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History Should and Probably Will Judge President Obama Harshly
Dave Lindorff
President Barack Obama is on track to go down in history as one of the, or perhaps as the worst and most criminal presidents in US history.
He started out, campaigning in 2008, as someone would would restore the rule of law in US international affairs and here at home after eight years of criminality during the Bush and Cheney administration, as saying he would end America’s wars and bring back an era of international cooperation and negotiation, and as saying that he would confront the dire threat of global climate change.
On the basis of that promise, he won a dramatic election victory, raising hopes across the country and across many voting blocks. On that basis, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize — the first time the award was given before anything had been done by the laureate being honored. And on the basis of that promise, people expected action on climate change and on ending America's wars.
But the president began backpedaling almost instantly. Instead of restoring the rule of law, he almost immediately announced that he would not permit his Justice Department to engage in any prosecutions of CIA, FBI, military of Bush/Cheney administration personnel for violations of international law or of US law (that, for the record, is one of the supreme crimes under the Nuremberg Principles later codified into the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory). He introduced new secrecy rules, launched a record number of prosecutions of government whistleblowers, including an international manhunt to arrest or kill NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which included the forcing down of a presidential aircraft carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales, wrongly suspected of flying Snowden from Russia to that Latin American country, and a secret espionage indictment against Wikileaks founder Julien Assange, who has thus been trapped for years in the little UK embassy of Ecuador where he's been granted asylum. And most egregiously, Obama sabotaged the first international meeting on climate change held in Copenhagen, and has ducked every opportunity since then to have the US lead on reaching an international agreement to seriously reduce global carbon emissions.
During the three Congressional electoral cycles and his re-election campaign in 2012, Obama studiously avoided campaigning on any of these key issues, and especially on climate change. His position == “all of the above” — for energy development, has seen the US move, not towards carbon emission reductions, but towards expanded production of gas, oil and even coal extraction, making the US the largest oil producer in the world, and a major provider of dirty coal to both US electric companies and large coal using countries abroad, including China.
Obama in Alaska talking about the urgency of fighting climate change, while Shell's arctic ocean drill platform heads north to search for more oil in the arctic sea floor, with White House approval
A news collective, founded as a blog in 2004, covering war, politics, environment, economy, culture and all the madness
Source: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2845
