DNC 2008: Real Change, Inspiration, Power Were Outside the Fence
Aug 31st, 2008 by admin
Our country has been hijacked, and the Democrats are in on the plan… When it came to war and occupation, the Democratic leadership showed us that financing an illegal and immoral war, based on lies, was more important to them than the people’s desire for peace. And when the people, hurting from the financial mismanagement of this country, called for accountability for the crimes that have been committed against the people here, against the global community, against nature, itself, the Democratic leadership took impeachment off the table! Grassroots Democratic Party activists want a livable wage! A ‘Medicare-for-all’ type of health care system, repeal of the Bush tax cuts that have ushered in the greatest income inequality in this country since the Great Depression. But the Democratic Party has shown itself to be incapable of providing even a semblance of the values even of its own activists.
Cindy Sheehan at the Mercury Cafe in Denver:
The Democrats and Republicans have lost all their heart.
Rosa Clemente, Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate:
You want to talk about war? Let’s talk about the war on people of color by police every day. … My generation is making some choices… We will not let any machine stop us from doing the radical work that is necessary…We need white, brown, black, yellow, indigenous people united around politics that benefit us.
Grace Paley (1922-2007), speaking of the war in Iraq just before her death of breast cancer:
I think the world is worse, but the people are better. I think this has to do with the revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s and the work we all did in that period. The important thing to remember about the Iraq war is that the whole world protested against it. For the first time in history, the whole world … came together to try to stop a war before it started. That had never happened before. I have a book with pictures of those protests from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from all over Europe. In every country people said, “No, no, don’t do it, don’t do it.” Whatever happens now, this fact is in the world. I think with those protests, we made maybe a couple of inches of progress. Some light flared there for a minute and that minute may be carried on. .. We’ll see what the next generation can do.
Larry Hales from Recreate 68 Alliance and FIST tells off Denver police. To his left is John Parker from Los Angeles Int’l Action Center. Link
Cynthia McKinney: It’s clear that Joe Biden will be the Democrats’ Dick Cheney. That means Democrats, just like the Republicans, represent more war and brutal occupation. They are playing with the notion that 60 enemies on Dick Cheney’s list aren’t enough and that nuclear Russia and nuclear China should be added to the enemies list.
Joe Biden is handmaiden to the special interests in Washington, D.C. that rely on war, death, untold carnage, and the insecurity of average, ordinary American citizens to have their way. It is clear that a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote for more war.
Charlene Spretnak in “Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering” from Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism:
We know that we are one fabric with all life on this glorious blue-green planet, that the elements in our bodies and in the world around us were forged by the fireball at the moment the universe was born and that we have no right to destroy the integrity of the Earth’s delicately balanced ecosystems, whose histories are far longer than our own. Around us we see the immensely destructive thrashing of patriarchal leaders who cannot even name the pain and ignorance that drive their greed. In their frenzy, they push 10,000 species into extinction each year…Can ecofeminism and the related grassroots movements heal those people, heal ourselves and heal the planet?
Catharine A. MacKinnon, from “Liberalism and the Death of Feminism” in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws:
What has been achieved for women through these politics of liberalism? The ERA has been lost. Abortion funding has been lost. Nothing very significant accomplished with rape law reform. The Supreme Court is fashioning some progressive law on sex discrimination largely on its own. You know, it is an incredible insult when the state does sex equality better than the women’s movement does it. We would have lost statutory maternity leave if this [liberal] feminism had its way. And pornography has been saved.
Liberalism makes these results necessary, in part because it cannot see sexual misogyny. That is because misogyny is sexual. To be clear, it is sexual on the left, it is sexual on the right, it is sexual to liberals, and it is sexual to conservatives. … To male dominance, of which liberalism is the current ruling ideology, the sexual misogyny that is fundamental to all these problems cannot be seen as a sex equality issue because its sexuality is premised on sex inequality. Equality law cannot apply to sexuality, because equality is not sexy and inequality is. Equality cannot apply to sexuality because sexuality occurs in private and nothing is supposed to interfere in the private, however unequal it is. And equality cannot be more important than speech because sexual expression is sex and unequal sex is something men want to say.
…We may have a women’s movement to get back. Perhaps you will think of ways…to mobilize women’s sex-based physical and economic insecurity, women’s vulnerability and desperation, not to be defeated by women’s sex-based personal indignity, women’s boredom and women’s despair. Think about how to change women’s fear, so that fear is no longer the most rational emotion we feel, how to transform women’s invisibility and exhaustion and silence and self-hate. If we loosed all of that, what could stand against it?
Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008) from “The Woman I Love Is a Planet”:
We are each and all a part of her, an expression of her essential being…We humans and our relatives the other creatures are integral expressions of her thought and being. We are not her, but we take our being from her, and in her being, we have being, as in her life, we have life. As she is, so are we.
Granny D, Doris Haddock, who in 2000 at age 90 completed a 14-month walk from Los Angeles to the Capitol in Washington D.C.:
Senators:… Of course, you may not have our democratic republic to sell. What our family members died for, we do not forget. They died for our freedom and equality, not for a government of the rich alone.
Along my three thousand miles through the heart of America, which I made to disprove your lie, did I meet anyone who thought that their voice as an equal citizen now counts for much in the corrupt halls of Washington? No, I did not. Did I meet anyone who felt anger or pain over this? I did indeed, and I watched them shake with rage sometimes when they spoke, and I saw tears well up in their eyes.
The people I met along my way have given me messages to deliver here. The messages are many, written with old and young hands of every color, and yet the messages are the same. They are this: Shame on you, senators and congressmen, who have turned the headquarters of a great and self-governing people into a bawdy house.
The time for this shame is ending. The American people see it and have decided against it. Our brooms are ballots and we come a sweeping. …
How did you dare think we do not care about our country? How did you dare think we would not come here to these steps to denounce your corruptions in the name of all who have given their lives to our country’s defense and improvement? … The people of our nation do care. …They are ready for real leaders, unselfish and principled leaders who will prove their worth by voting for meaningful reform.
Statue of Liberty, broken and pointing that a way.
Photographs from Code Pink and Zombie at Pajamas Media.
In solidarity with all who are commited to real change, peaceful revolution, defense of the earth and all life and women’s full humanity,
Heart
QUIVERFULL BLOG
Hi, thanks for posting those videos of Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente. My dad’s part of the Green Party and within the GP he advocates for the independence of Puerto Rico from the U.S.A. There’s even going to be this GP fundraiser at my family’s house in September. I’m probably voting for McKinney/ Clemente for the presidency, to help the GP get 5% of the vote, so there is a visible third party in the U.S.A. I wish McKinney and Clemente would talk a bit *more* about women’s rights though. There’s some kind of women’s caucus for the GP and if I have enough time in the future, I might get involved with it. I saw that you’re running on the Free Soil ticket. You know what’s funny, Heart…. I saw your picture and it’s making it difficult for me to want to register as Free Soil and vote for you. Kind of funny/weird huh? I think I’m bonding more with how McKinney/Clemente are darker skinned women of color (AND my dad is part of the GP). Your feminism hits home more for me than what I’ve heard from the GP candidates. I guess I’m somewhat torn. Maybe if my dad wasn’t heavily involved with advocating independence for Puerto Rico in the GP and if I didn’t love my dad, then I’d vote for you. Maybe I need to read more about the Free Soil party. Maybe when I’m older, when my dad’s passed away, I’ll take his agenda of Puerto Rico’s independence and ask the Free Soil party to take it up also. Sometimes I wish I was feminist-anarchist so I wouldn’t feel like I have to vote for anyone. There just seems to be all this pressure today to “choose” an identity, one cause over another… Hopefully all this having to “pick” an identity over another is a sign that a revolution is coming.
Hey, bluecoat! You’ll never hear me faulting anyone for standing in awe of Cynthia Mckinney and Rosa Clemente or, for that matter, of the potential for the Green Party just in general for the future! Just that there are these small beginnings, these new choices, gives me such hope. I know what you mean about feeling as though you can more readily bond with McKinney or with Clemente than with someone who looks like me. My moon, and the moon of women who look like me, is a waning moon, and this is good news for all of us as women. I have nine biracial children and more than a hundred stepkids, in-laws, grandchildren, step-grandchildren, nieces and nephews of color, most of them black or biracial. It fills me with hope that the world my descendants and loved ones inherit might — MIGHT — be kinder to them than the world I have known, that their voices increasingly will be heard in the world.
Go your dad’s and your work so far as an independent Puerto Rico and on behalf of the Greens! I believe we can make real revolution and lasting change and we need the energy of all people but especially of the young.
I hear you re anarchafeminism. I never voted in my whole life, nor registered to vote — on principle, by conscience — until the 2004 election when for the first time in history there was a viable third-party candidate in Ralph Nader (though initially I supported Carol Moseley Braun). I have always been an anarchist, even when I was a fundie (there is such a thing as a Christian anarchist, believe it or not!) and so have always rejected voting, but I can get behind voting if it might bring about the end of the two-party system in this country and if possibly it might usher in the kind of decentralist collectivism I have always believed in and longed for.
Heart
“I have always been an anarchist, even when I was a fundie (there is such a thing as a Christian anarchist, believe it or not!) and so have always rejected voting, but I can get behind voting if it might bring about the end of the two-party system in this country and if possibly it might usher in the kind of decentralist collectivism I have always believed in and longed for.”
How do you reconcile that with your Presidential campaign?
Hecate, on a certain level, I don’t attempt to reconcile it. Sometimes it’s most important to seize the day, act on the basis of our best intuition. On another level, if my campaign were to be successful, the two-party system would be successfully deconstructed, a good thing. On yet another level, I would be a very different kind of president, were I to be elected. On still another level, the world simply needs to see what our platform as womon-centered, radical feminists might look like.
This conversation is very interesting to me. On another (political) thread you (Heart) mentioned that time and again the political posts on your blog get comparatively few comments. I wonder if this could be, in part, because quite a few of us who read and share here are a bit anarchist in few of the fact that we have so thoroughly seen through the patriarchal foreground that we have little or no trust of its political mechanizations. We know they are not there for us, but to keep elite men in power. But I am split in my thinking, because I really do think advancements can be made by the changing of laws, one bitty thing at a time, ever so slowly. Well, speaking for myself, I suppose I don’t comment as much on political threads because my thinking on politics is so bifurcated. I am certainly glad other women are more invested in the political system and clearer on political action than I am.
Great quotes!
I was there! (At the Mercury & at the IVAW march) I have a lot of photos up for IVAW-it was an amazing thing that I still cannot write (well enough) about (to publish). It was so powerful with the 60 vets and the 8000+ people marching behind them. (Wednesday was my favourite between that and the Earth First!er march).