Why all the hate towards Cornell West?

[Peace Patriot]

320. No, he was not at all clear about who he was. I voted for him because he was NEW--

--a fresh new face, making vague speeches about "hope"--compared to the clusterfuck that I knew, even then, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be. Because of his vagueness on so many important issues, I did not expect much from Obama, and I feared that his young supporters were in for a big disillusionment. I feared they would drop out of politics--and that absolutely would have happened this year if it wasn't for the Bernie Sanders campaign, which is NOT vague: $15/hr. Restore free tuition at public colleges. Paid family leave. Single payer health care that you can believe in. Dismantle the banksters. END campaign money corruption. Climate change action is our MORAL responsibility.

As Sanders says, don't think small, think big! That way, you can get some of what you want and can work on getting the rest. If you think small, then even a public option goes off the table, and you get the mind-boggling complexity and evil profiteering of insurance-run and big pharma-run health care, that leaves millions out and leaves those in it still impoverished by premiums, co-pays and skyrocketing drug prices, and with lousy coverage.

Obama wasn't vague about a public option. I'll admit that. He pulled a Hillary: for it during the election, deep-sixed it after the election. But he was vague on just about everything else, like WHY we should feel "hope" when a trillion dollars of OUR money was going right into the pockets of the criminal banksters, and like what do we about war criminals and master thieves Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld (one billion dollars gone missing in Iraq--NOT TO MENTION all the criminal private contractors who sucked up billions more of OUR money). Um, "we need to look forward not backward." They teach that at Harvard Law School, but it only applies to the rich and powerful who commit crimes, and only if those crimes were committed in the past. (Lol.)

Talk about VAGUE. He wasn't even coherent on THAT matter.

I'll give him credit for what he's doing now, to try to UNDO the harm that Clinton did in the Middle East and North Africa and in Latin America with her actions as Secretary of State: i.e., Libya (what is called "Hillary's War" in Washington DC, an even bigger clusterfuck than Iraq, in its effects), and Honduras, which aroused the anger of the entirety of Latin America at yet another U.S.-engineered "regime change" in their region. Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, his opening to Cuba and his support for the Colombia/FARC peace talks--all led by John Kerry as SoS--are mitigating actions to improve relations in these regions.

I am glad for those Obama-Kerry actions, but not at all glad about the vagaries of Obama's "hope" that he carried into the White House, which continue to leave multi-millions of Americans impoverished and working 2 or even 3 jobs at shit wages just to eat and feed their families, which continue to leave the elderly stranded with inadequate incomes and bewildering programs like the Medicare drug program--a welfare program for Big Pharma--with our system STILL prosecuting poor people for marijuana possession while the war criminals and banksters go scot free, with mass incarceration of the poor, the black and the brown, with our militarized police shooting or strangling black people to death for standing on a sidewalk, with the horrendous mass disenfranchisement of the poor, the black and the brown, and with NOTHING WHATSOEVER done about this by our President or our Democratic Party, along with their doing nothing about gerrymandering, Citizens' United and 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines.

Vagueness about what "hope" means. Doing little or nothing about the practical things that make hope REAL. All he's really done is stand there being black. That IS hopeful. That IS courageous. But it is not enough in a country and world faced with climate catastrophe and economic collapse as a consequence of climate catastrophe. That is the reality. And Obama's vagueness about all things that impact the 99% is not a good answer to it. And TPP is a terrible answer to it. He's not vague about that.