{"id":280240,"date":"2016-11-20T21:59:04","date_gmt":"2016-11-20T20:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=280240"},"modified":"2016-11-20T22:46:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T21:46:18","slug":"obamas-nonexistent-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/obamas-nonexistent-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s Nonexistent Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\u201cTrump did more than any democrat to deflate the neocon\/neoliberal agenda that liberals themselves screamed was fascist when Bush was president.\u201d<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

That was a brilliant and profoundly true reader-comment posted November 14th about Hillary Clinton supporters who were demonstrating against Trump\u2019s winning the Presidency. Hillary was even more of a war-hawk than Bush was, or than Obama was: she supported not just Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq, but Obama\u2019s invasions of Libya and Syria, a coup in Honduras<\/span><\/a>, and helped plan Obama\u2019s coup<\/span><\/a> in Ukraine, which led to Ukraine\u2019s breaking apart into civil war<\/span><\/a>. Plus she was even more of a champion of Wall Street than Obama was, and maybe even more so than Bush was. Yet many Democrats think that the anti<\/i>-Establishment Donald Trump is, somehow, even worse<\/i>. They claim that Trump is a \u201cracist\u201d \u2014 as though either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton hadn\u2019t been leading a country where the top 0.1% got the vast majority of the economic benefits and the bottom 90% \u2014 including especially Blacks and Hispanics<\/i> \u2014 got no gains at all, neither in income nor in wealth<\/span><\/a>. So: what good did Obama do for Blacks-as-a-whole, or for Hispanics-as-a-whole? Other than invasions, there was nothing real, just words of \u201cracial reconciliation\u201d and other hypocrisies, for which he did little or nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama has no legacy except words (words that often contradicted his actual decisions in office). Mere<\/i> words are just a nullity; all that counts is actions. Empty words are, perhaps, lies, insincere expressions; but they certainly aren\u2019t actions; they\u2019re no legacy at all<\/i> (especially when the speaker\u2019s actions belie<\/i> his words).<\/span><\/p>\n

Democrats want to blame Republicans for Obama\u2019s failures about everything; and Republicans did all they could to help<\/i> him fail, but those same<\/i> Republicans also condemned Donald Trump<\/span><\/a> until he won the White House<\/i>, and your enemy\u2019s enemy is your friend; so, why is Donald Trump not Democrats\u2019 friend? Maybe he\u2019s an enemy to both the Republican and<\/i> the Democratic Establishment. Only time will tell; they\u2019ll tell when his words become replaced with actions, which will show what he really is<\/i>. But the anti-Trump protesters are not \u2014 at least as of yet \u2014 protesting his actions. Democrats simply want President Trump to fail, like Republicans had wanted Obama to fail. But it\u2019s only Obama (and Clinton) who is a proven failure, with a lousy-to-no legacy of achievement; so, why aren\u2019t there Democratic demonstrations against him (and her), instead?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Clinton-Obama Democrats who remain loyal to the Democratic Party in the wake of Trump\u2019s victory, are world-champion hypocrites, even if they\u2019re too oblivious of reality to know<\/i> it. The Clinton-Obama political tradition, of pro-megacorporate government, actually repudiates, instead of embodies, the Democratic Party that real progressives are proud of: the Democratic Party\u2019s earlier, quintessential period: the 1932-1980 FDR-dominated (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) era \u2014 the most progressive period in all of U.S. history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though I voted both times for Barack Obama, he turned out to be one of the worst U.S. Presidents, if not the worst of them all \u2014 even if he was (as I thought each time) the better of the bad (in each election). <\/span><\/p>\n

His only real legacy as President turns out to have been disasters<\/i>, including things far worse than his failed Obamacare, which increased the healthcare inflation-rate in our country, where healthcare already costs twice as much \u2014 and twice as high a percentage of GDP \u2014 as the international OECD average, but delivers inferior healthcare results. America is becoming internationally even less competitive<\/span><\/a> in our healthcare system than before \u2014 which was already at the international bottom. It\u2019s sucking the lifesblood out of the U.S. economy.<\/span><\/p>\n

But most of the real hell that Obama produced is in foreign countries: his bloody coup in Ukraine<\/span><\/a> followed by civil war<\/span><\/a> there, and, before that, the bloody catastrophe in Libya<\/span><\/a>, and the bloody years-long attempt (ever since Obama first came into office<\/span><\/a>) to overthrow the non-sectarian leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and replace him with Al Nusra and other jihadists that the Obama-regime weaponized and the Saud regime (America\u2019s \u2018allies\u2019) financed and recruited hoping for them to replace Assad and produce a Sharia-law Syrian government. Al Qaeda in Syria \u2014 \u201cAl Nusra\u201d \u2014 were leading Obama\u2019s \u2018moderate rebels\u2019 in Syria.<\/span><\/a> Obama lied and said he was supporting only \u2018moderate rebels\u2019. The Administration kept the reality hidden from the American public until late in October when Hillary\u2019s victory seemed assured and so Obama started to acknowledge publicly<\/i> that he was actually backing all of the anti-Assad people there except ISIS. Thus, for example, on October 20th, Russia\u2019s Sputnik News quoted an interview two days earlier<\/span><\/a> in which the American Russia-expert Stephen Cohen had remarked upon this sudden change:<\/span><\/p>\n

“If you pick up\u00a0a paper today the narrative is completely different,” the US academic stressed, “In Aleppo there are only rebels, there are no longer terrorists. You don’t see the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘jihadist’ in\u00a0the narrative any more. And alongside\u00a0them, with\u00a0rebels protecting them, there are children who are being killed by\u00a0Russian and Syrian war planes.” As the whole narrative has been re-written, Moscow and Damascus are now being portrayed as “war criminals” which are targeting civilians in\u00a0Aleppo, he noted.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas previously, Obama behind-the-scenes had been protecting and arming the non-ISIS jihadists even while acknowledging that they existed<\/span><\/a>, he was now starting publicly to acknowledge that the U.S. was actually supporting them.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to\u00a0the US academic, the inconvenient truth is that the US and its allies in\u00a0one way or another have abetted terrorists in\u00a0Syria for\u00a0many years. “The motive of\u00a0the United States, the only mission that the US has in\u00a0Syria, is removing [Syrian President] Assad from\u00a0power,” Cohen emphasized, adding that the most powerful force fighting against\u00a0Damascus are jihadi terrorists.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

But after the election, because Trump will be Obama\u2019s successor, Obama has finally decided that Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups that it leads in Syria are no longer \u2018moderates\u2019, but instead are people to target and kill in Syria.<\/span><\/a> Finally<\/i> \u2014 after his having long refused to join Russia\u2019s air-campaign to kill them there<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not only did Obama protect the jihadists in Syria<\/span><\/a>, but by doing so he created hell there<\/span><\/a>, and even Western-sponsored polling shows that the vast majority of the Syrian population blame the U.S. above all<\/span><\/a> as being the global power that enables the jihadists to destroy their country.<\/span><\/p>\n

I write this as a three-time voter for Barack Obama (both the primaries and the general election in 2008, and then again the general in 2012). I first became disappointed with Obama soon after his election in 2008 as President, when, on 25 November 2008<\/span><\/a>, he chose as the White House\u2019s chief economic advisor the snobbish Republican-turned-Democrat Lawrence Summers,\u00a0whose advice to President Bill Clinton in 1999 had encouraged him to terminate FDR\u2019s Glass-Steagall separation of consumer-banking (checking and savings accounts) from investment-banking (Wall Street\u2019s casinos)<\/span><\/a>. That Clinton action had left the FDIC protections of savers on the hook to bail out the billionaire gamblers who found themselves without a musical-chairs seat when the music finally stopped and George W. Bush’s MBS Ponzi real-estate economy came crashing down in 2007-2008. The purpose of ending Glass-Steagall was to put taxpayers ultimately on the hook for billionaires\u2019 stock-and-bond gambling-losses. Wall Street\u2019s propaganda said that doing this deregulation would \u2018unleash capitalism\u2019, but all it really unleashed was the banksters. Clinton\u2019s repeal of Glass-Steagall necessitated the Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street \u2014 Main Street\u2019s<\/i> bailout of Wall Street. That\u2019s part of Bill Clinton\u2019s delayed<\/i> legacy. But it\u2019s also Bush-Obama\u2019s legacy during their Administrations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I recognized Obama to be a total<\/i> fake \u2018progressive\u2019 because, the day before appointing Summers, he had appointed, on 24 November 2008, yet another pro-repeal \u2018Democrat\u2019, Summers\u2019s friend\u00a0Timothy Geithner<\/span><\/a>, who was the G.W. Bush era\u2019s N.Y. Federal Reserve Bank President<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and thus king of Wall Street, to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, supposedly to help America recover from the crash that Geithner and Summers and Bill Clinton had in crucial ways created. (The other major way they created the crash was their supporting total deregulation of derivative securities \u2014 turning derivatives into the financial system\u2019s crack cocaine. Brilliant! Brilliantly evil<\/i>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

And even before that, on November 18th, Obama had appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, signaling that the U.S. \u2018Justice\u2019 Department under Obama was to become headed by Wall Street\u2019s Mr. Unaccountability, an infamous champion<\/span><\/a> of keeping billionaires not only unconvicted and even uncharged but uninvestigated on any criminal law the billionaire might actually<\/i> have committed \u2014 and thus out of prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even then \u2014 before he had so much as entered the White House \u2014 Obama showed that he wasn\u2019t really interested in serving the public but in protecting the banksters, just like Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush had done before him. I kept voting for Obama because the alternative \u2014 originally Hillary Clinton, and then John McCain, in 2008, but now Romney in 2012 \u2014 was even worse. The system itself<\/i> was rotten; it gave us only a choice only between bads (goods for the aristocracy, but bads for the public) \u2014 this was by now clear. <\/span><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s how<\/i> bad President Obama actually was:<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

On 27 March 2009, Obama secretly told the chieftains of Wall Street assembled at a private meeting inside the White House (from which these morsels leaked out), \u201cMy Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,\u201d<\/span><\/a> thus comparing these billionaires and agents of billionaires, with the martyred Blacks whom KKKers in previous decades had chased with pitchforks before lynching. But that\u2019s not all of what Obama said to the banksters. This arrogant self-identifier with the aristocracy was very direct with them about his siding with them and their agents who had ripped off the entire world and enriched themselves thereby: \u201cYou guys have an acute public relations problem, and I want to help. \u2026 I\u2019m not out there to go after you. I\u2019m protecting you.\u201d<\/span><\/a> And that\u2019s exactly what he then, in fact, did (he told the truth only<\/i> to his masters, never<\/i> to their victims, the public): <\/span><\/p>\n

On 15 November 2011, TRAC Reports headlined that \u201cCriminal Prosecutions for Financial Institution Fraud Continue to Fall\u201d<\/span><\/a>, to record lows under Obama, even below the pathetic level of George W. Bush. 2009 was a record low. 2010 was a new record low. So was 2011. TRAC Reports never issued a follow-up article on that, but on 21 October 2016, they headlined with their usual understatement, \u201cWhite Collar Crime Prosecutions for August 2016\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and showed there that since 2003 each month\u2019s white-collar-crime prosecutions had peaked in 2011, and now were at record lows in 2015 and 2016. This at least suggests that the category of white-collar crimes that consists of \u201cfinancial institution fraud\u201d had at least not risen<\/i> from its all-time low posted in 2011.<\/span><\/p>\n

During Obama\u2019s 24 January 2012 State of the Union address, he promised<\/span><\/a> \u201cto expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. (Applause.) This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law.\u201d He lied. Two years later<\/span><\/a>, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice issued on 13 March 2014 its\u00a0\u201cAudit of the Department of Justice\u2019s Efforts to Address Mortgage Fraud\u201d<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0and reported \u201cWe found mortgage fraud to be a low priority, or not [even] listed as a priority, for the FBI Field Offices we visited.\u201d No wonder that white-collar-crime prosecutions were subsequently at record lows. It\u2019s not merely Hillary Clinton and her emails; it\u2019s the entire aristocracy who stand above the nation\u2019s laws, under Barack Obama\u2019s Presidential Administration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Impunity hidden behind lies is what defines Obama\u2019s Presidential legacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s zero in other ways, too.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s most ambitious project was his three proposed mega-\u2018trade\u2019 treaties \u2014 TPP, TTIP, and TISA \u2014 each of which was designed with a feature in it called \u201cInvestor State Dispute Resolution\u201d or ISDS<\/a><\/span>, which empowers international corporations to sue any signatory nation that will increase any regulation regarding the environment or product-safety or the rights of workers (employees) \u2014 no matter what the latest scientific findings on such a given subject might happen to indicate. The international corporation can sue for \u2018loss of profits\u2019 when any such regulation is made more stringent. Profits to stockholders are thus made sovereign and protected above the citizenry, the electorate; the controlling stockholder in an international corporation is granted rights that are above the rights of any mere citizen \u2014 even if that controlling stockholder lives abroad, and even if the international corporation is a foreign corporation. ISDS grants only one-way rights to sue: corporations suing governments, no governments suing corporations. Taxpayers pay those fines. The suits \u2014 this new profit-center for international corporations at the public\u2019s expense \u2014 are heard in no court of law in any nation but instead in international-corporate panels, each having three \u2018arbitrators\u2019 no judges and no juries and no democratic accountability to any electorate at all except to stockholders who elect the board of directors in their international corporation, which is suing. Hillary Clinton favored it and would probably have passed some or all of these fascist-world-government treaties, into law; but, instead, Donald Trump will be President. He is far less likely to move forward with Obama\u2019s grand scheme to spread ISDS \u2014 a world government controlled by international corporations<\/span><\/a> \u2014 like wildfire around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPoverty Rose In 96% Of U.S. House Districts, During Obama\u2019s Presidency\u201d<\/a><\/span>. What does Obama have to show for his 8 years in the White House? He served his masters well, even if not as well as he had been hoping (to pass into law his ISDS-infested\u00a0<\/span>international-trade mega-treaties: TPP, TTIP, and TISA). The income and wealth of the billionaires soared like at no time since 1923-1928. The \u201cShare of income and wealth of bottom 90% wealth holders\u201d<\/span><\/a> both declined. He served his masters well. But they weren\u2019t<\/i> the American public, and they certainly weren\u2019t the publics in other nations, especially not in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, and Haiti<\/span><\/a>, in each of which nations Obama made things far<\/i> worse, and turned those lands into hells.<\/span><\/p>\n

Was Barack Obama even worse than George W. Bush? Bush achieved almost all of the evil he pushed for; by contrast, Obama failed to achieve his biggest legacy-item of all: passage into law of his three international-corporate-government \u2018trade\u2019 treaties, which would have done more harm to the world\u2019s future than all the rest of his Presidency combined \u2014 even made impossible any implementation of an effective regulation of greenhouse gases (about which Obama\u2019s rhetoric feigned concern). Obama was trying to be even worse than he was ultimately able to be. Because of Bernie Sanders\u2019s and Donald Trump\u2019s shared leadership, those treaties finally became politically too toxic to pass. Maybe Obama there was prevented from being the worst U.S. President ever. That failure did more to improve Obama\u2019s legacy than any of his successes did.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDemocratic Leadership ADMITS that Clinton Lost the Election Because of Voters\u2019 Economic Worries\u201d<\/a><\/span> \u2014 click onto that and you\u2019ll see that \u201cthe Democratic leadership\u00a0itself\u00a0admits that the economy is the issue that sunk Clinton.\u201d Hillary Clinton was running on Obama\u2019s record except she was even more for \u201cregime change\u201d than he.<\/span><\/p>\n

To call Obama\u2019s legacy \u201czero\u201d or \u201cnonexistent\u201d would actually be unrealistic praise of him; his legacy is actually deeply negative<\/i>. No doubt he\u2019ll be rewarded handsomely for it, by his masters \u2014 which never were the American public.<\/span><\/p>\n

Barack Obama was the greatest con-artist ever to occupy the U.S. White House. If he has any legacy (besides the hell he created in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere), that\u2019s it. (After all, he won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize<\/span><\/a>, didn\u2019t he?)<\/span><\/p>\n

So: no, it wasn\u2019t actually \u201cnonexistent\u201d; it was atrocious.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org \u201cTrump did more than any democrat to deflate the neocon\/neoliberal agenda that liberals themselves screamed was fascist when Bush was president.\u201d That was a brilliant and profoundly true reader-comment posted November 14th about Hillary Clinton supporters who were demonstrating against Trump\u2019s winning the Presidency. Hillary was even more of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":278665,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[115,30,96,535,698,907,59,524,754,92,523,49,1235,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-280240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-cover-up","11":"tag-global-news","12":"tag-hillary-clinton","13":"tag-isis","14":"tag-military","15":"tag-russia","16":"tag-syria","17":"tag-terrorism","18":"tag-ukraine","19":"tag-usa-news","20":"tag-war","21":"tag-warfare","22":"tag-white-house","23":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280240","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=280240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}