Few Americans beneath the 1% have benefited much from
Obama’s seven years in office. The absence of tangible gains for non-affluent
Americans is especially glaring for African Americans, who turned out for Obama
in record numbers in 2008 and 2012. Obama’s race helped motivate millions of
voters (including droves of liberal white voters) to mark ballots of him with
little or any regard for his power-serving record. Obama has barely lifted a finger
as president to confront the nation’s profoundly entrenched institutional
racism.
Black median family income under Obama has fallen by one
fifth. Black home ownership has declined and the Black-white wealth gap has
risen. In 2009, white households were seven times richer than black households.
Now, white households are eight times wealthier. Deep and deadly racial bias
remains endemic across the nation’s giant, globally unmatched criminal
(in)justice system of mass surveillance, arrest, imprisonment, and felony
branding.
Frantz Fanon wrote in his book, 'Black Skin, White Masks', “is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.”
Who can forget his mega bailout and his ongoing political
and fiscal protection of the leading, parasitic financial institutions that
crashed the economy and crafted a business-rule-as-usual “recovery” for profits
over people. Obama has had a long record of lending assistance to the rich and
powerful, championing TPP and TTIP. We all remember the Affordable Care Act, a
blatant negation of longstanding majority U.S. support for national
single-payer health insurance. Obama has defended corporate insurance and
pharmaceutical oligopolies that regularly threw millions of American lives by
the wayside of market calculation, causing enormous disruptive harm and death
for the populace
New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar wrote after extensive
interviews with candidate Obama in May of 2007, “Obama is deeply conservative.”
MacFarquhar cited as an example of this reactionary sentiment Obama’s
reluctance to embrace single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model.
Obama administration was staffed by Wall Street agents who would
give the nation what the liberal columnist William Greider memorably called “a
blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They have watched,”
Greider wrote, “Washington run to rescue the very financial interests who
caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to
spend – when the right people want it” And little to spend on the rest of us,
the wrong people, soon to be known as “the 99%,” left to ask “where’s my
bailout?”
On December 10, 2009, Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Peace prize? The same day 12 civilians were killed by U.S. Special Forces during
a late night raid. “Why are they giving Obama a peace medal?” another village
resident asked. “He claims to want to bring security to us but he brings only
death.”
In the Afghan village of Bola Boluk, where a U.S. bombing killed
dozens of civilians the previous spring. “He doesn’t deserve the award,” a
young woman said. “He bombed us and left us with nothing, not even a home.”
While Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed
“regret” about the loss of innocent life, neither she nor Obama would issue an
apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilians.
The United States, Obama has said both as a U.S. Senator and as president,
should not apologize for its “mistakes”. This, he explains, is because the
United States is “an enormous force for good in the world,” one that prefers to
“look forward,” not “backwards.” Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s reported in
their book “Double Down: Game Change 2012”, the President once joked to his
aides that, thanks to the drone weapon, “it turns out I’m really good at
killing people.”
All this carnage came courtesy of a Nobel Peace laureate.
Clinton is cut from the same cloth,
representing Wall St interests. She plays the race card by accusing
Sanders of being racially incorrect by daring to criticize Obama. She adds the
gender card labeling the opposition as “angry white male Berniebros.”
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