices, and yet they betray us,
Cs: Condileeza Rice, Hillary Clinton, my nemesis Nancy Pelosi,
Cm: That’s right, Beware the Women of the Hegemon.
Well guess what? Women aren’t unique about this, black people have known all along that there were those collaborators who would betray the community, in fact Dr. King had to confront this when he chose to expand beyond Civil Rights to opposition to the war in Vietnam. He said there are those who say, “stick to Civil Rights,” but he said he had been fighting segregation too long to segregate his moral concerns, and that, “injustice anywhere was a threat to justice everywhere.”
With that, he (King) made a point of opposing war wherever it was, of opposing injustice wherever it was, and so now there are not very many people like Dr. King.
There are some people who say, “well, now, I am going to go along to get along, I don’t mind being called a collaborator, I don’t mind being called an Uncle Tom.”
Because, you know, black people know about Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima! They were always there to take care of the master’s business, not the people’s business. And so, out of this whole phenomenon, we can trace it back, through the government’s own documents, we can look at the writings of J. Edgar Hoover in the COINTELPRO documents.
Even before there was an FBI, J. Edgar Hoover wrote about Marcus Garvey, “he excites the negroes.” He wrote this back in 1918, he wrote a document saying it’s too bad that Marcus Garvey had not committed a crime so they could deport him, because he “excites the negroes.” That’s a direct quote: "he excites the Negroes." So guess what J. Edgar Hoover did? He went and found a black person who could get close to Marcus Garvey, who could set him up who could win his trust, set him up on fake charges, and get him out. So that’s what happened.
So, this elaborate program was constructed to thwart dissent in our country, and it tracked and targeted every black person who “excited the Negroes.”
It tracked Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, the Black Panther Party members, you name it, they were tracked and targeted. And the founding document of the counterintelligence paper says that there will “not be a black messiah.” They will not allow another black messiah to rise.
Then, when I was in Congress, I worked very closely with, well I worked on the King assassination, of course, being from Atlanta, and being supported by members of the King family.
Martin King III was a part of my support group, and his mother Coretta was also a supporter, and I basically just as a mother was trying to understand why it was so difficult for my son to have black male role models that thought like me, and why it was my followers in politics and why it was so difficult for him, but those people who always seem to sell out the black community never had opposition, always had money in their campaign coffers, what was going on? And that’s how I stumbled on the COINTELPRO papers. The book was by Ward Churchill...
Cs: …who has also been thoroughly demonized by the elite?
Cm: That’s exactly right, and all of those original United States government documents are there. So I began to get the full view of what our government was actually capable of. It was capable of doing remarkable things like rendering a Supreme Court decision…well it could do remarkable things in the opposite direction like Plessy Vs. Ferguson, or it could do remarkable things in the right direction like Brown Vs. Board of Education.
We had a government that could deliver the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act, that could respond to the push that the people were giving it, that the people were demanding, it could respond to the people’s demands, and even with the Vietnam War there was a real push even from inside the US military to stop this war.
The counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) showed the other side of that. That there were people inside the government contemplating ways they could disrupt people’s marriages, they could break into people’s homes to see what kind of projects they were working on. They could set people up with false accusations and imprison them for life. They could even orchestrate the murder of people. This is what my government with my parents’ tax dollars was doing, so I worked very closely with people in the Freedom of Information Act community and they would file these FOIA requests and get these documents. So I learned even more than what was revealed in the COINTELPRO papers.
One of the documents that was given to me by one of these researchers was a CIA document that had a stamp on it that said somewhere at the top there “must a Negro who is clean,” who can step into the vacuum of chaos once Dr. King is exposed or assassinated.
Basically this May 11. 1965 document, three years before the murder of Dr. King, was spelling out regime change in black America.
Now we know regime change is something that happened with Patrice Lumumba, and that our own president of the US said it was “ok” to murder an African head of state. We know these things about targeted assassinations, we even know they exist now even more commonly then back then and there has been this prohibition by the United States government to actually assassinate people.
There was this document, and this document basically spelled out to me, regime change. They were serious when they said there would never be another messiah for black people, unless that messiah was preselected by them. That’s the importance of the May 11, 1965 document.
So, then there’s a community of people who have been studying this, these COINTELPRO documents for a long time in the black community, and they’ve been trying to figure out because of course the names are blacked out, who these agents of repression of their own people were. There’s a lot of discussion in the black community of who these people are. But, what I think is important for us to understand is they were preparing themselves to play the race card when they needed it.
Cs: to get more people reinvested into the system. So, without me knowing any of this before this interview, that was my impression. My impression was by the end of the Bush administration, he had about a 23% approval rating. Many people were waking up to the fact that this government, except in the rare cases that you mentioned, most of the time works against us, for itself, for the oligarchy, I think. And there’s still a lot of progressives today like, 16 months (29 months, today) after Barack Obama was elected, who still support him with the wars continuing, with the hostilities you know increasing in South America, which is the focus of this book (Revolution, A Love Story), Africa, to Iran, with the increasing dysfunction of US foreign policy. Earlier, you said Barack Obama’s race card was played on the people of the world, which is true. 99% of the people of the world were against the US Empire, when Barack Obama came in their hearts softened, but they of course are figuring out things a lot quicker than us here in the United States. But a lot of progressive people, progressive white people, tell me, “but he’s black, we can’t criticize him,” even though he’s doing all of these things that we detest, that we detested when George Bush was president, that we have been detesting.
Most of them realize that Clinton was just in a long line of good Republican presidents, not even seeing that Barack Obama is just the continuation of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Reagan? You know, they see that, but they say we can’t criticize him because he’s a black person. And not even knowing what you just told me that was my suspicion all along that he had been groomed to be put in this place, at the right time, so the policies of the Empire, or what you call the hegemon, can continue.
Cm: Some people have suggested that what we now have is fresh face on fascism. I’ve been warned not to use that word by people in Europe who really understand what fascism is, but I say that to say we do have a fresh face, and the black community of the United States is known around the world as being the conscience of this country.
It is the black community that has always been against the Imperial designs on the rest of the world’s resources. It is the black community that has been so oppressed in this country that the world knows about our oppression and so therefore a black person springing from that tradition, generally speaking, would be the kind of change that would generate hope, the kind of hope that would say that “yes, it is possible for the United States to turn a page, it is possible for the United States that is sort of typified by the ideal of the “gleaming city on a hill” to welcome everyone into that city so everyone can be a part of it.”
Finally those descendents of those Africans who were brought over here in the most violent kind of way, against their will, were able to struggle and survive, that they too have become citizens of the “gleaming city on the hill.” Well, that’s not exactly the case. And the fact of the matter is if we look at some of the indices from income to family wealth, to infant mortality, to maternal mortality, to life expectancy, to social justice, to education, what we see is on some of these indices the black, the disparity between black life and white life in the United States is worse today that at the time of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. People don’t expect that.
Cs: Right, and not only the difference between black life and white life, but also the difference between the elite and rest of us is widening.
Cm: That’s right. And if you put all of these little pieces together, what you quickly pay attention to, I think it’s important that Henry Kissinger said that he was amazed at the amount of good will that the people of the world had for Barack Obama.
You said we can’t export something we don’t have--we don’t have democracy. We’ve seen phony elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US just overthrew the democratically elected government in Honduras, and in 2002 we tried to overthrow President Chavez, and what happened? His people said “no.”
Chavez was within hours of being assassinated, and his people came out and said “no.” From the time they threw off their oligarchs to today, the people of Venezuela are an example of something they (the oligarchs) don’t want to happen in the United States. Our oligarchs don’t want us to realize our power. But the people in Venezuela know it. And even if Chavez did a flip-flop, the people are still in power, and that’s when Chavez would lose his popular support. But he won’t do that because he literally owes the people of Venezuela his life.
So, what do you say to the people in this country about our power? You know, it seems like with the elections so compromised I don’t think we could get a fair election in this country. You know, you and I have tried from the inside, we’ve tried from the outside, what would you say to your community, what would you say to my community who even realizes our power less than your community? What would you say to the people of the United States, our community, about power? And about what we could do with our power if we realize it?
Because that’s ultimately what this book (Revolution, A Love Story) is about. It’s about overthrowing the oligarchs of the United States by peaceful means, and the people of the United States taking back our power?
Cm: Well, I just happened to have participated in a musical concert in the Bay Area by Michael Franti called “Power to the Peaceful.”
Just imagine the power we would have if people who really wanted peace were able to throw off the shackle of conformity and commitment to a political party that is not for peace. If we could decide if we were going to vote independently, and think analytically, we will behave ourselves, comport ourselves, in a way that furthers our values.
I think then that that is the ultimate of self-determination, and then the people will really exercise the power that they already have. That’s why Fox and CNN and the rest of them work so hard to shield us from the truth, because once we have possession of the facts, I still have confidence that people will do the right thing.
I know that I have met too many people across this country who are good people, they want a better America, they do not want the United States to be a warmongering, always trying to hate someone else, whether it’s hating people on the inside or hating people outside our country, they want our county to be a part of the community of mankind, but we have to actually do something more than just want it. If we do, they don’t say “power to the people” for nothing, because the people do have the power, and all we have to do is vote our values, all we have to do is act on our values, and understand that every time we cast a vote for someone who has voted to finance war, then we’re not going to get peace. And if they deal with people who want their vote, who proselytize hatred, then we’re not going to have dignity. We’ve got to have dignity, we must protect the dignity we have, we have to protect truth, and we’ve got to protect peace.
The power is ours, and it’s up to us to flex our muscles!
I'd like to acknowledge and thank my daughter, Carly, for do a wonderful job in transcribing the interview!
I'd like to acknowledge and thank my daughter, Carly, for do a wonderful job in transcribing the interview!
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