Obama's 'Zero' Legacy
by Tyler Durden
Nov 19, 2016 6:15 PM
Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,
«Trump did more than any democrat to deflate the neocon/neoliberal agenda that liberals themselves screamed was fascist when Bush was president».
That was a brilliant and profoundly true reader-comment recently posted about Hillary Clinton supporters who are demonstrating against Trump’s winning the Presidency.
ADVERTISING
Clinton-Obama Democrats who remain loyal to the Democratic Party in the wake of Trump’s victory are world-champion hypocrites, even if they’re too oblivious to know it. The Clinton-Obama political tradition of pro-megacorporate government, actually repudiates, instead of embodies, that of the Democratic Party’s earlier quintessential exemplar: the 1932-1980 FDR-dominated (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) era, the most progressive period in all of U.S. history.
Though I voted both times for Barack Obama, he turned out to be one of the worst U.S. Presidents, if not the worst of them all — even if he was (as I thought each time) the best of the bad (in each election).
His only real legacy as President turns out to have been disasters, including things far worse than his failed Obamacare, which increased the healthcare inflation-rate in our country, where healthcare already costs twice as much — and twice as high a percentage of GDP — as the international OECD average, but delivers inferior healthcare results. America is becoming internationally even less competitive in our healthcare system than before — which was already at the international bottom. It’s sucking the lifesblood out of the U.S. economy.
But most of the real hell that Obama produced is in foreign countries:his bloody coup in Ukraine followed by civil war there, and the bloody catastrophe in Libya, and the bloody years-long attempt (ever since Obama first came into office) to overthrow the non-sectarian leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and replace him with Al Nusra and other jihadists that the Obama-regime weaponized and the Saud regime financed and recruited hoping for them to replace Assad and produce a Sharia-law Syrian government. Al Qaeda in Syria — «Al Nusra» — were leading Obama’s ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria. The Administration kept this fact hidden from the American public until late in October when Hillary’s victory seemed assured and so Obama started to acknowledge publicly that he was actually backing all of the anti-Assad people there except ISIS. Thus, for example, on October 20th, Russia’s Sputnik News quoted an interview two days earlier in which the American Russia-expert Stephen Cohen had remarked upon this sudden change:
«If you pick up a paper today the narrative is completely different», the US academic stressed, «In Aleppo there are only rebels, there are no longer terrorists. You don't see the word 'terrorist' or 'jihadist' in the narrative any more. And alongside them, with rebels protecting them, there are children who are being killed by Russian and Syrian war planes». As the whole narrative has been re-written, Moscow and Damascus are now being portrayed as «war criminals» which are targeting civilians in Aleppo, he noted.
Whereas previously, Obama behind-the-scenes had been protecting and arming the non-ISIS jihadists even while acknowledging that they existed, he was now starting publicly to acknowledge that the U.S. was actually supporting them.
According to the US academic, the inconvenient truth is that the US and its allies in one way or another have abetted terrorists in Syria for many years. «The motive of the United States, the only mission that the US has in Syria, is removing [Syrian President] Assad from power», Cohen emphasized, adding that the most powerful force fighting against Damascus are jihadi terrorists.
But after the election, because Trump will be Obama’s successor, Obama has finally decided that Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups that it leads in Syria are no longer ‘moderates’, but instead are people to target and kill in Syria. Finally — after his having long refused to join Russia’s air-campaign to kill them there.
I write this as a three-time voter for Barack Obama (both the primaries and the general election in 2008, and then again the general in 2012). I first became disappointed with Obama soon after his election in 2008 as President, when, on 25 November 2008, he chose as the White House’s chief economic advisor the snobbish Republican-turned-Democrat Lawrence Summers, whose advice to President Bill Clinton in 1999 had encouraged him to terminate FDR’s Glass-Steagall separation of consumer-banking (checking and savings accounts) from investment-banking (Wall Street’s casinos). That Clinton action had left the FDIC protections of savers on the hook to bail out the billionaire gamblers who found themselves without a musical-chairs seat when the music finally stopped and George W. Bush's MBS Ponzi real-estate economy came crashing down in 2007-2008. Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall necessitated the Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street — Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street.
by Tyler Durden
Nov 19, 2016 6:15 PM
Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,
«Trump did more than any democrat to deflate the neocon/neoliberal agenda that liberals themselves screamed was fascist when Bush was president».
That was a brilliant and profoundly true reader-comment recently posted about Hillary Clinton supporters who are demonstrating against Trump’s winning the Presidency.
ADVERTISING
Clinton-Obama Democrats who remain loyal to the Democratic Party in the wake of Trump’s victory are world-champion hypocrites, even if they’re too oblivious to know it. The Clinton-Obama political tradition of pro-megacorporate government, actually repudiates, instead of embodies, that of the Democratic Party’s earlier quintessential exemplar: the 1932-1980 FDR-dominated (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) era, the most progressive period in all of U.S. history.
Though I voted both times for Barack Obama, he turned out to be one of the worst U.S. Presidents, if not the worst of them all — even if he was (as I thought each time) the best of the bad (in each election).
His only real legacy as President turns out to have been disasters, including things far worse than his failed Obamacare, which increased the healthcare inflation-rate in our country, where healthcare already costs twice as much — and twice as high a percentage of GDP — as the international OECD average, but delivers inferior healthcare results. America is becoming internationally even less competitive in our healthcare system than before — which was already at the international bottom. It’s sucking the lifesblood out of the U.S. economy.
But most of the real hell that Obama produced is in foreign countries:his bloody coup in Ukraine followed by civil war there, and the bloody catastrophe in Libya, and the bloody years-long attempt (ever since Obama first came into office) to overthrow the non-sectarian leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and replace him with Al Nusra and other jihadists that the Obama-regime weaponized and the Saud regime financed and recruited hoping for them to replace Assad and produce a Sharia-law Syrian government. Al Qaeda in Syria — «Al Nusra» — were leading Obama’s ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria. The Administration kept this fact hidden from the American public until late in October when Hillary’s victory seemed assured and so Obama started to acknowledge publicly that he was actually backing all of the anti-Assad people there except ISIS. Thus, for example, on October 20th, Russia’s Sputnik News quoted an interview two days earlier in which the American Russia-expert Stephen Cohen had remarked upon this sudden change:
«If you pick up a paper today the narrative is completely different», the US academic stressed, «In Aleppo there are only rebels, there are no longer terrorists. You don't see the word 'terrorist' or 'jihadist' in the narrative any more. And alongside them, with rebels protecting them, there are children who are being killed by Russian and Syrian war planes». As the whole narrative has been re-written, Moscow and Damascus are now being portrayed as «war criminals» which are targeting civilians in Aleppo, he noted.
Whereas previously, Obama behind-the-scenes had been protecting and arming the non-ISIS jihadists even while acknowledging that they existed, he was now starting publicly to acknowledge that the U.S. was actually supporting them.
According to the US academic, the inconvenient truth is that the US and its allies in one way or another have abetted terrorists in Syria for many years. «The motive of the United States, the only mission that the US has in Syria, is removing [Syrian President] Assad from power», Cohen emphasized, adding that the most powerful force fighting against Damascus are jihadi terrorists.
But after the election, because Trump will be Obama’s successor, Obama has finally decided that Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups that it leads in Syria are no longer ‘moderates’, but instead are people to target and kill in Syria. Finally — after his having long refused to join Russia’s air-campaign to kill them there.
I write this as a three-time voter for Barack Obama (both the primaries and the general election in 2008, and then again the general in 2012). I first became disappointed with Obama soon after his election in 2008 as President, when, on 25 November 2008, he chose as the White House’s chief economic advisor the snobbish Republican-turned-Democrat Lawrence Summers, whose advice to President Bill Clinton in 1999 had encouraged him to terminate FDR’s Glass-Steagall separation of consumer-banking (checking and savings accounts) from investment-banking (Wall Street’s casinos). That Clinton action had left the FDIC protections of savers on the hook to bail out the billionaire gamblers who found themselves without a musical-chairs seat when the music finally stopped and George W. Bush's MBS Ponzi real-estate economy came crashing down in 2007-2008. Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall necessitated the Bush-Obama bailout of Wall Street — Main Street’s bailout of Wall Street.
