This was taken from the EURWEB.com site
It's a little long, but it has some interesting tidbits....
POWELL, RICE: NO COMFORT FOR BLACKS
by Abayomi Azikiwe
(Dec. 25, 2000) Cynicism is running rampant in DC these days. And George W. Bush is the source of a lot of it.
He recognized the anger and apprehension among most African-Americans over his ascension to the White House. Blacks voted 9 to 1 against him. In his own state of Texas, Bush's margin of loss was closer to 10 to 1.
So, he made a series of appointments to deflect the fact that his administration has no real political base in the Black community.
Two conservative right-wing African-American Republicans, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, are slated for Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, respectively. With this, the Bush government is continuing the long-time effort by previous administrations and the intelligence agencies, of attempting to neutralize the influence of existing Black leaders.
During the heyday of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, approved a plan to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to replace him with Samuel Pierce, a black conservative who later served in the Reagan administration as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
People today laugh when you mention this. But this plot is revealed in FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act. Pierce had no personal charisma nor any credentials as a church or community leader.
Other attempts at creating synthetic leaders in the African-American community occurred during the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s and early 1990s. An example is the placement of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court by George Bush's father in 1991.
Before this, Colin Powell was appointed as the first Black man to head the U.S. military. Condoleezza Rice played a role in this process of creating false role models and leaders in the African-American community when she served under George Bush's father on the National Security Council during his one-term tenure as U.S. president.
However, despite these attempts to confuse and politically neutralize the progressive character of black U.S. politics, these individuals have met very little widespread success in our community.
Gen. Powell led American soldiers in their invasions of Panama and Iraq -- invasions where horrendous crimes against the civilian populations of these nations were carried out. He has never stood for elections for any office. After a "false run" for president in 1996, Powell has been content to serve as a member of the Republican public relations apparatus -- someone who can be brought out as an example of what the obedient servant can gain if he follows the orders of the right wing. Yet Powell has seldom been associated with any positive group effort in the African-American community.
As for Condoleezza Rice, she mentions her origins in the segregated South, yet says nothing about the continuing legacy of institutional racism and national oppression that African-Americans must still overcome. Her political background is within the Cold War politics of the Reagan and Bush era, where she served as a so-called "Russian specialist." She is trained to think in terms of anti-communism and political subversion.
During the reign of Reagan and Bush, the government she served carried out the bombing of the harbors off the coast of Nicaragua and the illegal financing of the CONTRA counterrevolutionary militias in that country. This was the same time period that crack cocaine distribution was introduced by the Central Intelligence Agency in the nation's African-American communities.
Rice later played a role in keeping the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Namibia alive. She helped maintain the roadblocks to the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners. Her vice president, Dick Cheney, voted in Congress to oppose the U.S. sanctions imposed on South Africa in1986. Bush's father, who appointed Rice to the NSC, carried out the Gulf War, where hundred of thousands of Iraqis were killed along with the poisoning of tens of thousands of US troops with chemical weapons -- a claim that the Bush administration subsequently denied in the war's aftermath.
Such appointments will only serve to further alienate the largest ethnic group in the United States from a government that is viewed as a hostile force that came to power through the mass disenfranchisement of African voters. In other words, who does Powell and Rice really represent other than themselves and their Republican right-wing sponsors?
What can be expected from the Bush regime?
Bush would not state in a debate with Gore whether he opposed affirmative action -- only saying that "if it means quotas, then I'm opposed." Tokenism is by no means a substitute for a legitimate affirmative action program. Consequently, selecting Blacks who have never held elective office or worked within African-American organizations will not blind whole communities to the draconian racist policies of the Republican right.
Huge tax cuts for the rich, the rollback of affirmative action programs in higher education and labor, the increase of the black prison population, the escalation of the death penalty against people of color and the poor, police brutality and murder, the eradication of immigrant rights, cultural debasement, the denial of women's fundamental rights, the repression and criminalization of the youth, the neglect of senior citizens and the poor and homeless, will be hallmarks of George W. Bush.
The appointment of a handful of unrepresentative neo- conservative Blacks will not disrupt the struggle of the broader community to realize genuine democracy and economic justice.
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