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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Elections: a road to power?

Obama, the election and the struggle for justice, peace, a better life and Black Power
UhuruNews
Published Jul 15, 2012

The Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations is calling on African people and our allies to join us in our national conference in Newark, New Jersey on August 18, 2012.

With the theme of  "Obama, the election and the struggle for justice, peace, a better life and black power," this conference will be one of the defining events for African people this year.

We will look at the issue of the electoral system and its role, if any, in the struggle of our people to end the centuries of oppression and exploitation that daily threaten our security and existence.

This important conference will address the question of whether historically it was the vote that brought us change or whether it was change created by masses of organized African people in motion that brought us the vote.

The question is whether elections work very well for us anywhere.

In Haiti, U.S. direct and indirect military intervention led to the overthrow of the popularly elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide on more than one occasion. In Ivory Coast French occupation troops were used to install a puppet president friendlier to French interests.

Millions of Africans mobilized around the world when the imperialist-supported Kabila regime retained power through rigged elections there.

Meanwhile, the election of Francois Hollande as president of France has not contributed to any positive changes for Africans in France or in the French dominated Francophone "states" of Africa that continue to pay colonial tribute to France at the expense of the economic security of African workers and peasants.

In the U.S. there are nearly 10,000 black elected officials and the actual material conditions of our people continue to deteriorate, most often with their blessings.

The election of Obama as U.S. president has encouraged even more Africans to pursue elections as the road to power.

Clearly it is time for us to make a dispassionate investigation of the issue of elections and what, if any, use they have in our struggle for freedom at this critical moment in human history.

The hope that millions of people had in the Obama election to bring peace to the world and to African people has been illusionary. Moreover, the issue of reparations has been deliberately swept under the rug.

Under Obama there has been an escalation of murderous U.S. assaults on the lives of people throughout the Middle East and other areas of the world. "Unmanned" U.S. drones terrorize whole communities and engage in targeted murders or assassinations that are illegal even by imperialist definition. These drones are also being deployed throughout the Caribbean and are beginning to be used over African communities in the U.S.

The government of Libya was brutally overthrown, its president lynched and the U.S. is at the head of a gang of cutthroat European and Middle Eastern states that is wreaking havoc with the lives and rights of the people in Syria in an attempt to salvage the imperialist status quo in that region and the world.

There is no peace. There is no justice.

Obama has shoveled trillions of dollars into the already bulging coffers of the bankers and corporations that are the mainstay of the parasitic capitalist system that was born of our enslavement and the colonization of Africa and the world.

At the same time our people have been pushed deeper into the social poverty that characterizes our existence throughout the world. Home foreclosures stemming from the sub prime mortgage scheme created by Obama's Chicago pal and former campaign financial chairwoman Penny Pritzker have resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of black wealth.

And, while the economists talk about a growing recovery for the bankers and corporations, joblessness stalks our communities and increasing numbers of our young people can only look forward to a future of violence, imposed ignorance and prison.

AFRICOM, representing the U.S. centralized militarization of the entire Continent of Africa, is the primary vehicle currently being utilized to protect U.S. imperialist interests. But specific acts of aggression by the U.S. and traditional imperialist powers are spreading chaos throughout — in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Ivory Coast, Libya, Egypt, and Uganda, to name only a few places.

The devastating earthquake in Haiti was followed by an unremitting plague of cholera, a disease never seen on the island before its introduction by the U.S. led United Nations. The consequences of both disasters are with us still today, two years later despite the contribution of billions of dollars that never went to relief for our people in Haiti or even to the Haitian government.

On August 18, the Black is Back Coalition, created to give African people a united, organized ability to respond to these and other contradictions that victimize African people worldwide, will host our conference to give coherence and organization to our efforts everywhere — in every city, village, town and country.

The Black is Back Coalition has offered our people the best organizational vehicle since the revolution of the sixties. It gives organizations and individuals an ability to unite around a common set of principles and demands without having to sacrifice our unique identity and ideology.

The Black is Back conference will firmly unite our struggle with African people around the world and with those of millions of people on every continent that are overturning the policies and structures of the past that were built and are sustained by misery and brutality.

The road to social justice, peace and reparations leads to the August 18 National Conference in Newark, New Jersey. It is a path once taken will forever change the course of history.

Forward to Newark!

Black is Back!

For more information on this mobilization, go to blackisbackcoalition.org

http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=obama-the-election-and-the-struggle

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