Hillary Clinton Needs a Mirror
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
One of the wishes that readers often express to me came true today (May 11). I was on the mainstream media. It was a program with a worldwide reach--the
BBC World Service. There were others on the program as well, and the topic was Hillary Clinton’s remarks (May 10) about the lack of democracy and human rights in China.
I startled the program’s host when I compared Hillary’s remarks to the pot calling the kettle black. I was somewhat taken aback myself by the British
BBC program host’s rush to America’s defense and wondered about it as the program continued. Surely, he had heard about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo detainees, CIA secret torture prisons sprinkled around the world, invasion and destruction of Iraq on the basis of lies and deceptions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Surely, he was aware of Hillary’s hypocrisy as she demonized China but turned a blind eye to Israel, Mubarak, Bahrain and the Saudis. China’s record is not perfect, but is it this bad? Why wasn’t the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs criticizing America’s human rights abuses and rigged elections? How come China minds its own business and we don’t?
These questions didn’t go down well. None of the other interviewees or guests thought that Hilary had made a good decision, but even the Chinese guests were not free of the common mindset that frames every issue from the standpoint that the West is the standard by which the rest of the world is judged. By pointing out our own shortcomings, I was challenging that standard. The host and other guests could not escape from the restraints imposed on thought by the role of the West as world standard.
What has happened to the West is that it can see itself and others only through the eyes of its own propaganda. There was a great deal of talk about China’s lack of democracy. As the
BBC program was being broadcast, the news intruded that Greeks had again taken to the streets to protest the costs of the bailout of the banks and Wall Street--the rich--being imposed on ordinary people at the expense of their lives and aspirations. The Irish government announced that it was going to confiscate with a tax part of the Irish people’s pension accumulations. It simply did not occur to the host and other guests that these are not democratic outcomes.
It is a strange form of democracy that produces political outcomes that reward the few and punish the many, despite the energetic protests of the many.
Political scientists understand that US electoral outcomes are determined by powerful moneyed interests that finance the political campaigns and that the bills Congress passes and the President signs are written by these interest groups to serve their narrow interests. Such conclusions are dismissed as cynicism and do not alter the mindset.
While the program’s host and guests were indulging in the West’s democratic and human rights superiority, the American Civil Liberties Union was sending out a bulletin urging its members to oppose legislation now before Congress that would give the current and future Presidents of the United States expanded war authority to use, on their own initiative, military force anywhere in the world independently of the restraints imposed by the US Constitution and international law.
In other words, in the great American “democracy,” the president is to become a Caesar.
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Living Free, Outside the Mainstream
By JOHN SINCLAIR
The legalization of medical marijuana by means of a ballot initiative approved by 62 percent of Michigan voters in the 2008 election signaled the end of the drug war that's raged unchecked for almost a half-century without appreciable positive effect. Any fool can see that the use of recreational drugs by our citizens has not been diminished or in any way abated by the efforts of the legions of police, prosecutors, judges and jailers sworn to stop us from getting high.
In my last column I surmised that perhaps the
War on Drugs wasn't really about drug use per se but was launched as an attack on certain sectors of our citizenry whose commitment to social change was seen as presenting a threat to the dominant order and the political, economic and cultural imperatives established as the foundation of corporate consumer society.
During the decade from 1965 to 1975, hippies turned their backs en masse on mainstream America and its perverse value system, refused to fight its wars, and attempted to create an alternative way of life based in sharing, tolerance and self-realization through collective effort and creative production. Their withdrawal from the reigning social contract presented a real challenge to the consumerist system and its operators: Until defecting to the hippie ideal, these young Americans had been expected to inherit and manipulate the machinery of exploitation and control devised by generations of rich white people to maintain their privileged existence at the top of the social order.
It's hard for people today to picture the world the hippies populated as our numbers grew from a few isolated pockets of bohemianism and weirdness in disparate parts of the country into a movement of millions of determined young white people demanding a new and better world for all Americans and a swift end to the militarism, racism, sexism, economic exploitation and banal popular culture at the core of the established order.
Hippies were united by their belief in personal freedom and its manifestation in the way they looked and acted and conducted their daily lives outside the social mainstream. As a general rule, hippies had long hair, wore funky clothes expressing their disdain for the consumer ideal, opposed the war in Vietnam and increasingly refused to join the armed forces, didn't have a real job and didn't want one, often embraced collective work for the common good and lived as equals in communes and creative groupings, actively appreciated diverse forms of artistic expression and lived with music at the exact heart of their lives.
Hippies loved to gather in the thousands at concerts in the parks where the bands played for free and the people danced and laughed and had a ball together over and over again. They also turned out in ever-increasing numbers for rallies and demonstrations in opposition to the war in Vietnam and in support of racial equality and social justice.
Hippie musicians created startling new forms and imaginative extensions of the African-American musical idioms introduced into their lives through the magic of repeated radio airplay of 45 rpm records by innovative artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye. But what bound hippies together above all else was marijuana as a component of everyday life. A hippie smoked weed, everybody knew that, and hippies smoked weed together, in every possible circumstance.
Despite the positive and progressive aspects of the hippie philosophy and the hippies' committed social practice in pursuit of its principles, despite the brilliance of their music and art forms, despite their heartfelt visions of a better world based in peace and love and social equality for all, hippies were demonized as criminal narcotics users to be apprehended, brought before the bar of justice, convicted and sent to prison or scrutinized by the narcotics police and courts for years as felonious probationers.
Nothing else the hippies did was against the law. Even our protests and demonstrations were protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Our lifestyle, our living and working arrangements, our music and cultural practices, our gatherings and public celebrations, however unusual or offensive to mainstream values, were well within the strictures of the law. Only our mass recreational, medicinal or spiritual smoking of marijuana — which we well knew was at the very least not a narcotic, and very possibly a beneficial natural healing resource with no discernible negative social effects — brought trouble with law enforcement and provided the police with a socially acceptable way to punish these renegades from the American Way whose very presence seemed to violate every established standard of normal behavior.
My own case exemplifies this. I was a socially active poet, performer, underground journalist, cultural organizer and community broadcaster who also spoke out for the legalization of marijuana starting in 1964 and actually smoked marijuana on a daily basis. I was arrested by the Detroit Narcotics Squad three times for possession and sales of narcotics — very small amounts of marijuana in fact — and served a total of five years probation, six months in the Detroit House of Correction, and 2-1/2 years of a 9-1/2- to 10-year prison sentence before my legal challenge to the constitutionality of Michigan's narcotics statutes eventually resulted, in 1972, with the existing law declared unconstitutional; marijuana was then removed from the narcotics category and possession of small amounts of marijuana reduced to a misdemeanor with a one-year maximum sentence.
My writings and public activities, however offensive or disturbing to guardians of the social order, were constitutionally protected. But my use of marijuana as a righteous component of daily life branded me as a criminal — a felon — subject to the brutal invasion of my life itself by the criminal justice system and its enforcers in uniform or plainclothes.
I'm out of space for this installment, but with your permission I'll continue to pursue this line of thought here in seeking a full understanding of the destructive impact of the
War on Drugs on harmless marijuana smokers and on the fabric of our social order itself. Our lives — and our national life as well — have suffered immeasurably from the imposition and unbridled growth of the police-state mechanism that's been built up on our backs.
Me, I've been sick of this shit for all of my adult life, and I just hope I'll live long enough to see the
War on Drugs dead and buried and the full range of its punitive apparatus dismantled and finally discredited once and for all.
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Obama Never Promised You a Pot Garden
By FRED GARDNER
Drug-policy-reform advocates are complaining bitterly that they have been double-crossed by Barack Obama. "What's Behind the Obama Administration's About Face Regarding Medical Marijuana?" asked Paul Armentano of NORML in the Huffington Post May 5.
"Obama's Sudden, Senseless Assault on Medical Marijuana," was the headline on a piece by Scott Morgan, associate editor of
Stopthedrugwar.org. According to Morgan, "Recent months have brought about what can only be described as the rapid collapse of the Obama Administration's support for medical marijuana."
This is way wrong. There is nothing "sudden" or unprecedented about the DEA raids and other oppressive measures emanating from the Department of Justice. And neither Obama nor the DOJ ever expressed unambiguous support for medical marijuana. It was the reform honchos themselves who misread and misrepresented Administration policy. How could they? And why did they?
Two days after Obama's inauguration, DEA agents raided a South Lake Tahoe cannabis dispensary run by a wheelchair-bound activist named Ken Estes. They took five pounds of herb and a few thousand dollars. "A typical rip-and-run," is how Estes described it.
There was a certain poetic injustice to Ken Estes being the feds' first target of the Obama era. A working-class dude with courage enhanced by his disability, Estes used to run a dispensary in Berkeley. When the city gave him the boot for being located too near a school, the three other dispensary owners did not come to his defense. They tsk-tsked about Estes' operation being "too loose," in contrast to their own fine, upstanding establishments. To paraphrase Pastor Niemoller, "When they came for Ken Estes..."
On Feb. 3, 2009, DEA squads raided four dispensaries in the Los Angeles area. On Feb. 11 DEA agents participated in a raid on the MendoHealing Co-op's grow in Fort Bragg.
JeanMarie Todd, who was detained, reported: "I saw two DEA agents amongst the sheriff's deputies, so I said, 'I thought Obama had called off these raids.' A deputy replied, 'We haven't gotten the message.'"
Like Ken Estes, MendoHealing's David Moore got zero support from the leaders of the medical cannabis industry in Northern California. He had once offended them by lowering prices at the MendoHealing dispensary in San Francisco. So, "When they came for David Moore..."
On Feb. 25 Attorney General Attorney Eric Holder and Acting DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart held a press conference to bemoan drug-related violence in Mexico. The presence of Leonhart indicated that the new Administration was going to continue fighting the War on Drugs in the same old ways. (Holder had the perfect pretext for replacing her that week. Rachel Maddow had revealed that Leonhart spent $123,000 of public funds on a charter flight to Colombia instead of using a plane from DEA's huge fleet.)
Ignoring the significance of the Administration keeping Leonhart at DEA, the reform honchos seized on Holder's vague, meaningless response to an unexpected question about the raids on medical marijuana providers, to claim that he opposed them! The Marijuana Policy Project posted a video clip headlined "Holder Says 'No More DEA Raids' in Press Conference." But Holder never spoke those words! The phonies at MPP just made it up!
At another press conference March 18 Holder told reporters that Justice Department "policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law. To the extent that people do that and try to use medical marijuana laws as a shield for activity that is not designed to comport with what the intention was of the state law, those are the organizations, the people, that we will target. And that is consistent with what the president said during the campaign."
Reform leaders again claimed a big win and some reporters fell for it. "Today's comments clearly represent a change in policy out of Washington," Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance told the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times ran a piece headlined "Dispensers of Marijuana Find Relief in Policy Shift" that quoted Nadelmann (son of a rabbi) saying that the feds now recognize state medical marijuana laws as "kosher."
On March 23, US District Court Judge in California, George Wu, postponed the sentencing of Charles Lynch —a Morro Bay dispensary operator who by all accounts had sought to comply with state law— and asked the US Attorney to provide a written statement elucidating Administration policy. A definitive response came from H. Marshall Jarrrett, director of the office that oversees all U.S. Attorneys:
"In response to your request, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General reviewed the facts of this case to determine whether the prosecution of Mr. Lynch comports with the Department of Justice's policies with respect to marijuana prosecutions. Based on the facts of this case, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General concurs with your office that the investigation, prosecution, and conviction of Mr. Lynch are entirely consistent with Department policies as well as public statements made by the Attorney General. Accordingly, you should seek to proceed with the sentencing recommendations which your office has filed with the court."
Our piece about the Jarrett letter in Counterpunch April 21 was headlined "No More Ambiguity: Obama's DOJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers." It began: "It's official —under Barack Obama, the Department of Justice will not restrain federal prosecutors targeting medical marijuana providers. Any lingering hopes that the new Administration would implement change in this area were blasted April 17 when U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien forwarded to District Judge George Wu a letter from DOJ clarifying ObamAdmin policy..."
The Administration gave drug-policy reformers another occasion to cheer (but not a real reason to cheer) in October '09 when David Ogden, the second-highest official at DOJ, issued a formal "Memorandum for Selected United States Attorneys on Investigations and Prosecutions in States Authorizing the Medical Use of Marijuana."
We reported at the time that the Ogden memo "restated the mixed messages Attorney General Eric Holder had sent out verbally." But to this day —at least through May 5, when Paul Armentano cited it— reformers contend that the toothless memo was meant to restrain U.S. attorneys like Joe Russoniello (who had been advising his counterparts that all dispensaries are illegal under state law because profits are being made).
The Ogden memo made it clear than any dispensary was, as Russoniello put it, "fair game" for the DEA. "Prosecution of commercial enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana for profit continues to be an enforcement priority of the Department," wrote Ogden. How can law enforcement determine if a given business is making a profit without raiding the premises, seizing their books and computers, their cash on hand, and their herb? We slugged our report, "With wins like this…"
Why did the pro-cannabis reformers misinterpret and misrepresent Obama Administration policy so consistently and for so long? Why did Ethan Nadelmann afix his "kosher" seal to Obama's baloney? Wishful thinking is not a good enough excuse. Political leaders owe the rank-and-file accurate information and analysis. Obviously it is advantageous for fund-raising purposes to report success, and this was certainly a factor. But it wasn't just their own interests that the reform honchos were advancing with false claims of Administration support.
Above all, the honchos were serving the interests of Cannabis-industry entrepreneurs eager to attract customers and investors. Starting in the fall of 2008, the line "Obama is going to let it happen," induced countless thousands of people to visit pro-cannabis doctors and then their local dispensaries. The most successful California dispensary operators developed franchising ventures and pitched investors, using Obama's alleged hands-off approach as part of their pitch. "Money that was sitting on the sidelines came in after the election," is how one of them summarized the boom that continued through 2009 and well into 2010,
It peaked that fall when Eric Holder warned that if California voters passed a legalization initiative, the feds would "vigorously enforce" federal law to block its implementation. Holder's threat turned the tide against Prop 19, making it seem like a futile and costly gesture of defiance instead of a practical source of revenue for the insolvent state. In the same period, federal threats forced Oakland to back away from (ecologically disasterous) plans for four big industrial grow ops.
What's happening in recent months —the threatening letters from US attorneys to state officials, the tax audits of dispensaries, banks refusing to handle dispensary accounts, etc.— is an escalation, not a change of policy. It's a surge, to use the term the Drug Warriors undoubtedly used when they planned it. And you can bet they did plan it —that there were meetings involving DEA, and Joe Califano's Prohibitionist think tank at Columbia University, and strategists from Johnson & Johnson, just as there had been after Prop 215 passed in '96... It's got all the earmarks of an orchestrated campaign.
