A revolution happening here!

Brother General Colin Powell spoke about the new leader, Barack Obama a few days ago. After comparing him with the more experienced and worthy Senator John McCain, Powell said the times, however, called and favoured a man with Obama’s credentials.
“Obama has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational leader. Obama has displayed steadiness, crossed lines of generation, race, values and social status to reach all over America,” Powell said. This is the same judgment reached by Senator Edward Kennedy, Obama’s mentor two years ago.
My white student, who is working for Obama, put it better. He said that “America has always been prejudged by the world as a racist society, even before we sat on the table of world affairs. Sending Obama to the world is bound to change that perspective.”
Believe me, the message is beginning to sink here that America is ready to redeem itself in its own eyes and in the eyes of the world. The events that have led to this situation are even more fearful.
Despite its checks and balances, the US ship of state was hijacked by a group of Texan cowboys, supported by oil companies, Halliburton and Brown Associates. These cowboys used the revered Powell to lie to the world about weapons of mass destruction, thus bringing the nation behind a false war. His announcement that he would vote for Obama is part of the general American desire to redeem them from the Iraq war.
The machinery of this revolution is even awesome. Obama, with no support from the oil companies and conglomerates that had hijacked the US state machinery through the expensive electoral machinery, gathered, as of Sunday, 3.1 million Americans.
The average donation was US$86 per month. The largest numbers of these contributors were retired folks and students. Last month alone, 600 000 new contributors came on board, bringing a total of U$$150 million in one month alone.
This sum puts McCain to shame, who collected less than US$50 million in comparison. But the failure of McCain may be due to the fact that capitalists are masters of self re-invention. Having seen where the wind is blowing, they have decided to cool it and join the bandwagon.
The US polity is the only one we know that has within its constitution the desire of its people to achieve happiness and prosperity enshrined. Over the last centuries American standards of living have been rising steadily. Eighty percent of the population lives in their own houses. This is why the home mortgage collapse has cut across the whole economy.
The collapse of the home mortgage helped in accelerating the revolution. Not only did the Texan mafia deal corruptly with the Iraq no-bid contracts (most of them going to Halliburton and Brown and Associates) they allowed the financial backers back home to loot the banks on such a massive scale that the word entered into a recession.
Senator Chuck Hagel proposed, two years ago, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, the largest government backed mortgage companies be supervised more carefully. These companies spent US$2 million lobbying the Republican senators so that they be allowed to do as they please. The chief lobbyist for those companies now works for Senator McCain. The bill is still on the shelf somewhere in Hagel’s office.
According to Speaker Newt Gingrich, more than one thousand California millionaires went off shore in order to avoid taxes in the last eight years. The US is being slowly ground into the earth by the Third World like greedy entrepreneurs. There has been a massive de-industrialisation of the south.
Entrepreneurs, encouraged by corrupt tax laws and the Free Trade Agreement, ship their factories across the border, manufacture goods there and bring them into the US for sale. Thus they have a double dip. They hide their wealth abroad, like Zimbabwean chefs, but make their money in the US.
For the last eight years, incomes have been declining as these capitalist barons de-industrialise and go abroad. They even encouraged 10 million Mexican workers to cross the border illegally and find employment in the US. This is the first time in decades when incomes have steadily declined, manufacturing jobs have been shipped abroad, prices of food have been rising due to petrol prices quadrupling, retirement savings on the stock market were prone to theft by financial barons, and health insurances were no longer available to 40 million people.
It has taken a revolution for Americans to realise that their good life is being taken away from right under their feet by financial barons. Even their human rights of privacy were invaded for the first time this century.
Under pretence of “national security”, the Federal Bureau can listen in on conversations of private citizens without permission from a judge. The Central Intelligence Agency has been running its own prison in Cuba, keeping people in jail for seven years without trial.
It dawned on Ameri-cans that a revolution was needed to reverse this trend. This is the Obama revolution that has overwhelmed America. Change must come.
l Ken Mufuka is a patron of the Zimbabwe Global Forum, an organisation of over one million exiles. He welcomes suggestions from readers and can be reached at kenmufuka@yahoo.com