Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

African People's Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela has been delivering a series of presentations around the U.S. on the significance of the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Here are excerpts from the Chairman's speech at the Uhuru House in St. Petersburg on February 23, 2008. Listen to the full speeches made on February 23 and March 2, 2008, this Sunday on Uhuru Radio (http://uhurunews.com/radio/). Visit www.UhuruNews.com or subscribe to the Burning Spear Newspaper (http://burningspearmarketplace.com/category/spear) for continued analysis.

"The U.S. economy is in big-time trouble and Africans are bearing the brunt of the crisis at this point, although a lot of people are going to pay prices. It’s much more than what people understand. And one reason it’s more is that a lot of what’s happening to African people is not being reported as something that’s happening to African people.

"You hear in general terms about people losing homes to sub-prime mortgages, etc. [Black Agenda Report] reads that 'the sub-prime lending debacle should cause massive rethinking among those who have long proclaimed that the route to black equality is through wealth accumulation'.

"It talks about how the 'catastrophic losses inflicted on blacks and Latinos in the U.S. at the hands of predatory lenders has resulted in the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history'. It says that 'banks and other lending institutions trap blacks and Latinos in predatory lending schemes as a matter of policy'.

"So all this stuff is happening to us. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you look at this sub-prime mortgage crisis, you must understand the implications it has for other areas of the economy. They said that last year there was a 26% decrease in new housing starts – the largest in history. So, you’ve got people who can’t buy new houses, people who are losing houses they already got, people who can’t afford to live in houses.

"So what happens? The construction industry is a real serious part of the economic force in this country. If they’re not building houses, they fire people, and they lay people off. If they lose their jobs, many of them are also going to lose their houses, right? It also means that they can’t buy the car they expected to buy. They can’t replace the refrigerator that they planned to do because they’re having problems with it. It means that therefore, the auto industry has to cut back.

"If the auto industry cuts back and the people who make refrigerators and stoves cut back, that means they lay people off. Then the people who got laid off can’t buy new clothes for the children that the planned to get, etc. So that hits the retail industry, so they lay off. Sears (Robuck and Co.), I understand, is fighting for its very life right now. Sears is almost down the drain. So if they lay people off, it means the things that those people would be buying, they can’t buy.

"So this thing reverberates throughout the entire economy. You’ve got a meltdown that’s happening here. I’m not sure where it’s going and all the implications that there are for it. That’s the objective reality that people are confronted with in this country right now.

"And it leads to other kinds of contradictions, contradictions of deeper poverty and a deeper scramble for resources that are not there, in our communities in particular, where it’s been so badly hit. It means more police, more police violence and things like that. And then there’s Barack Obama.

"The U.S. has to use whatever means it can to secure resources around the world. It has to engage in escalated struggle against China and the European Union and other forces out there. And there’s Barack Obama.

"That’s a serious contradiction that we are confronted with, because they’re going to have to do terrible things to African people. They already are doing terrible things to African people. And Barack Obama doesn’t have a program any better than Hillary Clinton’s when they’re dealing with the mortgage situation. And he won’t even say that something is happening to African people here.

"That’s why Africans ourselves are not aware that this is something that’s specializing in attacking us, because nobody will talk about the implications. Nobody will say, ‘this is the summation – look where people are losing their homes; look where it’s happening’, right? That’s a serious problem that we are confronted with.

"A greater problem is that people do not understand the nature of the system itself. People are looking at Barack Obama because he looks like us and assuming that somehow this is a great thing that all these people voted for Barack Obama.

"Part of a whole counterinsurgency policy all over the world has been for the government to kill off revolutionaries, and at the same time they’re killing off revolutionaries, to raise up these other kinds of organizations as false solutions. So when struggle gets real serious, they kill off, murder leaders and then raise up these substitute organizations that pretend to be standing for something. They killed Dadan Kimathi in Kenya, who headed the Kenyan Land Freedom Army and then raised up Jomo Kenyatta. They did that stuff all over the world and created these phony organizations.

"Barack Obama raised more than $100 million! Hillary Clinton - $100 million! Who gave them $100 million? I want to tell you that they work for the ones that gave them $100 million. Their campaign and their program is for the ones that gave them $100 million.

"You can be inspired by Barack Obama because he’s a smart negro. He’s the smartest person out there running. Listen to him talk. He speaks much better than every candidate that’s out there. Y’all got a flare for that kind of stuff. (laughter) So it’s easy to get carried away. You feel pride because “white people are supposed to be so smart but look at Barack”. Right? But you don’t understand the system. Because Barack is working for the same people that Hillary is working for, that McCain is working for, that Huck – whatever his name is – is working for.

"They just had a list of his advisors in the [Washington] Post. They include Zbigniew Brzezinski. You’ve heard me talk about Brezinski, haven’t you? He’s the architect of the Afghanistan trap for the Soviet Union. He was the one who represented Carter as National Security Advisor. He’s the one who people speculate could have even been involved in this 9/11 event that he said would be absolutely necessary for the government to do what it needed to do in order to move the economy forward.

"[The list of Obama's advisors] includes a man named Richard A. Clark, who was Clinton and George W. Bush’s counterterrorism czar. It includes a guy named Gregory Craig, a State Department director of policy planning under Clinton, and now a partner in some law firm, William & Connelly. He’s a foreign policy advisor. It’s got a whole bunch of other people just like that. Major General Jonathan Scott Gration, a 32-year Air Force veteran and now CEO of Africa “anti-poverty effort” Millennium Villages. He’s a national security advisor. And there are a whole bunch of others on here. Those people whose names I just read? Whoever they work for – that’s who Obama works for.

"The other thing is this. It doesn’t matter about an election. We were having a discussion in a meeting the other day and we were doing a study on question of the state as an organization that represents the interests of the ruling class and the existing social system. We were speaking about Obama in relationship to the state. The state is an oppressive organization. It is an organization of coercion. It is like the prison system, the courts, the jail, the military. All these forces constitute what you call state power.

"In the middle of the discussion, we brought up Obama and the fact that, because of the existence of this state of the bourgeoisie, of white power imperialism, it didn’t matter who got elected. And somebody said, ‘well yeah, but look at Obama’s history because he doesn’t have a history of this and that’. I don’t care if Obama had a history of being the most militant member of the Black Panther Party who was also secretly an advisor to Elijah Mohammed at the height of the influence of the Nation of Islam. The reality is, if he became President of the United States he would be subservient to the white imperialist bourgeois state!

"It doesn’t matter about his history. What you need to know is about the history of the state as an institution that exists in human society. If you know that, then you know that whoever’s in charge, whoever is supposedly in charge there, is subservient to that institution.

"Now, Barack has a potential for believing this stuff, you see, because Obama is new to the African world. I mean that in the literal sense of the word. Because he never lived with Africans. He never went to school with Africans. He lived in other places. His understanding of America is the ideal of America that’s been promoted and taught in schools and stuff like that.

"Obama hasn’t shared the African experience like that. Except you know he lived in Chicago. He did some community work, which is different. You can find those people in the Peace Corp. And they used to have the U.S.-based Peace Corp, VISTA, where the white people used to be in your community. They had all these kind of programs. You can do that and work in the African community and I think that’s the kind of experience that he’s had.

"It’s different for Africans who are not born in the United States. I’m coming to learn a lot more about that. I’ve read where the majority of the African students in the Ivy League campuses today are students from Africa, not students from here. And it’s because the students from Africa are easier to manage. Because the students from here, they say, are aggressive. And I didn’t notice that about them. For me they look like something else. But they’re hard to handle, because of the whole direct slavery experience. Africans here ain’t never got enough, while Africans who are coming from home got the best s**t they ever had, because they’re coming from terrible circumstances to what appears to be great circumstances over here. So they’re easier to get along with, than the Africans who are here.

"They come here. They’ve read all the stuff about America and they found 'oh, it’s true'. You know, they can go to the movies all the time. They can do all other kinds of things that they could never do at home. They even got streets that work, where in most places in Africa you got dirt roads, and sometimes it’s an overstatement to call them roads. They’re like a row of ditches that you have to travel through. I’ve learned while I was in Ghana on this last trip what an automobile can withstand. I never would have imagined that an automobile could handle the kind of stuff that I saw in Ghana.

"So they get here and for them this is a whole different thing. Africans who were born here, coming from the slavery experience, etc., are still fighting. So I can see how Obama might actually be an honest opportunist. But in any event, he doesn’t offer a solution. And I think that we have to really help African people to grapple with this question, because people can be disarmed. At a time when the masses need clarity more than any time, people can be sucked into this whole thing of the Democratic Party. At a time of crisis when people need to be finding alternatives to Americanism, to be sucked into the embrace of the Democratic Party is seriously problematic."