A Modest Proposal for 2008:MUMIA for PRESIDENT!

We at Savage Justice have followed the 2008 elections with a passing degree of amusement.

Uncle Sam's electoral campaigns chiefly test a man's ability to beg for Corporate Welfare Checks, and it's remarkable to see how low men will go in order to grovel. When it's all over, the winner usually becomes the next ShellGame Despot chosen by Uncle Sam to augment his historical legacy of imperialist pillage and slaughter.

Within such a rigged system, the main task for a revolutionary must be to highlight the contradictions and hypocrisy embedded within it. The degree of success or failure in achieving this objective, and not just the number of votes, serves as the measure of ones effectiveness during a bourgeois campaign.

For many years, millions and millions of people, awake to Uncle Sam's ShellGame Politricks, have sought an alternative to and concrete negation of that system, but had no candidate with an organic connection between themselves and the masses of people. Perhaps because Uncle Sam assassinated so many of the best young leaders. Perhaps for other reasons as well.

A campaign that puts Mumia at its head could reverse that.

Mumia Abu-Jamal makes manifest Uncle Sam's blatant hypocrisy on Human Rights and Press Freedom. His forced captivity calls attention to the plight of the countless Political Prisoners languishing in Uncle Sam's Concentration Camps and Torture Chambers. And his innocence exposes the Vanilla Justice that locked him up in the first place.

Any campaign must call attention to the racist Death Penalty and to the plight of the poor on Uncle Sam's Plantation. Any campaign must call attention to the plight of Black New Orleans, which none of dwarfs has done except except as a PR stunt (right HairDo?).

And of course, any campaign must stand in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, along with the Palestinians and the Iraqis dying daily by the dozens thanks to Uncle Sam's unquenchable thirst for bloodshed and plunder.

The entire cadre of tools standing for coronation refuses to reverse any of this now. They will refuse even less in the future.

The Left has a choice to make: Ralph Nader, his coronated successor, Bill Moyers, and the myriad other Left candidates all perform a needed service in mounting a challenge to the two-party system. Do they have the power and charisma to captivate the spirit and imagination of the people that Mumia does?

These other campaigns are no better financially than a yet-conceived Mumia campaign, which has the potential to be self-sustaining thanks to people's already-existing deep connection with him.

Uncle Sam will release Mumia under only one circumstance: the development of a collective popular will that demands it. Could that demand be made any clearer than through such a campaign? Wouldn't a powerful and organized campaign make murdering Mumia more difficult?

I cannot think of a more brazen or concrete way of exposing and articulating Uncle Sam's hypocrisy of thought, word, and deed than by lifting up Mumia Abu-Jamal as a political leader: a new Mandella! A campaign such as this one - with such potential to unify - could arouse the imagination and catalyze a movement that makes his release one act among many that strikes directly into the heart of Vanilla Justice!

MUMIA in 2008!