{"id":217036,"date":"2016-01-18T03:36:44","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T03:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=217036"},"modified":"2016-01-18T03:38:30","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T03:38:30","slug":"217036","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/217036\/","title":{"rendered":"A Balanced View of the Obama Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Barack Obama\u2019s Presidency turns out to have been what neither his supporters nor his opponents expected. A balanced historical view of his performance in office will take a long time to develop, but enough is already known so that intelligent preliminary estimates can now be made: the following is just one historian\u2019s attempt to do this, a year before his Presidency ends.<\/span><\/p>\n

As with every President, Obama has done some things that are bad, and some that are good. The great question is: how will historians make sense of it all? The challenge is to identify his priorities. We\u2019ll start here with the bad, because his good can\u2019t be understood accurately outside the context of his bad. His priorities drove both, and did not change \u2013 and are producing his actual historical legacy, which will be what\u2019s most-remembered about his Presidency. <\/span><\/p>\n

He was no Abraham Lincoln, whose motives were what he said they were. That\u2019s one of the reasons why both Democrats and Republicans misrepresent the type of person he is, the type of President he is, and the Obama Presidency itself \u2013 including his selections of the people to occupy the cabinet departments and the other key positions in his Administration. Republicans cannot criticize him honestly, because many of his actual motives are similar to theirs, and Republicans cannot acknowledge that he\u2019s largely one of them except in his rhetoric (which often contradicts his actions). Many of his actions reflect longstanding Republican policies \u2013 against which the Democratic Party had long fought (and has now lost, under his Presidency \u2013 a \u2018Democratic\u2019 victory for the Republicans: one which, were a Republican<\/i> <\/span>President to have done it, would be far likelier to be able to be undone<\/i> <\/span>by some future Democratic Administration, which then would be accused by Democrats for reversing a \u2018Democratic\u2019 policy). Thus, his legacy will likely be especially longlasting, not only large. <\/span><\/p>\n

Obama is a highly intelligent and competent person, and his priorities shaped many of the important changes that have occurred, both in America, and in the wider world, during his Presidency. Unfortunately, as will be demonstrated here, he happens to be also extremely dishonest, and very skillfully so: he\u2019s the most skillful American politician since the time of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps the most deceptive person ever to occupy the White House. Neither the Republican view nor the Democratic view of Obama is realistic, nor can a realistic view of him become constructed by some sort of combination of those two views.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is why no balanced view of his Presidency is possible which demands that he be interpreted in the light only of his stated<\/i> <\/span>goals and priorities. Many of those he not only didn\u2019t achieve, but he actually and intentionaly blocked: he didn\u2019t really want them.<\/span><\/p>\n

One must start with his actions, not with his mere words. And one must acknowledge that, while some of his actions were good, some of his actions were bad. The problem in trying to understand the Obama Presidency is to dig deeper than his words, and deeper even than his actions alone, to the actual priorities that produced both. In his case, the good cannot be understood outside the context of his bad. If he were merely a bumbler, instead of a brilliant leader \u2013 which he has, in fact, been<\/i> \u2013 then one could reasonably attribute the bad to mere errors on his part. But that\u2019s not the case with him. Obama is actually an extraordinarily effective President.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the reason why Obama\u2019s Presidency turns out to have been what neither his supporters nor his opponents expected. His exquisitely subtle and skillfully-applied dishonesty has greatly confused people on both sides. This is also the reason why many of Presidential candidate Obama\u2019s campaign promises \u2013 on the basis of which he had won first the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in 2008, and then went on to beat Republican John McCain in the general election \u2013 were abandoned by him immediately when he won the election, such as, for example,\u00a0his first promise about health care (as he announced it on the morning of 24 March 2007):<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got\u00a0universal health care for all Americans by the end of\u00a0my first term as president.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

There are some basic principles that this plan will have.\u00a0Number one, we’re going to have to make sure that\u00a0everybody is in. Number two, we’ve got to make sure\u00a0that we apply some principles, because I think every\u00a0expert agrees to in terms of how we save money and\u00a0get more out of the dollars that we’re already\u00a0spending. For example, we’ve got to put more money\u00a0in prevention. It makes no sense for the children to be\u00a0going to the emergency room for treatable ailments\u00a0like asthma. And if we are giving them regular\u00a0checkups with their primary care physician, then we’re\u00a0going to save money in the system. Twenty percent of\u00a0our patients who have chronic illnesses account for\u00a0eighty percent of the costs. And so it’s absolutely\u00a0critical that we invest in managing those with chronic\u00a0illnesses, like diabetes. If we, for example, hire a case\u00a0manager to work with them to ensure that they’re\u00a0taking the proper treatments, then potentially we’re\u00a0not going to spend $30,000 on a leg amputation if\u00a0they’re diabetic. Application of medical technology can\u00a0not only reduce administrative costs but it can also\u00a0improve quality and reduce medical errors. We’re going\u00a0to have to take those savings and apply them to those\u00a0persons who can’t afford health insurance so that they\u00a0can buy into the system that we’re subsidizing them in\u00a0some fashion.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Another principle is that it’s going to have to be some\u00a0form of pooling of costs of risk. And there are going to\u00a0be a number of proposals, and they’re out. I heard in\u00a0some of the previous questions that one pool would be\u00a0the federal pool that already exists for myself and\u00a0other federal workers. Some states, like California and\u00a0Massachusetts, already started to set up their pools.\u00a0Whatever the mechanism, we going to have to have a\u00a0pooling system so that individuals have the benefits of\u00a0being part of a larger group. And the final thing that I’ll\u00a0just mention is that we’re going to have to do\u00a0something serious about quality and how we spend our\u00a0money. Not only do we have to put more money in\u00a0prevention, but we’ve also got to make sure that, for\u00a0example, if a generic works just as well as a brand\u00a0name drug, that we’re not fighting drug companies to\u00a0dictate what is on the formulary, what drugs are\u00a0available under a plan but we make sure that the\u00a0money is spent on the most efficient drug for that\u00a0particular disease.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

If we do all those things, I believe there’s no reason\u00a0why we can’t end up with the kind of health care\u00a0system that would ensure that every American has\u00a0high quality, basic health care.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

(The transcript is\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Gallup, which provides the most reliable estimates of the percentages of the American public who are insured and who aren\u2019t, headlined on 7 January 2016\u00a0\u201cU.S. Uninsured Rate 11.9% in Fourth Quarter of 2015,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and they presented a graph showing the comparable figures going back to the First Quarter of 2008 \u2013 which turned out to have been the only<\/i> pre-crash figure in Gallup\u2019s entire series. It also happened to have been the very time when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the other candidates, were originally introducing their proposals regarding health insurance. So: it\u2019s the real baseline for comparison. The uninsured figure then was 14.6%, which thus constitutes the real baseline for comparison between the pre-Obama norm, versus today\u2019s Obamacare reality. When Obama was promising to reduce the figure to zero uninsureds, or universal insurance, that 14.6% is the figure he was actually promising the nation he\u2019d reduce down to zero, or universal insurance (100% coverage). That figure rose to 18.0% by the Third Quarter of 2013, when Obamacare ultimately started. Many Americans were deciding then not to renew their existing health insurance policies, in the hope and expectation that better alternatives would soon become available to them in the new system. So, there was an artificial rise while Americans were in that limbo, awaiting the new system. But that rise didn\u2019t produce a new baseline. Instead, it went in the opposite direction from what had been promised, but it was only temporary anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama had said “My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal health\u00a0care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president. \u2026 Number one, we’re going to have to make sure that everybody\u00a0is in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Right now, 11.9% of Americans are not in. Pre-Obamacare, 14.6% had been not in. Obama\u2019s promise, his \u201cnumber one\u201d “commitment,\u201d was that “by the end of my first term as president,\u201d it would be 0%. That\u2019s “universal health care for all Americans.\u201d It\u2019s 100% of Americans who are \u201cin.\u201d By the time of “the end of my first term as president,\u201d which was on 19 January 2013, Obamacare hadn\u2019t even yet started (Republicans had delayed it with rants about its \u201cdeath panels\u201d and other such demagogic lies), but the uninsured-rate at that time was around 16.5% \u2013 that\u2019s at the time when Obamacare started, not the 14.6% at the time Obama was running for President and promising to reduce that 14.6% rate down to 0%.<\/span><\/p>\n

The uninsured-rate is now going up, not down, after having bottomed-out at 11.4% in the Second Quarter of 2015. It rose again to 11.6% by the Third Quarter of 2015, and was next the latest available figure, 11.9%, in the Fourth Quarter of 2015. Whether it will go back up to 14.6% can\u2019t yet be known, and no prediction is being made here. <\/span><\/p>\n

Obamacare thus increased the insured-rate from the pre-Obamacare norm of <\/i>85.4%<\/i><\/b> (100%-14.6%)<\/i> up to a high of 88.6%<\/i><\/b> (100%-11.4%)<\/i>, and it\u2019s now heading back down again; but, even if it turns around and starts heading back up again (instead of sinking below its current level of 88.1%<\/b>), it will never be able to reach the other<\/i> <\/span>nations\u2019 rate, which is 100% (the level that Obama, like all of the other Democratic candidates, was promising), unless Obamacare becomes replaced, by some form of socialization of either the health-insurance function (such as in France), or else the health-care function itself (such as in UK).<\/span><\/p>\n

All other advanced industrialized nations have a 0% uninsured-rate. 100% of the citizens have health insurance there.<\/a><\/span>\u00a0It\u2019s called socialized health insurance or socialized healthcare; and, in most countries, it is paid for via taxes on everybody, instead of as in America, via corporate-insurance premiums. And\u00a0the quality of health care is superior in all of those other nations<\/span><\/a>. (And that study also found: in the latest comparable year, the U.S. had by far the highest per-capita spending on health care (twice the average spending in the other advanced nations). The U.S. ranked lowest of all nations on \u201cefficiency,\u201d as well as in \u201cequity,\u201d \u201chealthy lives,\u201d and \u201coverall.\u201d In other words: the U.S. health-insurance system is atrocious: it robs the public in multiple ways. (But, since the loot is going to private investors, not to the government, the American public consider it to be \u2018capitalism\u2019 and thus okay.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding public-welfare matters, the historical record is clear that democratic socialism is vastly more efficient than is capitalism. Only the U.S. (and the countries that it most fully controls) fails to make the distinction between democratic<\/i> <\/span>socialism, such as exists in those other countries, versus dictatorial<\/i> <\/span>socialism or \u201ccommunism,\u201d such as had existed in the Soviet Union. Americans are ideologically mind-stuck decades behind <\/span>reality, in the U.S-versus-U.S.S.R era \u2013 the ideological Cold War (which the West won \u2013 because the real contest was between democracy versus dictatorship, and not<\/i> <\/span>between socialism and capitalism). Barack Obama knew, when he made his campaign promises, that he wouldn\u2019t challenge the American system; he wouldn\u2019t challenge that misconception, because his billionaire-backers wouldn\u2019t back him if he did that. If he were to have tried to educate the American public about the stark differences between democratic socialism and dictatorial socialism, then he wouldn\u2019t have been able to win. He knew he wouldn\u2019t even try to make the distinction clear, between socialism (which is democratic) versus communism (which is dictatorial). The billionaires simply prohibited that. Least of all would he praise<\/i> <\/span>democratic socialism: no billionaire would tolerate his doing that \u2013 all of them had gotten where they were via the existing system. Democratic socialism is something they all fear (even though billionaires in some other countries seem to have acclimated themselves to it, at least partially).<\/span><\/p>\n

So: he simply lied to the public. There is no way \u201cto make sure that we’ve got universal health care for all\u00a0Americans\u201d without<\/i> socializing the health-care or health-insurance function. And Obama is smart enough to have recognized this fact. He was no fool. There is no way that, \u201cNumber one, we’re going to have to make sure that everybody\u00a0is in,\u201d except<\/i> <\/span>by socializing it. There is no way that costs will go down and quality go up in American health care, but by democratically socializing this function. <\/span><\/p>\n

There is no way to have universal coverage other than<\/i> <\/span>to socialize either the healthcare function, or the health-insurance function, and Obama knew that.<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, here is what he told the very pro socialized health-insurance AFL-CIO Civil, Human and Women\u2019s Rights Conference in 2003 (probably on June 30th):<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim\u2019s talking about because: everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care coverage, universal health care coverage, that’s what I\u2019d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.\u201d<\/i> (See him saying this in the video<\/span><\/a> here.)<\/span><\/p>\n

During his first year as President, before there was complete certainty that Obama wouldn\u2019t include a \u201cpublic option\u201d in his plan (a device to serve as a possible wedge into socialized or single-payer health insurance \u2013 and progressives knew that it was an essential feature to include in any plan other than one that goes directly<\/i> <\/span>to single-payer), Politifact headlined \u201cObama Statements on Single-Payer Have Changed a Bit,\u201d<\/span><\/a> and identified the \u201cJim\u201d that\u2019s referred to in that 2003 video as \u201cJim Duffett, director of the Illinois advocacy group Campaign for Better Health Care.\u201d And they spoke to him: \u201c\u2018I’ve never felt that his core principles for accessible, guaranteed health care for everyone were ever compromised. He’s an organizer, and you have to figure out as strategically as you can, how to win,\u2019 he said.\u201d All progressives were simply expecting Obama\u2019s plan to include its promised public option \u2013 a health-insurance option designed and run with accountability only to the public, none at all to the aristocracy (who own the insurance companies) \u2013 something that was overwhelmingly popular with the American public. But Obama never pushed for it. Senator Ted Kennedy wanted to draft that, but Obama refused to allow it.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time of 30 May 2007, Obama introduced the plan on which he ran for \u2013 and won \u2013 the Presidency: \u201cBARACK OBAMA\u2019S PLAN FOR A HEALTHY AMERICA: Lowering health care costs and ensuring affordable, high-quality health care for all.\u201d<\/span><\/a> It included: \u201cSpecifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program, available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees.\u201d That \u201cnew public insurance program\u201d was his public option, and it was the first-mentioned of his plan\u2019s six listed features. He gave it emphasis. And yet Obama blocked that feature from being included at all in the plan that, as President, he handed off to the conservative Democratic Senator Max Baucus to draw up and present to Congress, to win his signature.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama knows the score. He\u2019s basically satisfied for America to rank at the very bottom in quality and universality \u2013 and at the very top in prices \u2013 on healthcare. This combination presents a huge drag on the entire American economy; every company (especially small ones) that operates here pays for it, even when they don\u2019t pay for health insurance for their employees: sick days, disability rates, decreased performance, etc. But all of the big investors, the billionaires, want the profits that derive from the pharmaceutical industry, the medical-products industry, the hospital-industry, etc., which profits gain billionaires far more than sick workers can ever cost them. Anyway, those jobs and sick workers can be replaced cheaper, offshored to places like India \u2013 and Obama (especially with his proposed \u2018trade\u2019 treaties, TISA, TPP, and TTIP) is the all-time champion at assisting the offshoring of labor to cheaper countries. Obama is an international champion<\/i> <\/span>of capitalism, including of the international shell-game that his political opponent Mitt Romney famously profited from at Bain Capital, and that Obama criticized him for during the 2012 campaign. (Romney wasn\u2019t even nearly as skillful a deceiver as was Obama. He generally believed what he was saying.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama lied about several other things regarding his health-insurance plan, such as that he would fight for the inclusion in it of a \u201cpublic option,” and his promise that his plan wouldn\u2019t include any \u201chealthcare mandate\u201d or penalty to be paid by Americans who refuse to buy health insurance. He abandoned both of those promises as soon as he won the election. He never fought for them. He opposed them. Obamacare does include the individual mandate, and doesn\u2019t include any public option. Obama had campaigned vigorously against Hillary Clinton\u2019s plan because it had included the individual mandate<\/span><\/a> \u2013 the requirement to purchase insurance. But as soon as he was elected, he started pushing for the individual mandate to be included in the plan that he assigned to the conservative Democratic Party U.S. Senator Max Baucus (instead of<\/i> <\/span>to the progressive Democratic Party U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy) to draft. (Republicans attacked him for its including the individual mandate, the requirement for individuals to purchase health insurance<\/span><\/a>, but the individual mandate had originally been a Republican idea<\/span><\/a>. And it had also been part of the health insurance plan that Obama\u2019s 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, had introduced in Massachusetts in 2006<\/span><\/a> and on the basis of which had been constructed the health-insurance proposal that came from each of the three major 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates: Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. But now, after having produced the \u2018Democratic\u2019 plan \u2013 minus the public option that all Democrats proposed \u2013 Romney was condemning the plan that the \u2018Democrat\u2019 Obama passed with support from congressional \u2018Democrats\u2019.) This is called \u201cbait-and-switch.\u201d It makes suckers of voters, not people to be served but instead people who are manipulated for the benefit of the real beneficiaries: instead of there being a democracy, there is now a dictatorship via deceits. (Jimmy Carter recently called it an \u201coligarchy.\u201d)<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In other important ways, too, Obama was lying during his campaigns. I have addressed those in other articles, such as\u00a0this one.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Concerning the issue of NAFTA and other U.S. Government policies for sending American jobs to cheaper foreign countries so as to increase the profits to America\u2019s international corporations and thus raise the wealth of the U.S. aristocracy who own and control those corporations and who are also the major benefactors to all top U.S. politicians, here is one of Obama\u2019s 2008 campaign-flyers (and Hillary was doing the same to him that he was doing to her \u2013 only not nearly as effectively):<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/blog.cleveland.com\/openers\/2008\/02\/1obma.pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

By the time of 2015, even the Democratic Party\u2019s loyal website the Daily Kos started to issue articles such as\u00a0“The Liberal Apologies for Obama\u2019s Ugly Reign.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Even that liberal site was no longer entirely in denial about the reality. And, unlike in the few prior instances where someone at that site had criticized Obama, the reader-comments to this critical commentary about Obama\u2019s performance were no longer\u00a0to blackball the writer<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for having pointed out the ugly truth: the readers were by now finally starting to recognize that they had previously been fooled, and that they had been fools for having refused, for such a long time, to acknowledge the by-now-obvious truth. (And, to many Democrats, it\u2019s still<\/i> <\/span>not obvious enough. On the night when Obama delivered his final State of the Union Address, 12 January 2016, the latest Gallup<\/span><\/a> report on his job-approval rating was 84% approval among Democrats, and 10% approval among Republicans. And one has no reason to assume that Republicans were disapproving his performance for any rational reasons \u2013 that\u2019s not the Republican way of anything. The total result of that insanity on both sides was 47% approval, 49% disapproval, which likewise has no correlation with the reality of Obama\u2019s job-performance. \u2018Democracy\u2019 that\u2019s based on misinformed insanity of the public is no real democracy at all. It\u2019s based instead on a manipulated public, which is bifurcated on bogus grounds.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The same was the case across-the-board. For example, Obama\u2019s policies on k-12 education were simply\u00a0extensions of George W. Bush\u2019s No-Child-Left-Behind school-privatization-and-high-stakes-testing<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0that were focused on punishing teachers and administrators who served people in the lowest-income school districts, and that did nothing to raise the quality of education for America\u2019s children, to competitive international standards. Only teachers and administrators in low-income districts were fired. Punishing low-performing schools when it\u2019s what the children bring to class from their impoverished backgrounds, not what the teachers and administrators are bringing to their students in their classrooms, that\u2019s actually causing the low performance, may please billionaires (whose children can be educated just as they were before), but the poorest Americans suffer greatly from it, especially because that new system provides an even higher incentive for any new teacher to avoid even applying to get a job in a low-income district. Higher-income districts then receive yet more teacher-applicants than before. Most teachers prefer an easier job at a higher pay. However, the rich also benefit, by not needing to pay their teachers as a high salary as might otherwise be necessary to attract applicants. In other words: it\u2019s perverse \u2013 yet it\u2019s Republican policy in two successive Presidencies, one of which is nominally \u2018Democratic\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, President Obama\u2019s foreign policies have been outright catastrophic for the people in\u00a0Honduras<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0Libya, Syria<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0Ukraine<\/span><\/a>, and harmful elsewhere (including Europe). They will be catastrophic for the entire world if his\u00a0international-trade treaties, TPP, TTIP, and TISA,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0become passed into law. That\u2019s the highest-priority item in his entire Presidency (higher even than Obamacare was); and, if he succeeds in it (as he probably will at least on TPP with almost solid Republican support for it), then democracy itself will shrivel, if not completely die, throughout the world. If all three of those proposed treaties become approved, then Barack Obama will certainly have been the worst President in all of American history, and maybe even the worst head-of-state in all of human history. The world was able to recover and get over Hitler and Stalin, even if many millions of their victims weren\u2019t. But if Obama gets even just two of his trade-treaties pased, then the world itself will probably be doomed. (That\u2019s a \u2018prediction,\u2019 but a conditional one; so, in that sense, it\u2019s not fully<\/i> <\/span>a prediction.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, for the good about Obama: This side of the issue was covered well by Michael Grunwald at Politico on 6 January 2016, under the banner\u00a0\u201cThe Nation He Built: A POLITICO review of Barack Obama\u2019s domestic policy legacy\u2013and the changes he made while nobody was paying attention.\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0Grunwald admiringly reports there:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Obamacare would cover millions of the uninsured, a giant step toward the\u00a0Democratic dream of health care for all. It also included dozens of less prominent\u00a0provisions to rein in the soaring cost and transform the dysfunctional delivery of\u00a0American medicine. It was the kind of BFD that the most consequential presidencies\u00a0are made of, even though it had squeaked through Congress without any\u00a0Republican votes, and few Americans truly understood what was in it.\u00a0\u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Tucked into the parliamentary maneuver that rescued his health care law was a\u00a0similarly radical reform of the trillion-dollar student loan program. When Biden\u2019s wife,\u00a0Jill, a professor at Northern Virginia, introduced Obama that day, she called it\u00a0\u201canother historic piece of legislation.\u201d The House Republican leader, John Boehner\u00a0of Ohio, complained that \u201ctoday, the president will sign not one, but two job-killing\u00a0government takeovers.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Obamacare wasn\u2019t really a government takeover, but the student loan overhaul\u00a0actually was; it yanked the program away from Sallie Mae and other private lenders\u00a0that had raked in enormous fees without taking much risk. The bill then diverted the\u00a0budget savings into a $36 billion expansion of Pell Grants for low-income\u00a0undergraduates, plus an unheralded but extraordinary student-debt relief effort that\u00a0is now quietly transferring the burden of college loans from struggling borrowers to\u00a0taxpayers. It all added up to a revolution in how America finances higher education,\u00a0completely overshadowed by the health care hoopla and drama.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past seven years, Americans have heard an awful lot about Barack Obama\u00a0and his presidency, but the actual substance of his domestic policies and their\u00a0impact on the country remain poorly understood. He has engineered quite a few\u00a0quiet revolutions\u2013and some of his louder revolutions are shaking up the status quo\u00a0in quiet ways. Obama is often dinged for failing to deliver on the hope-and-change\u00a0rhetoric that inspired so many voters during his ascent to the presidency. But a\u00a0review of his record shows that the Obama era has produced much more sweeping\u00a0change than most of his supporters or detractors realize.\u00a0\u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

What he\u2019s done is changing the way we produce and consume energy, the way\u00a0doctors and hospitals treat us, the academic standards in our schools and the long-term fiscal trajectory of the nation. Gays can now serve openly in the military,\u00a0insurers can no longer deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions, credit card\u00a0companies can no longer impose hidden fees and markets no longer believe the\u00a0biggest banks are too big to fail. Solar energy installations are up nearly 2,000\u00a0percent, and carbon emissions have dropped even though the economy is growing. …<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s fairly well known that Obama bailed out U.S. automakers, enacted an enormous\u00a0economic stimulus package, signed the most sweeping rewrite of financial rules\u00a0since the Great Depression, killed the Keystone XL pipeline and issued historic\u00a0carbon regulations to fight climate change. But how many Americans are aware of\u00a0his administration\u2019s harsh regulations cracking down on for-profit diploma mills,\u00a0inefficient industrial motors and investment advisers with conflicts of interest?\u00a0Everyone knows the Obamacare website was a disaster, but few realize that Obama\u00a0got some of the Silicon Valley techies who fixed it to stick around and start up a U.S.\u00a0Digital Service, a groundbreaking effort to bring government tech into the 21st\u00a0century.\u00a0\u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The economy was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month when Obama took office; it has\u00a0now enjoyed a record 69 straight months of private-sector job growth, though\u00a0economists disagree about how much credit Obama deserves for the recovery, and\u00a0in any case wage growth has been tepid. The deficit has shrunk by nearly $1 trillion,\u00a0and Medicare\u2019s long-term solvency has been extended by 13 years. The\u00a0resuscitated auto industry produced 11 million vehicles in 2014. Federal contractors\u00a0can no longer discriminate against gays, women can now serve in combat and the\u00a0rich are paying higher taxes. A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is\u00a0policing unscrupulous mortgage brokers, payday lenders and other rip-off artists,\u00a0and the financial system has much less risky leverage.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Before Obama, Americans were using more energy every year; now we use less\u00a0energy overall, and more of that energy is clean.\u00a0\u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s lots more; you can see it all there. However, that article said nothing about foreign policy. Obama did have two positive achievements in foreign policy: the nuclear sanctions deal with Iran, and his acceptance of the 2015 global agreement to place restraints against future production of carbon gases. (He did that climate-control deal even though he wasn\u2019t really supportive of action against global warming<\/span><\/a>.) If Obama gets his \u2018trade\u2019 deals passed into law \u2013 especially if two or all three of them are \u2013 then the global-warming promises will almost certainly turn to dust<\/span><\/a>. TPP and TTIP especially would make practically impossible any increase in economic regulation by governments, and this includes any increase in environmental regulations<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama was vastly less progressive than he pretended, but never as far right as the Republican Party moved in order to be able to stay to his right. The Republicans always moved even farther to the right so as to retain the loyalty of the voters in America\u2019s conservative Party. Without the votes of Republicans in Republican primaries, no Republican candidate has even a chance of contesting in, much less winning, a general election. Thus, no matter how rightwing Obama actually performed, the Republican Party moved even farther to the right, and so America\u2019s political center moved to the right even though the American public really did not. The public became politically almost inconsequential during the Obama years, continuing a long-term trend in that direction<\/span><\/a>: \u201coligarchy,\u201d otherwise called \u201caristocracy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What all of this \u2013 both the cons and the pros \u2013 exhibits consistently is that Obama brilliantly protected and carried out the basic agenda of America\u2019s billionaire-class, while still doing enough on the \u2018left\u2019 so as to retain also the requisite loyalty of Democratic Party voters. This way, by serving the \u201coligarchy,\u201d<\/span><\/a> even while pretending to be \u2018a man of the people,\u2019 he will end his Presidency with at least as rich a future for himself and his progeny as Bill Clinton left his. (After all, Clinton not only passed NAFTA but he ended the Democratic Party\u2019s FDR bank-reforms and restored essentially the pre-FDR regulatory system, which Wall Street loved.) In other words: Obama\u2019s Presidential operation was a skillful business-plan, which will serve him and his family well, regardless of what it has done and might ultimately result in doing to the nation, and to the entire world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s top priority is himself and his family. And he has served it brilliantly. Don\u2019t believe what Democrats say about him, or what Republicans say about him. Believe his actual record, which has been presented here. That\u2019s what a real historian will believe. The only substantial question that remains is how to explain his record, how to explain the man. The serious attempts to do that started only in 2010. <\/span><\/p>\n

The following is adapted here from an earlier article I wrote, \u201cThe Two Contending Visions of World Government: The Origin & Broader Context of Obama\u2019s \u2018Trade\u2019 Deals,\u201d<\/span><\/a> which digs deeper into Obama\u2019s world-view; so, I close with this description of Obama\u2019s personal background:<\/span><\/p>\n

As the great independent investigative journalist Wayne Madsen has reported, in depth, in his many articles, such as (and these are repostings of originals from Madsen\u2019s subscription-only website)\u00a0\u201cObama\u2019s CIA Pedigree\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0“Details revealed about Obama’s former CIA\u00a0employer\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0“The Story\u00a0of Obama: All in The Company,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and in his 2012 book\u00a0The Manufacturing of a President: The CIA’s Insertion of Barack H. Obama, Jr. into the\u00a0White House,<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/i>Obama\u2019s parents and grandparents were in the pay alternately of the U.S.-aristocracy-controlled CIA and of the U.S.-aristocracy-controlled Ford Foundation; and the boss of Obama\u2019s mother at the Ford Foundation was none other than Peter Geithner, who was the father of Timothy Geithner<\/span><\/a>, the Wall Street operative who ran the U.S. Treasury Department in Obama\u2019s first term and who bailed out the investors in the megabanks while he refused to bail out the uneducated and poor mortgagees they had suckered with excessive loans, and the pension funds and other outside investors in the fraudulent resulting \u2018AAA\u2019-rated Mortgage Backed Securities (MBSs, which the Federal Reserve until recently was buying up and transferring onto the backs of future U.S. taxpayers). <\/span><\/p>\n

So, Obama was deep into service to America\u2019s aristocracy, ever since he was in college; and his parents even raised him with money from the CIA and the Ford Foundation. Furthermore, Obama\u2019s first employment was with the CIA front firm, Business International Corporation, in 1983 and 1984, though he might have been recruited by the CIA as early as around 1980. (Going back even farther than Madsen, some terrific independent investigators, such as Joseph Cannon<\/span><\/a> and the libertarian Robert Wenzel<\/span><\/a>, were already exploring Obama\u2019s CIA connections within mere months of his having won the U.S. Presidency in 2008. And, then, after Madsen, Andrew Krieg, in his 2013 blockbuster\u00a0Presidential Puppetry<\/i><\/span><\/a>, brought all of this together into a much broader, well documented, recent history of the U.S. as being an oligarchic instead of a democratic nation. But nobody was onto Obama\u2019s reality until Obama had already won the White House. Nobody. That\u2019s how skillfully Obama constructed his act.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org Barack Obama\u2019s Presidency turns out to have been what neither his supporters nor his opponents expected. A balanced historical view of his performance in office will take a long time to develop, but enough is already known so that intelligent preliminary estimates can now be made: the following is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":217037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[115,30,96,907,59,1023,804,543,524,754,843,694,12174,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-217036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-cover-up","11":"tag-isis","12":"tag-military","13":"tag-nuclear","14":"tag-politics-2","15":"tag-putin","16":"tag-russia","17":"tag-syria","18":"tag-tpp","19":"tag-ttip","20":"tag-ukarine","21":"tag-usa-news","22":"tag-warfare","23":"tag-white-house","24":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}