Egregiously off path of a great nation’s promise

WSWS political analyst Joseph Kishore pens “Obama’s legacy”

Excerpting, editing, brief comment by 

Carolyn Bennett

I know of no principled, law-abiding leader or citizen who aspires to this epitaphic litany

Ordering the assassination of a U.S. citizen without due process

Former constitutional law professor his initial job was with a CIA-linked corporation, the first president in U.S. history to boast openly of executing a U.S. citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) without judicial review. More than any other, his administration has sought to institutionalize and bureaucratize extra-judicial state killing, presiding over weekly meetings and the drawing up of ‘kill lists’ to select targets for U.S. drone missiles.

 

Vastly expanding the global police state spying apparatus

The Edward Snowden revelations expose a spying apparatus that operates without constraint, monitoring the communications of virtually every person on the planet.

Criminalizing those who reveal government crimes

The Obama government’s attitude toward democratic rights is reflected in the fate of those who exposed illegal state actions: Bradley Manning’s in prison, Julian Assange’s trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain, and Edward Snowden’s forced into exile in Russia and facing death threats from U.S. officials.

Yet the administration adamantly opposes prosecution of government officials who ordered torture and committed war crimes.

Waging war without limit

The Obama government continues its predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and sends countless drone missiles to pulverize targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries; in 2011 initiated a war in Libya to overthrow and murder head of state Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi; for the past two years, with its allies, financed and armed an Islamist-dominated opposition in Syria, igniting civil war that has taken the lives of tens of thousands and turned millions of Syrians into refugees.

 

The Obama government has carried out a ‘pivot to Asia’ to militarily encircle and economically and diplomatically undermine China. It has deliberately provoked regional tensions that, a hundred years after the eruption of World War I, threaten to unleash a new global conflict.

Overseeing, in the world’s documented history, the greatest transfer of wealth from poor people to rich people 

2008 bailout of the banks and the “quantitative easing” expanded by the Obama government saw corporate profits rise higher than ever — while wage growth dropped to its lowest level since the end of the Second World War. Wage collapse, for the first time in history, has resulted in the majority of U.S. food stamp recipients being of working age.

Giving a free pass to Wall Street criminals

Shielded, not a single top banker held accountable for the crimes committed and the disaster inflicted on the world’s populations. 

Carrying out a social counterrevolution, beginning with the decimation of health care for workers under Obamacare

Leading a relentless assault on every social program, … the Obama government boasts its lowering of domestic discretionary spending to its lowest share of the U.S. economy since the 1950s. 

J

oseph Kishore concludes, the Obama government “has operated with the support of the trade unions and the liberal and ‘left’ forces, wedded to identity politics that championed his election in 2008 as a ‘transformative’ event in American history.” This latest “State of the Union address will be aimed in large part at providing a phony ‘reformist’ image around which these forces can coalesce to bolster support for the Democratic Party and block the emergence of an independent movement of the working class.…

Perhaps [U.S. President Barack] Obama’s most significant legacy will be that his administration demonstrated to millions that the ruling class has absolutely nothing to offer; and that it presides over an economic system, capitalism, that is historically bankrupt.

“The conclusion that follows, and is beginning to be drawn by wider sections of the working class,” Kishore writes,  “is that it [the economic system] must be overthrown.”

Sources and notes

“Obama’s legacy: This evening, Barack Obama delivers his fifth State of the Union address, an annual political tradition that over the years has become a hollow ritual, with little or no relationship between the president’s words and the actual state of U.S. society. This year will be no different” by Joseph Kishore, January 28, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/28/pers-j28.html

Joseph Kishore is a Senior Political Analyst with the World Socialist Web Site and is affiliated with (National Secretary) and on the board of the Socialist Equality Party http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Joseph-Kishore/1309816212

The World Socialist Web Site, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, features daily news and analysis written from a socialist perspective, and commentary on the arts, culture, history, and politics. http://www.zoominfo.com/c/World-Socialist-Web-Site/302628879

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