Randall Robinson Interview

<snip> At the same time, I think the business community knows that half the world's oil reserves are gone. All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and now there's the scramble for what remains, and they are willing to do anything to take--as Henry Kissinger called it once--our oil. What they don't talk about publicly is how they are prepared to use up lives of white and black poor to realize these ambitions. We are up against an anti-democratic foe that is prepared to do anything to preserve its position of avaricious privilege. I am not hopeful that anything could happen one way or the other without a good deal of tumult. And I'm aware that because America is so powerful--with its tentacles reaching out to the world--one doesn't escape it by leaving. This is the most dangerous and disturbing time in my life. <snip>

In an interior way, I am not as bleak as I sound. I'm a fairly happy human being. But am I in the short term optimistic? No. I search for reasons to be, and I'd be interested in you telling me what some might be, but I haven't found anything in the short term. So I'm sorry, but I'm just not hopeful. And then there's the collaboration or the accommodation of prominent blacks like Dorothy Haight and Andrew Young who stood up for Condoleezza Rice. One asks the question: Well, doesn't one have to be something more than black to elicit your support? <snip>

And I've never had any trouble opposing people I've been close to. I've never worried about offending or bothering people I feel strongly about. I've opposed black regimes and white regimes, leftist regimes and rightist regimes. I'm close to Aristide because I have respect for him, but all that is beside the point. There's only one point that counts: Democracy requires that if you who don't like the outcome of elections you have to tolerate it and then pursue your interest the next time around. Aristide said simply that we must learn in this nascent democracy to move from election to election. It was as simple as that. These people invaded and threw out 7,000 elected officials, and replaced them with Latortue, who had been all this time in Florida. A woefully unqualified fellow. I'm not suggesting that Aristide didn't make mistakes. But he was put in a place by the United States where it was impossible for him to succeed. I don't know of any situation where you're going to have an officeholder in a country of eight million people who's cut off at the knees by the most powerful force in this world and who can still make it fly. <snip>

Well, I knew the moment I saw that George Tenet had been given a similar honor just the day before that I couldn't accept an honorary degree from Georgetown. Rejecting it caused me a great degree of discomfort. First, because the people who fought for Georgetown to confer the degree on me were occasioned a certain amount of discomfort by me. But I knew just no other way out. So I explained my situation to the dean. And if they were annoyed, they masked that. I think they understood why I took that position. I wouldn't have come that far to receive an honorary degree if I didn't think that it wasn't an important thing. So I was vastly disappointed to read about Tenet. But from that point onward, the degree meant absolutely nothing. <snip>

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=8924

I always enjoy reading Randall Robinson. Much to think about in that article.