Imagine Nonviolent Solutions

Imagine Nonviolent Solutions

I heard that Obama's first job after undergraduate school, was working for a firm that may have been quite cozy with Henry Kissinger, a firm that may also have been quite cozy with intrusive and interventionist policies and practices of the American CIA.

The following is from a comment by Brian Willson: "Obama's first job out of Columbia college in mid-1980s, according to available records, was as a research assoc for Business International Corp where his boss was a former associate of Kissinger Associates. I don't think there is any evidence that Obama worked for Kissinger Associates. The BIC, founded in 1953, was a publishing & advisory firm for US companies working overseas, which admitted that in the late 1950s it provided cover for CIA agents working overseas. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago from 1985-88, at which time he entered Harvard Law Sch."

What I think is this: our culture is fundamentally flawed. So no President working within this system would be able to fix the problems.

I like to believe that Obama is a good person, and that he truly desires change, or some certain changes (of which I am now more unsure of than during his campaign or early in his term.) But I can also understand that he might be trying to do what he thinks is best for himself, and for his family. Well, in this day and age, that's not enough. It's not good enough for people, especially those with political power, to look out for their own self-interest at the sake of the interest and well-being of others. People in positions of power need to take effective action to make the changes that will be necessary to ensure social justice and ecological sustainability for future generations.

Obama's justifications for war are completely disillusioning. Our system is corrupt. It is broken, I think, beyond repair. We need change. And I think we would be unwise to hope that it will come from federal or even the state level governments. The change that is necessary will require a broad consensus of local people, working locally, to end the serious and mounting problems that we face, problems including by not necessarily limited to: resource depletion, environmental degradation, and economic and ecological unsustainability; as well as the social problems of poverty, joblessness, violence, inequality, and oppression.