In his 5th State of the Union speech, Obama needs to address these topics—then actually follow through, for a change.
US President Barack Obama speaks in Washington, DC on January 17, 2014
January 26, 2014
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President Barack Obama is getting ready for his 5th State of the
Union Address tomorrow night. Typically, presidents use the occasion to
sketch out their agenda and vision for the next year while subtly
putting tons of positive spin on their accomplishments. Here, as a good
talker, Obama has been is in his element. But now, Obama's sweet talk
has begun to turn sour—he has a long pattern of soaring rhetoric and
empty promises followed by some fundamental failures to deliver. It is
the lack of action, the hypocrisy, the talking the talk without walking
the walk, that have made many progressives and liberals frustrated and
angry.
This is not a bright moment for Mr. Obama.
His popularity is in the dumpster—currently at a measly 46 percent from
an all-time low of 42 percent in November, it is certainly no help for
the Democrats in the 2014 Congressional races. Some of Obama's low
popularity is due to the relentless, often irrational attacks by the
conservatives on the Affordable Care Act, which—while having many
positive elements—is still fraught with many problems that frustrate
people across the spectrum.
In fact, Obama's
popularity has dropped among liberals and independents. And there are
plenty of reasons why, as you'll see below.
So, on the eve of
his SOTU, the editorial staff at AlterNet brings you a list of Obama
"bads"— a list of 10 areas where Mr. Obama has made us most mad,
frustrated and disgusted. We wish he would both address these topics
head on in his SOTU, and then do everything in his power to mobilize
people to get things done. There is still time for our 44th president to
show some mettle. There is time to get beyond the talk, stop catering
to the corporate interests who still believe in cutting budgets, stop
shrinking Social Security, and stop screwing the large majority of
Americans in the name of dividends and profits—and become a true
populist.
Mr. President, how about following up
your recent stirring rhetoric on the question of inequality with a
fierce determination that will inspire many millions. How about crack
some eggs, kick some butts and make a bunch of billionaires and bankers
unhappy with you. That is a legacy to which you should be aspiring.
Don't worry, you will make plenty of millions after you leave the White
House.
1. Obama's caver-in-chief leadership style
When
Obama ran for president in 2008, some thought a refreshing aspect of
his candidacy was his potential management style. Unlike the Bush
administration, which ruled by dictates—like its war of choice in
Iraq—Obama was a mediator who would bridge the gap between liberals and
conservatives. Obama offered a mediator's promise. It was not, "We won,
we rule." Instead it was a pledge to find common ground.
Sadly,
this management style has mostly failed in Washington. During Obama's
first five years, many of his biggest domestic disappointments have come
from negotiating with Republicans and with private interests who never
had any intention of compromising or working in good faith. Perhaps the
only memorable thing that former Sen. John Edwards said in his 2008
campaign was his critique of Obama’s style: "You cannot negotiate with
political thugs."
But Obama's inclination to try to satisfy all
factions has lead to the key disasters of his presidency. The budget
battles with the House GOP—and the tactical error he made about
GOP thinking—lead to the cruel federal sequester and subsequent
government shutdown. His decision not to push for a public option in
Obamacare and his failure to insist on cost controls for private health
plans are two others. It’s sad that being a reasonable person in today’s
Washington often doesn’t work. A less charitable interpretation is that
Obama just wimped out. The hard truth is that a president has to be
feared and respected by his opponents, not seen as a person who is more
willing to compromise than draw lines.
2. Obama's deportation of nearly 2 million undocumented immigrants
During
his 2013 inaugural speech, Obama addressed immigration reform
specifically, saying: “Our journey is not complete until we find a
better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see
America as a land of opportunity — until bright young students and
engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our
country.”
However, Obama has deported nearly two million undocumented immigrants — more than any president in history. And a 2013
report found
that Immigrations Custom Enforcement detained nearly 90 percent of
undocumented immigrants in 2012 and the beginning of 2013 for
non-serious offenses. Deportations have become so rampant that 61
percent of immigrant Hispanics said that deportation relief is
more important than
a pathway to citizenship. This past year alone, in an attempt to resist
the craze, undocumented activists have chained themselves to the White
House demanding “Not One More." They've blocked deportation buses,
interrupted Obama’s speeches and 30 even crossed the border, which
resulted in five of them getting deported. Last month, 29 House
Democrats sent a letter to Obama, urging him to halt deportations. And
five of these lawmakers will bring immigration activists as their guests
to the SOTU address.
3. Obama's coziness with, and failure to regulate or punish, the big banks
The
devastating financial crisis of 2007-08 was an opportunity for a
transformative leader to take on the out-of-control banking industry,
which has become a dangerous oligopoly that threatens the economy and
preys upon American citizens. FDR did this during the Great Depression,
ensuring a thorough investigation of wrongdoing and setting up rules and
regulations that kept banks in line for many decades until the
deregulatory fever of the 1980s once again unleashed them.
Unfortunately,
rather than bringing change, Obama has consistently surrounded himself
with bank-friendly policy advisors who tend to believe that what is good
for the banks is good for everyone. He has not made bringing criminal
bankers to justice a priority, and his administration is clearly a
revolving door for Wall Street. The biggest and most dangerous
banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo—are
even bigger than they were before the crisis. Scarcely a week passes
without news of some new abuse committed by these institutions. Obama
has failed to support obvious measures to rein in Wall Street, such as
the financial transaction tax, and Dodd-Frank has been mostly defanged.
Banks have enjoyed special treatment and record-breaking profits during
Obama’s tenure, while ordinary Americans have struggled.
4. Obama's education "reformers" are corporate privatizers
Looking
for further proof of Obama’s neoliberal, anti-progressive bona fides?
Then look no further than how his administration has approached public
education over these past five years.
From the moment the president chose Arne Duncan—who
famously closed dozens of public schools and
pushed privatization of the rest during his tenure as Chicago schools
CEO—to head the Department of Education, it was clear that corporate
interests would play a central role in the shaping of education policy.
The administration’s signature education initiative, unveiled in late
2009, was nothing less than a chip off the old, failed policy block that
defined George W. Bush’s “
No Child Left Behind” agenda.
The Obama/Duncan “
Race to the Top”
initiative uses both carrots and sticks to lure schools to compete for
$4.35 billion in federal funding; required is a willingness to commit to
increasingly controversial testing and assessment—linking teacher
evaluation to student performance—and an enthusiasm for shuttering
low-performing schools and turning them over to charter operators to
spur private investments wherever possible.
These are not small concerns. As education historian Diane Ravitch
noted in 2010, with Race to the Top,
“[President
Obama and Secretary Duncan] are heading in the wrong direction. On
their present course, they will end up demoralizing teachers, closing
schools that are struggling to improve, dismantling the teaching
profession, destabilizing communities, and harming public education.”
Who
pays the price for these policies, none of which have actually been
proven to work? The children and families of America. The neediest among
us, of course, most of all.
5. Obama's call to ramp-up and embrace of our now pervasive surveillance state
In
his first run for president, Obama repeatedly criticized George Bush
for using post-9/11 programs to spy on American citizens. But after
entering office, Obama has done nothing but ramp up all forms of
surveillance, from metadata capture to wiretapping to recording phone
log information of American citizens. Edward Snowden's revelations about
the NSA's surveillance programs and capabilities shoot deep into the
territory of science fiction and George Orwell's 1984. Obama's speech on
the NSA and surveillance this January provided little in the way of
peace of mind for any citizen concerned with maintaining a shred of
privacy.
Robert Scheer got to the heart of the matter:
"Barack
Obama’s speech on surveillance was his worst performance... in its
stark betrayal of his oft-proclaimed respect for constitutional
safeguards and civil liberty. His unbridled defense of the surveillance
state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne
Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees,
who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible
Russian spy.
"Somewhere in law school, Obama must have learned
that the whole point of our Bill of Rights, inspired by American
revolutionaries like Sam Adams, a Sons of Liberty co-conspirator, was to
curtail government power as the main threat to freedom. Thus was Adams’
insistence on the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment,
banning the warrantless searches that Obama now seeks to justify."
6. Obama's dedication to secrecy and his hypocrisy about drones
Barack
Obama owes a chunk of his election success to anti-war voters who
turned out during the Democratic primaries in 2008, disgusted by Hillary
Clinton’s vote to authorize force on Iraq. But the man who became
president has sorely disappointed many of the same anti-war voters with
his expansion of the deadly drone war.
Since he was elected,
President Obama has launched more 390 drone strikes—eight times the
number George W. Bush oversaw. Obama has escalated the drone war in
Pakistan—where the majority of attacks take place—and in Somalia and
Yemen. The drone strikes, meant to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban, have
killed scores of civilians, disrupted tribal life, brought about huge
suffering and trauma and inflamed anger at the U.S. Four Americans have
been killed in drone attacks, and the whole program remains shrouded in
secrecy.
In response to a growing wave of criticism, Obama gave a
landmark speech last year where he vowed that transparency would
increase and that drone strikes would only occur when there was a
“near-certainty” civilians would not be killed. Those promises have gone
unfulfilled. The U.S. has yet to release a count of the civilians and
militants it has killed or offer up the full legal rationale to Congress
justifying these missile strikes. Meanwhile, civilians continue to die
in Pakistan and Yemen, “collateral damage” from these drone attacks. The
latest example came on December 12, 2013, when a drone attack in Yemen,
said to be aimed at an Al Qaeda leader, killed 12 civilians driving as
part of a wedding convoy.
7. Obama's attempt to ram through the corporation-loving, people-harming Trans-Pacific Partnership in secret
The
Trans-Pacific Partnership, a super-secret multinational corporate
scheme sometimes described as "NAFTA on steroids," is one of Obama's
worst initiatives. As secretive as it is, information about the TPP has
been leaking out, and the more people hear about it, the worse it
sounds. Fortunately, the light of day may also help to scuttle the
deal.
Wikileaks leaked the TPP Environmental Chapter [in
mid-January]. The bottom line—there is no enforcement to protect the
environment. The TPP is worse than President George W. Bush’s trade
deals. Mainstream environmental groups are saying the TPP is
unacceptable. Similarly, the leak of the Intellectual Property
Chapter revealed that it created a path to patent everything imaginable,
including plants and animals, to turn everything into a commodity for
profit. The Obama administration was pushing it way beyond normal
intellectual property law in order to increase profits for everything
from pharmaceuticals to textbooks.
As Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
recently wrote for AlterNet:
"After four years of secret negotiations with more than 600 corporate
advisers, the once seemingly invincible largest trade bill in history,
covering 40% of the world’s economy, looks very much like it can be
defeated."
Why is the TPP looking like it can be stopped? According to Flowers and Zeese:
"One
reason is its secrecy. Leaks are sinking the TPP like the Titanic.
... The refrain is always the same: profits come first. The necessities
of the people and protection of the planet come last."
Ron
Kirk, the former U.S. trade rep, said they were keeping it secret
because the more people knew, the less they would like the TPP and it
would become so unpopular it could never become law. Each leak has
proven him right.
8. Obama's failure to do much about the racist drug war and discriminatory sentencing
President
Obama, a former heavy pot smoker in his youth, has very slowly and
finally admitted a few painful realities about the drug war, which were
just as true 5 years ago when he took office as now.
Obama recently told the
New Yorker he
thinks marijuana isn't any more harmful than alcohol (actually, it’s
proven that cannabis is far less harmful the booze...but this is what we
call progress). He also said it is important for the new cannabis laws
in Colorado and Washington to go forward "because it’s important for
society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have
at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get
punished.”
But here, hypocrisy reigns supreme.
Obama does not walk the walk of his talk. In 2011, drug offenders
accounted for 48 percent of the federal prisoner population and 16
percent of the state prisoner population—and half of all of those people
are incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes, according to the
Sentencing Project.
Last
year the U.S. Department of Justice revised the law so that mandatory
minimum sentences no longer applied to the majority of nonviolent drug
offenders. However, Obama has only granted clemency to 8 of the more
than 100,000 prisoners still serving time for drug related crimes in the
country. And he still holds the record for granting the fewest pardons
of any U.S. president.
And in a truly shocking move, according to Linda Greenhouse in the
New York Times, Obama's
Justice Department fought a Court recommendation to release thousands
of federal inmates still serving time under the racist crack standards
of pre-2010. So the full court overruled its panel, and those thousands
continue to rot in jail with a law that in essence, due to its
discriminatory effect, was illegal. Obama's words are empty until he
actually takes the actions that are well within his power, to end the
corrupt and racist war on drugs, and curb its devastating effects.
9. Obama's counter productive energy policy
Calling
someone “anti-science” is usually an epithet reserved for those
clinging to creationism and climate denialism, and yet Obama’s embrace
of an energy strategy using “all of the above” flies in the face of
everything the world’s top scientists have been saying about the threats
we face as a result of climate change. The scale of the accelerating
climate catastrophe requires an energy policy grounded in the best
science, prioritizing clean energy, and severely limiting the use and
extraction of fossil fuels—not a namby-pamby “all of the above.” Not
even close.
Inexcusable are the Obama administration’s embrace of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas, and the
continual propping up of a dying coal industry that’s killing us along with itself. A great example,
as Jeff Biggers outlines on AlterNet recently, was Obama’s Department of Energy gifting Big Coal $1 billion for a ‘clean coal’ boondoggle.
Also baffling and unacceptable is
Obama’s green-lighting of
the southern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, while
hypocritically calling for more review of climate change impacts of the
northern section. In light of the best science from the international
community, the Obama administration should be figuring out how to move
us away from dependence on tar sands, coal, oil and fracked gas as
quickly as possible – not making them the centerpiece of his energy
policy.
“An ‘all of the above’ strategy is a compromise that future generations can’t afford,” read a
letter to Obamasigned
by a coalition of the country’s major environmental organizations. “It
fails to prioritize clean energy … it locks in the extraction of fossil
fuels that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic climate future. It
threatens our health, our homes, our most sensitive public lands, our
oceans and our most precious wild places.”
10. Obama's huge expansion of the number of countries where we are fighting secret wars with Special Ops
Bush
was a real war monger, with his “Shock and Awe,” “Mission
Accomplished,” and wars of choice. But Obama, once seen as the anti-war
candidate, has him soundly beat in the number of secret wars with
unconventional forces spread across the globe. After a thorough
investigation, Nick Turse of Tom Dispatch recently reported the
staggering fact that there are currently U.S. Special Ops in 70% of the
world’s nations. “All over the planet, the Obama administration is
waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed,” Turse wrote.
Turse
then offers an accounting of the exponential growth in Special Ops,
which include Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force
commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs
personnel, and much more.
“In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in
about 60 countries around the world . . . In 2013, elite U.S. forces
were deployed in 134 countries around the globe . . . This 123% increase
during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional
wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying,
the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of
overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s
most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far
from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight,
increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic
consequences.” Like 9/11. That’s an example of blowback.
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