TEN-HUT! RIGHT TURN, FORWARD MARCH
Gen. Powell Invites You To Join The Grand Ole Party
by Elombe Brath
Before Black people get swept up in the duststorm left by Ret. Gen. Colin
Powell’s speech to the Republican Convention which, under the guise of
speaking on education, glorified most of the most reactionary leadership of
the Grand Ole Party (GOP) which have held state power and executive
privilege for twelve years of the last two decades, we need to understand the
man who spoke and who and what he was speaking for - and against.
If you think that Gen Powell, whose popularity is based on his reputation for
waging war on Third World nations from Vietnam to Iraq and Panama, was
speaking on behalf of the broad masses of Africans who are suffering all over
the world, you are dead wrong. Likewise, if you think that he was speaking up
for the advancement of the majority of African-Americans in the United
States, wrong again. And if you thought that he was trying to see that our
people get a proper education to carry us through the 21st century, well,
sorry, wrong again.
Gen. Colin Powell was simply speaking up for the corporate interests
that have feathered his nest and have chosen a high profile role for him to
help consolidate their vested interests without stirring up the “democratic
distemper” in the U.S., particularly Black people and other peoples of color.
This is why Powell, the U.S. champion of volunteerism, is reported to be paid
$150,000, plus first class travel and accomodation, per speech. While being
hinted as a possible Secretary of State (or is it Education?) in his cabinet
by Gov. Bush, Powell also let it be known that he could just as well work for
Vice-President Al Gore if he is the one who is victorious in November.
The general’s admission is another reason why so many people now believe that
there is no major difference between the Republican and Democratic Parties,
both which uphold monopoly capitalism and are sponsored by corporate
interests. And it‘s not just Powell that, when push comes to shove, shut up
and either directly take the money or fall in line with those who are bribed
and hired to help manage an economy favored for ruling class elements - the
real minority special interest group that controls this country.
It was interesting that Powell, so trusted in regards to national security of
the United States that he could be chosen to be the National Security Advisor
for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as the chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff of the country’s military apparatus, was not invited to say
anything on the second day of the ceremonies. This Star Spangled Banner
Extravaganza with Bombast Bursting All Through the Night tribute to America’s
wars, featured Bob Dole, Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, McCain et al, heard not
a peep from the military man who was responsible for probably killing more
people of color throughout his career than all of them put together.
Powell’s role at the convention seem to be saluting all of his former bosses
and praising the Texas governor whose five and half year tenure is marked
with his presiding over the executions of over 135 inmates, including Shaka
Sankofa (formerly known as Gary Graham.) It was Shaka Sankofa whose
presumption of innocence caused many people, both pro- and anti-death penalty
advocates, to take pause and show enough concern that the case was seen as
one of the best illustrations to call for a new trial in history.
This fact did not dissuade Bush from allowing the execution of Shaka Sankofa
to go forward. What was particularly repugnant about Bush’s modus operandi
was use of a host of Black intermediaries to cover up his criminal conspiracy
to engage in state sanctioned lynching. From the so-called “one eye(d)
witness to a Mock attorney to a covert agent presiding over the Texas Board
of Pardons and Paroles to our so-called Black Supreme Court Justice to absorb
and deflect attention to themselves and away from him; it was a devious,
slick revision and twisted update of the senior Bush’s playing of his Willie
Horton electoral race card that destroyed his Democratic opponent,
Massachussetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
In the case of John McCain’s befriending of Gov. Bush in the most humbling
superlatives, his omission of any murmur of the influence of “soft money”
(i.e Big money financing” in the electoral process, was shameful. Being that
campaign reform was his main political contradiction between him and his now
fearless leader upon which his former candidacy and rivalry with the Texan
governor was based, and he defeated Bush in seven primaries, was very, very
interesting.
And the of financial fat cats impact on the campaign was even more sharpened
when the New York Times revealed on Tuesday night, August 1st, that “two
elite groups of 739 individuals and corporations have contributed at least
$94.8 million in so-called soft money to the Republican Party since the
beginning of 1999.”
The two groups, the Republican Regents who gave $250,000 each to the party
every two years, headed up by Mel Sembler who is the finance chairman of the
Republican National Committee, and Team 100, which was formed in 1988, whose
members gave at least $100,000 to the RNC (and/or GOP) also every two years.
McCain, another military “hero” but dissimilar to Powell’s “heroics”, had
also signed on to perform in the carefully crafted script which seems to have
been a passport to get onstage in prime time during the show in Philadelphia,
gave their blessings to their newly beloved candidate in the most glowing
platitudes. Ret. Gen. Powell, sounding more like someone auditioning for
Education czar than a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with his
eye on the Secretary of State slot - or maybe that of his former boss, Dick
Cheney, President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense.
If anyone thinks that Colin Powell’s tongue-lashing of the assembled
Republican Convention attendees on affirmative action and admonished them to
persuaded urban so-called “minority” youth to go to college instead of being
shuttled off to prisons and death chambers that he is spearheading the
democratization of the GOP by de-emphasizing its racist character, think
again. His speech was tailor made-and approved by the RNC as a tactic to
confuse enough of the Black and Latino electorate to win over a fraction more
of both previously despised communities to increase their image of a new, all
inclusive, Big Tent political formation with Abraham Lincoln as its standard
bearer.
About this Black fidelity to Abraham Lincoln. Doesn’t anybody remember that
it was Ole Honest Abe, the 16th president of the so-called “Great
Emancipator” who said, “ will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been,
in favor of bringing about in any way the sociaI and political equality of
the white and Black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of
making voters or jurors of negroes - nor of qualifying them to hold office,
nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that
there is a physical difference between the white and Black races which will
ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political
equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain
together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much
as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the
white race.”
Is Gen. Powell hip to this part of Abe Lincoln? Are you? Does the Black
community understand the fallacy that placing our people’s destiny in the
hands of hypocritical white icons and the founding fathers of the
then-slavocracy which they protected in both their Declaration of
Independence and the U.S. Constitution that had to be amended time after time
to make it more reflect what they said it was in the first place? Do you
think that the Republican Party, and even in a certain sense, the Democrats
too, are seriously going to give you unfettered prominence in their
respective political formations? In education, as Carlos Cooks pointed out
over 45 years ago, “Do you believe that the white man is going to educate the
Black child to compete with his?”
Well then, what is George W. (recently written as Dubya by some in the media)
and his retrofitted Republican Party up to with its sudden overture to the
African-American community? Is there another reason for their reformulated
agenda?
With this in mind, R.W. Apple of the New York Times recently made a an
interesting observation. Apple pointed out that rather then soley attribute
this revised image of the Republicans as becoming a neoliberal formation
being aimed at reaching out to the so-called minority electorate, could it
very well be, as in the game of billiards, a “three-cushion shot, a subtle
play for the votes of white surburbanites, a pivotal voting block that
includes many voters for whom civil rights remains a high priority?”
Apple points out that David Bositis, a member of the nonpartisan Joint Center
for Political and Economic Studies, believes that Bush “has no chance of
getting any significant African-American vote”, adding that the governor’s
overtures are “not even about that.” Instead, “It’s about the suburbs, and
about moderate swing voters all across the country. There’s no better way to
distance himself from Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and the other hard-liners in
Congress than showing that he’s friendly to blacks and Hispanics.”
In the case of John McCain, an embittered Vietnam War POW who, incidently,
still uses the disparaging vile term “Gook” which was coined during the
Korean War for use against those from North Korea (but supposedly not those
from South Korea!?), he’s another piece of work. McCain claims that he can
neither forget nor forgive the Vietnamese who, after captured in the process
of killing their countrymen, held him prisoner to the end of the U.S.
Indochina war. Yet he and Powell are supposed to influence people who have
been brutally treated over 224 the years by the conservative Republicans - as
well as the Democrats - to forgive and forget our experiences and give the
GOP a chance.
In support of wooing Black voters to cast their ballot for the Bush-Cheney
ticket the attention of African-Americans are directed towards the rising
bright Black star of foreign policy and national security affairs of the
administration of president Daddy Bush and his Son the Candidate’s senior
foreign policy advisor, Candoleeza Rice.
Candoleeza Rice is the Republican Party’s predecessorr to the Clinton
Administration’s Susan Elizabeth Rice, Assistant Secretary for
African-Affairs within the Department of State. While Candoleeza and Susan
share the same last name, they are not related - except, perhaps, tracing
their family name back to the same slavemaster. They have different
slavemasters now but both, although highly paid, are enslaved to a political
socioeconomic system that has enriched itself by plundering the majority of
the world’s people.
While Candoleeza is a former Soviet, now Russian specialist (i.e. an
anti-communist/pro-capitalist scholar) and Susan is a highly touted Africa
specialist (i,e. a pro-capitalist/anti-revolutionary nationalist academic),
they have as much in common as do their two respective political parties.
Their party affiliations notwithstanding, the Rice sisters both have their
intellectual capabilities diminished in regards to the liberation of Africans
and other oppressed people throughout the world who find themselves in a
desparate struggle trying to resist the domination and stranglehold of debt
trap monopoly capital and its transnational corporations.
A listener to WLIB called in to Mark Riley and Wayne Gilman and said that
rightwing television host Robert Novak claimed that Candoleeza Rice’s speech
was “dumbed down.” I don’t know whether if it was dumbed down or not, but I
do that for her to assert that she was “an individual” rather than “part of
a group” was pretty damn dumb for a Black woman with a Ph.D, who entered the
University of Denver at age 15 and graduated at 19 with a BA in political
science (cum laude), to make.
But then again, when you look at the illustrious corporate boards that she
is a director, including Chevron, Transamerica, University of Notre Dame,
International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan, San Francisco Symphony Board
of Governors and the William and Flora Hewlet Foundation, as well as being a
Hoover Senior fellow and a professor and provost at Stanford, you understand
where this young 45 year old professor - who as Time magazine pointed out,
was mentored in foreign policy by Prof. Josef Korbel, the father of the
current U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright - is coming from.
Born in the infamous Jim Crow Birmingham, Alabama in 1954, the same year when
the historic Supreme Court ordered that public schools should be desegregated
“with all deliberate speed”, when we see Dr. Rice is now and where she
intends to go. While her meteoritic rise to fame and fortune came about out
of the struggle of Black people, it has nothing to do with Black people now.
Contrary to what the Republican Party represents culturally, e.g. the music
of Kate Smith (whose presence and music was indeed invoked), this convention
seemingly presented more Black people entertaining onstage than Showtime at
the Apollo. When one looked at the television screen periodically, because of
dextrous camera work, it seems that every one of the 4 percent of Black
Republicans who were said to be among the 4132 delegates assembled at the
First Union Center were showcased for their at least 15 seconds of fame.
[Incidently, it was reported that 45,000 people were in attendance, including
2,066 delegates, 2066 alternates and 15,000 media personnel; the other nearly
20,000 people were not accounted for in regards to which sector they
represented or how many demonstrators were outside - or if there is any
relation to this question. Additionally, if Black people represented 4
percent of delegates attending and their total number was only 85 (according
to Riley on ‘LIB), did the percentage calculated also include alternative
delegates with the party regulars, which - if done -would lessen the
percentage nearly by half. A trivia question, yes, but I believe a very
telling one. Moreso, is the observation, that Texas, the second largest state
in the Union, had only one Black delegate.]
With all of this said, prepare yourself for the most deceptive appeal to the
African community as the Republican National Committee goes through the
coronation ceremony of supposedly the most qualified person to lead us
through the first five years of the new century: Bush-Cheney, the real choice
of the dynastic ruling class and their oiligarchy.
As of now, you can try to figure out how are you going to be able to convince
the majority of white people in the U.S. that since King George of Britain to
George Washington - the first George W. - through George Bush the 1st and
possibly George Bush the 2nd (or as he hinted, the second George W.), along
with the all the others who historically have chosen to “let George do it.”
Whether we discuss Republicans or Democrats - or in between, the fact remains
that American politics, as well as politicians, are as trustworthy as
Three-Card Monte. Brace yourself for a real rumble if we are ever going to be
respected or gain our self-determination to realize our liberation from this
224 year old nightmare that we still find ourselves wistfully in search of
today.
Therefore, when Gen. Powell gives the order to fall in line, “We want you!”,
take it from me; It’s best you take a deferment. When the general says, “At
ease, men” (and women), it’s best instead for you to snap to attention!
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