Obama Insults Half a Race -- Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report

Tweet

I'm done with presidential politics. I think Cindy Sheehan's race against Nancy Pelosi is more important. But I agree with the Glen Ford's assessment here (portion below): http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=661&Itemid=1

Having led no one anywhere recently, the Obama-backing "leaders" pretend that the candidate's popularity in the presidential race is the equivalent of a "movement." It is no such thing, and they and Obama know it. Obama's claim to be at the head of a movement is no surprise, part of his slick M.O., signifying nothing. The last thing any politician wants is to be bothered with movements. They are, at the very least, distractions to the smooth running of governments, which seek to be unencumbered by meddlesome popular demands. More to the point, Obama doesn't see any need for a specifically "Black" movement, since African Americans have already "come 90 percent of the way" to equality, as he proclaimed in Selma, last year.

He made clear in his Philadelphia "Race Speech" three months ago that Black-centered complaints are "divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all."

Obama wants to shut down what's left of the Black Freedom Movement. He's getting help from panicked and unprincipled Black Left misleaders who contort their former politics beyond recognition in order to attach themselves, mostly uninvited, to a corporate campaign that tries to masquerade in movement clothing. They meekly offer insubstantial but nevertheless unwelcome advice to unhearing campaign operatives on how to make the campaign appear more like a genuine people's mass political vehicle, as if Goldman Sachs and the other Wall Streeters who made Obama the early money frontrunner would tolerate interference in their behind-the-curtain rule.

McKinney Candidacy Plus People's Movement

There is a presidential candidate who is Black, a proven progressive, a person of courage and unchallenged integrity. Cynthia McKinney, running on a Power to the People platform for the Green Party nomination, wants to rebuild a real movement. Peace and racial and social justice cannot be achieved absent a popular movement, which in the United States must be led by African Americans. Presidential aspirant Barack Obama has never faced movement scrutiny, because Black "progressive" leaders rolled over like puppies (minus the cuteness) without initially presenting even strong policy suggestions, much less demands, to Obama's corporate campaign. Not satisfied with neutering themselves, they encouraged Black people as a body to become irrelevant. Now, they are objects of derision, fare game for Obama's piercing scowl.

A vote (and/or contribution) for Cynthia McKinney, the former congresswoman from Georgia, signals that you have not been fooled by the corporate handmaiden, Obama, and his "progressive" apologists. It means you are ready to build a movement in which periodic electoral politics is a secondary appendage to 24-7 mass struggle.

It means that you support a woman who genuinely loves people and would never defame half a race on Father's Day.