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Washington Monthly / By Paul Glastris and Ryan Cooper and Siyu Hu

Top 50 Things Accomplished by President Barack Obama

A look back at Obama's first term.

April 4, 2012  |  

 

 

 

1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.
2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.
3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.
4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.
5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.
6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.
7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.
8. Recapitalized Banks: In the midst of financial crisis, approved controversial Treasury Department plan to lure private capital into the country’s largest banks via “stress tests” of their balance sheets and a public-private fund to buy their “toxic” assets. Got banks back on their feet at essentially zero cost to the government.
9. Repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: Ended 1990s-era restriction and formalized new policy allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military for the first time.
10. Toppled Moammar Gaddafi: In March 2011, joined a coalition of European and Arab governments in military action, including air power and naval blockade, against Gaddafi regime to defend Libyan civilians and support rebel troops. Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule ended when the dictator was overthrown and killed by rebels on October 20, 2011. No American lives were lost.
11. Told Mubarak to Go: On February 1, 2011, publicly called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to accept reform or step down, thus weakening the dictator’s position and putting America on the right side of the Arab Spring. Mubarak ended thirty-year rule when overthrown on February 11.
12. Reversed Bush Torture Policies: Two days after taking office, nullified Bush-era rulings that had allowed detainees in U.S. custody to undergo certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques considered inhumane under the Geneva Conventions. Also released the secret Bush legal rulings supporting the use of these techniques.
13. Improved America’s Image Abroad: With new policies, diplomacy, and rhetoric, reversed a sharp decline in world opinion toward the U.S. (and the corresponding loss of “soft power”) during the Bush years. From 2008 to 2011, favorable opinion toward the United States rose in ten of fifteen countries surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with an average increase of 26 percent.
14. Kicked Banks Out of Federal Student Loan Program, Expanded Pell Grant Spending: As part of the 2010 health care reform bill, signed measure ending the wasteful decades-old practice of subsidizing banks to provide college loans. Starting July 2010 all students began getting their federal student loans directly from the federal government. Treasury will save $67 billion over ten years, $36 billion of which will go to expanding Pell Grants to lower-income students.
15. Created Race to the Top: With funds from stimulus, started $4.35 billion program of competitive grants to encourage and reward states for education reform.
16. Boosted Fuel Efficiency Standards: Released new fuel efficiency standards in 2011 that will nearly double the fuel economy for cars and trucks by 2025.
17. Coordinated International Response to Financial Crisis: To keep world economy out of recession in 2009 and 2010, helped secure from G-20 nations more than $500 billion for the IMF to provide lines of credit and other support to emerging market countries, which kept them liquid and avoided crises with their currencies.
18. Passed Mini Stimuli: To help families hurt by the recession and spur the economy as stimulus spending declined, signed series of measures (July 22, 2010; December 17, 2010; December 23, 2011) to extend unemployment insurance and cut payroll taxes.
19. Began Asia “Pivot”: In 2011, reoriented American military and diplomatic priorities and focus from the Middle East and Europe to the Asian-Pacific region. Executed multipronged strategy of positively engaging China while reasserting U.S. leadership in the region by increasing American military presence and crafting new commercial, diplomatic, and military alliances with neighboring countries made uncomfortable by recent Chinese behavior.
20. Increased Support for Veterans: With so many soldiers coming home from Iraq and Iran with serious physical and mental health problems, yet facing long waits for services, increased 2010 Department of Veterans Affairs budget by 16 percent and 2011 budget by 10 percent. Also signed new GI bill offering $78 billion in tuition assistance over a decade, and provided multiple tax credits to encourage businesses to hire veterans.
21. Tightened Sanctions on Iran: In effort to deter Iran’s nuclear program, signed Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act (2010) to punish firms and individuals who aid Iran’s petroleum sector. In late 2011 and early 2012, coordinated with other major Western powers to impose sanctions aimed at Iran’s banks and with Japan, South Korea, and China to shift their oil purchases away from Iran.
22. Created Conditions to Begin Closing Dirtiest Power Plants: New EPA restrictions on mercury and toxic pollution, issued in December 2011, likely to lead to the closing of between sixty-eight and 231 of the nation’s oldest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants. Estimated cost to utilities: at least $11 billion by 2016. Estimated health benefits: $59 billion to $140 billion. Will also significantly reduce carbon emissions and, with other regulations, comprises what’s been called Obama’s “stealth climate policy.”
23. Passed Credit Card Reforms: Signed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act (2009), which prohibits credit card companies from raising rates without advance notification, mandates a grace period on interest rate increases, and strictly limits overdraft and other fees.
24. Eliminated Catch-22 in Pay Equality Laws: Signed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, giving women who are paid less than men for the same work the right to sue their employers after they find out about the discrimination, even if that discrimination happened years ago. Under previous law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., the statute of limitations on such suits ran out 180 days after the alleged discrimination occurred, even if the victims never knew about it.
25. Protected Two Liberal Seats on the U.S. Supreme Court: Nominated and obtained confirmation for Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and third woman to serve, in 2009; and Elena Kagan, the fourth woman to serve, in 2010. They replaced David Souter and John Paul Stevens, respectively.
26. Improved Food Safety System: In 2011, signed FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, which boosts the Food and Drug Administration’s budget by $1.4 billion and expands its regulatory responsibilities to include increasing number of food inspections, issuing direct food recalls, and reviewing the current food safety practices of countries importing products into America.
27. Achieved New START Treaty: Signed with Russia (2010) and won ratification in Congress (2011) of treaty that limits each country to 1,550 strategic warheads (down from 2,200) and 700 launchers (down from more than 1,400), and reestablished and strengthened a monitoring and transparency program that had lapsed in 2009, through which each country can monitor the other.
28. Expanded National Service: Signed Serve America Act in 2009, which authorized a tripling of the size of AmeriCorps. Program grew 13 percent to 85,000 members across the country by 2012, when new House GOP majority refused to appropriate more funds for further expansion.
29. Expanded Wilderness and Watershed Protection: Signed Omnibus Public Lands Management Act (2009), which designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, created thousands of miles of recreational and historic trails, and protected more than 1,000 miles of rivers.
30. Gave the FDA Power to Regulate Tobacco: Signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (2009). Nine years in the making and long resisted by the tobacco industry, the law mandates that tobacco manufacturers disclose all ingredients, obtain FDA approval for new tobacco products, and expand the size and prominence of cigarette warning labels, and bans the sale of misleadingly labeled “light” cigarette brands and tobacco sponsorship of entertainment events.
31. Pushed Federal Agencies to Be Green Leaders: Issued executive order in 2009 requiring all federal agencies to make plans to soften their environmental impacts by 2020. Goals include 30 percent reduction in fleet gasoline use, 26 percent boost in water efficiency, and sustainability requirements for 95 percent of all federal contracts. Because federal government is the country’s single biggest purchaser of goods and services, likely to have ripple effects throughout the economy for years to come.
32. Passed Fair Sentencing Act: Signed 2010 legislation that reduces sentencing disparity between crack versus powder cocaine possessionfrom100 to1 to 18 to1.
33. Trimmed and Reoriented Missile Defense: Cut the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile defense budget, saving $1.4 billion in 2010, and canceled plans to station antiballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic in favor of sea-based defense plan focused on Iran and North Korea.
34. Began Post-Post-9/11 Military Builddown: After winning agreement from congressional Republicans and Democrats in summer 2011 budget deal to reduce projected defense spending by $450 billion, proposed new DoD budget this year with cuts of that size and a new national defense strategy that would shrink ground forces from 570,000 to 490,000 over the next ten years while increasing programs in intelligence gathering and cyberwarfare.
35. Let Space Shuttle Die and Killed Planned Moon Mission: Allowed the expensive ($1 billion per launch), badly designed, dangerous shuttle program to make its final launch on July 8, 2011. Cut off funding for even more bloated and problem-plagued Bush-era Constellation program to build moon base in favor of support for private-sector low-earth orbit ventures, research on new rocket technologies for long-distance manned flight missions, and unmanned space exploration, including the largest interplanetary rover ever launched, which will investigate Mars’s potential to support life.
36. Invested Heavily in Renewable Technology: As part of the 2009 stimulus, invested $90 billion, more than any previous administration, in research on smart grids, energy efficiency, electric cars, renewable electricity generation, cleaner coal, and biofuels.
37. Crafting Next-Generation School Tests: Devoted $330 million in stimulus money to pay two consortia of states and universities to create competing versions of new K-12 student performance tests based on latest psychometric research. New tests could transform the learning environment in vast majority of public school classrooms beginning in 2014.
38. Cracked Down on Bad For-Profit Colleges: In effort to fight predatory practices of some for-profit colleges, Department of Education issued “gainful employment” regulations in 2011 cutting off commercially focused schools from federal student aid funding if more than 35 percent of former students aren’t paying off their loans and/or if the average former student spends more than 12 percent of his or her total earnings servicing student loans.
39. Improved School Nutrition: In coordination with Michelle Obama, signed Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 mandating $4.5 billion spending boost and higher nutritional and health standards for school lunches. New rules based on the law, released in January, double the amount of fruits and vegetables and require only whole grains in food served to students.
40. Expanded Hate Crimes Protections: Signed Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009), which expands existing hate crime protections to include crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender, or disability, in addition to race, color, religion, or national origin.
41. Avoided Scandal: As of November 2011, served longer than any president in decades without a scandal, as measured by the appearance of the word “scandal” (or lack thereof) on the front page of the Washington Post.
42. Brokered Agreement for Speedy Compensation to Victims of Gulf Oil Spill: Though lacking statutory power to compel British Petroleum to act, used moral authority of his office to convince oil company to agree in 2010 to a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; $6.5 billion already paid out without lawsuits. By comparison, it took nearly two decades for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill case to receive $1.3 billion.
43. Created Recovery.gov: Web site run by independent board of inspectors general looking for fraud and abuse in stimulus spending, provides public with detailed information on every contract funded by $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Thanks partly to this transparency, board has uncovered very little fraud, and Web site has become national model: “The stimulus has done more to promote transparency at almost all levels of government than any piece of legislation in recent memory,” reports Governing magazine.
44. Pushed Broadband Coverage: Proposed and obtained in 2011 Federal Communications Commission approval for a shift of $8 billion in subsidies away from landlines and toward broadband Internet for lower-income rural families.
45. Expanded Health Coverage for Children: Signed 2009 Children’s Health Insurance Authorization Act, which allows the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to cover health care for 4 million more children, paid for by a tax increase on tobacco products.
46. Recognized the Dangers of Carbon Dioxide: In 2009, EPA declared carbon dioxide a pollutant, allowing the agency to regulate its production.
47. Expanded Stem Cell Research: In 2009, eliminated the Bush-era restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, which shows promise in treating spinal injuries, among many other areas.
48. Provided Payment to Wronged Minority Farmers: In 2009, signed Claims Resolution Act, which provided $4.6 billion in funding for a legal settlement with black and Native American farmers who the government cheated out of loans and natural resource royalties in years past.
49. Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Helped South Sudan Declare Independence: Appointed two envoys to Sudan and personally attended a special UN meeting on the area. Through U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, helped negotiate a peaceful split in 2011.
50. Killed the F-22: In 2009, ended further purchases of Lockheed Martin single-seat, twin-engine, fighter aircraft, which cost $358 million apiece. Though the military had 187 built, the plane has never flown a single combat mission. Eliminating it saved $4 billion.

Paul Glastris, Ryan Cooper, and Siyu Hu collaborated on this article. Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. Cooper and Hu are interns at the magazine.

Obama Joins the Democracy Sell Off

Published on Wednesday, February 8, 2012 by MediaCitizen

Obama Joins the Democracy Sell Off

by Tim Karr

President Obama succumbed late Monday to the dark logic of the Super PACs, instructing top West Wing staffers to help raise money for the so-called "independent" groups that have been successful in picking winners and losers thus far in 2012.

"We decided to do this because we can't afford for the work you're doing in your communities, and the grassroots donations you give to support it, to be destroyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina wrote supporters in an email Monday night.

This is no small news -- which explains why the New York Times placed this story on page one today -- as it signals that the president has reversed his earlier stance against working with Super PACs and joined others on the low road to political influence.

It also sounds the starting gun for the real race to win the White House in 2012 -- one that will very likely award the candidate who raises the most cash with victory in November. In this case, though, it won't be the victor who gets the spoils, but the wealthy corporations and individuals that funded him.

What's really happening in 2012 is a transfer of money and power unlike any other in the history of U.S. politics. It's a process that's unfolding in corporate boardrooms and corridors of political power, far from public view or scrutiny.

Here's what we've found:

1. Money Wins Elections: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the federal candidate who raised more money in 2008 won his or her race nine out of 10 times. Former White House political czar Karl Rove knows this well. His Super PAC American Crossroads and 501(c)(4) group Crossroads GPS recorded an unbroken string of victories in 2010 after spending an estimated $40 million. This year he's aiming to raise more than five times that.

2. The Wealthiest Give the Most: Thanks to the 2010 Citizens United decision, the overwhelming majority of political contributions (in terms of dollars) now come from the wealthiest corporations and individuals. According to the Sunlight Foundation, almost half of the contributions to the nine largest super PAC spenders thus far came from just 22 donors, who each gave more than $500,000. Nearly 80 percent of their donors were those who gave more than $100,000. It's a list that includes some of the wealthiest hedge fund managers (Julian Robertson: $1 million for pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC), Hollywood execs (Jeffrey Katzenberg: $2 million for pro-Obama Super PAC) and property developers (Bob Perry: $2.5 million for Karl Rove's Super PAC).

3. There's More Being Spent Now than Ever Before: 2012 will break all previous records for contributions to campaigns, Super PACs and even less accountable 501(c)(4)s, all of which are concentrating their spending on media buys in local television markets. Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that candidates, political parties and independent groups will spend up to $3.3 billion to buy TV ads during the 2012 election season. That's a 57 percent increase over the estimated $2.1 billion that was spent on local ads during the 2008 election cycle.

4.Political Ads Work: The reason so much money is being spent on so many ads is that it's a proven formula for success. Newt Gingrich saw a near-complete reversal of his political fortunes in both Iowa and Florida after "Restore Our Future," a pro-Romney Super PAC, plowed many times more money into ads in those states than Gingrich's counterpart. Romney's camp and his allies aired nearly 13,000 television commercials in Florida, compared with fewer than 300 by Gingrich and his supporters, according to a study by the Wesleyan Media Project. As in Iowa, this on-air onslaught coincided with the decline of Gingrich support in the polls, and, ultimately, at the ballot box.

5. Broadcasters Are a Part of the Problem: The broadcasters benefiting most from this massive transfer of money oppose any effort that would require them to better disclose who's buying political influence. Broadcasters balked at the Federal Communications Commission proposal to put online the political advertising information in their "public files," preferring to keep this information hidden away. But it gets worse. According to Free Press' recent report Citizens Inundated, stations are also providing less of the sort of local political coverage that would help viewers separate political fact from fiction in an election year.

6. Transparency Can't Take a Back Seat to Business as Usual: The FCC chair who is supposed to hold stations accountable just got a signal from his boss in the White House that this backdoor money-and-media game is now business as usual in Washington. The FCC would do well to ignore that message and push broadcasters to embrace the sort of transparency and accountability that would shed light on the money that makes these Super PACs tick. This action becomes even more important now that the president has decided to cast his lot with these shadowy outside groups.

© 2012 MediaCitizen

As the Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, Karr oversees campaigns on public broadcasting and noncommercial media, fake news and propaganda, journalism in crisis, and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network.

Obama Supports Fracking America

AlterNet.org

Democracy Now! / By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

Gasland Director Josh Fox: Obama's Support for Natural Gas Drilling 'A Painful Moment' for Communities Exposed to Fracking

Fox talks with Democracy Now following his arrest Wednesday while trying to film a Congressional hearing.

February 2, 2012 |

Last week, President Obama called the United States "the Saudi Arabia of natural gas" in a speech about boosting domestic energy production. That concerns Wyoming farmer John Fenton, who already has more than two dozen gas wells on his property. The Environmental Protection Agency ruled in December that water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, was a result natural gas extraction and the controversial technique known as fracking. "Things changed pretty rapidly," Fenton says, after fracking took place on his land near Pavillion, and he now has to ship in water for drinking. "It didn’t take long to notice significant impacts to the water, the change to smell like diesel fuel. Methane was bubbling in the water. We had neighbors that actually had livestock die from drinking the water. And we also saw really huge impacts to our way of life. The farm fields are full of wellheads now that we have to work around. We have people coming and going off our property 24 hours a day. And we’ve seen over a 50 percent devaluation in the value of our land." We also speak with filmmaker Josh Fox, who was arrested for attempting to record a congressional hearing over the EPA report on Pavillion. Fox is producing a sequel to his award-winning film, "Gasland," about the impact of fracking across the United States.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Wednesday’s hearing focused on a recent Environmental Protection Agency draft report that linked contaminated water supplies in Wyoming to chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. While a lobbyist from the Western Energy Alliance testified at Wednesday’s hearing, no local residents impacted by the water contamination were invited to speak.

AMY GOODMAN: Joining us now from Washington, D.C., is filmmaker Josh Fox. With us also via Democracy Now! video stream is John Fenton, who is a Wyoming farmer and chair of the Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens.

Josh, it’s good to have you out of jail. Explain exactly why you were in that hearing yesterday and what happened, as we listen to the debate between the Democrats and the Republicans as you were being handcuffed by police and taken out of the room.

JOSH FOX: Good morning, Amy and Juan. And certainly, hi to John Fenton. Nice to see you.

Well, basically, I was there to report on a story that I’ve been following very closely for three-and-a-half years. John and his fellow people from Pavillion, I’ve been documenting their cases of water contamination for three years, and it’s featured in the first film, Gasland. We continue to feature that in Gasland 2. So, this was a crucial hearing for us to tape, because what was going on there was a clear and brazen attack on the EPA and on the meticulous three-and-a-half-year investigation that took place in the small town of Pavillion, Wyoming, to expose a link between fracking and groundwater contamination. And this is the first case in which EPA has come out and said, at least in this last 10 years, that the likely cause of groundwater contamination was fracking.

And what was apparent to us was that this was going to be an attack on science from within the science and technology committee, that they had a panel that was stuffed with gas industry lobbyists, that this was actually a way of trying to dismantle this EPA report. We wanted to be there to show that that was what the agenda was. We wanted to report on what happened. I was not interested in disrupting that hearing. It was not a protest action. I was simply trying to do my job as a journalist and go in there and show to the American people what was transpiring in that hearing, so that down the line, as we know there will be a lot of challenges mounted to that EPA report—and frankly, to the people in Pavillion, who have been sticking up for themselves and demanding an investigation into the groundwater contamination—and to make sure that people could view that in a larger forum than usually happens.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Josh, the attacks have come not only through this congressional investigation on the EPA report, but also from local press in Wyoming, as well? Obviously, there are huge implications nationwide for what the results of this study show.

JOSH FOX: Well, virtually every Republican candidate right now is out for elimination of the EPA, which shows the deep, deep influence of oil and gas on Congress and on the Republican Party. So, what you’re seeing here happening is a war between the federal agency, which is well funded and impartial, in a certain sense, or more impartial, and the state regulatory agencies, which, as we’ve investigated, and we will show quite thoroughly, I think, in Gasland 2, have an enormous amount of influence and pressure on them from oil and gas, to the point to which many, many people think that they’re corrupt. So getting the EPA out of the way is one of these ways that you completely dismantle the regulatory system, and that’s why the EPA is the target here.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to President Obama’s recent comments about natural gas drilling. This is what he said just last week in his State of the Union address.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use, because America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk. The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of 30 years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock, reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in the State of the Union address. Josh Fox, director of Gasland?

JOSH FOX: That was actually quite, I think, a very painful moment for a lot of people who have been focusing on gas fracking for the last several years. I think the President’s statements right there are wrong. I mean, it’s very clear that we do not have a hundred years’ worth of natural gas, and certainly not if we want to start using it in cars and trucks. And it has been—it’s very, very unclear, in the science, whether or not this fracking technique can be done safely. And in my research, it shows itself to be inherently contaminating. And there is no proof to think that we could be doing this gas extraction safely.

On the other hand, what the President did say was that he was in support of the disclosure of the chemicals, which is to say, the reversal of the exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act that the gas industry was granted in 2005. They were made exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act, which stated that—in the 2005 energy bill, allowing them to inject toxic chemicals and toxic material into the ground without having to report that. So what he’s saying is, you can’t get away with not reporting and not disclosing the chemicals that you’re pumping into the ground. However, when we look at the industry’s own reports, and it shows that 40 percent of their wells have integrity issues—that is to say, the well casing that protects the groundwater cracks in 40 percent of the cases over a short period of time, and in a larger percentage over a longer period of time—this is basically surrendering those areas to groundwater contamination, either in the short term or in the long term.

So, I think that this is obviously an issue of an enormous amount of importance. And there’s no way you can actually just start galloping down this road of natural gas. What this means is a further delay in our transition to a renewable energy economy. And when you look at what Obama’s EPA is doing, they’re extremely aggressive. They have actually been very responsive. I mean, John could probably talk about that. EPA just delivered water to people in the town of Dimock, which suffered a similar kind of water contamination as happened in Pavillion. And they have been stepping up to the plate. So this is why you’re seeing the Republicans attacking EPA, which is the part of Obama’s policy which I agree with wholeheartedly.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we’re also joined by John Fenton, a farmer who lives near Pavillion, Wyoming. He’s chair of the group Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens.

John Fenton, could you talk to us about the changing views of the residents around in your area about fracking? You have about a dozen gas wells on your property?

JOHN FENTON: Within just 350 feet of our home, we have eight to 10 of them. On the whole farm, we have 24 gas wells. When industry first moved in here in the middle ’90s and started really filling this field in, we were assured over and over that these processes were safe, that we had nothing to worry about. And, you know, a lot of people around here, quite frankly, have a pro-industry view and wanted the gas to be extracted.

But things changed pretty rapidly. It didn’t take long to notice significant impacts to the water, the change to smell like diesel fuel. Methane was bubbling in the water. We had neighbors that actually had livestock die from drinking the water. And we also saw really huge impacts to our way of life. The farm fields are full of wellheads now that we have to work around. We have people coming and going off our property 24 hours a day. And we’ve seen over a 50 percent devaluation in the value of our land. So iwe’ve been hit on every front with this. And the idea that this can be done safely and without impact, I think that we could disprove that real quickly, if you’d come and see us here in Pavillion, Wyoming.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you raised issues to the companies and to authorities about the impact on the water supply, what was the response?

JOHN FENTON: Well, when we first started to see this, we initially went to industry, which Encana is the company in our case, and we went to the state of Wyoming. Now, the state of Wyoming has insisted all along that there’s nothing wrong going on here in Pavillion, Wyoming. And a lot of times what they would do is they would show up with—you know, we’d have a Department of Environmental Quality staff person show up with an Encana employee, and the state employees would point to Encana’s water tests and say, "Look, there’s nothing wrong with your water." They would also say things like, "Well, the water has always been bad out here." Or, it even got to the point where we were accused of contaminating our own water. It became really frustrating.

You know, the people here, all of us work in ag-related business, and we work really close, and we’re in touch with the land all the time, and we can tell when things change. And we knew that what was happening was not normal. And we knew that we hadn’t done this. So, we really felt left out, and we felt ignored by the people who were supposed to be looking out for us. And so, we started to take the issues into our own hands. And first of all, what we did was we—our Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens is an affiliate group of the Powder River Basin Resource Council. They work on grassroots problems. They work for the people, the people that are directly impacted. And through them, and through our work with our neighbors, we contacted the Environmental Protection Agency. And only then did we start to deal with people who realized that we had genuine concerns and that came to Pavillion and began to investigate those concerns.

AMY GOODMAN: Josh Fox, we want to play a clip of your movie. This is the part that has gotten so much attention in your first film, Gasland. In this clip, Josh Fox, you visit the home of Mike Markham of Colorado. Markham demonstrates how his tap water is so toxic he can set it on fire.

JOSH FOX: I saw it go up for a second.

MIKE MARKHAM: Yeah, we’ll just give it a second here.

JOSH FOX: Whoa! Jesus Christ!

MIKE MARKHAM: That’s the best I’ve done!

AMY GOODMAN: Whoa! And there we see Josh Fox filming Mike Markham setting his tap water on fire. Josh, talk more about that and how this fits into Wyoming and the EPA hearing you were arrested at yesterday on Capitol Hill.

JOSH FOX: Well, I mean, this is a scene that’s been played over and over again. It’s actually one of seven different people in the film who can light their water on fire. And when I got to Pavillion, Wyoming, Louis Meeks, which is one of John’s neighbors, lights—puts a blowtorch to his water and then burns off a kind of weird chemical plastic film on the surface. And I think people—you’re going to see a lot more of this water on fire phenomenon in the next film.

I want to remind everybody that this gas drilling, this fracking, is not only happening in small places like Pavillion, Wyoming, or Dimock, Pennsylvania. We’re talking about half of New York state, three-quarters of Pennsylvania, half of Ohio, all of West Virginia—indeed, in 34 states. And there’s a map that people can look up at gaslandthemovie.com and also see that clip, for those of you listening on the radio.

But what we’re seeing here is a rampant situation of water contamination, both with methane getting into aquifers, as you see the methane coming into the private water well, the natural gas, and actually being ignitable out of the tap—but what’s scarier, in a way, is the benzene and the carcinogenic chemicals, some of these things that have shown up in John Fenton’s well, that are associated with drilling fluids and drilling muds. In Pavillion, they showed that there was 50 times the safe level of benzene in their groundwater. Now there’s no real safe level of benzene at all in groundwater. Benzene is a carcinogen. But when you’re talking about 50 times the safe level, when you’re looking—they also had 2-Butoxyethanol in their water. A lot of these same contaminants were showing up in water wells in Pennsylvania. We’ve seen the flammable water phenomenon happening in Australia. We’ve seen it in PA. We’ve seen it in Canada. So this is not something that’s happening on a small scale, and it’s not something that’s happening in only a few exceptional cases. But what’s happening with John and Pavillion is exceptional in the sense that they actually got EPA to come out there and do this three-and-a-half-year investigation.

And when you witness the events of yesterday, not only kicking out journalism from the House of Representatives and kicking the First Amendment out, and out with that goes John Boehner’s pledge of transparency in Congress, but also kicking out science and saying, "Actually, we don’t care about science." And what’s true here is that we’re living in an age which is not kind to objective information. And frankly, this kind of obstructionism of investigating the truth, reporting the truth, this is what we’ve seen over and over and over again. And I’m outraged at this approach, because when you see people like John Fenton, who have been dealing with this and who don’t have a political position coming into it, and they’re being attacked simply for reporting what’s happening to them, you witness that this is a phenomenon and a tactic and a strategy that happened when climate change was first reported. It goes all the way back to when they started to link tobacco with lung cancer. They mounted a PR campaign to try to dismantle that information. And this is not a democratic approach. When we are given objective information, objective science, you have Americans coming forward, asking for investigations, or a person like me going into Congress to try to report on those investigations, you cannot be faced with bullying tactics, intimidation tactics, and literally either being handcuffed and thrown in jail and taken out of there, or in the situation where you’re being made to be a prisoner in your own home because no one is listening to you, like John and Louis Meeks and a lot of these thousands of cases of groundwater contamination in America.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Josh, I’d like to ask John Fenton specifically about this whole issue of how he makes do now with the situation of the contaminated water. Are you having water trucked in for the community? And what about bathing, cooking, the other aspects of life that you depend on water for?

JOHN FENTON: Drinking and cooking water comes in five-gallon office cooler-type water jugs now. So that’s what we do all of our drinking and cooking issues with. We’re still bathing in the contaminated water. We have not been able to prepare an alternative source yet. We’ve seen all sorts of impacts from that. We have people with really unexplainable health conditions, a lot of neurological problems, a neuropathy, seizures, people losing their sense of smell, sense of taste, you know, people with their arms and legs going numb. It’s very significant.

People here who [inaudible] their whole lives, this is their retirement. This is something they wanted to hand down to their family. Small agriculture, family farming, is under attack everywhere. And here we have just one more example of that deterioration of the family unit. It’s even to the point where the water that comes out of our wells is no longer usable for growing a garden. It stunts all the plants. So, it’s had a huge impact. And we’re working towards trying to get whole house replacements so we’re bathing in clean water, but that’s something that we haven’t been able to do yet.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue to follow this issue. We got this statement from one of the members of the House committee, Maurice Hinchey, who is retiring at the end of his term, from upstate New York. He said, "It is beyond unacceptable that acclaimed documentary director Josh Fox was arrested for trying to film a public hearing on groundwater contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing in Pavillion, Wyoming." Congressman Hinchey goes on to say, "This was a public hearing, there was plenty of room for cameras, and a credentialed camera crew was told they would be denied access because they were working for a documentary filmmaker. This is blatant censorship and a shameful stain on [this] Congress. I stand by Josh’s right to record this hearing. His arrest was a huge mistake." Again, the statement of retiring Congress Member Maurice Hinchey, who was in the room, on the committee. Josh Fox, will you attempt to film another EPAhearing on Capitol Hill, as we wrap up?

JOSH FOX: We film hundreds of—hundreds of public hearings across America, of course. And I would say, I’d like to try to see them arrest me in Congress to tape a public hearing again. I think, when you have a First Amendment threat, the thing that you have to do is exercise the First Amendment. So, I very much doubt that they will be arresting me at a public hearing in Congress again. I doubt it.

AMY GOODMAN: And this last news that we just reported in the last few days, Environmental Protection Agency agreeing to begin delivering fresh water to four homes in northeastern Pennsylvania, where water wells have been contaminated by fracking?

JOSH FOX: Yes. Well, that’s in Dimock, Pennsylvania. And there’s another case where residents stuck to their guns, and in spite of an enormous amount of intimidation, both by industry and by DEP, in a similar situation where John—what John Fenton described, where you had DEP from Pennsylvania, the state agency, walking in, arm in arm, with Cabot Oil & Gas, a lot of this revolving door between state regulators and industry, finally got the attention of the EPA, the federal agency. And they came in, did their own survey of the water wells, looked at the testing results, and decided these people need water delivery.

And this is not a cheap or inexpensive thing to do. The original proposal was for a water line. That was going to cost $12 million to serve 18 families. So when you take a look at the cost to taxpayers and the cost to the quality of life in America from hydraulic fracturing and you realize that the profit from that gas is going all towards these huge oil and gas companies, you realize that this is a raw deal when you actually add up the economics of it. We pay the cost, as citizens, for the damage that will go on forever. And when I’ve talked to John Fenton, I asked him, "Is there any remedy for the groundwater in Pavillion?" And he said to me, "Well, actually, this is going to outlast me." There is no talk of ever fixing this problem in the ground. And that is a similar situation to what’s happening in Dimock. So when you’re taking a look at the long-term impact on groundwater versus this short-term windfall profit for oil and gas, it’s very, very clear what’s going on here.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.

Juan Gonzalez is the co-host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.

Obama’s “post-partisan” strategy

Wednesday, Feb 1, 2012 8:00 PM EST

Obama’s “post-partisan” strategy

His rhetoric about consensus politics has sent the GOP off the deep end. Maybe that was the point

(Credit: AP)

Topics:2012 Elections, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama

To the extent that he ever believed much, if any, of his own soaring rhetoric about a transformative, post-partisan presidency during the 2008 campaign, President Obama would have to be judged a failure. Even after the election, his inaugural address called for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Was it really possible, I wondered, that Obama had mistaken the U.S. government for the Harvard Law Review, where the emollient balm of his personality persuaded rival factions to reason together? Did he actually believe that the political battles of the Clinton and Bush years could be laughed off as “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation,” easily transcended by an Ivy League raisonneur like him?

I’ve never thought any Chicago politician could possibly be so naive. Rather, Obama appeared to be an opportunistic shape-shifter like most successful candidates, enacting the pose of healer to set him apart first from Hillary Clinton, then Sen. John McCain — two figures hopelessly identified with the Washington trench warfare most Americans had grown heartily sick of. A fresh face, a proverbial outsider. “Mr. Hopey-Changey,” as an embittered Clinton supporter of my acquaintance called him.

So here we are, three years down the road. President Obama’s no longer a fresh face, Washington infighting has never been fiercer, nor Republican intransigence and recriminations any more bitter. “Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics,” writes the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “now seem not just naïve but delusional.”

Yet even as he’s disappointed liberals by yielding to GOP budgetary demands — extending the Bush tax cuts, and capitulating during last summer’s farcical debt limit hostage crisis — Republicans have responded by attacking him in ever more hysterical terms. Washington Post pecksniff George Will, who hosted a January 2009 dinner party introducing Obama to conservative pundits, now accuses the president of “Lenin-Socialism.”

The Post’s Charles Krauthammer reacted to Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech by decrying “a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation [and] crushing debt,” yet compared him a few sentences later to Mao Tse-Tung. This for the sin of calling for “equality and fairness.” You know, like the Sermon on the Mount.

Sometimes, you wonder what these boys are smoking. Whatever else you’d call Chairman Mao, you wouldn’t call him ineffectual.

If anything, Obama’s GOP political rivals have gone even further off the deep end. Mitt Romney has this passage in his stump speech where he all but accuses the president of being a communist.

“President Obama,” Romney insists, “believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government.”

This when the multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker isn’t accusing hecklers of envying his wealth — rarely a successful political tactic, in my experience.

“This is nuts, Glenn Beck-level insane,” writes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “Restoring Clinton-era taxes is not a plan to equalize outcomes, or even close. It’s not even a plan to stop rising inequality. Obama’s America will continue to be the most unequal society in the advanced world — only slightly less so.”

So is it possible that driving Republicans crazy is Obama’s deepest political strategy of all? His key to reelection in 2012? In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan argues that’s precisely the case: that having inherited an economy in near-catastrophic free fall — losing jobs at a rate of 750,000 a month in early 2009 — problems he knew couldn’t be fixed overnight, President Obama has been playing a “long game” all along.

That is, thinking in terms of eight years rather than four, and employing a Zen-like strategy that makes him appear to the untrained eye incapable of defending himself. Time and again, Sullivan tells us “the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider.”

Fair enough. But this isn’t the genius-level strategy of a political savant; it’s how a good poker player thinks. Play the cards you’re dealt, not the ones you wish you had. One hand at a time. To anybody not hypnotized by the Hopey-Changey business, President Obama’s never been anything else: a pragmatic mainstream Democrat, more Bill Clinton than, say, Dennis Kucinich.

As for Republicans, the Bush administration’s epic failures confronted them with two options: fold or double-down on ideology.

Most simply pushed all their chips onto the table.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons

Obama Has Governed as a Conservative

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Guy T. Saperstein

Andrew Sullivan is Right: Obama Has Governed as a Conservative

Sullivan took Obama's critics to task for not recognizing his accomplishments--sadly, those accomplishments only appeal to "conservative-minded independents" like him.

January 23, 2012 |

Last week, Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast published an article by Andrew Sullivan, “How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” which excoriated left-wing critics for failing to appreciate how much Obama has accomplished, while at the same time trying to convince conservatives that Obama is not a liberal, let alone a socialist, and that, in fact, he has governed as a conservative. The fact that these two critiques are internally inconsistent has somehow managed to escape Mr. Sullivan.

The main case Mr. Sullivan, a self-described “conservative-minded independent,” makes for Obama is that, “he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated the bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.”

In fact, Obama deserves even more credit for the bank bailout (TARP) than Sullivan gives him: Obama did not simply “continue the bank bail-out,” he, more than Bush, was the main reason TARP passed Congress, as Congress first rejected TARP, then passed it by a narrow margin when Obama, then far in the lead of McCain in the Presidential race, endorsed it and actively campaigned for its passage. It was the first, but not the last, example of Obama promoting a Republican plan.

Sullivan essentially argues that the bank rescue was necessary, so stop whining about it and give Obama the credit he deserves. There are many problems with this theory, the first of which is that TARP, and the subsequent giveaways and guarantees given to banks by the Federal Reserve and overseen by Obama, put too much of a burden on taxpayers, too little on the bank shareholders, and placed almost no conditions on the banks in terms of how they used the federal hand-outs or how they compensated the managers of these failed banks. Normally, when a business fails in a capitalist economy, the shareholders take the losses. But what TARP did was shift losses for toxic investments in poorly collateralized debts (mostly mortgages) to taxpayers. At the same time the private equity market was paying 20 cents on the dollar for toxic assets, Obama’s advisor and later Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, was counseling Obama to agree to pay 100 cents on the dollar for the same junk, which he did. If you read Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’ book, “Freefall,” you will see that Obama did this passively and reflexively, without any serious consideration of alternatives. Not only did the federal government overpay and over-guarantee bank obligations, it imposed no conditions on the banks to loan money to Main Street.

The central economic problem, of course, was the freezing up of credit, which blocked investment and development; even if saving the biggest banks was required (as opposed to other options, such as nationalizing the largest banks or letting banks fail and establishing a federal lending institution), the fact that money was not distributed downward into the economy allowed the economy to continue to stagnate while the banks were awash in cash, which they used mainly to buy up small and mid-sized banks so today the big banks are even bigger and there are fewer community-based and mid-sized banks to compete with them. And, of course, the banks continued their excessive compensation practices unabated while most taxpayers saw their house values, pension plans and net worth fall 30-40%. Arianna Huffington said at the time that Obama had sacrificed 70% of his credibility with voters by standing with the banks, and not average people, and that seems about right to me. The Democrats historic shellacking in the November 2010 election confirms this assessment. Was that huge election defeat part of Obama’s “long game,” Mr. Sullivan?

Sullivan credits Obama with saving the auto industry, and I agree that credit is warranted. But Sullivan fails to note how differently auto workers were treated than bankers by Obama. When the Obama Administration agreed to invest in the auto companies, they did so on the condition that future worker wages and benefits would be substantially diminished, so what you now have in the auto industry is a two-tier wage/benefits scale, with older workers getting good wages and benefits and younger workers getting substantially less now and in their futures. No such wage or compensation limits were placed on bankers, despite the fact that the federal bank bailouts and guarantees were more than a hundred times bigger than the auto bailouts. If and when “long game” historians write the obituary of organized labor, the auto industry’s two-tier wage cram-down by Obama will merit a chapter.

Sullivan credits Obama with creating jobs with his $787 billion stimulus plan, but fails to note that $282 billion of this was tax cuts which no one had asked for and which had very little stimulus effect, as people used their tax rebates to pay off debt. That left only $500 billion for real stimulus---approximately 1/3 of what his economic advisors considered necessary to jolt the economy and bring it back to life. If you read Ron Suskind’s marvelous book, “Confidence Men,” which carefully examines the stimulus decision within the Obama White House, it becomes painfully obvious that the decision had little to do with economic projections, let alone what was needed economically---instead, the decision was driven entirely by politics, with Rahm Emanuel and Obama deciding that the stimulus had to be less than $1 trillion for cosmetic and political purposes. The fact that putting too little money into the economic stimulus might not create sufficient jobs to fix the economy and that Obama might be judged in the 2010 and 2012 elections by economic results, not political perceptions, seems to have escaped Mr. Sullivan. Or, perhaps it is part of Obama’s “long game” that Mr, Sullivan cherishes.

Sullivan cites some job creation statistics, but all his comparisons are to Bush’s presidency, which sets an extremely low bar for job creation. The truth is that Obama, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers badly miscalculated the problems of the economy, projecting that unemployment would top out at 8%, when, in fact, it rose to 10.2% and remains around 9% only because millions of workers have dropped out of the labor market due to discouragement. That is the main reason Obama’s re-election is in doubt, despite the Clown Act that is the Republican Presidential primaries.

Sullivan chides his conservative friends for criticizing Obamacare. He explains that it is a very conservative program, based entirely on Republican principles and ideas developed in conservative think tanks and endorsed by a long line of Republicans: “Obamacare…is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have the public option, it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right.” In fact, Obamacare is “remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal.”

This should put to rest any claim that Obamacare is a progressive healthcare reform; in fact, it brings 30 million involuntary customers and $500 billion per year of new revenues to the private health insurance industry, with no public healthcare competition and no meaningful cost controls---despite the fact that in 2008 Obama had campaigned against the individual mandate and for a public healthcare option (was this flip-flop part of the Obama “long game,” Mr, Sullivan?). Of course, claiming any benefits from this “reform” assumes that the individual mandate is not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, but most legal analysts think there is at least a 50% chance the Court will strike it down as beyond the powers of the federal government under the Commerce Clause. If the individual mandate falls, Obamacare totally collapses, a fact Mr. Sullivan fails to include in his assessment of Obama’s “long game.”

Sullivan gives credit to Obama for tracking down Osama bin Laden, but fails to ask why a kill order was issued, when clearly the unarmed bin Laden could have been captured and brought back for trial. But Sullivan does not appear bothered by that or the summary executions, often of innocent people, caused by the expanded drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan which have fueled Islamic extremism in the most dangerous country on earth.

Sullivan credits Obama for leaving Iraq, despite the fact that the withdrawal was negotiated by President Bush, not Obama, despite the fact that the Obama Administration worked mightily to extend the occupation past the agreed departure date and despite the fact that the only reason the U.S. is finally withdrawing is that the Iraqi Parliament refused to continue to grant immunity to U.S. troops for crimes committed on Iraq soil. In a nutshell, despite running as an anti-Iraq War candidate, Obama surrounded himself with national security advisors who all had supported the invasion of Iraq, including his Secretaries of State and Defense, and his policies and performance in Iraq have not been different in any significant way from Bush/Cheney.

Sullivan also points out that Obama ignored “the war crimes of the recent past,” which Sullivan deplores.

Sullivan acknowledges that, “Not only did he [Obama] agree not to sunset the Bush tax cuts for his entire first term, he has aggressively lowered taxes on most Americans.” Obama’s decision to continue the Bush tax cuts for the rich was extremely unpopular; in fact, a December 3, 2010 CBS News poll showed that only 26% of voters believed tax cuts should be extended to people making more than $250,000 a year and these tax cuts for people who have done extremely well in a bad economy are projected to cost $800 billion. Surely, Sullivan argues, Obama deserves credit from conservatives for those big-ticket giveaways, especially to the rich; in fact, he argues, “You could easily make the case that Obama has been far more fiscally conservative than his predecessor….” But Sullivan fails to acknowledge the fiscal consequence of such fiscal conservatism and continued tax giveaways---a major reduction in federal tax revenues. As a consequence of these and other tax short-falls, Obama was the first Democratic President in American history to put on the table for negotiations with Republicans major reductions in Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid---concessions sure to thrill and delight conservatives.

So, yes, Mr. Sullivan, you have convinced me. Obama has governed as a conservative. Progressives might want to take note.

Guy T. Saperstein is a past president of the Sierra Club Foundation; previously, he was one of the National Law Journal’s "100 Most Influential Lawyers in America."

Why Focus On Obama's Dumbest Critics?

Published on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 by The Atlantic

Dear Andrew Sullivan: Why Focus On Obama's Dumbest Critics?

A conversation-changing defense of the president exaggerates Obama's accomplishments and misses the point: his scandalous transgressions against rule of law

by Conor Friedersdorf

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power? (Image credit: Reuters)

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

Pretend that you knew, circa 2008, that President Cheney or Palin or Rice or Rumsfeld or Giuliani would do all those things -- but that, on the bright side, they'd refrain from torturing anyone else, end Don't Ask, Don't Tell, sign a bank bailout, and pass a health-care bill that you regard as improving on the status quo starting in 2014. Would you vote for them on that basis?

I submit that you would not. And if they were elected, and four years later were running for re-election, would you focus on the stupidity of the least persuasive attacks on their tenure? Or would you laud their most incisive critics? I believe that you'd be among their most incisive critics.

Back to the present.

The Newsweek cover headline for Sullivan's piece is "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" It's entirely defensible to point out that many critiques of Obama are laughably disconnected from reality -- I've done that myself on many occasions -- so it's arguably a fair headline.

But the one I've chosen is fair too: "Why Focus on Obama's Dumbest Critics?"

No, Obama isn't a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist. But he is a lawbreaker and an advocate of radical executive power. What precedent could be more radical than insisting that the executive is empowered to draw up a kill list of American citizens in secret, without telling anyone what names are on it, or the legal justification for it, or even that it exists? What if Newt Gingrich inherits that power?

He may yet.

Over the years, Sullivan has confronted, as few others have, American transgressions abroad, including torture, detainee abuse, and various imperial ambitions. He's long drawn attention to civil-liberties violations at home too, as a solo blogger and as lead editor and writer of a blogazine. When I worked for Sullivan, he not only published but actively encouraged items I found that highlighted civil-liberties abuses by the Obama Administration, and since I parted ways with The Daily Dish, he and the Dish team have continued to air critiques of Obama on these questions.

But his Newsweek essay fits the pattern I've lamented of Obama apologists who tell a narrative of his administration that ignores some of these issues and minimizes the importance of others, as if they're a relatively unimportant matter to be set aside in a sentence or three before proceeding to the more important business of whether the president is being critiqued fairly by obtuse partisans.

Sullivan should reconsider this approach.

During President Bush's first term, Sullivan will recall the most unhinged attacks on him -- the comparisons to Hitler, the puppets burned in effigy, the comparisons to a chimp. There wasn't anything wrong with lamenting those attacks, just as there's nothing wrong with pointing out exaggerated and baseless attacks on Obama, which have spread through most of the Republican Party. But the priority put on rebutting the least persuasive left-wing critiques of Bush, and pre-election 2004 worrying about the flaws of the Democratic field, are part of what postponed the backlash against Bush's ruinous policies. The backlash should've been the priority all along.

The same is now true of Obama. Like President Bush, he is breaking the law, transgressing against civil liberties, and championing a radical view of executive power -- and he is invoking the War on Terror to get away with it. As much as it was in 2003 or 2007, it is vital in 2012 that there be a backlash against these post-9/11 excesses, that liberty-loving citizens push back so that these are anomalies that are reined in, rather than permanent features of a bipartisan consensus that can only end in a catastrophically abusive executive operating in an office stripped by successive presidents and their minions of both constitutional and prudential checks.

Beyond strenuously objecting to the focus of his piece and what it doesn't mention, and agreeing with some of Sullivan's points, I have important disagreements with others. "Where Bush talked tough and acted counter-productively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war," Sullivan writes. "Since he took office, al Qaeda's popularity in the Muslim world has plummeted." But it's surely relevant that, according to surveys like this one from James Zogby in 2011, "After improving with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, U.S. favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush Administration, and lower than Iran's favorable ratings (except in Saudi Arabia)." And in the areas where Obama's drone strikes are killing innocent civilians, he is trading short-term terrorist deaths for the possibility that our policies will create more terrorists in the long run. It's a tradeoff some people consider prudent; but that's different from saying he is "winning the propaganda war." In fact, the predictable effect of some of his policies is to increase hatred of the U.S.

© 2012 The Atlantic

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Chris Hedges' Columns

Why I’m Suing Barack Obama

Posted on Jan 16, 2012

AP / Dusan Vranic

Detainees pray at the U.S. military detention facility known as Camp Bucca in Iraq in this 2009 photo.

By Chris Hedges

Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.

The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.

To read Chris Hedges’ legal filing aimed at overturning a new law that would allow the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens deemed terrorism suspects, click here. To read the law itself, click here.

I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.

Section 1031 of the bill defines a “covered person”—one subject to detention—as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

The bill, however, does not define the terms “substantially supported,” “directly supported” or “associated forces.”

I met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. I used to visit Palestine Liberation Organization leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, in Tunis when they were branded international terrorists. I have spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. All these entities were or are labeled as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. What would this bill have meant if it had been in place when I and other Americans traveled in the 1980s with armed units of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front guerrillas in El Salvador? What would it have meant for those of us who were with the southern insurgents during the civil war in Yemen or the rebels in the southern Sudan? I have had dinner more times than I can count with people whom this country brands as terrorists. But that does not make me one.

Once a group is deemed to be a terrorist organization, whether it is a Palestinian charity or an element of the Uighur independence movement, the military can under this bill pick up a U.S. citizen who supported charities associated with the group or unwittingly sent money or medical supplies to front groups. We have already seen the persecution and closure of Islamic charity organizations in the United States that supported the Palestinians. Now the members of these organizations can be treated like card-carrying “terrorists” and sent to Guantanamo.

But I suspect the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up. Consider the arcane criteria that can make you a suspect in our new military-corporate state. The Department of Justice considers you worth investigating if you are missing a few fingers, if you have weatherproof ammunition, if you own guns or if you have hoarded more than seven days of food in your house. Adding a few of the obstructionist tactics of the Occupy movement to this list would be a seamless process. On the whim of the military, a suspected “terrorist” who also happens to be a U.S. citizen can suffer extraordinary rendition—being kidnapped and then left to rot in one of our black sites “until the end of hostilities.” Since this is an endless war that will be a very long stay.

This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system.

The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”?

Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission.

The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress.

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

Text of Hedges’ Legal Complaint

NDAA Official Text

To read Chris Hedges’ legal filing aimed at overturning a new law that would allow the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens deemed terrorism suspects, click here. To read the law itself, click here.

January 7, 2012 at 20:10:36

Is Obama the Trojan Horse, A Psychopath, A Bad Boyfriend or all Three?

By Julia Dalton (about the author)

I believe Barack Obama was put into office to do what no Republican could ever have gotten away with. Obama has extended the wars, created new wars, extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich, given additional bail out money to the banks, allowed the health insurance industry to write the healthcare bill, extended the Patriot Act and signed the NDAA.


Barack T-Shirt by self


Under his watch not one member of the Bush Administration has been held accountable for leading us into wars built on false evidence and lies; not one banker has been held accountable for the fraud and corruption that brought down the global economy. And the final nail in the coffin, Mr. Slim Shady signed the NDAA bill on New Year's Eve while most American's sipped champagne and sang Auld Lang Syne . The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) makes America the battlefield and allows indefinite detention of U.S. citizens suspected of "terrorist" leanings without due process.

But why be so negative you might ask? Here are a few things Obama did manage to do. He extended unemployment benefits because they're no jobs as his stimulus package was too small. He also managed to cut payroll taxes, which is a back door way to defund Social Security, He helped cover up the BP oil spill in the Gulf by allowing Coexit, a toxic disbursement not allowed in other countries, to break up the oil which then dropped to the bottom instead of just cleaning it up. In other words, allowing them to hide the body.

Obama hates truth tellers such as Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who's been held in detention for almost two years for, according to Obama, exposing state secrets aka a horrendous war crime. That is if Manning is the alleged leaker who gave the "Collateral Murder" video to WikiLeaks showing 12 civilians murdered by American soldiers. What is the difference between the "Collateral Murder" war atrocity and the 1970 My Lai Massacre and the Court-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina? What is the difference between the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning? I mean isn't this evidence we're now living in a corporate/fascist/ military/police state?

Now look, I know they're still plenty of Obama supporters among us but I find it very difficult to understand why so many people still love, honor and support this guy. I voted for this guy too. I fell for his smooth talk, cool demeanor and wide-open smile. I've always been a sucker for tall dark and handsome but if he wasn't lying then he's lying now and I for one am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

I know it's hard to admit you made a mistake. I get it. You really believed this guy was "the one" and he is the one for the 1%: Wall Street, the too big to fail banks, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big oil, big pharma, i.e. the corporate fascist state he's so gingerly locking into place.

We looked the other way when he said he'd put on comfy shoes and march with the unions and then when the unions had their bargaining rights withdrawn, Obama like the good corporate shill he is, remained silent. We made excuses for him when he remained silent as the police brutalized, beat, pepper sprayed and shot projectiles at peaceful demonstrators. Obama, unlike Robert Kennedy who had the balls to stand up to the racists down south and brought in the National Guard to protect those fighting for their civil rights, is a coward.

It could be battered spouse syndrome. I know there are people hospitalized with a broken jaw or collarbone and they won't press charges against their attackers. I can't explain why victims protect their abusers but they do and not only do they protect them, they go back to them over and over only to be beaten again and again.

Or maybe it's the Stockholm syndrome whereby victims fall in love with their captors. It happens. No need to beat yourself up over it.

To me Obama's like the bad boyfriend. He lies to you, cheats on you, forgets to call, but you just keep taking him back and making excuses. "Well, he can't help it. He has to stand up to those mean Republicans." Right?

And, therefore, I feel it's my duty to do an intervention. For those of you still deluding yourselves, who still can't face reality I suggest therapy or better yet maybe pick up a copy of "He's just Not That Into You."

I know it's hard. I told you I voted for him too. I sent him money. I believed him. But let's be honest this guy is a lying, cheating, warmongering, opportunist who serves the 1% so he might get reelected. He's in bed with Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile, GE and whoever else will pay him for his services.

He does throw us the occasional bone like the recent appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And studies show even rats will keep going back to find the food pellet over and over again even if it only shows up very rarely. But there comes a time when one must admit they were wrong, cut their losses and move on.

Not to worry they're other fish in the sea. Jill Stein of the Green Party has a very sane 5-point program. I know she may seem boring as we all love our bad boys but really a psychopath who murders innocent civilians and destroys countries using drone attacks will eventually turn on you. Didn't you see "Sleeping With the Enemy?" Hello! And there's also Anderson of the Justice Party. So don't despair you'll find somebody new. Maybe not right away but you won't have to sleep alone forever.

The Obama brand is collapsing just as the Bush brand before him became so craven even the most deluded had to recognize the fraud that had been perpetrated upon the American people.

For those of you who still don't see it you're sort of like the Bushies who believed in the Iraq war and defended the honesty and integrity of their fearless leader no matter how many lies he told. I guess it may prove the old adage. Love really is blind.

www.recoveringarmybrat.wordpress.com

Jill Dalton is a recovering army brat/writer/performer/activist who has appeared in film and television as well as performing her solo plays in New York and around the country. Most recently she can be seen in and consulted for William Hurt on the (more...)

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