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President Barack Obama's Crappy Legacy
Dave Lindorff
Barack Obama came into the White House on a wave of passionate new voters, many of them black or young and white, becoming the nation's first black president and promising a new era of “hope and change.”
Eight years later, as he is preparing to exit the White House, he leaves behind considerable wreckage, disappointment and a legacy of death and destruction, plenty of it physical, but also much of it in the legislative and political arena.
He did give us, over the last eight years, a lot of change, but not much hope, and most of the change has been negative.
Let's just run through at least some of the list:
* One of candidate Obama's big selling points in 2008 was that he promised to end the Bush/Cheney administration's disastrous war in Iraq, to close the horrific torture site and prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so damaging to American principles and to the county's international reputation, and to restore the rule of law with regard to government behavior in areas like torture, extrajudicial killing and surveillance. Eight years later, the war in Iraq — a country almost totally destroyed by the illegal US invasion in 2003 and by the subsequent occupation and deliberate encouragement of civil war between Sunni and Shia populations — continues, with US forces being added even as our Nobel Peace Laureate president prepares to leave office. Guantanamo remains open and stocked with prisoners, many of them known to have been wrongly accused of terrorism, as the president has proved too gutless to do the right thing and just shut the place down, or order the captives released. Meanwhile, torture continues, the president has expanded and formalized a system of state-sanctioned and directed murder, even of US citizens abroad, and surveillance of Americans has reached appalling levels not even imagined by science fiction writers like George Orwell a generation or more ago. Indeed, the Obama administration had its lawyers actively and aggressively defend these Constitutional assaults, crimes and violations of international law in the nation's federal courts, even appealing when courageous federal judges made the right decisions.
* Race relations in the US, and the economic condition of people of color in America, have only deteriorated during President Obama's two terms. When a police officer arrested a distinguished middle-aged Harvard professor in his own house early in Obama's first term, falsely assuming the man, despite showing his faculty ID, was a burglar, the president had the two men to the White House for a “beer summit,” instead of demanding an end to such racial profiling. As a result, racial profiling and the killing of unarmed blacks, including children, by mostly white police officers has become epidemic and an almost daily occurrance on this president's watch, along with a general militarization of police (encouraged by his administration's offer of free military surplus war armaments) to the point that it's hard to distinguish them from an army of occupation across the land. The president has had basically nothing to say about reversing this catastrophic assault on freedom and democracy.
Obama 2008-2016: First hope and a legacy of hopelessness
A news collective, founded as a blog in 2004, covering war, politics, environment, economy, culture and all the madness
Source: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/3314
