Obama's Legacy

Many versions and interpretations of what kind of President Barack Obama has been and what legacy he leaves will be forthcoming. In my observed opinion, he is neither the best nor worst of Presidents. He came in on the cusp of an economic disaster wrought of record corruption stemming from finance deregulation; a burst real-estate bubble built on shoddy deals and financial games including the creation and selling of bad debt. These practices would have been illegal prior to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated and restricted affiliations between banks and investment institutions.

Our country's spirit along, with its economy, had also been drained by the illegal and ill-considered invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan on borrowed money amid record tax breaks. Our nation had been shamed by practices of torture and human rights abuse. Obama campaigned for office on changing that. His landslide election was a repudiation of the failed neoconservative leadership of the Bush years. Obama did, at least officially, put a stop to torture, though it has continued to a degree in secret prisons around the globe and at our gulag in Guantanamo, Cuba which he promised to shut down. He has to his credit reduced the population of prisoners there against stiff opposition.

As David Bromwich writes in Harper's Magazine, Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man. He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other. He talks with unnerving ease on both sides of an issue: about the desirability, for example, of continuing large-scale investment in fossil fuels. Anyone who voted twice for Obama and was baffled twice by what followed — there must be millions of us — will feel that this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.

Though I thought initially that Obama came in with good intentions, he quickly showed himself to be corporate a centrist lacking intent or direction. His stated agenda was to bring an end to the wars begun by Bush. He was ill prepared for and not expecting the kind of resistance he has had to deal with from Republicans. He naively expected that once elected, a degree of good will would follow. But as we know, a cabal of Republican leaders met even before Obama was sworn in and agreed on a plan to obstruct him on every issue. No President has had to deal with the kind of obstruction he has faced since day one. We can now hope that obstruction and defiance will continue with the Trump Presidency.

In response to the corruption of Wall Street finance which wrecked our economy, Obama continued the bailout begun by Bush and went a step further in passing the Dodd-Frank Finance Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This legislation was instantly attacked and continues to be undermined by an army of lobbyists working for big finance houses like Goldman Sachs – at least nine lobbyists per Congressional representative with an unlimited financial arsenal. Dodd-Frank is in no way as effective as would be reinstating the protections against corruption provided by Glass-Steagall. Banks remain larger and more powerful than ever and continue with many of the same practices that crashed our economy in 2008.

President Obama is rightly credited for slowing the collapse of the economy. Unemployment has officially reached a 9-year low. The reality is that jobs remain scarce and wages inadequate. Though a far worse depression was averted, most economists agree that a larger spending package aimed at more than bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry would have been more effective. The economy has recovered for those at the top but it remains stagnant at best for the rest of us with 50% of working Americans at the poverty level. The vast divide between extreme wealth for a few and massive poverty has continued to grow during his tenure, reaching historic levels.

On the more damaging side, President Obama continues to push the Trans-Pacific Trade agreement which will hurt working people and cede national autonomy on labor and environmental laws to international corporate tribunals. This along with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) would be disastrous to our economy and a mortal threat to government-run services and public infrastructure from utilities to the Post Office. These pacts follow and build on the disastrous trade deals passed by the Clinton administration that still hurt us today and are a large part of the reason for the rust belt rebellion which cost Clinton the election.

Where climate change and ecology are concerned, Obama, as journalist David Bromwich noted, speaks out of both sides of his mouth. On one hand, he acknowledges the seriousness of this issue imposing stronger limits on carbon emissions with his Clean Power Plan which aims to reduce carbon emissions by 32% by 2030. On the other hand, he pushes an “all of the above” policy increasing oil and gas drilling, shale oil projects and intensive fracking. To his credit, Obama did finally nix the XL Pipeline. He has also overseen the largest expansion of public land of any President, designating 3 new parks; Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains national monuments. To his discredit, he has allowed oil drilling and fracking on federally protected public land.

The promotion of fracking may be one of the worst legacies Obama leaves us. This dangerous process destabilizes our geography resulting in earthquakes. It seeps methane into the atmosphere where it is the most dangerous of greenhouse gases. It poisons our deep aquifers – possibly forever, and continues to poison many communities. I was horrified to learn that recycled fracking water contaminated with toxic chemicals like benzine, petroleum, acetone and methylene chloride are being sprayed on crops in California. Chevron sells this stuff to farmers struggling with drought for half the price of water. Those Halos glowing in the produce section and those “organic” leafy greens beckoning like sirens are a toxic legacy that will haunt us for years with unknown costs to our health.

Speaking of health costs, Obama ushered in a complicated version of insurance reform, “Obamacare” largely written by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries which has increased coverage to many and reduced costs for some. It is an important effort, though it leaves many without coverage and many others with coverage they cannot afford to use due to high deductibles and drug costs. At the time this was in discussion, people advocating for a simpler single-payer version were escorted out of public hearings by police for mentioning it. This was an indication of things to come.

The Obama administration has been hardest, at least domestically, on whistleblowers and truth telling journalists. As CNN's Jake Tapper accurately stated back in 2014, The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more than all previous administrations combined. Truth tellers like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, John Keriaku, Stephen Kim and Jeffrey Sterling have been prosecuted. All have served jail time with the exception of Edward Snowden who remains in exile for the crime of exposing government abuse and wrong-doing. Punishment is not evenly applied where leaking or mishandling classified information is concerned. General Patraeus and Hillary Clinton get off with minor wrist slaps. At the same time, for intelligence workers, simply going to one's superiors to report abuses can result in dismissal, arrest, and frozen bank accounts.

We witnessed during this administration the crushing of the Occupy encampments, the escalation of racist militarized police violence as well as the metastasis of the intrusive power of the CIA and National Security apparatus Edward Snowden exposed.

President Obama has, to his credit, been somewhat more reluctant than his predecessor and his advisers, including Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, to engage troops in battle and to initiate foreign interventions. Though he ran promising to end Bush's wars and bring our troops home, he continued our presence in Iraq and in Afghanistan – now our longest historic war. He also oversaw the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya followed by the continuing anarchy of warlords. In the recent past, we also initiated a coup in Ukraine helping to install an overtly fascist junta. We continue to amass military weapons on the border of Russia and are increasing a military presence in Asia.

Obama takes credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. As investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in his in-depth exposé published by necessity in England, Bin Laden was an unarmed, ill old man under house arrest in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was an organized hit for publicity, making sure Bin Laden would not be put on trial or speak publicly. It played much better to American audiences than to Pakistanis already upset by our drone presence and assassinations in their country.

Obama's most important legacy may well be the official codification of global political assassination and his use of drones. Barack Obama is the first President with an official “kill list” reviewed regularly. An excellent book, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by respected investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill deals with this reality and its implications for the future in detail.

In an interview on DemocracyNow! Scahill states, What the Obama administration is doing right now is basically trying to rebrand and engage in historical revisionism about what is going to be one of the most deadly legacies of the Obama era, and that is that somehow they came up with a cleaner way of waging war. I would say that the most significant aspect of what President Obama has done, regarding drones and regarding the so-called targeted killing program around the world, is that Obama has codified assassination as a central official component of American foreign policy. He has implemented policies that a Republican probably would not have been able to implement, certainly not with the support that Obama has received from so many self-identified liberals.

Though the murder of women and children, of families, as well as of suspected militants, their relatives and unfortunate bystanders is poorly reported if mentioned at all in our press, it creates immense geographies of fear and resentment. It fosters political destabilization of dangerous, and in Pakistan's case, nuclear states and it creates enemies. As Scahill notes, What you really see come through in the military’s own assessments of the drone program is that the U.S. is creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Rather than stopping terrorism, the U.S., through its drone program, is encouraging terrorism and providing terrorist organizations with recruitment material. Our use of killer drones also opens up the very real possibility that they will be used here by other countries as well as by our own government.

In the final analysis, President Barack Obama was an inexperienced centrist not equipped to play the hard politics of standing up to corporate influence, neo-con militarists, or the organized resistance of the extreme right, too often preferring the path of least resistance. His policies, more often than not, are superficial bandaids that make better publicity than they do progress. His staff choices, people like Rahm Emmanuel, David Petraeus, Janet Yellen, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton reveal his conservative corporatist leanings as does his vocal defense of American exceptionalism – of empire. Though he is likeable and quick on his feet, an ideal talk show host, he has been a weak often indecisive leader in tough times. His legacy of codifying drone assassination, of expanding the powers of the Presidencey, of solidifying corporate power, the growth of an intrusive National Security State and the poisoned earth left by fracking will continue to haunt us for the foreseeable future.

Triumph of the Shills -- or How We Got Here

This article was written for for Veer in November 2016 before knew the outcome of the last election. It remainson that site thus far

Of all the things that bothered me about the recent electoral season, I found the ugly rise and empowerment of hate-groups and the neo-fascist right the most disturbing. Beyond partisan politics, it is obvious that we as a nation have a serious problem. Though I write this before the election, whatever the outcome, this dangerous problem will continue to plague us like a putrid cyst, unless we deal with the diseased culture of hatred, bigotry and xenophobia that has been exposed.

Trump opened the Pandora’s Box of white supremacist bigotry and hyper-militant nationalism that festers beneath the surface of American society, but he didn’t invent it. If anything, maybe he did us a favor in exposing the reality of a growing menace in what is now calling itself the “alt-right.” What was in the past an assortment of hate groups has become more aligned through the internet, developing into a subculture with its own coded language and symbols. Subcultures, once established are resilient and long-lasting. The essence of what unites these groups is white nationalism. This includes militant varieties of fundamentalist Christianity, hyper-nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant fervor and gun culture. Many of these people are hard hit by the de-industrialization and pervasive debt resulting from neo-liberal economics. They feel threatened by “minorities and foreigners” as voiced by white nationalist and author Kevin MacDonald who edits the Occidental Observer, an online anti-Semitic and racist e-zine — one of many. Some wealthier types, like Trump, see personal opportunity by feeding the hate and fears of others. None of this is new to our country.

The United States was established and built on racism, slavery and genocide. Virginia’s early economy was based on the breeding and selling of slaves. This, in fact, became a keystone in the national economy just as fossil fuels and militarism are today. The issue of slavery tore our nation apart resulting in the Civil War and continuing regional resentments to this day. Early in the republic citizen groups like the “Know Nothings” formed, voicing fear, hatred and opposition to immigrants from Germany and Ireland. As the Civil War ended, resentment and fear of newly freed Blacks gave rise to the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. In the west, Chinese, as well as Native Americans were the focus of brutal and often violent hatred.

In the 20th century the Klan saw a resurgence in the teens and 1920s. Lynchings and segregation continued in the south and in much of the country into the 1960s. The depression of the 1930s saw a popular rise of socialist thought and at the same time a fascist reaction to it with the growth of pro-Nazi groups. Leading pro-Nazi Americans included such notables as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and The Dulles brothers (Alan and John Foster) as well as leading industrialists who saw in fascism an opportunity to crush organized Labor and socialism. Anti-Semitism was pervasive as well. When my parents were young, Jews were discriminated against and often faced violence. I experienced this regularly growing up in California in the 1960s.

The post WWII years saw the rise of the racist John Birch society founded by Robert Welch and Fred Koch, not coincidentally, the father of the Koch brothers who continue to fund the corporate right. This period was also marked by the McCarthy Red Scare – really an attack on organized labor. This era saw the founding of the New Republic magazine by William F. Buckley, possibly the last intellectual of the far right, and a blatant racist. It also saw the founding of the American Nazi Party led by George Lincoln Rockwell. Much of this was a reaction to Roosevelt’s New Deal and to the struggle for civil rights. In fact, right wing politics from Mussolini to the present is generally a reaction against progress and modernism, thus the term “reactionary” to describe it. Even today, the progeny of these racist organizations voice a desire to “return to a white, Christian America,” to an idealized version of a time in which everyone but wealthy white Christian men was without rights.

Beyond the fear of disinheritance and disenfranchisement pushed by scapegoating others; behind the false populism pushed by right-wing extremists to lull those left behind, there is a real class context that needs to be acknowledged. It is no coincidence that peaceful protesters, from pipeline resisters to those who chose to occupy parks, met the violent suppression of heavily armed police while right-wing fanatics hoard military weapons and form practicing militias without any resistance. It is not a coincidence that Native Americans peacefully protesting on the Standing Rock Reservation to protect their water from a destructive oil pipeline are brutally attacked and charged with crimes while armed militia members led by Ammon Bundy get off Scott-free for violently seizing and occupying public property at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Unlike those exposing corporate and government malfeasance or injustice, extreme rightists and gun-hoarding anti-government types do not threaten the corporate basis of power. Neither do anti-social Libertarians. As I wrote in a previous article, Libertarianism was a project of the corporate world, launched as a big business “ideology” in 1946 by The US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. They established a new lobbying front called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) that focused on promoting a new pro-business ideology which they labeled Libertarianism. The purpose of this front, and of Libertarianism as it was originally created, was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economic rationale and to back legal attacks on organized labor and on government regulations. It later became a way to confuse and mislead angry working class folks to support the very corporate agendas which do us harm. So too with front groups like the corporate-backed “Tea Party.” Armed militias and hate groups also act as a force against citizen activism, as the “Oath Keepers” did in Ferguson and as other groups like the KKK have done by threatening and attacking protesters and strikers in the past.

As civil rights and progressive social consciousness advanced in the 1960s, many of these hate groups and right-wing organizations were on the wane with shrinking memberships. Richard Nixon was successful in tapping racist resentments about the ending of legal segregation in the south and to breaking the former regional Democratic Party lock or “solid south” by appealing to racist Dixiecrats, many of whom switched to the GOP in the election of 1968. Though Nixon’s strategy led in the short term to his electoral victory, it set the GOP on a different path. What had been the party of Lincoln became the party of the old Confederacy. The GOP continued to pander to a racist and reactionary base which, like a cancer, eventually took it over. The seed was further planted with the help of Nixon’s adviser and extreme right political pathogen, Roger Ailes.

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oger Ailes is a master of propaganda who also advised Ronald Reagan and George Bush but his biggest and most influential role came as founder and chairman of FOX news. FOX, now owned by Rupert Murdoch, is connected with corporate think tanks and lobbying groups like “The Franklin Center” funded by the Koch brothers and the influential American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Along with “Clear Channel” radio, owned by Bain Capital, which hosts right wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Sean Hannity and others who consistently dispense divisive partisan misinformation, Ailes has managed to warp the minds of a significant number of people with blatant lies. The slant of the propaganda offered feeds the hatreds, fears and nationalism of the extreme right, awakening and empowering old hatreds and resentments. These came to the fore with election of Barack Obama, our first Black President. Gun sales rapidly increased as did hate group membership.

Trump tapped into the brain-rotted trail left by Roger Ailes’ FOX project and Clear channel talk-radio but long after Trump is gone from the political scene, the ugliness he has empowered and made evident will still be with us and will have to be dealt with.

How we do this remains to be seen. Media bears a great deal of responsibility. Chris Hedges speaks to this writing, “We are blinded to our depressing reality by the avalanche of images disseminated by mass media. Political, intellectual and cultural discourse has been replaced with spectacle. Emotionalism and sensationalism are prized over truth. Highly paid pundits who parrot back the official narrative, corporate advertisers, inane talk shows, violent or sexually explicit entertainment and gossip-fueled news have contaminated cultural life. “Reality” television, as contrived as every other form of mass entertainment, has produced a “reality” presidential candidate.

Mass culture, because it speaks to us in easily digestible clichés and stereotypes, reinforces ignorance, bigotry and racism. It promotes our individual and collective self-glorification. It sanctifies nonexistent national virtues. It takes from us the intellectual and linguistic tools needed to separate illusion from truth. There are hundreds of millions of Americans who know that something is terribly wrong. A light has gone out. They see this in their own suffering and hopelessness and the suffering and hopelessness of their neighbors. But they lack, because of the contamination of our political, cultural and intellectual discourse, the words and ideas to make sense of what is happening around them. They are bereft of a vision. Austerity, globalization, unfettered capitalism, an expansion of the extraction of fossil fuels, and war are not the prices to be paid for progress and the advance of civilization. They are part of the savage and deadly exploitation by corporate capitalism and imperialism. They serve a neoliberal ideology. The elites dare not speak this truth. It is toxic. They peddle the seductive illusions that saturate the airwaves. We are left to strike out at shadows. We are led to succumb to the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a culture in dissolution.”

Along with the blind eye turned toward dangerous proto-terrorist gun-hoarding extremists, fear-mongering and racist propaganda has been allowed as a vestige of “freedom of speech” while truth tellers have been locked up, exiled or suppressed by the corporate media. You won’t see Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman or Julian Assange on CNN. It is time for some public responsibility. Hate speech should be as regulated as child pornography and blatant misinformation should be labeled as opinion, not news. Hate rhetoric is not free speech. It is incitement to violence.

Instead of corporate media mergers like the impending merger of AT&T and Time Warner, we need more independent public media, not like what has become of NPR but more like the BBC or Germany’s Deutsche Welle where actual news is reported and multiple views encouraged. We need to dis-embed our press from the National Security State and hold media moguls responsible for misreporting and for its effects.

We also need an emphasis on multi-cultural education and mutual respect. None of us should tolerate bigotry. All of us need to question ourselves, examining and rooting out our own prejudices. The best way to overcome prejudice and misconceptions about others is to get to know them. No one can make you do so but we can and should have more kinds of people and more experiences in our media to break down barriers of fear and ignorance.

Our American demographic reality is changing. This will continue in spite of the rise of bigotry the GOP has encouraged and fed. It gives me hope to see multi-racial families and social groups, welcomed immigrants and the blending of cultures. No matter the noise from the extreme right, our country is not going back to the blatant racism of the past but, as mass shootings and recent attacks by racist groups demonstrate, we need to seriously crack down on gun-hoarding, hate groups and militias. These present a real and present danger to public safety and to the security of our country.

The tribalism and animosity this election season demonstrated with threats to not accept the outcome and of “2nd amendment solutions,” could easily devolve into a violent civil breakdown and social unraveling not unlike the nightmare of the Yugoslav break up or the horror happening in Syria. We are a nation increasingly, but artificially, divided. I fear that, if Clinton is the President-elect as you read this, the extreme-right will continue to grow if not confronted. We can choose sides but it would be far more constructive to realize that we are, the vast majority of us, really on the same side. We need to understand that what really divides us are not race gender identity, ethnicity, religion or immigrant status but class loyalties and manipulated fear. These are efforts of the oligarchy to divert our focus and keep us divided for their own security, because together we might threaten their power and influence by demanding real representative democracy, climate sanity and an economy that works for all of us. It is time to reject the divisive hatreds and come together as a nation and as a world beyond artificial borders to face the real problems that affect us all.

As the heinous Trump error passes, we are witnessing the unleashed violence of a crtical mass of faschists who have also become inseperable from our armed forces and police. The challenge for Biden is to crack down on this domestic terrorism, the media that feeds it and the laws which arm it. The GOP must be confronted and abolished as a faschist terrorist front and not a legitimate poltcal party. Biden must also move forward with policies that directly benefit working people to undermine the legitmate anger which is twisted by corporate interests and think tanks. We need national healthcare, a minimum income guarantee, free job tranng and publc works job creation to clean of industrial polluton and rebuild public infrastructure. Continung with neoliberal, trickle-down polcies and empty symbolism will not do.