Power to the people!
Say it like you mean it, because most of us have not been acting in the spirit of All Power to the People for a very long time.
For decades, we have been acting under the illusion that we could empower Black people by sending Black elected officials to the city council and the state legislature – and finally putting one in the White House – only to find that their philosophy of politics was: All Power To Those Who Already Have Power.
All Power to the Banks, to the Real Estate Developers; All Power to the Plutocrats, and to the Pentagon. That’s what has become of our Black Power, in the hands of our Black elected officials.
All Power to a President who uses his power to send $16 trillion dollars to Wall Street – and not just banks on Wall Street, but to banks in France, and Great Britain, and Belgium and Switzerland.
But not a dime to bail out Harlem, and all the Harlems of this country.
There comes a time of awakening. We are now in that time – although some Black folks are not yet awake. Our job is to wake our people up, so that we don’t sleep through this moment.
The young people that began this Occupation Movement less than two months ago are not “us,” but they have done all of us a great service. They have shouted out the name and address of the enemy – the enemy of all humanity. The enemy’s name is Finance Capital, and the address is Wall Street, and that is the truth.
But there are some who try to confuse our folks about this essential truth. They want to obscure the fact that Finance Capital is the greatest danger to everyone on this planet, from those of us sitting right here in this church, to the Black people of Libya who are being hunted down like animals, this very evening, by forces that the U.S. Government has empowered.
Finance Capital – Wall Street – wants to seize and corner every market and every resource in the world, from the land that we stand on here in Harlem, to the oil under the land, in Libya. We need to be focused on that central truth.
We need to stop listening to those who say we shouldn’t be associating with those white Occupation people; that those white kids don’t speak for us.
Well, that’s right. They don’t speak for us; we have to speak for ourselves. Their presence downtown is a challenge to us to speak up against a Wall Street that has done more damage to Black America than to anyone else in the country.
That is our obligation, and we must meet it. We owe that to the ancestors.
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Some of you should remember that candidate Barack Obama took the most pro-Wall Street position of all the Democratic candidates in early 2008. John Edwards called for a mandatory moratorium on home foreclosures. Hillary Clinton wanted a voluntary moratorium. But Barack Obama opposed any moratorium on foreclosures. He said “the markets” ought to work the problem out on their own.
He was working for Wall Street then, and he didn’t even have the job, yet. And he’s been working for them ever since. Just like Bill Clinton worked for Wall Street.
Black people were the FIRST to be STRUCK by Clinton’s policies. His NAFTA Treaty stole what was left of our good manufacturing jobs.
His Welfare Reform fell disproportionately on Black mothers and children.
He imprisoned more of us than any other president.
And when he left the White House, he made sure that the Glass-Steagall Act, which had been in place since the Great Depression, was repealed.
Bill Clinton set the stage for the Great Recession, and for the economic destruction of Black America. But we did not CRY OUT.
When Clinton’s political twin, Barack Obama, entered the White House with the same Clinton Wall Street crew, we did cry – with tears of joy.
