CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE November 3, 2004 DUNIA SPECIAL ON THE US ELECTIONS
1.0. Oloo Forced To Eat Crow
I am sitting at my dinner table right now,Eating Crow.
Dear Reader I have a CONFESSION to make to you before I continue:
My One and Only Beloved Born Again Christian Fiancé is a DIE HARD Bush SUPPORTER.
That is exactly Right(in ALL senses of the word):
Yes, the soon to be Mrs. Njeri Oloo is delirious with joy that Dubya won.
I am sure you think I am pulling your leg.
You think that I am just kidding don’t you?
Not at all.
On Wednesday afternoon, I called Kenya and I spoke to my wangu wa moyoni, the only sabuni of my roho, my mshikaji; someone who if I had been Kobe Bryant, I would have called “my backbone”(in which case I would have had to rename my own original spine to something as pedantic and pedestrian as “mgongo wangu”).
We of course, spoke about other, more personal things, but this is
an excerpt from an interview I did with her and one of her relatives
(yes she knew about it and fully consented to the recording) where she gives her reaction to the news coming out of the United States of America.
Closer to Quebec, a Caribbean friend of mine who lives in the neighbouring province of Ontario found it necessary to call long distance for the express purpose of depositing the following
message on my voicemail.
And on one Kenyan online discussion forum, the President of The Worldwide Oloo Fan Club spent the last fourteen hours posting a message EVERY TEN MINUTES demanding that I come online to “concede defeat” as if Onyango Oloo was the other independent candidate alongside Ralph Nader aiming to become the next President of the United States!!
2.0. 100,000 Innocent Iraqi Civilians Are Still Dead
There was no
regime change.
Instead, the World’s Most Famous Idiot is back in power
Four years ago he was a thief who was crowned surreptiously by some creepy Supreme Court Justices.
This time around, he apparently won it fair and square.
Or did he?
Keep reading.
But Bush can partly thank those wonderful new electronic voting machines from Diebold.
This company has a lot of connections with the Republicans as you can see from this expose and this link as well. Chris Blackwell, the African-American Secretary of State for Ohio who we all saw at the height of that see-saw on election night, is also mixed up with this somehow.
If you go to this link you can read a report of what a non-partisan group monitoring the November 2 contest found out by the voting machines.
Ironically, Dubya won the Presidential election by the exact margin that I had predicted KERRY would win it by- 51% to 48% a comfortable spread with millions of votes to spare.
In addition his Republicans tightened their grip on the Senate and will now extend their dominance of Congress to twelve years.
Bush had a lot of heroes and heroines to thank for his reelection.
Here are a select few:
Here is what George Bush had to say in accepting victory.
The Kerrycrats are meanwhile, completely stunned, reeling with shock, licking their painful wounds, possibly weeping profusely undercover in assorted bathrooms across the United States of America even as progressives around the world ponder the ramifications of this seismic shock.
Here is a link to a special broadcast from Democracy Now! covering the Kerry concession.
How did this happen?
A paper in the Philippines offered this assessment.
The following quote captures it for me:
Novak's pronouncement echoed a basic strategy of the Republicans, specifically Karl Rove, main tactical plotter for Bush: to get white, conservative, evangelical Protestants who for one reason or another didn't go out to vote for Bush in 2000, to get out and vote in 2004. Rove calculated that Bush missed out on around four million votes from this group in 2000. Republicans moved heaven and earth to get this sector out while reaching out to other sectors, including Latinos (who seem to have significantly gone over to Bush in Florida, in large part it is said, because of his brother's handling of things after the many hurricanes that struck the state).
The Democrats gambled on several things. The first was to get out the vote for traditionally strong Democratic groups such as African-Americans and the elderly (they seem to have failed to hold their numbers with both). Second was to get out the youth, an effort in which celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Moby and many others pitched in (this apparently failed, too). Third was to bring out many first-time voters in key states such as Pennsylvania (where it worked tremendously), Ohio and Florida (where some Democrats and their sympathizers say it failed or was frustrated by Republican legal stratagems such as filing cases and questioning voters).
The above assessment is echoed in the following CBS analysis.
It was interesting to read the gut reaction of the
money markets in Europe.
Perhaps that jittery response can be partly explained by a news item like this one.
Kerry’s defeat is not only being celebrated by the rightwing nutbars of the world.
Some prominent leftwing commentators have not wasted any tears or mercy on the hapless Kerry campaign.
For example, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair the editors of Counterpunch came out yesterday with this scathing dismemberment of the Democratic Presidential campaign.
There is no getting around the basic Morning After reality that Kerry, Edwards and the Democrats were trounced handily.
Or so it appears.
Greg Palast wrote an interesting article which was posted on his blog the day before the election. In it he details how up to a MILLION Democratic votes was lost. Greg is well known for exposing the electoral atrocity which saw thousands of African-Americans robbed of their votes in Florida in 2000. If what he is saying has any credence, then one is not that impressed with the Bush margin of victory; in fact, one the contrary, one has a renewed sense of nausea at the speed by which rich White men in the Democratic Party who court the Black vote discard the rights of the very same Democratic party faithful so quickly.
We saw Al Gore do the same thing four years ago and yesterday, we witnessed how quickly the Kerry-Edwards “We Will Count Every Vote and Make Every Vote Count” rushed to capitulate to the Bush electoral conquistadors.
Here is a link to the Greg Palast article.
You can read more about this by clicking here and checking out this pre-election from the Havana-based Granma.
3.0. Obama Is WRONG About This "One America" Claptrap
Even though I am sorely tempted to tell Americans that they are now zooming on the Highway to Hell, I think that life in America and the world is a lot more nuanced than that.
We have to look way beyond the GOP smirking, yodeling, chortling and the chest thumping and the Grits fainting spells and wailing marathons.
It is crucial that we transcend the demonization and personalization of Dubya the Dummy in the White House. He is an easy target with his unsophisticated evil designs that are laid out in the open for all to see. The long term agenda of the project of the New American Century is publicly posted on their website and one should not be surprised to see the litany of US imperialist military forays around the world continue in the last leg of the Bush Dictatorship. The Australian journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger recently asked if there is going to be a US war against the WORLD after the just concluded elections. And US based corporations like vultures HAVE ALREADY DESCENDED in Darfur.
No wonder Wall Street was quick in welcoming the Bush victory.
Defense stocks simply surged.
One of the most prominent of these military stocks is Lockheed Martin.
And you should know that Boeing makes “smart bombs”, not just 747s.
Have you ever heard of United Technologies?
How about Raytheon?
We all know about Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.
And speaking of Dick, this unauthorized biography that was recently aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggests that Cheney is THE REAL AMERICAN President.
Behind the façade of the Bush presidency lies a shadowy corporation known as the Carlyle Group.
The CEOs of the companies that regularly make the Ten Worst Corporations List are rubbing their overfed fingers with glee.
In alliance with these corporations is the powerful Christian Religious Right movement as well as a dizzying network of Neo-Conservative organizations.
Arrayed against the above elitist, superrich, military-industrial complex corporate forces are millions of Americans comprising the majority of the people who came out to vote, not for John Kerry, but against the political direction that George W Bush and the Republicans are driving their society.
I am talking about democratic minded American workers who are not infected too much with racism; I am talking about militant American women worried about the threat to their hard won historic gains; I am talking about radical American youth who have protested globalization and the war of occupation against the Iraqi people; I am talking of the African-Americans who have overwhelmingly continued to repudiate the Republicans despite high profile appointments like Rice and Powell; I am talking of communities of colour and Indigenous people as well; I am talking of thousands of communists, socialists, anti-imperialists; I am talking of singers, musicians, artists, writers, film makers, actors and other cultural workers who HAVE NOT followed in the footsteps of the Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, John Wayne, the Terminator, Kurt Russell, Britney Spears, Canibus or Bruce Willis; I am talking of professional athletes who have not endorsed George Bush the way Karl Malone and Jack Nicklaus recently did.
With all due respect to that half-Kenyan senator, Barrack Obama, there is more than one America, as the fractious election clearly revealed.
And these two, or three or four Americas are locked in mortal combat.
4.0. Deepening of Ideological Cleavages in American Society
The mainstream media has been blithely blathering that Bush received a decisive mandate to push through with his Far Right agenda in the United States and around the world.
That is simply not true.
How can you claim that you have a mandate when almost HALF OF THE COUNTRY came out to vote AGAINST YOUR POLICIES?
How can you claim a mandate when you used all the fear mongering tactics and bogeymen in your arsenal-Satan, Black people, Muslims, gays, women who abort, terrorists etc to scare the simple minded IVORY evangelical fold to line up behind you?
Getting an electoral majority does not necessarily mean that one is progressive. Hitler WAS ELECTED as a VERY POPULAR Chancellor in 1933 before he became a Fuhrer (Dubya’s grandfather by the way, had some financial links with the Nazis).
Many of the social justice activists who mobilized across the United States to bring out the vote against Bush and the Republicans are already thinking of their next moves. Some are calling for massive anti-war rallies. Others are calling for a variety of grass roots initiatives.
Most want to build on the momentum of the last two years of anti-Bush mobilization.
That is why those people who are crowing triumphant should pace out their multiple orgasms.
The tremendous and massive mobilizations by people like Howard Dean, Russell Simons, P.Diddy and other mainstream American figures will only bolster preexisting left leaning mobilizations by forces such as Move On.Org and many of the anti-globalization movements in that country.
The snow white faces of American evangelical crusaders may have kept W in the White House for another four years but will not stop the sea of humanity that is very eager to transcend the constricted centrist confines of the right leaning Democratic party.
As Kenyans we can relate.
If the Kenyan opposition HAD NOT LOST to Moi in 1992 and 1997, they would NOT have mobilized as effectively as they did in 2002.
Kerry and Edwards’ loss may prove ultimately to the best thing to have happened in a long time to the emergent American mass democratic movement.
Maybe the crushing victory by Bush and his cronies ought to be a wake up call to all democratic minded Americans that electoral contests in and of themselves ARE NOT pathways to sustainable alternatives; at best they provide a terrain of/for struggle where progressive social forces can struggle to expand as well deepen the democratic spaces in that particular milieu.
Many of the people who ended up voting for Nader or staying at home have argued persuasively that they would not dignify the twin headed corporate two party monster by voting for either Kerry or Bush.
While they have an undeniable point, I will only respond to them from within the framework of Marxists who have examined and reexamined, over the years, the ultra-leftist obsession with boycotting events and initiatives that some others feel is just a waste of time.
As a Marxist, my take off point is that you first look at where the masses, especially the most advanced section are at when it comes to things like participating or boycotting the election. You then build your short term and long term strategy in working with this progressive section to realize, through concrete struggle the limitations of mainstream contestations for power and start exploring other more militant and revolutionary alternatives.
I happen to believe that showing up to vote is part of a series of progressive fight back actions that extend to protests, rallies, demonstrations, strikes, letter writing campaigns, internet activism and so on.
Progressive forces start digging their own politcal graves when they fall into one of those EITHER/OR conundrums when the real conjunction should be AND; WITH etc. The vast majority of people who voted for Kerry were not exactly unaware of the senator’s patrician background and his decades of hobnobbing with the Washington elite. That is why the same things that motivated them to vote-affirmative action, reproductive rights, pay equity, the environment, the rights of people with disabilities you name it- will still keep them going on, only this time with renewed anger and perhaps a more long term strategic vision that is more inclusive of people at the margins.
5.0. What Bush III Means to Kenya, Africa and the Rest of the World
In terms of impact overseas those who reelected Bush are telling Palestinians in the Occupied Territories that their lives do not matter because Uncle Sam will always be there to shore up Ariel Sharon and other Israeli hawks; the Bush victory is a message to the Iraqi civilians who are dying in droves because of Dubya’s misplaced machismo that there will be more of the same; it is a message to all reproductive rights advocates and HIV/AIDS educators around the world that Bush will continue to block funds to family planning clinics and preach abstinence and other simplistic, simple minded and plain wrong so called "moral solutions" to the complicated AIDS pandemic; I have already seen within the Kenyan context that over at the NATION Forum homophobes are screaming with joy screaming that Bush’s victory means it is OK for Kenyans to hate gays and compare them to monkeys; in short the only people who are celebrating Bush’s victories around the world are Neo-Conservatives and Religious Fundamentalists.
In fact, it would appear that in a moment of candour, our very own vice president Moody Awori expressed himself honestly expressing fears of a second Bush term having negative consequences around the world. From this thread in the Mashada forum, it seems that the neo-colonial Kibaki-NAK regime anxious not to annoy its US master went into overdrive to erase that unfortunate “outburst” from Moody Awori.
Americans can expect to be hated more around the world.
The Iraqi national resistance movement will be spurred on by the Bush victory because they know(and judging by the hawkish pronouncements of the hordes of self-proclaimed “security consultants” on CNN) that the US government with their Iraqi puppets are about to launch a genocidal blitzkrieg on Falluja and that Bush will want to crush the resistance to run away from the hard questions which came up again and again- from the lies about the WMDs to the discovery of that lost arms cache to an exclusive posted this week in the Counterpoint website by an Afghan American who has documents proving that the American government was offered Osama Bin Ladin by the Taliban several times between 1999 and 2002 and simply refused to take up the offer.
I will not be surprised if the United States invades Somalia on a dubious mission to ostensibly look for Al Qaeda terrorists but in reality establish a geopolitical military beach head in the Horn of Africa.
And guess who will be Uncle Sam’s closest pals in East Africa?
Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda and Rwanda.
In other words, as a direct result of the Bush victory, expect East and Central Africa to be MORE UNSTABLE.
he second Bush administration will help to drastically and dramatically transform the brand of Islam practiced in East Africa from the tolerant, cosmopolitan and relatively politically progressive variety that some of us can bear witness to coexisting with in places like Mombasa and Dar es Salaam to an increasingly fundamentalist Wahabbi, Iranian conservative variant with a lot of consequences for women, for people from other faith communities and especially for secular civil society. In a bizarre development, the second Bush administration will then point to this alien mutation of Islam in Kenya for instance as an excuse to infest our country with their racist Muslim hating FBI and CIA agents.
It is up to the Kenyan government to decide whether they are going to have the political backbone to chart an independent foreign policy that is predicated on the principles of good neighbourliness, peace, non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states and African unity or continue with the cowardly trend of selling out Kenyan national interests to the lowest imperialist bidder.
Kenyan progressives cannot pretend that the second Bush era of terror and error is NOT already upon us. As it is, so many Kenyan social justice activists who work for US supported NGOsin Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, Eldoret and elsewhere are scared shitless when it comes to denouncing Uncle Sam’s attack on civil liberties around the world.
My question to them is this:
What is more important:
A few tens of thousands of Yankee dollars or a long term commitment to democratic and progressive principles?
To sum up:
Bush won, but he is still the world's most famous idiot; those 100,000 Iraqi civilians who lost their lives as a result of his lies and racist policies are still dead; those American youth in uniform who lost their limbs because of his regime change madness are still crippled and those tens of thousands of Americans who lost their jobs because of Bush’s disastrous domestic policies are still unemployed…
Long Live the progressive and democratic minded American People!
Fight Bush, the Neo-Conservatives, the Religious Right and US led Imperialism!
Oppose all Racist Wars of Recolonization!
Zinduka! Pambana!
Onyango Oloo
Montreal
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