ATLANTA - “Politics in the U.S. is at a crisis level,” Green Party presidential hopeful Cynthia McKinney said during a recent interview. “Disillusionment, lack of participation and establishment of false choice—what is one to do?”
Cynthia McKinney
Ms. McKinney served as a Democratic Georgia state legislator from 1988 to 1992 and as a U.S. representative from Georgia from 1993 to 2003, as well as from 2005 to 2007. Now she is the frontrunner for the U.S. Green Party nomination, although the candidate has yet to be formally decided.
“For me, I can’t give up hope. I said ‘yes’ when the Green Party said, ‘Okay, now you want to do it?’ There are important issues, national in scope, that need to be addressed,” Ms. McKinney said. “Unfortunately, they’re not being addressed now.”
Always outspoken, Ms. McKinney lost her seat in 2003 after commenting on KPFA radio: “We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on Sept. 11. ... Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before Sept. 11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms’ stocks. What did the (George W. Bush) administration know, and when did it know it about the events of Sept. 11?”
Corporate media outlets only played the last part of her lengthy quote and called her loony, a nut and a conspiracy theorist, among other things.
After gaining back her seat in 2005, Ms. McKinney was targeted again after another much-publicized incident in 2006 in which she physically protected herself after being assaulted by a police officer in Washington who did not recognize her as a congresswoman when she was entering the Capitol building. Democratic leaders dissociated themselves from Ms. McKinney and would not support her after the incident, in which she was never charged, despite a full investigation.
Since then, she has remained active in politics at home and abroad, participating in the Hurricane Katrina Tribunal about the effects of the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast states in 2005 and about the official neglect that followed in the aftermath.
“The situation with Hurricane Katrina is something no one’s talking about,” she noted.
Ms. McKinney announced her resignation from the Democratic Party on March 17, 2007, at an anti-war rally in front of the Pentagon.
“I know as a result (of my candidacy) a lot of people are looking. Hopefully, they will give the Green Party a look. In order to have choice, you have to vote that choice. If you haven’t voted in the past, maybe this is the time to vote,” she said.
“Through the power of the vote they change their circumstances. If they can do it in Nicaragua, you know we can do it here,” she said. (IPS/GIN)
What's
your opinion on this article?
Email this article
