http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/01/obamas_legacy_lies_with_a_side_of_weakening_our_national_security.html
January 10, 2017
Obama's legacy: Lies, with a side of weakening our national security
By J. Marsolo
In 2008, Obama promised to fundamentally transform our country. He has accomplished much of his promise.
He has abandoned and betrayed our most reliable ally, Israel, the only democratic country in the Middle East. According to Bibi Netanyahu, Obama orchestratedthe U.N. vote to condemn Israel on its settlement policy.
He empowered and rewarded our principal enemy, Iran, the principal supporter of Islamist terrorism since 1979, by allowing Iran to continue its nuclear development program, and he gave Iran 150 billion dollars plus another billion in ransom money. Iran is using and will use this money to fund and support terrorism. To reward Iran, Obama bypassed the constitutional provision requiring a two-thirds vote to approve a treaty, by terming it an "agreement" with Iran. Congress abdicated its role by voting 98-1 to allow it to be called an agreement.
He lied about the cause of Benghazi to blame the attack on a video when he knew it was Islamist terrorism. He did this to win the 2012 election. Obama went onthe David Letterman show, a noted journalist on foreign affairs, to say:
OBAMA: Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. And so, this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world. But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya.
He passed Obamacare with only Democratic Party votes, thus extending federal control over one seventh of the economy. He lied when he said you could keep your doctor and your premium would be reduced. He is lying now when he says Republicans did not offer any proposals about health insurance. He refused to listen or accept any Republican proposals or input.
He ruled by issuing executive orders and having agencies issue regulations, thus damaging the separation of powers under our federal system.
He has worsened race relations by dividing the nation by race and income. Hemocked many rural Americans by saying they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
His main legacy is that he did not govern in the best interests of the country, but he campaigned for eight years as a polarizing Democratic Party community organizer.
He campaigned furiously and daily to help Hillary, but she lost. He told voters his agenda was on the ballot and that he would take it as a personal insult if his base did not turn out to vote for Hillary. When she lost, instead of accepting the will of the voters, he started the campaign to discredit Donald Trump's election and presidency by blaming the Russians for "interfering "with the election. This is now the narrative with his cheerleaders in the mainstream media: Trump won because the Russians "interfered."
He does not say the truth that the supposed interference is that John Podesta's emails were hacked when Podesta opened a phishing email. The emails disclosed that Hillary lied, that she sold access to the State Department, and that Obama lied when he said he did not know Hillary used an unsecure private email server. Obama then started the campaign to de-legitimize the Trump election by blaming the Russians for "helping" Trump win. The Obama-Democrat-MSM narrative is that disclosure of the truth, disclosed by the emails, is interference.
Obama endangered our national security by abandoning Israel at the U.N. resolution to condemn Israel, and by allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons and giving Iran $150 billion plus another billion for ransom, which money will be used to further fund terrorism, such as Hamas and Hezb'allah.
The worst element of Obama's legacy is that he has shifted the focus from Iran, our real enemy, to Russia strictly for political purposes to damage Trump. He is using national security strictly for political purposes to explain away his proxy Hillary's loss. Obama is not truthful about Russia because in 2008 he mocked Mitt Romney when Romney said Russia was our main geopolitical enemy.
But now, for domestic political purposes, to explain away Hillary and his loss, he is trying to restart the Cold War.
This endangers our national security because it strengthens Iran and weakens Israel, and it increases the risk of an attack on Israel. We will defend Israel, which will draw us into war.
Obama's legacy of war, repression and inequality
Obama's legacy of war, repression and inequality
By Joseph Kishore
10 January 2017
US President Barack Obama’s “farewell address to the nation,” scheduled for tonight, has been preceded by a concentrated media buildup on the theme of Obama’s legacy. This has included fawning tributes portraying the president as a brilliant orator, progressive reformer, visionary and man of the people.
Seeking to mold the narrative of Obama’s presidency, the White House put out a video over the weekend featuring comedians Ellen DeGeneres and Jerry Seinfeld, actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, former basketball star Michael Jordan and other celebrities extolling the “historic moments that prove, yes, we can create progress.” Such absurd and nauseating effusions testify not to the qualities or accomplishments of the 44th president, but to the intellectual, political and moral debasement of the American cultural establishment.
For Obama and the privileged social layers that surround the Democratic Party, a legacy can be crafted with honeyed phrases and clever marketing. Millions of people, however, will judge the administration by its actions.
It would take far more space than is available here to outline in detail the real record of the Obama White House. However, any objective appraisal of the past eight years would have to include the following elements:
1. Unending war
Obama is the first president in American history to serve two full terms in office with the nation at war. This includes the continued bloodletting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the six-year-long war for regime change in Syria, and support for the Saudi-led destruction of Yemen. A recent survey reported that in 2016, US Special Operations forces were deployed in 138 nations, or 70 percent of the countries of the world.
The “wars of the 21st century,” begun under Bush and expanded under Obama, have killed more than a million people and driven millions more from their homes, producing the worst refugee disaster since the Second World War. Obama’s “pivot to Asia” has inflamed tensions from the South China Sea to India and Pakistan. The current president will leave the White House as NATO troops deploy to Eastern Europe in the midst of an anti-Russia war hysteria stoked by the media and the Democratic Party.
Obama is the “drone” president, supervising the killing of some 3,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya by means of unmanned aerial vehicles, along with several thousand more in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Democratic rights
At least three of the individuals killed in drone strikes were US citizens. The declaration of the Obama administration in 2011 that the president has the authority to assassinate anyone, including US citizens, without due process sums up the attitude of the former constitutional law professor to basic democratic precepts.
The US detention and torture center in Guantanamo Bay, which Obama pledged on his inauguration day to close, remains open. Chelsea Manning, who courageously exposed war crimes in Iraq, is serving a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Obama White House has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all previous administrations combined. Edward Snowden was forced into exile in Russia under threat of prosecution or worse, while WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The massive spying programs of the National Security Agency exposed by Snowden remain in place, and not a single individual has been prosecuted for clearly illegal and unconstitutional activity. Proclaiming the need to “look forward, not backwards,” Obama gave a free pass to Bush administration officials who institutionalized torture, with some of them, including current CIA Director John Brennan, finding top posts in Obama’s administration.
Obama has expanded the militarization of police departments and intervened in court to uphold police abuses that violate the Constitution.
3. Social inequality
Obama came into office in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, and the focus of his administration has been to restore the wealth of the financial aristocracy. Since their low point in March of 2009 (two months after Inauguration Day), stock values—fueled by the “quantitative easing” policies of the US Federal Reserve—have more than tripled, with the top one percent the overwhelming beneficiary of this new orgy of speculation. Aggregate quarterly corporate profits rose from $671 billion at the end of 2008 to $1.636 trillion in 2016, and the wealth of the richest 400 Americans increased from $1.57 trillion to $2.4 trillion.
At the other pole, eight years of the Obama administration have produced declining wages, rising living costs and growing indebtedness. Nearly 95 percent of all jobs added during the Obama administration’s “recovery” have been temporary or part-time positions, according to a recent study by Harvard and Princeton, with the share of workers in temporary jobs rising from 10.7 percent to 15.8 percent. Obama presided over the bankruptcy of the auto companies early in his administration (imposing an across-the-board 50 percent cut in wages for new-hires). He supported the bankruptcy of Detroit and slashing of city workers’ pensions. In the name of education “reform,” he oversaw a wave of public school closures and attacks on teachers, who were laid off in the hundreds of thousands.
As for Obama’s principal domestic initiative, the Affordable Care Act, its intended and actual outcome has been the shifting of health care costs from corporations and the state to individuals, with corporations slashing coverage and workers forced to pay exorbitant prices for substandard care. One statistic sums up the consequences: For the first time since the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1993, life expectancy fell in the US between 2014 and 2015 due to rising adult mortality from drug overdoses, suicides and other manifestations of social distress.
No account of the legacy of Obama would be complete without noting two additional statistics. Since 2009, approximately 10,000 people have been killed by police in the United States, while the Obama administration has deported about three million immigrants, more than any other US administration in history.
Then there is the man himself. What is most striking is Obama’s emptiness. From his first major speech, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the media has hailed Obama as a great orator. Yet over the span of 12 years in political office at the federal level, including eight in the White House, Obama leaves behind not a single sentence from a speech or interview that will be remembered.
Everything about Obama, who came into office having been named “Marketer of the Year,” is false and contrived. The only thing he consistently conveys is indifference, a strange remoteness, a man without qualities.
The personality is related to the function. More than anything else, Obama has been the president of the intelligence agencies. His political convictions appear to extend no further than his CIA briefing books. To those who care to look more closely into the background, there always seemed to be hands guiding his way to the White House.
For the ruling class, Obama’s particular function was to fuse in his person and his administration identity politics with the absolute domination of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. The “change” Obama was to represent was in the color of his skin, not the content of his policies.
The nominally liberal and pseudo-left organizations of the upper-middle class that surround the Democratic Party hailed his election as a “transformative” event, seizing upon the elevation of an African-American as an opportunity to abandon their oppositional pretenses. However, his tenure has merely demonstrated that it is class, not race, that is the decisive social category.
Amidst all the commentary on Obama’s “progressive” legacy, no one seems capable of explaining why it is that eight years of the Obama White House paved the way for the election of Donald Trump. Yet the bitter realities of social life, the widespread anger and disappointment, led to a collapse of the Democratic Party vote amidst a general feeling of disillusionment with the entire political establishment.
Obama now bequeaths to the world a ferocious conflict between two right-wing factions of the ruling class: The Trump administration, which is preparing an authoritarian and militarist government of the oligarchy, and its critics, furious that he is reluctant, for the present, to proceed with their preparations to wage war against Russia.
The record of the Obama administration and the character of the individual himself speak, in the end, to the structure of American politics—an ossified and reactionary political establishment that lacks any broad base of support, standing atop a cauldron of seething social tensions. The true legacy of Obama is the deepening of the crisis of American capitalism and the emergence of a new period of social and revolutionary struggles.
Wikileaks exposed!
BARACK OBAMA …… the banksters’ RENT BOY!
“Citigroup’s recommendations came just three days after then-President George W. Bush signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which allocated $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in cash in the form of a government stock purchase, plus a $306 billion government guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-related assets.”
MUCH MORE HERE:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-bankster-owned-president-citigroup.html
“As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the financial collapse and Great Recession, and he personally intervened to block legislation capping executive pay at bailed-out firms.”
“So when Clinton was hobnobbing with Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman and the other Wall Street banks were still ongoing, she was consorting with a man who belonged in prison.”
ALARMING!
HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY WILL ALLOW 100 MILLION MORE ILLEGALS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/heritage-foundation-amnesty-will-allow.html
Illegals are a crime tidal wave as it is!
THE CONSPIRACY:
The Democrat Party and the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA…. Partnered to finish off white American middle class.
HOW MEXICO KILLED AMERICA FROM BORDER to OPEN BORDER…. By invitation of the Democrat Party
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/how-mexico-killed-america-from-border.html
THE MASSIVE CYBERATTACK EXPOSES AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION, BANKSTER LOOTING AND THE SURRENDER OF U.S. BORDERS TO NARCOMEX.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/10/alert-more-massive-cyberattack-shuts.html
WARNING!
VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/10/america-la-raza-mexicos-wide-open.html
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S SURRENDER OF OUR BORDERS TO LA
RAZA, AND THE MEX DRUG ONS.
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, Breitbart News has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the Los Angeles Times observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
TRUMP SIGNALS OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS THAT BETTER LOOTING IS UP AHEAD.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/trumps-bankster-driven-economy-more-of.html
The chief motivating factor behind the rise on Wall Street is the understanding that the incoming Trump administration will not only carry out policies to benefit the financial elites, but that responsibility for implementing this agenda will be in the hands of some its foremost representatives.
AMERICA DIES YOUNG, POOR AND ADDICTED!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/americas-slow-march-to-death-us-life.html
A Nation Commits Suicide
AMERICA’S STROLL TO CIVIL WAR II
The emphasis on class warfare, open borders, secularism, and multiculturalism at the expense of Americanism by not only the Democratic Party, but by their cohorts in the media and universities has led to a very divided America with each having a separate vision for the United States. The Left as represented by the Democratic Party seeks an open-border stateless America where anyone who sets foot on our soil is free to practice their branch of identity within our borders and with no allegiance to American sovereignty.
President Barack Obama, the Democratic leader who presided over the decimation of his party, now claims that he would have beaten Donald Trump if he had a chance to run for a third term. The problem is that Hillary Clinton ran as Obama’s third ...
December 28, 2016
Trump Would Have Beaten Delusional Obama
By Daniel John Sobieski
President Barack Obama, the Democratic leader who presided over the decimation of his party, now claims that he would have beaten Donald Trump if he had a chance to run for a third term. The problem is that Hillary Clinton ran as Obama’s third term, with the president’s active support and was rejected. That fact has yet to dawn on our narcissist-in-chief, who proclaimed, as the Los Angeles Times reported: Obama spoke in a wide-ranging interview with former senior advisor and now CNN commentator David Axelrod for the Democratic political operative's Axe Files podcast. The interview was released by CNN on Monday. "You know, I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I -- if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it," Obama said. His comments were part of a wider discussion of what he called "ugly" sentiments of racism and xenophobia...(Read Full Article)
THANKSGIVING 2016 THE LAST BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
STAGGERING ADDICTION and POVERTY IN AMERICA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/11/staggering-poverty-in-america-under.html
THE TWISTED ROAD TO REVOLUTION CAME DOWN WALL STREET
FIRST
OBAMA –CLINTONOMICS FOR THE SUPER RICH
"Between 2002 and 2015 annual earnings for the bottom 90 percent
of Americans rose by only 4.5 percent, while earnings for the top
1 percent grew by 22.7 percent, according to the Economic Policy
Institute. Under the Obama administration, more than 90 percent of
income gains since the so-called “recovery” began have gone to
the top one percent."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/11/comes-revolution-class-struggle-in-us.html
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike,
has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This
is the way a great country is raided by its elite.”
---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN THINKER.com
AMERICAN HAS FOUND MILLIONS OF JOBS FOR ILLEGALS AND BILLIONS FOR WELFARE.... BUT FOR AMERICANS... Nada!
“Behind this year’s surge is a toxic mix of cuts to social services, unemployment, hopelessness…”
Panic at America’s malls: Class tensions at the breaking point
Panic at America’s malls: Class tensions at the breaking point
By Eric London
28 December 2016
The scenes of chaos and panic that played out at more than 15 shopping malls across the United States on Monday convey the tense and explosive character of social life in America at the end of 2016.
What began as one of the busiest shopping days of the year ended with large-scale evacuations, dozens of arrests, numerous injuries and entire malls on police lockdown.
Heavily armed police cleared crowds of youth at a number of shopping malls, primarily those located in working-class neighborhoods. Bystander video shows hysterical shoppers running away as police armed with assault rifles and military helmets move in to subdue large groups of youth.
Though there is no indication that the gatherings of young people were coordinated, a remarkable pattern emerges from what can be pieced together about the separate events.
In the early evening, as the malls reached peak activity, hundreds of young people began to converge in what the youth billed as “fights” in social media posts. Small scuffles broke out between individual young people, most of whom were on winter break from high school, and the crowds grew larger.
Word passed and a mood of panic set in. Rumors of shooting incidents spread rapidly. Jittery onlookers interpreted loud noises as gunshots. There were many reports of people shouting, “Gun!” People were injured as thousands sought to flee the crowded malls for the perceived safety of their cars.
At a mall in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a local news program reported “chaotic panic and everybody running all at once” after the sound of a chair slamming into the floor was mistaken for gunfire. An eight-year-old and a 12-year-old were injured in the evacuation as police surrounded and entered the mall.
In Garden City, New York, where seven people were injured, eyewitnesses described a “stampede” after dozens of people called police, erroneously believing a shooting was taking place. In Newport News, Virginia, a local news organization reported that people “were running out of the mall screaming; some people feared for their lives after they heard rumors that someone was running around the mall with a gun.”
Police cleared two malls in Memphis, Tennessee and arrested seven youth after fights and false reports of shootings. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, youth set off firecrackers and “kicked off a wave of panic,” according to a CNN report. In Brentwood, Ohio, outside Cleveland, police placed a mall on lockdown and arrested a young person “for attempting to strike an officer that was dealing with another disorderly patron.” Police used pepper spray to disperse the crowd.
Five young men between the ages of 14 and 16 from Hartford, Connecticut, a largely impoverished city, were arrested at a mall in nearby Manchester, where officers called in backup from neighboring jurisdictions and descended on the facility to break up gatherings of hundreds of youth. Similar events took place in Farmington, Connecticut; Aurora, Illinois; Fort Worth, Texas; Syracuse, New York; Monroeville, Pennsylvania; Tempe, Arizona; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Aurora, Colorado, where police reported that over 500 youth “surrounded an off-duty officer” who was attempting to detain another youth.
Meanwhile, the city of Chicago was hit by the most deadly wave of shooting violence in twenty years, with 53 wounded and 11 killed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As DNAInfo reported, “Behind this year’s surge is a toxic mix of cuts to social services, unemployment, hopelessness…”
Just hours before the mall disorders took place, and after the devastating weekend in Chicago, Obama was interviewed on CNN by David Axelrod, his former campaign manager. Amidst much laughter and mutual flattery, Obama touted his presidential tenure and presented himself as a fighter for social justice. “I would argue that during the entire eight years that I’ve been president, that spirit of America has still been there in all sorts of ways,” he declared.
In his end-of-the-year press conference on December 16, Obama spoke of “how far we’ve come over the past eight years,” before adding that “by so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started. That’s a situation that I’m proud to leave for my successor.”
The mall eruptions expose as a lie the saccharine picture of America painted by the corporate press and Obama as his administration draws to a close. That mini-riots took
place in fifteen different locations located
hundreds of miles from one another shows
that something is profoundly wrong with
America.
Monday’s free-for-all in Aurora, Colorado took place at the same mall where James Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others in July 2012. Since Obama took office, 122 people have been killed in school shootings alone. The response of the government has been two-fold: empty banalities and the militarization of the police.
Though concerns for their immediate safety may have provoked shoppers to take flight, the underlying anxieties are rooted in social relations that are dominated by the vast levels of economic inequality that loom over every aspect of life in the United States.
The outbursts of violence and fear took place against the backdrop of a holiday season ritualized by the media to conceal the brutal fact that all human relations are mediated through the buying and selling of commodities. While this process reaches a fever pitch at Christmas—the make-or-break period for retail profits—the commodification of human relations, with the general tension and frustration it produces, is essential to all social relations under capitalism.
The United States is a country dominated by a
financial oligarchy, both economically and
politically. The vast majority of the people
have no outlet for expressing their own social
interests. All of the official institutions,
including the corporate-controlled media, the
two big-business parties and the trade
unions, are dedicated to stifling social
opposition and generating higher corporate
profits.
Half of all high school students—those fifteen years of age and younger—have never lived a day when the United States was not at war. Completely abandoned by the political establishment and hostile to the wars, poverty, state surveillance and police violence that have dominated their entire conscious lives, those youth who were old enough to vote in the Democratic primary contests voted for the self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders by a nine-to-one margin over Hillary Clinton.
In his interview with Axelrod, Obama did not even address the character of the incoming Trump administration, which is promising to be the most reactionary in US history. In three weeks, Trump and his cabal of billionaires, evangelicals, generals, fascists and close relatives will control the executive branch. The incoming administration has promised a nuclear arms race, an assault on Social Security, Medicare and public education, and the deportation of millions of immigrant workers and their families.
This holiday season, the vast majority of workers share neither the complacent and cynical optimism of Obama, nor the blind bullishness of the stock market. What took place in America’s malls on Monday provides an inkling of the profound social shocks on the horizon for 2017.
The mood that predominates in America as the year concludes is one of nervousness and frustration combined with an emerging combativene