Comments on: Beware the Obama Hype

By: P. Collins

P. Collins — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:05:58 +0000

Columbian drug lords claim, the U.S. is their largest consumer of drugs, “if the U.S. citizens didn’t want it, we wouldn’t grow it.”
We need to de-criminalize non violent drug users and stop building more, for profit, prisons. History has been repeated from the alcohol prohabition years. When alcohol prohabition law ended, everyone didn’t become alcoholics. Why aren’t we opening our eyes to history. There will always be blood shed from illegal sales and profit of illegal
drugs. Alcoholics don’t serve a year in a 6′x 8′ prison cell for consuming too much alcohol. The drug addict doesn’t want the addiction. They want help. The U.S. government should grow it, legalize it, and monitor it. Administer it through a medical clinics with pshycologist and medical physicians. Ex. If a patient needs 2 marajuana cigarettes a day, charge them $14. for the week. If they want an ounce a week, charge them $300 for a bag. This would take it off the black market. We would save billions of dollars a year, not monitoring borders and the seas for drug importation. There would be no more profits from foreign and domestic drug lords. Follow the procedure from the alcohol repeal procedure.
Drug addiction should be a family problem treated through medical help. 1 in 135 people are incarcerated for illegal drugs, classified as felons which reduces any chance of gaining employment. Result, welfare paid out to their families or dealing drugs to support their families at tax payers expense. The bloody mafia is still alive but not from the sales of alcohol, it’s profit is selling drugs. Is our new administration brave enough to step up to the plate, make history again, and change this law. This would domino the deficit and bloodshed from every direction.

By: UH2L

UH2L — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:35:50 +0000

It’s never good to be overconfident or feel superior but after eight years of nothing going right in this country, we need a leader that can make us feel confident and Obama has already done that before he even becomes president. We can be confident without being arrogant. Helping others is a sign of confidence gone good just as initiating unjustified military actions is a sign of confidence gone bad.

There is perhaps too much hype and extremely high expectations for Obama, but his election has restored my faith in our country for generally turning a blind eye to his ethnicity and for voting for the most intelligent and strategic of the two major candidates. No candidate is perfect, just as none of us are perfect. We all have skeletons in our closet, deficiencies in our character and opinions that not everyone else agrees with.I at least have confidence in this leader and that confidence is infectious. He won’t be perfect, but can you think of a better viable alternative?

UH2L
http://www.thingsivenoticed.com

By: Rita

Rita — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:03:34 +0000

Jason,

Yes, i agree with you. I think that the need to feel superior is based, actually in a deep feeling of inadequacy. If someone is secure within oneself, one needn’t convince others and indeed force their own ways on them.

It really is like organized Christianity in so many ways. If they honestly believed in their own mythology, then the fact that there are those who don’t hold the same belief systems, would not be threatening to them. It is not unlike the reports that Dick Cheney insisted that all television sets in any hotel he stayed in, had to be tuned to fox news. That way he need not confront any sort of dissonance. It is the height of insecurity.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:16:09 +0000

Excellent analysis and thanks for the accurate portrayal of the Kennedy Assassination research of Penn Jones. He was one of the early critics of the official theory, which has since been completely discredited by scholarly researchers and professional historians.

By: Ramsefall

Ramsefall — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:35:36 +0000

John,

a great production you did with The War on Democracy, always refreshing to hear information that tells the other side of the story. Your acquiescent cynicism with some of the wealthy semi-humans you interviewed was appropriately done without them even realizing, especially the ex-CIA pig. While Chavez may not be perfect, he’s done a hell of a lot more than any other Venezuelan leader in the past 50+ years, the poor finally have access and some level of recognition.

ANY TIME you’re in the region and need assistance with another documentary, you have a glove in Colombia.

I concur with your warning on the Obama hype, it was actually more tolerable watching the drawn-out, farcical performance from abroad. His Senate voting record speaks for itself, as do most of his previous comments. Rita’s comment sums things up nicely. I do what I can to maintain a perspective of positive realism while not giving into pessimism before Obama takes office. We’ll see how he performs out of the gates, but so far it’s not looking good by the company the man keeps.

Thanks again for the realistic perspective, John.

Best to you.

By: Max Shields

Max Shields — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:07:14 +0000

Diane,

There are several “flavors” of so-called “leftist’, and going back to analyze why America is not a left-leaning country may not prove all that fruitful. But let me be clear, the trajectory is much longer than a few decades.

There is NO monolithic “left”, let’s just be clear. Yes, there are some socialists and then there are some anti-capitalists (who may or may not be socialists) and then there are progressives (call them “leftist” if you must) who are interested in scalability, have found that economics, human scaled, is real only to the extent that is scaled accordingly, and that there is a threshold at which privatization throught massive production of money allows for concentration of resources and hence wealth by a few.

I would fall in the latter category. I’ve read Marx and Smith and Recardo; and my favorite, Henry George.

Add to that the scalability of E.F. Schumacher to George with a dash of the urbanist, Jane Jacobs, and you have a good sense of what a 21st Century independent progressive movement can be. It stands on its head the empire paradigm.

It’s not about left-right. It’s about power, and real change. The people who understand power the best are the people who have it and hold on to it. Most others (99%) just don’t get it and are left to squabble amongst themselves, calling one another names, deriding “leftists” for this and that like children lost in the woods.

Read some Neitzche for christ’s sakes. The problem with Marx is that his battle is with capitalism as it relates to one major dimension – workers. He does a superb job in dissecting it. He was an outstanding analyst of what was going on in the 19th Century and has gems of valuable info. Einstein had the best take on it. He understood energy. It is the balance between the amount of energy it takes to get energy that is the very foundation of Western civilization, of empires and is totally and completely non-negotiable. We built a civilization, a way of life, on fossil. It is unique in ways we don’t consider. Alternative energy can only work when we are ready to face the fact that growth is uneconomic. Production cannot exclude land/resources as non-capital, and consumption must be scaled to meet renewability at every level.

Until our lives meet these un-negotiable demands of nature, there is really nothing to talk about.

So, I would submit that there is a “left/progressive” who understand this and who are acting on it. It is not about old Socialism Vs Old Capitalism.

It is about the very premise upon which this ediface was built – a week without electricity in Canada in winter – now there’s a real lesson in fragility of our reality.

By: Erroll

Erroll — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:53:24 +0000

Jason Oberg

Intelligently and persuasively well stated.

By: Jason Oberg

Jason Oberg — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:35:54 +0000

If that is the case, Rita, then we truly have nothing to hope for. This idiotic notion of American superiority is what has solidified our status as an aggressive imperialist nation for so long now. It must stop, especially in our politicians. America does not lead the world in literacy, equality, freedom, health care, productivity or science. Certainly not in prosperity for its own citizens. In fact, we’re pretty far down the list on all these things. We have the biggest bombs. That’s it. When Obama speaks of American exceptionalism, he really refers to our ability to shove the concept of American greatness down other’s throats. The rest of the world needs to collectively put the United States in its place. Too long has an unrealistic air of superiority pervaded Washington. Not to mention middle America, which eats this garbage up, believing while working two jobs to pay the light bill that they live in the greatest nation on the face of the earth, ever. How horribly deceived we have all become.

By: Diane

Diane — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:34:21 +0000

I went to a talk John Pilger gave, when he was back in Austalia recently, and at the end his advice was “get back to the streets and protest” or something to that effect. Well John as someone who spent 30 years in the rank and file trade union movement, I can tell you that is not much of a solution. An old TU friend of mine said the other day “I think the problem with out generation is that we were too its all about me” and I agree with her. The negativity about Obama from the male left is nothing less than astonishing in its naivity, of course he is going to support the status quo, the only difference is that there is not going to be much of a status quo soon, and then we will see how good a tap dancer he is.
To me the problem is more about the lack of self reflection on the part of the left. The refusal to go back to the 70’s and 80’s and really analyse what went wrong. To perhaps accept that in the short term the capitalist class outflanked them, afterall they read Marx too, and too accept that the first world working classes, took the money and ran, after all they are only 100 years out of rural peasantry, you can’t expect peasants too really care all that much about the fate of people in lands they can’t even find on a map. Collectively the left has to see what they did wrong and to examine the tools that the capitalist class used to confuse and then perhaps we can start getting somewhere, go read Sheila Rowbotham’s Beyond Fragments for starters

By: Rita

Rita — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:48:15 +0000

I inadvertently came upon Barack Obama giving a talk on his book “Dreams of my Father”, at an NYC Barnes &Noble, circa 2005. This was on C-SPAN book tv.

I was intrigued to hear him say, “I do believe in American exceptionalism”. I think this is so very telling. However, i don’t know that any person who becomes a presidential candidate in either major party can believe otherwise. It is like being a Catholic Bishop, I suppose. You must believe in the superiority of your own institution and self identity. Which, in both cases, inevitably translates into forcing your way of life and perspective, on others. Even if it means torturing them for the good of their souls.

It is all the same.