A Radical Solution to the War on Drugs: Legalize EVERYTHING
By John H. Richardson
We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.
Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.
Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:
6,487.
To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.
I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.
Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."
That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."
Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.
So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."
I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.
"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."
Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem
Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."
"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"
"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."
So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.
That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.
But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?
"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."
I told Franklin I was surprised to hear a cop express so much sympathy for drug addicts. Even pro-drug types don't do that much. "I do have sympathy," he says. "What they're dealing with is a health issue, not a criminal issue. And as long as you treat it as a criminal issue, we're treating the symptom and not the cause."
Why Cleaning Up the Justice System Solves the Wasted-Money Problem
Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he's made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he's been surprised by another discovery: "I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they're not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize."
And why, exactly, don't we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?
"Selfish reasons," he says. "There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country."
Really? One third?
"And give back all the federal funds too. That's why very seldom will you see a police chief step forward and say, 'Yeah, we need to do this.'"
I made a stab at crunching those numbers, too. In 2003, America's local police budgets (PDF) were $43 billion dollars. A third of that: $12.9 billion. Add another $9 billion in domestic and international law enforcement (PDF) and the number rises to $21.9 billion.
Then consider America's prisons, the problems with which we've discussed here time and again. "The prison population is off the hook in this country," Franklin says. "In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we'd rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment."
So... our federal prison budget in 2007 was $6.3 billion, and 55 percent of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. The total state-prison budget for the U.S. in 2007 was $49 billion, according to this study from the Pew Foundation, which found that "at least" 44 states had gone into the red to incarcerate their citizens. Using the same 55 percent number — which is probably low — we arrive at a rough total of the prison expenses associated with the drug war: $30.4 billion.
"I know jails are a big business and keep lot of people employed," Franklin says, "but it doesn't make it right."
To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering:
15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.
"We've got serious constitutional issues involved, too," Franklin adds. "Improper search and seizure is occurring every day..."
But I'll save that for another column.
Correction appended: An earlier version of this column estimated an incorrect fraction of America's local police budgets.
Sound off on the drug war! Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/drug-war-facts-090109#ixzz0Ty8H5uV7
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Give Back the Prize, Obama
Top Ten Reasons President Obama Should Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize
by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
In the real world Barack Obama is a politician. The Nobel Peace Prize is highly political too, handed out with equanimity to bloodthirsty warmongers and genuine peacemakers alike, according to the politics of the moment. Henry Kissinger got one less than a year after breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam war to bomb Hanoi over the 1972 Christmas holidays. Dr. King's receipt of the prize on the other hand, contributed mightily to his eventual public opposition to the imperial war in Vietnam.
Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Like his Republican opponent John McCain, Barack Obama ran not as the peace candidate on Afghanistan, but the war candidate, promising to up the ante with drone attacks and cross-border forays into Afghanistan. The main difference between Obama and McCain on that issue was that McCain said we should escalate the war in that part of the world because we were winning, while Obama contended we must escalate it because we were winning. This is one promise Obama has kept. His first military strike inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater was ordered within 36 hours of his inauguration. The president is reportedly now considering the deployment of 40,000 or more additional US forces to Afghanistan.
Reason Number Nine: Obama's puppet Afghan president is the brother of the country's and possibly the planet's biggest opium dealer.
That's no small thing, since Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's opium, most of which is refined into heroin for addicts at home and around the world. To be fair, Obama did inherit the puppet regime from his predecessor, who also begat the tradition of the United States funding its puppet regimes and mercenary armies abroad with drug profits. We did it in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where many of our local generals were the opium lords who ran the refineries and exported the crop. The Reagan regime also paid for its bloody contra war in Nicaragua with a mixture of illicit arms sales and profits from the cocaine trade too. So despite being hailed as a '”transformative leader” President Obama continues a proud and corrupt tradition of dubious and drug-soaked allies to carry on the wars at the fringes of America's global empire.
Reason Number Eight: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.
When Iran announced that it planned to exercise its treaty right to diversify its energy sources and build a plant for enriching uranium within the guidelines of applicable international agreements, President Obama sank nearly to the level of his predecessors in trying to sell to the world the spectre of an imaginary nuclear threat. The fact that the president's own intelligence agencies and the relevant international bodies affirm that there is no Iranian nuclear threat didn't stop the president warlike rhetoric of sanctions and drastic measures directed against Iran. The last president who sold us imaginary tales of Middle Eastern nukes used those tales to justify a genocidal war that has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis along with a few thousand Americans, at a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Reason Number Seven: Barack Obama's first budget called for expanding, not shrinking the army and marine corps.
The military has two jobs, breaking things and killing people. It's no secret that with no real military rivals anywhere on earth for the last twenty years, the United States, with five percent of the world's population has outspent the rest of the planet combined on military hardware, personnel, bases, research and operations. President Obama ran for office pledging to expand the US army and marines by 90 to 120 thousand pairs of boots, the better to fight multiple wars in far-flung corners of a world where the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries.
Reason Number Six: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.
In a 1948 rebranding, the US renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Nothing else changed but the name. Barack Obama is the first president in more than two centuries of US history to keep the Secretary of War installed by a predecessor of the opposite party. The current Secretary of War, Robert Gates has a history of bloodstained treachery stretching back to his betrayal of Jimmy Carter when he served on Carter's National Security Administration team. Gates allegedly assured Iran they'd get a better deal from Reagan if they kept the hostages till the new president took office. Gates was rewarded with the post of deputy director at the Reagan era CIA, where he doctored intelligence and ran murderous secret operations around the world till the end of the first Bush administration. When 1993 Democrats decided to “look forward” and not prosecute the crimes of Reagan-Bush misrule, Gates slunk off to private life until his recall a decade later by the second Bush. The Pentagon under Robert Gates has 2.1 million uniformed employees and millions more contractors, civilian employees, armies of spooks, lobbyists and propagandists and dozens of secret budgets.
Reason Number Five: In the Americas, the US Still Blockades Cuba, Threatens Venezuela, & Funds The Longest and Bloodiest War in South America since the Genocide of Native Americans in Colombia
All of these are legacy policies President Obama inherited. He has renounced none of them and continued each and every one. Obama still punishes Cuba for the crime of self-rule by keeping intact travel bans and a fifty year blockade of the island only 90 miles from Florida, separating families, choking trade and disrupting cultural ties. Colombia continues to be one of the world's top recipients, after Israel and Egypt, of US military aid, which it utilizes to prosecute a decades-long civil war in which Afro-Colombians and been particularly victimized. More than a million Colombians are displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands have died. And under President Obama, the US is now building two military bases in Colombia near the Venezuelan border.
Reason Number Four: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.
From stateside military brigs Carolinas to dungeons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Egypt and black holes in ships at sea or remote Diego Garcia, where the US military has allowed no journalists for twenty years, US civil servants are committing lawless and unspeakable acts of torture and degradation. They've been doing it for some time now in our name and on our dime. It didn't start with George Bush and apparently it will not end with Barack Obama. In the spirit of 1993 Democrats who declined to investigate or prosecute the decade of rampant criminality on the part of three Reagan-Bush administrations, Nobel laureate Barack Obama has adopted a don't ask don't tell don't prosecute policy on war crimes, international kidnapping and torture committed by US agents in or out of uniform. Let's look to the future, the president has told us, crimes are in the past. But aren't all crimes in the past?
Reason Number Three: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.
Comedian Bill Maher says people should try to remember that Barack Obama is their president, not their boyfriend. When your boyfriend lies it's a private matter whether you forgive, forget or believe him the next time. Presidents act with your money and in your name. When they lie it's a very public affair. Although close and lawyerly scrutiny of his statements reveals he probably never intended to withdraw from Iraq, Candidate Obama deliberately gave the impression he would bring home some or most of the troops because he knew that was what the electorate wanted in a Democratic candidate for president. By now President Obama should have withdrawn more than half a dozen combat brigades from Iraq, but there are few signs of that happening. An Iraqi referendum on whether the US must leave by a date certain is supposed to occur in 2010 under the current Status of Forces Agreement, but it is doubtful that this will ever occur.
Reason Number Three: The US Continues to Ignore Israeli nukes, while it acts as banker, diplomatic cover, and armorer its brutal Israel's sixty year occupation of Palestine.
Despite being in violation of more UN resolutions than any nation on earth, Israel is the top recipient of US economic and military aid. The optimism in the Arab world that greeted Obama's swearing in has given way to resignation and despair as the bloody occupation endures, the choking of Gaza and the taking of Palestinian land and resources on the West Bank continues. The Obama administration has even blocked the investigation of Israeli war crimes in its military assault against the nearly helpless civilian population of Gaza last year. Israel still conducts military exercises to underline the nuclear threat it poses to every other state in the region, a nuclear threat President Obama is not even inclined to acknowledge, let alone address in the meaningful fashion of a peacemaker. This is the same Barack Obama who used to attend Palestinian community events as a state senator in Chicago. Barack Obama has been captured by the office of president rather than the other way around.
Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.
In recent years the US has given military aid to more than fifty of the fifty four nations on the African continent, invariably backing at least one, and often two or more sides in every case of invasion or civil war. As Glen Ford pointed out only last week, the US has just concluded a joint training exercise with personnel from dozens of African armies, all of which are being made to look to Uncle Sam as their paymaster, armorer and training resource. The US intends to grab the lion's share of African oil, water, agricultural and mineral resources in the coming century. The rape of the Congo, in which more than five million have perished in the last decade, has been perpetrated to make central Africa safe for business. Congolese resources are flowing to the US and its allies, so five million dead there is not considered a genocide. But neighboring Darfur, where the Chinese are pumping the oil, a hundredth of that death toll several years back still fuels fresh charges of genocide and calls for US intervention on the part of our bipartisan foreign policy elite. By backing the military sectors of African societies instead of civil sectors, by sending arms instead of forgiving the debt and allowing African countries to build their own hospitals and educate their people, the First Black President perpetuates a dreadful legacy of neo-colonial oppression that has cost millions of lives and will injure millions more to come.
Reason Number One: It just ain't right.
The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.
The European elite didn't do Barack a favor with this Nobel prize. But then you don't flatter the king to help the monarch out. You flatter the king to help yourself. The Nobel Peace Prize is their soiled and fulsome love note to the new emperor. It will hang around Obama's neck like a millstone, a token of the vast gulf between the fiction of a progressive black president and the reality of just another imperial CEO minding the same old store.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendarport.com.
by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
In the real world Barack Obama is a politician. The Nobel Peace Prize is highly political too, handed out with equanimity to bloodthirsty warmongers and genuine peacemakers alike, according to the politics of the moment. Henry Kissinger got one less than a year after breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam war to bomb Hanoi over the 1972 Christmas holidays. Dr. King's receipt of the prize on the other hand, contributed mightily to his eventual public opposition to the imperial war in Vietnam.
Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Like his Republican opponent John McCain, Barack Obama ran not as the peace candidate on Afghanistan, but the war candidate, promising to up the ante with drone attacks and cross-border forays into Afghanistan. The main difference between Obama and McCain on that issue was that McCain said we should escalate the war in that part of the world because we were winning, while Obama contended we must escalate it because we were winning. This is one promise Obama has kept. His first military strike inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater was ordered within 36 hours of his inauguration. The president is reportedly now considering the deployment of 40,000 or more additional US forces to Afghanistan.
Reason Number Nine: Obama's puppet Afghan president is the brother of the country's and possibly the planet's biggest opium dealer.
That's no small thing, since Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's opium, most of which is refined into heroin for addicts at home and around the world. To be fair, Obama did inherit the puppet regime from his predecessor, who also begat the tradition of the United States funding its puppet regimes and mercenary armies abroad with drug profits. We did it in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where many of our local generals were the opium lords who ran the refineries and exported the crop. The Reagan regime also paid for its bloody contra war in Nicaragua with a mixture of illicit arms sales and profits from the cocaine trade too. So despite being hailed as a '”transformative leader” President Obama continues a proud and corrupt tradition of dubious and drug-soaked allies to carry on the wars at the fringes of America's global empire.
Reason Number Eight: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.
When Iran announced that it planned to exercise its treaty right to diversify its energy sources and build a plant for enriching uranium within the guidelines of applicable international agreements, President Obama sank nearly to the level of his predecessors in trying to sell to the world the spectre of an imaginary nuclear threat. The fact that the president's own intelligence agencies and the relevant international bodies affirm that there is no Iranian nuclear threat didn't stop the president warlike rhetoric of sanctions and drastic measures directed against Iran. The last president who sold us imaginary tales of Middle Eastern nukes used those tales to justify a genocidal war that has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis along with a few thousand Americans, at a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Reason Number Seven: Barack Obama's first budget called for expanding, not shrinking the army and marine corps.
The military has two jobs, breaking things and killing people. It's no secret that with no real military rivals anywhere on earth for the last twenty years, the United States, with five percent of the world's population has outspent the rest of the planet combined on military hardware, personnel, bases, research and operations. President Obama ran for office pledging to expand the US army and marines by 90 to 120 thousand pairs of boots, the better to fight multiple wars in far-flung corners of a world where the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries.
Reason Number Six: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.
In a 1948 rebranding, the US renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Nothing else changed but the name. Barack Obama is the first president in more than two centuries of US history to keep the Secretary of War installed by a predecessor of the opposite party. The current Secretary of War, Robert Gates has a history of bloodstained treachery stretching back to his betrayal of Jimmy Carter when he served on Carter's National Security Administration team. Gates allegedly assured Iran they'd get a better deal from Reagan if they kept the hostages till the new president took office. Gates was rewarded with the post of deputy director at the Reagan era CIA, where he doctored intelligence and ran murderous secret operations around the world till the end of the first Bush administration. When 1993 Democrats decided to “look forward” and not prosecute the crimes of Reagan-Bush misrule, Gates slunk off to private life until his recall a decade later by the second Bush. The Pentagon under Robert Gates has 2.1 million uniformed employees and millions more contractors, civilian employees, armies of spooks, lobbyists and propagandists and dozens of secret budgets.
Reason Number Five: In the Americas, the US Still Blockades Cuba, Threatens Venezuela, & Funds The Longest and Bloodiest War in South America since the Genocide of Native Americans in Colombia
All of these are legacy policies President Obama inherited. He has renounced none of them and continued each and every one. Obama still punishes Cuba for the crime of self-rule by keeping intact travel bans and a fifty year blockade of the island only 90 miles from Florida, separating families, choking trade and disrupting cultural ties. Colombia continues to be one of the world's top recipients, after Israel and Egypt, of US military aid, which it utilizes to prosecute a decades-long civil war in which Afro-Colombians and been particularly victimized. More than a million Colombians are displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands have died. And under President Obama, the US is now building two military bases in Colombia near the Venezuelan border.
Reason Number Four: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.
From stateside military brigs Carolinas to dungeons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Egypt and black holes in ships at sea or remote Diego Garcia, where the US military has allowed no journalists for twenty years, US civil servants are committing lawless and unspeakable acts of torture and degradation. They've been doing it for some time now in our name and on our dime. It didn't start with George Bush and apparently it will not end with Barack Obama. In the spirit of 1993 Democrats who declined to investigate or prosecute the decade of rampant criminality on the part of three Reagan-Bush administrations, Nobel laureate Barack Obama has adopted a don't ask don't tell don't prosecute policy on war crimes, international kidnapping and torture committed by US agents in or out of uniform. Let's look to the future, the president has told us, crimes are in the past. But aren't all crimes in the past?
Reason Number Three: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.
Comedian Bill Maher says people should try to remember that Barack Obama is their president, not their boyfriend. When your boyfriend lies it's a private matter whether you forgive, forget or believe him the next time. Presidents act with your money and in your name. When they lie it's a very public affair. Although close and lawyerly scrutiny of his statements reveals he probably never intended to withdraw from Iraq, Candidate Obama deliberately gave the impression he would bring home some or most of the troops because he knew that was what the electorate wanted in a Democratic candidate for president. By now President Obama should have withdrawn more than half a dozen combat brigades from Iraq, but there are few signs of that happening. An Iraqi referendum on whether the US must leave by a date certain is supposed to occur in 2010 under the current Status of Forces Agreement, but it is doubtful that this will ever occur.
Reason Number Three: The US Continues to Ignore Israeli nukes, while it acts as banker, diplomatic cover, and armorer its brutal Israel's sixty year occupation of Palestine.
Despite being in violation of more UN resolutions than any nation on earth, Israel is the top recipient of US economic and military aid. The optimism in the Arab world that greeted Obama's swearing in has given way to resignation and despair as the bloody occupation endures, the choking of Gaza and the taking of Palestinian land and resources on the West Bank continues. The Obama administration has even blocked the investigation of Israeli war crimes in its military assault against the nearly helpless civilian population of Gaza last year. Israel still conducts military exercises to underline the nuclear threat it poses to every other state in the region, a nuclear threat President Obama is not even inclined to acknowledge, let alone address in the meaningful fashion of a peacemaker. This is the same Barack Obama who used to attend Palestinian community events as a state senator in Chicago. Barack Obama has been captured by the office of president rather than the other way around.
Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.
In recent years the US has given military aid to more than fifty of the fifty four nations on the African continent, invariably backing at least one, and often two or more sides in every case of invasion or civil war. As Glen Ford pointed out only last week, the US has just concluded a joint training exercise with personnel from dozens of African armies, all of which are being made to look to Uncle Sam as their paymaster, armorer and training resource. The US intends to grab the lion's share of African oil, water, agricultural and mineral resources in the coming century. The rape of the Congo, in which more than five million have perished in the last decade, has been perpetrated to make central Africa safe for business. Congolese resources are flowing to the US and its allies, so five million dead there is not considered a genocide. But neighboring Darfur, where the Chinese are pumping the oil, a hundredth of that death toll several years back still fuels fresh charges of genocide and calls for US intervention on the part of our bipartisan foreign policy elite. By backing the military sectors of African societies instead of civil sectors, by sending arms instead of forgiving the debt and allowing African countries to build their own hospitals and educate their people, the First Black President perpetuates a dreadful legacy of neo-colonial oppression that has cost millions of lives and will injure millions more to come.
Reason Number One: It just ain't right.
The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.
The European elite didn't do Barack a favor with this Nobel prize. But then you don't flatter the king to help the monarch out. You flatter the king to help yourself. The Nobel Peace Prize is their soiled and fulsome love note to the new emperor. It will hang around Obama's neck like a millstone, a token of the vast gulf between the fiction of a progressive black president and the reality of just another imperial CEO minding the same old store.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendarport.com.
Too Positive?
Check out: Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
I think there is a difference between positivity vs. complacency on one hand and delusion on the other, even though I've never liked the corporate motivational speakers-types or advocates of unlimited prosperity and "The Secret" enthusiasts. Having a positive attitude works for humanity when it's coupled with a genuine understanding of reality and the challenges of the human experience. Positivity isn't about delusion (i.e. the Wall Street/'no housing bubble' mentality, etc.). It's about understanding your own personal power and the possibility of improvement and advancement. It's definitely possible to be realistic and positive at the same time. One way to see this realized is to look at expectations. If a person has unrealistic expectations (hence an unrealistic person), she is unlikely to be positive once those expectations aren't met, but if she were to base her expectations on what is actually possible under the current circumstances, positivity is easier to maintain.
A concrete example of this concerns the last presidential election. I knew someone who had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, convinced herself that a leftist third-party candidate had the chance of winning. When this didn't happened, she was extremely upset to the point of insanity, even though most of the left, even the Green Party-types, were celebrating because not only did the country elect its first other-than-white president, Obama happened to be more progressive than McCain, albeit not nearly as progressive as Cynthia McKinney and others. Most who had supported third-party candidates did so with the understanding that they would not win the election and probably not even win the critical 5% needed to gain further attention and access, so they were not upset when Barack Obama won. They held up their heads, and some were even excited about it.
This is not to say that we shouldn't think big, but we should do so while aiming small. This will keep us from suffering from the kind of delusional positivity that Ehrenreich is criticizing.
On the other hand, I believe she is also criticizing complacency with the status quo. This is also delusional thinking. If you're positive because you think things are fine the way they are in this country and the world, you need to read. It's as simple as that.
I think there is a difference between positivity vs. complacency on one hand and delusion on the other, even though I've never liked the corporate motivational speakers-types or advocates of unlimited prosperity and "The Secret" enthusiasts. Having a positive attitude works for humanity when it's coupled with a genuine understanding of reality and the challenges of the human experience. Positivity isn't about delusion (i.e. the Wall Street/'no housing bubble' mentality, etc.). It's about understanding your own personal power and the possibility of improvement and advancement. It's definitely possible to be realistic and positive at the same time. One way to see this realized is to look at expectations. If a person has unrealistic expectations (hence an unrealistic person), she is unlikely to be positive once those expectations aren't met, but if she were to base her expectations on what is actually possible under the current circumstances, positivity is easier to maintain.
A concrete example of this concerns the last presidential election. I knew someone who had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, convinced herself that a leftist third-party candidate had the chance of winning. When this didn't happened, she was extremely upset to the point of insanity, even though most of the left, even the Green Party-types, were celebrating because not only did the country elect its first other-than-white president, Obama happened to be more progressive than McCain, albeit not nearly as progressive as Cynthia McKinney and others. Most who had supported third-party candidates did so with the understanding that they would not win the election and probably not even win the critical 5% needed to gain further attention and access, so they were not upset when Barack Obama won. They held up their heads, and some were even excited about it.
This is not to say that we shouldn't think big, but we should do so while aiming small. This will keep us from suffering from the kind of delusional positivity that Ehrenreich is criticizing.
On the other hand, I believe she is also criticizing complacency with the status quo. This is also delusional thinking. If you're positive because you think things are fine the way they are in this country and the world, you need to read. It's as simple as that.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Perfect Tribute to Columbus's Victims
Today's Democracy Now! featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie, indigenous singer and activist.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Verses in Faith Mind
There is a very famous poem written by the third patriarch of Zen, Seng-ts’an, called the Hsin-Hsin Ming, which translates as Verses in Faith Mind. In this poem Seng-ts’an writes these lines: “Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” This is a reversal of the way most people go about trying to realize absolute truth. Most people seek truth, but Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek truth. This sounds very strange indeed. How will you find truth if you don’t seek it? How will you find happiness if you do not seek it? How will you find God if you do not seek God? Everyone seems to be seeking something. In spirituality seeking is highly honored and respected, and here comes Seng-ts’an saying not to seek.
[…]
In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.
[…]
This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.
[…]
In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.
[…]
This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Free Leonard Peltier!
His parole was just denied after 33 years in prison.
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/index1.htm
http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
The other side...
http://www.noparolepeltier.com/
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/index1.htm
http://www.leonardpeltier.net/
The other side...
http://www.noparolepeltier.com/
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Other 9/11 (the more hopeful one)
Click here
Think of the response to the World Trade Center attacks if Gandhi's principles had been remembered.
Think of the response to the World Trade Center attacks if Gandhi's principles had been remembered.
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