Obama Promised us Change but Gave us More of the Same

The Rich got Richer and the Poor Poorer under Obama
  • “Over the last 5 years, the number in poverty has increased by nearly 31%, to 49.7 million, with the poverty rate climbing over 30% to 16.1%,” Ferarra wrote. “Obama has also been the food stamp President, with the number on food stamps increasing during his Administration to an all time record high of 47.7 million, up 80% over the past 5 years.” (source)
  • The gap in wealth between the world's richest tycoons and the rest of the global population is growing to levels unseen since before the Great Depression, according to new research published this week. But the divide may also be gaining traction as a pressing political issue more than it has at any point in the past 30 years.

    The disparity in wealth between the world's richest and poorest is staggering: 80 billionaires now hold the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the global population, according to an analysis by Oxfam International. Of those 80 billionaires, 90 percent are male and 85 percent are over the age of 50. (source)
  • A new Pew Research Center survey shows most Americans believe President Barack Obama’s two terms in office have favored the rich, and have not benefited the middle class or the poor. (source)
  • "In 1928, the top one per cent earned twenty-four per cent of all income; in 1944, they earned eleven per cent, a rate that began to rise in the nineteen-eighties. By 2012, according to Saez’s updated data, the top one per cent were earning twenty-three per cent of the nation’s income, almost the same ratio as in 1928..." (source)
Just Another Politician
  • "Former President Barack Obama has agreed to speak at a Wall Street conference for $400,000, according to a new report." (source)
  • "The White House accidentally identified the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan on Sunday, sending his name to reporters traveling with President Barack Obama on a short Memorial Day weekend visit to the U.S.-run Bagram Air Base outside Kabul." (source)
  • Bill Moyers criticized President Barack Obama on Friday for his decision to seemingly leave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the hands of the anti-net neutrality forces he opposed as a candidate. (source)
  • Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday that he was told not to “acknowledge” or “discuss” the secret drone program when becoming the government’s top spokesman. (source)
  • So far, however, he’s been half-hearted at best when it comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin at bargain-basement prices to coal companies. His State Department flubbed the global climate-change negotiations. (It’s hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic failure than the Copenhagen summit.) And now Washington rings with rumors that he’ll approve the Keystone pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that’s the amount his new auto mileage regulations would save. If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just the obvious and easy. (source)
  • As a Presidential candidate in 2008, Obama promised to fix the VA. Now 6 years later the agency is worse than ever.
  • "But Mr. Obama and his team would benefit, as they begin the second term, by acknowledging that many of the biggest problems facing the administration flow directly from the man at the top. Mr. Obama is a lousy manager. As chief executive he gets a C — and then only if graded on a curve that takes into account his predecessor’s managerial weaknesses." (Source: Op-Ed, NY Times)
  • Making Unpleasant Decisions And Standing Up To Narrow Interests: Though Congress passed the sweeping Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in 2010, two-thirds of the rules have yet to be finalized. That’s thanks in part to bank lobbying, which has weakened or slowed down the process of making the rules - (7 Inauguration Promises Obama Never Fulfilled)
  • "Yet, it is no small irony that the anti-inequality movement that cleared the path for Obama’s presidency would find its supposed personification in a chief executive who has spoken less about poverty and race than any Democratic president in a generation. And that the Baptist preacher from Georgia who stood for nonviolence would never have condoned the militaristic actions of a president whose escalated use of drone warfare kills innocents around the world." (source: Fredrick Harris, professor of political science and the director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University)
  • "Fast-forward to today. Guantanamo remains open, warrantless wiretapping continues, and drone strikes have accelerated, leading to the deaths of innocent civilians and a burst in support for anti-American forces in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Instead of breaking with the Bush era, Obama has codified and permanently institutionalized the “war on terror” framework that has characterized American foreign policy since the September 11, 2001 attacks. And they have done all of this largely in secret, refusing to open up about how drone strikes are decided on. So while torture has been thrown out of the American playbook, other black marks remain. Obama has done everything but restore “core constitutional values” to how the U.S. conducts itself around the world." (Salon, January 2013)
  • "President Obama on Thursday signed a bill granting him — along with George W. Bush and future ex-presidents — lifetime Secret Service protection, reversing a 1990s law that limited post-presidency security." (Source)
  • This is the second time that Obama has sought to put Brennan at the helm of the CIA, and his confirmation process is likely to revisit old controversies over U.S. counterterrorism measures undertaken by the administrations of Obama and George W. Bush. (source)
  • "JON MEACHAM: It's a little worse than normal.  Because even though he was there, my sense is he doesn't particularly like people and politicians who don't like people are kinda in the wrong business."' (source)
He betrayed the people who supported him the most:
Obama has one of the worst records on civil liberties of any President in American history:
  • James Risen: "I think this administration has been the most secretive since the Nixon administration..." - Reliable Sources
  • Obama Quietly Signs The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" Into Law - Source, 12/16
  • "It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined – in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general." - Source
  • Obama behaves like a centrist who leans tentatively left on certain social programs but boldly right on military force and civil liberties. His supporters, who have watched him duplicate and codify some of the Bush administration’s most damaging civil liberties violations, are now reduced to wishful thinking that an authentic Obama will soon step forward and return the country to the constitutional footing that was abandoned after 9/11. - Source: TheNation
  • A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the US military, the CIA, the NSA and the like. While it has launched an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.” (source)
  • "President Obama has weakened two branches of our government in favor of the third, which is currently his executive branch that has secret negotiations with 11 other nations, some of which are brutal regimes.Allowing foreign investors (aka corporations) to bypass our courts and sue the U.S. government (aka the taxpayers) for money damages before secret outside tribunals is considered unconstitutional by many, including Alan Morrison, a constitutional law specialist and litigator now at George Washington University Law School.  (Source: Ralph Nader)
His administration has been corporate friendly
  • In a slap in the face to fishermen, Tribes, environmental justice advocates, conservationists and family farmers, President Obama on Friday signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act into law with its environmentally destructive Big Ag rider sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). (source)
"The Intellectual dishonesty of Barack Obama" - Ron Fournier
  • "Yes, the GOP is obstinate. We get it. But assigning the White House some blame is no false equivalence."
  • "But it's my belief that Obama has overstated his obstacles to success on taxes, immigration, climate change and other issues. The candidate of unbridled optimism in 2008 is now cynical, bowed and nearly beaten – a leader whose excuse for failure amounts to, I can't lead because Republicans won't let me. By the way, that is not a conservative talking point; it's rooted in dozens of conversation I've had in the past 17 months with Democrats."
  • "Sargent makes a reasonable point. However, Democrats had control of both chambers of Congress when Obama took office in 2009, and most voters weren't happy with the result. Furthermore, Sargent's prescription for a better state of politics is exactly what's wrong with the system. "Winning elections" is all the matters in Washington. Obama promised better."
  • "Rarer still is one side 100 percent right, which is why Obama is guilty of false purity. Obama's intellectual dishonesty has prevented him from learning on the job, which is what's required of great presidents – the kind who overcome obstacles that others whine about."

A Failed President:
  • Obama had an average job approval rating under 50% during his tenure in the White House. That ranks him below both Bush presidents, and even Nixon.
  • "It's no wonder, then, that despite millions of jobs being added under President Barack Obama and an economy that looks good on paper, many voters who felt left out of the recovery turned out for Donald Trump. "An economy that fails to deliver growth for half of its people for an entire generation is bound to generate discontent with the status quo and a rejection of establishment politics," Saez, Piketty, and fellow economist Gabriel Zucman recently wrote in a post for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Trump tapped into that..." (source - 12/2016)
  • For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year — a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. (12/2016)
  • "Big Failures"
    • "Empowering GOP extremists."; "Expanding the national security state."; "Expanding charter schools."; "Coddling corporate America. "; "Political reform obstructionist."
  • "Big Incompletes"
    • "Addressing economic inequality."; "Comprehensive immigration reform."; "Lessening gun violence in America."; "Racist policing and police violence."; "Racist policing and police violence."; "Getting out of the Middle East’s wars."
  • Obama expanded the Afghanistan War now he's abandoning the country to the Taliban. Those are same people who we overthrew because they harbored al Qaeda?
He betrayed his party and country by supporting TPP
Terrorism has Skyrocketed:
  • Vision of Humanity also notes in its 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI), that, “the last decade has seen a historic decline in world peace. This interrupts the long term improvements in peace since World War II.” The 2016 GPI depressingly states that, “the number of yearly incidents has almost tripled since 2011 and the number of deaths has increased to over 30,000.” (source)
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