Dismal Trajectories

Hypocrisy in Party Politics

“The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican” (1) -Barack Obama, 12/14/2012

1. Introduction

The era of Trump is disconcerting to those who cherish the values of an open and free society. Freedom of expression and assembly, as well as applicability of legal constraints on sitting presidents have been largely nullified (2, 3). The second Trump administration is reaching even more appalling extremes of executive overreach than the first— exhibiting quasi-fascistic levels of violent oppression, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and totalitarian surveillance of the subject population (4, 5). Trump has facilitated rule by the wealthy while cutting social safety nets and repealing protective regulations (6). There is no doubt that these trends reach back at least to the early years of the 21^st Century with the era of George W. Bush. But partisan loyalists on the blue side of the aisle often neglect to acknowledge this despotic trajectory running through the terms of their sacred centrist hero, Barack Obama. In some respects, the Obama era was setting the stage for the encroachment of plutocracy and authoritarian government that appears to be climaxing with the second term of Donald Trump. The roots of this oft-neglected episode extend to before Barack Obama’s first stint as executive in chief even began.

This monograph will expose the double standard of partisan loyalties by highlighting some of the most morally objectionable and antidemocratic choices made by the Obama White House. Many of Obama’s actions and policies would have been met with more vociferous denunciations by great swaths of Democratic voters had they ocurred under a Republican administration. We will begin by looking at Obama’s origins as a presidential candidate and examine how his cabinet was constructed. We will examine his evolving stance on healthcare as a function of his ascent through the stratified firmament of the American political system, from lowly state legislator to the chief executive of the federal government. Next, we will see how Obama’s economic team administered the “recovery” from the 2008 financial crisis and whose interests they secured. We will proceed by looking at his authoritarian record on civil liberties. Then an exploration of some of the most eggregious of the Obama administration’s foreign policy decisions will reveal an evolution in the American project to advance U.S. and European imperial interests through militarism and support for retrograde proxies. Finally, we will take an honest assessment of his contradictory record on climate issues and see that his reputation as a champion of environmentalism has a seldom-acknowledged dark side.

The purpose of this exposition is not to suggest that Obama was worse than Trump, which is clearly not the case. Instead, the point is to show that the moral standards behind objections to President Trump’s slide into dangerous extremes of regressive policies and authoritarian power ought to have inspired similar levels of antipathy and dissent against Obama’s most grievous transgressions. If one finds oneself making excuses for one president while passing harsh judgment on another for similarly offensive acts, beware the power of self-delusion that comes with cults of personality.

2. Transformative Hero or Establishment PR Man?

In 2009, Barack Obama blew into the Oval Office on a whirlwind of nationwide enthusiasm. He enjoyed immense popularity and a mandate for serious change that stemmed from the country’s disillusionment with the disastrous Bush years. Obama was able to craft a celebrity status based on the public’s desire for a fresh start and a new direction:

People obviously wanted change and hope, and Obama offered a spectacle of both since he was the first candidate of color and represented a generational change in leadership. . . . Thus, the possibility emerges that Obama was helped by his ethnicity which became a positive rather than negative factor. . . . In the 2000s, there were many anticipations of the yearning and acceptance of a figure like Barack Obama in television and Hollywood films, and one could argue that media culture helped prepare the conditions to elect a black president. The country was arguably made ready to think about a president of color and became familiar with black presidents from Hollywood film and television. . . . Following Obama’s election, there was no question of his unique celebrity status. Obama’s face appeared on the cover of every news magazine and his post-election vacation to Hawaii and return home to Chicago was covered by a paparazzi horde perhaps never before equaled. . . . While Obama’s traditionally short inaugural speech did not have the lofty and soaring rhetoric and crowd-pleasing chants of his most memorable discourses, its recognition of the severity of the crisis confronting the country, the need for fundamental change in politics and values from the Bush-Cheney administration, and determination to confront these problems satisfied the crowds and most serious observers. . . . Obama’s narrative from the beginning was bound up with the Obama spectacle, representing himself as a new kind of politician that embodied change and could bring together people of different colors, ethnicities, ages, regions, and political views. Obama effectively used media spectacle and new media to promote his candidacy and generally been consistent in his major themes and storylines . . . (7).

The radiant spectacle of the in-coming president, as media darling de jour, rode the wave of an ominous structural feature of American political culture: Celebrity visibility is often symbiotically linked to favorable promotion by dominant media corporations that serve the interests of one or another faction of the ruling class. Obama crafted a magnetic brand that fulfilled a widespread desire for something new and different. He was the perfect person to flourish in the American socio-politico-economic matrix—which is, to a large extent, a diasimocracy (i.e. rule by celebrity).

In practice, our access to information is heavily mediated. Capitalism and corporate dominance of information, and especially media, significantly structure and hinder what access people have to information. . . . The economic and political structures that mediate information are themselves mediated by the social gravity of celebrity. People are drawn to those who are famous and people assume that if one is famous, that makes one interesting, even fascinating. That something is popular doesn’t make it good. That many people believe something doesn’t make it true. This should be obvious, and yet, argumentum ad populum, the “argument to the people,” or argument from popularity, is a very common logical fallacy, and it is at work in the fascination with celebrity. . . . Under the power of the corporate media, diasimocracy is a means of dominance and control that restricts information and who has access to it. The corporate media exploits the human vulnerability to be fooled by the bandwagon fallacy, and the rule by the media benefits not the common interest but the interests of the celebrities and the corporate gatekeepers. The mass media is an information space ruled by celebrity. Those who try to get noticed in the mass media through merit are all but shut out. You can say that media corporations are motivated by money, as is the nature of corporate capitalism, but ask yourself what is driving the revenue that media corporations want to grab. That would be the rule by celebrities. The information space is a celebrity economy, and the corporations are simply exploiting that. This is the diasimocracy in which we live. It is a tyranny that benefits a few but not the common interest (8).

In sociological terms, there is an elective affinity between celebrity appeal and corporate media within the mixed capitalist context of 21st Century America. Obama’s public persona was a concatenation of desiderata that generated a perfect storm for political ascendancy. He became a feedback loop—a dust devil who grew into a tornado. Obama was the simulacrum of change craved by a popular discontent that thirsted for such a figure. In turn, he was lavished with more media attention, which amplified his appearance of legitimacy.

Candidate Barack Obama transformed himself from a mere political unknown in 2004 to a worldwide sensation by the time the general election started in 2008, galvanizing a massive amount of support by transforming his campaign into a movement. While many dismissed him for his lack of political experience, he turned that criticism into an asset by focusing on change and a new America. Obama’s campaign marketing strategy drew in people of all types, convinced them to support Obama, and most importantly got them to the polls on Election Day. The Obama campaign carefully crafted a strategy to achieve brand recognition, and then never strayed from their core message. . . . [T]he state of the economy put Obama in a prime position to criticize the Republican Party and to equate McCain to Bush, making a McCain presidency seem like just four more years of failed Bush policies. As an inexperienced first-term senator, Obama had to stand out in order to win. While he lacked years of political experience normally associated with presidential candidates, Obama won the country over with his personal qualities and his emphasis on hope and change. Obama came off as a personable, relatable, and youthful candidate, prepared to take on the heavy issues plaguing the country. Additionally, as a Washington outsider, community organizer, and a Democrat, it was easy for Obama to convince people that he represented change. . . . One of Obama’s most important personal qualities was his ability to inspire his audiences. He used his oratory skills “to mesmerize listeners, leaving them spellbound”. . . . In fact, the theme of change “became something greater than the sum of its parts,” as Obama continued to give hope to the people that change and a “New America” was coming their way. For instance, in his famous “Yes We Can” speech after the New Hampshire Primary, Obama asserted that “we know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices for change.” Here, Obama positioned himself as the candidate of the people, empowering them to join his campaign and to become a part of his movement for change. Obama’s rhetoric used patriotic symbols which got “Americans to care about this country, to want to believe in this country, to regain hope and faith in this country, and to believe we are more alike than we are different with a common destiny and a core set of values. . . . The Obama campaign focused on appealing to the youth because they knew his message could capture the hearts of young voters who ready for change. . . . Thus, two important factors were at play in 2008: more young voters voted in general and the majority of young voters decided to support Obama. The youth came out to support for Obama for many reasons. One of the top reasons was the economy, as millennials were particularly familiar with financial difficulties in 2008. The youth was dealing with more college debt than ever before and more than a quarter of young voters lacked health care coverage, a rate twice as high as the rest of the population. Additionally, when the financial crisis hit in 2008, many young voters were worried about staying afloat during the first years of their financial independence. Obama understood these struggles and marketed himself as the candidate to represent the struggles of the youth. . . . Frustrations with the nation’s continued involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the effects of a crippling economy prompted young voters to come out to the polls like never before. Young voters were looking for a fresh and new perspective, one that matched their modern and liberal outlook on life. . . . [H]e gave voters a positive feeling; he made them feel part of large and important movement; he made them feel as though they themselves were part of the hope and change (9).

But as we will see, Obama made the Faustian decision to court the moneyed interests while encouraging the ordinary citizenry to project their wildest dreams of “hope and change” unto his shiny veneer as political savior. Thus, his fame was boosted by The Establishment. Obama commanded a disarming charisma that was useful to the power elite. Once he edged out a primary election victory over Hillary Clinton, the path for his rise to power was cleared. Before the general election, his cabinet was being quietly assembled behind the scenes with the help of his transition team leader, John Podesta—founder of a think tank called the Center for American Progress (CAP):

CAP’s parroting of the Democratic Party line reflects not only the collapse of the old Democratic New Deal coalition, which at least gave some voice to labor unions and the poor, but also the collapse of radical journalism. . . . A review of CAP’s research track record shows that the group’s work is dictated by two simple mainsprings: its obvious and overwhelming fealty to the Democratic Party, and the pursuit of corporate cash. For evidence of the former, one need look no further than the frenetically revolving door that connects the think tank and the Obama administration. At least forty CAP staffers have taken administration jobs since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, and at least eight administration officials moved to CAP after leaving their government posts. White House visitor logs show hundreds of meetings between CAP staffers and administration officials; CAP leaders Podesta and Tanden, not surprisingly, are among the most frequent White House visitors.

One former CAP staffer described “total synchronization” between the administration and the think tank, which he said routinely allowed Team Obama to vet reports prior to publication. . . . Another former staffer offered a somewhat more generous interpretation of the group’s tight alliance with the business wing of the Democratic Party. “Corporate influence is a huge part of American politics,” he said. “CAP is interested in politically achievable policy, and if no one is going to profit from it, it is not going to be achievable.” Translation: CAP is going to advance a self-styled progressive policy agenda by greeting the steady creep of plutocratic rule with a variation of “Everybody into the pool!”

It’s therefore no surprise that the other plank of the CAP research agenda—the eager acquisition of greater corporate backing—commands an increasing share of the group’s efforts. There’s little functional difference between the Democratic Party and the corporate world when it comes to running campaigns and elections; why should the promotion of policy debate be any different? In 2007, CAP launched the Business Alliance, which is a Membership Rewards–style program for big donors. Though CAP refuses to release any of these donors’ names, I obtained various lists (as I first disclosed in The Nation), and they have included Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Wal-Mart, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, GE, General Motors, Amgen, Pfizer, and Verizon (10).

It should be no surprise that the process by which Obama’s appointees were chosen set the tone for his pro-status quo style of governance:

The most important revelation in the WikiLeaks dump of John Podesta’s emails has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton. The messages go all the way back to 2008, when Podesta served as co-chair of President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. And a month before the election, the key staffing for that future administration was almost entirely in place, revealing that some of the most crucial decisions an administration can make occur well before a vote has been cast.

Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup email address. He attached three documents: a list of women for top administration jobs, a list of non-white candidates, and a sample outline of 31 cabinet-level positions and who would fill them. “The lists will continue to grow,” Froman wrote to Podesta, “but these are the names to date that seem to be coming up as recommended by various sources for senior level jobs.”

The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.

This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted.

. . . Many already suspected that Froman, a longtime Obama consigliere, did the key economic policy hiring while part of the transition team. We didn’t know he had so much influence that he could lock in key staff that early, without fanfare, while everyone was busy trying to get Obama elected (11).

What is the significance of a Citigroup functionary playing such an important role in shaping the future Democratic administration? A peek into the ethos of this milieu will give us the answer: A notorious leaked 2005 Citigroup memo that circulated to their wealthiest clients (not intended for broad public attention) reveals the institution’s celebration of the increasing economic inequality in the United States:

In early September we . . . introduced the idea that the U.S. is a plutonomy—a concept that generated great interest from our clients. . . . We will posit that: 1) the world is dividing into two blocs—the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. . . . In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie. . . . [T]he top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. . . . To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe)—the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together. . . . If we are right, that the rise of income inequality, the rise of the rich, the rise of plutonomy, is largely to blame for these “perplexing” global imbalances. Surely, then, it is the collapse of plutonomy, rather than the collapse of the U.S. dollar that we should worry about to bring an end to imbalances. In other words, we are fretting unnecessarily about global imbalances. . . . There are rich consumers, and there are the rest. The rich are getting richer, we have contended, and they dominate consumption. As the rich have been getting richer, so too stocks associated with the rich, have performed exceptionally well. . . . If Plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well. (12).

Citigroup’s values (and presumably those of its peers in big finance) are clearly reflected in the “it gets better” admission. The parenthetical subordinate clause (i.e. “or worse, depending on your political stripe”) suggests that the authors did not identify with this more humane perspective (i.e., that radical disparities in wealth and economic power are bad). Presumably, the assessment that the U.S. is a plutonomy “generated great interest” from the wealthiest inner sanctum of Citigroup’s clientele for the predictable reason that they welcomed it. So, a multinational investment bank that revels in the burgeoning American plutonomy was given the monumental privilege of coordinating critical staffing decisions for the incoming Democratic administration.

The consequences of this deference to plutocracy rippled out from the earliest days of the administration whose true character often belied the lofty intentions (tempered by pragmatic necessity) enunciated in Obama’s graceful orations to the American public. When contrasted with the policy decisions of his administration, Obama’s rhetorical flights (“Yes we can!”) begin to look like more like the reassuring words of a smooth salesman who inspires confidence while cunningly manipulating the customer into a bad decision: “[I]t is evident that Obama failed to bring the ‘change’ he so masterfully convinced the American people to believe in. As Obama proclaimed during the campaign, ‘let me be clear, this isn’t about ending the failed policies of the Bush years; it’s about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those policies’” (9). Given such a grandiose declaration, one would expect policy initiatives that actually reflected this fundamental push for systemic change. Yet, what is the evidence for this noble dedication to overhaul the “failed system in Washington that produces those [failed] policies”? How compatible is this seemingly progressive dictum to the Obama campaign’s operative ideology (i.e. “Corporate influence is a huge part of American politics. . . . [I]f no one is going to profit from it, it is not going to be achievable.”)? If the a priori criterion for “politically acheivable policy” was corporate profitability, then the administration imposed arbitrary limitations on itself and guaranteed the perpetuation of corporatocracy.

3. Healthcare

Take, for instance, Obama’s approach to healthcare. In 2003 when speaking to a group from organized labor (the AFL-CIO), the state senator unequivocally supported the institution of a single-payer universal system without qualification:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That's what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we've got to take back the White House, we've got to take back the Senate, and we've got to take back the House (13).

Interestingly, Obama’s party enjoyed control of Congress for part of his first term: “Did President Obama have ‘total control’ of Congress? Yes, for 4 entire months. And it was during that very small time window that Obamacare was passed in the Senate with 60 all-Democratic votes” (14). Had he been laser focused on passing an already-drafted single-payer bill (e.g. The Conyers bill or Ted Kennedy’s Medicare for All Act), it seems likely that it could have been rushed through the legislative machine over the heads of lobbyists. This was a real possibility since the Democrats dominated Congress and 69% of registered Democrats favored such a reform in 2009 (15). Given the political capital he enjoyed early into his administration (especially among the energized youth voters), Obama could have used the bully pulpit to mobilize public pressure against any reluctant Democratic legislators (including the majority whip) who were reticent to vote for the bill. Sadly, this was not to be, as Obama’s secretary of health and human services expressed other commitments: “As lawmakers on Capitol Hill hammer out legislation to overhaul the nation's health care system this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says that a single-payer option is not on the table” (16). Notice that Kathleen Sebelius was one of the cabinet picks on the list from Citigroup. Coincidence?

When talking to labor, Obama claimed the only limitation and prerequisite for enacting single-payer legislation was gaining the presidency and a Democratic-majority congress. However, in the years leading up to the Oval Office, he walked back his strident and unapologetic support for it. Eventually, he would claim that it was not feasible and that he only recommended a single-payer program if you could build a system “from scratch” (13). Yet, there are no signs of any such hesitancy in his 2003 speech to the AFL-CIO: “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.” If you think a single-payer system is a quixotic pipe dream, then you are not truly a proponent of that reform—as Obama pretended to be. Obviously, a “from scratch” state of affairs was not a realistic expectation. So, Obama was telling an audience of blue-collar representatives what their base wanted to hear while not actually holding such policy convictions. In that case, his initial support of single-payer system was empty posturing that gave way to an industry-friendly position as his more grandiose political ambitions began to solidify. This transition away from single-payer tracked with his meteoric progression from state senate, to senate, to presidency. His nakedly opportunistic shift in policy preferences was not what the American public needed or deserved:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called “Obamacare,” may be the biggest insurance scam in history. The industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law. This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits. . . . This is what happens in a market-based system of health care. People get only the amount of health care they can afford, rather than what they need. The ACA takes our failed market-based system to a whole new level by forcing the uninsured to purchase private health plans and using the government to sell and subsidize them. . . . Sadly, most Americans are being manipulated into supporting the ACA and do not even know they are being bamboozled. . . . Of course, the Republicans attack Obamacare for partisan reasons. And they are often blatantly dishonest in their criticism. Their foundational claim, calling Obamacare socialized medicine, is the opposite of reality.

Throughout the winter and spring of 2009, the Obama administration gave the appearance of bringing all of the “stakeholders” together to work for health reform. The president held a White House Health Summit in March 2009, which included representatives from health insurance corporations, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. The only groups that were not included, until there was a threat of protest, were those who advocate for Medicare for all. The single-payer advocates did not speak, but the insurance spokesperson opened and closed the White House summit (17).

By the end of Obama’s second term, it was obvious that the ACA was inadequate. Its inferiority to the single-payer alternative was even more apparent as noted in this 2016 assessment by four medical doctors:

Unfortunately, the ACA falls short in terms of both universality and comprehensiveness. Fewer than half of America’s uninsured residents have gained coverage, and underinsurance remains ubiquitous. Employers seeking to restrain their health benefit costs have tripled deductibles since 2006, and the ACA’s excise tax on expensive “Cadillac” plans—recently postponed until 2020—is poised to accelerate this trend. Many of the estimated 11 million Americans who have purchased plans on the ACA’s exchanges face punishingly high copayments and deductibles, which average more than $5300 in Bronze plans. Such underinsurance often compromises access to care and financial well-being. In 2014, 36% of nonelderly adults skipped needed care because of cost (down from 41% in 2010), and more than half of all overdue debts on credit reports were medical.

A single-payer NHP, in contrast, would provide comprehensive coverage without copayments or deductibles to everyone in the country, replacing our current complex and wasteful patchwork of coverage. . . . Despite the ACA, many serious problems remain in American health care. Uninsurance and underinsurance endure, bureaucracy is growing, costs are likely to rise, and caring relationships take second place to the financial prerogatives of health insurers and providers. A single-payer NHP offers a salutary alternative, one that would at long last take the right to health care from the realm of political rhetoric to that of reality (18).

Continuing with Obama’s record on healthcare, the Public Option saga has a similar sequence: rhetorical commitment followed by cynical abandonment. This was supposed to be a health-insurance program administered by the federal government to provide an alternative for people who could not afford a corporate plan. A majority of Americans favored such a reform (19). As with single-payer, resistance to it was largely based on public and political misconceptions about deficit spending (20). The Public Option was also expected to provide the ancillary advantage of lowering the cost of private insurance through competitive market pressure.

The convincer for many who supported real health reform was “the Public Option.” The idea was that the law would force the uninsured to purchase insurance but would include the choice of a public health insurance plan. The public was told that this option would be more cost-effective than private insurance and, thus, less expensive, which would make it more attractive. Many were convinced that a public option would become a Medicare-for-all system, that it was a “back door” to single payer (17).

Unfortunately, the disappointing reality of Obama’s predilections reared its ugly head again:

Even while President Obama was saying that he thought a public option was a good idea and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare plan would include one, he had promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there would be no public option in the final bill (21).

One can reasonably argue that entering into secret, backroom deals to please industry interests was a "pragmatic" thing to do, notwithstanding how often Obama railed against exactly such transactions during his campaign (remember the I'll-put-all-health-care-negotiations-on-C-SPAN pledge?). One can also argue that the public option would never have gotten 60 votes even if Obama and the White House had pushed for it. But one cannot argue that the White House did push for it, or even that they wanted it, since it was part of their deal with industry and its lobbyists from the start that it would not be in the final bill (22).

Again, one wonders if the Public Option could have been included had the bully pulpit been exploited to rally public support and hold legislators’ feet to the fire, given that over half the country supported it at the time (23). Sadly, Obama showed no inclination to at least attempt to bypass and resist the entrenched industry interests.

What is the legacy of Obama’s vaunted healthcare “miracle”, the Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare)? What would one predict, given the process by which Obama’s cabinet was selected? The results do not seem to have been a net benefit:

Most scholars and analysts conclude that, particularly when fully accounting for the various government subsidies for individual insurance coverage, the ACA significantly increased individual market premiums (24).

Has Obamacare done better than Romneycare in terms of ending medical bankruptcy? Both plans dramatically expanded coverage to millions of people, but as with Romneycare, patients and their families are still struggling to pay their medical bills with Obamacare (25).

Despite gains in coverage and access to care from the ACA, our findings suggest that it did not change the proportion of bankruptcies with medical causes (26).

In fact, Obama’s conciliatory appeasement of the healthcare industry has had a transformative effect on the fundamental structure of the marketplace:

Obama had promised on the campaign trail that he would sign a universal health care bill into law, and one that would “cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year." In 2004, the average insured family of four paid $11,192 in health care costs, by 2022 that amount was $30,260. That increase in cost for a family of four is the price of a small car, every single year. And that’s because prices have gone up, and not because there are more doctors, beds, or care. While Obamacare did expand access, it didn’t address the key problem in the U.S. health care system—monopoly power. So prices kept rising. And still are. . . . After the passage of the ACA in 2010, health insurance companies pursued a variety of strategies to increase profits. . . . [O]nce the government capped insurer profits at 15% of insurance revenue, these firms had a different incentive. They sought higher revenue and higher spending, instead of cost controls. But also, they wanted to buy providers so they could get access to that other 85% of the revenue. What better way to make money than by being both the buyer and the seller? . . . Payers could buy providers, and then send revenue to related businesses. . . . There have been hundreds of acquisitions since the ACA was signed, and the American health care system is now a whole different beast than it was. Talking about insurers, or PBMs, or drug store chains, or doctor practices in isolation, simply doesn’t make sense anymore. We are dominated by health care conglomerates (27).

Ironically, Obama was circumspect about the prospect of radical change that a single-payer reform would precipitate, yet his more “moderate” centrist approach ended up being just as transformative but in the opposite direction—favoring monopolistic profiteering over adequately helping the average citizen. Evidently, attending to the necessary anti-trust regulatory changes that could have forestalled this vertical consolidation trend was of little interest to the Obama administration. Had the Obama administration been committed to push for a single-payer system, the discoveries of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) demonstrate that not only could it have been paid for without raising taxes, but a safety net for employees of the for-profit system could have also been funded to transition the nation into an era of universal healthcare with minimal disruption (20). Once one discovers who crafted the ACA bill, it becomes no surprise that the outcomes have been as bad as they are:

When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Fowler, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. . . . What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider (before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus' top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office, Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, and Young. . . . [T]he bill's mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well". . . . More amazingly still, when the Obama White House needed someone to oversee implementation of Obamacare after the bill passed, it chose . . . Liz Fowler. That the White House would put a former health insurance industry executive in charge of implementation of its new massive health care law was roundly condemned by good government groups as at least a violation of the "spirit" of governing ethics rules and even "gross", but those objections were, of course, brushed aside by the White House. She then became Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy at the National Economic Council. Now, [. . .] Fowler is once again passing through the deeply corrupting revolving door as she leaves the Obama administration to return to the loving and lucrative arms of the private health care industry. . . . The pharmaceutical giant that just hired Fowler actively supported the passage of Obamacare through its membership in the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobby. Indeed, PhRMA was one of the most aggressive supporters—and most lavish beneficiaries - of the health care bill drafted by Fowler. . . (28).

Again, does putting an industry representative (who drafted industry-friendly legislation) at the helm of administering said new law sound like the doing of a party interested in remaking “the failed system in Washington”? Perhaps the healthcare arena is a special exception to an otherwise progressive administration.

4. Economic “Recovery”

Who did Obama primarily help after the great financial collapse of 2008? After all, this was an opportunity for his administration to fulfill the “Hope and Change” motto that he so forthrightly ran on. Any guess how it turned out?

[President Obama] must also own this tragedy: the dispossession of at least 5.2 million US homeowner families, the explosion of inequality, and the largest ruination of middle-class wealth in nearly a century. Though some policy failures can be blamed on Republican obstruction, it was within Obama’s power to remedy this one—to ensure that a foreclosure crisis now in its eighth year would actually end, with relief for homeowners to rebuild wealth, and to preserve Americans’ faith that their government will aid them in times of economic struggle.

Faced with numerous options to limit the foreclosure damage, the administration settled on a policy called HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program, which was entirely voluntary. Under HAMP, mortgage companies were given financial inducements to modify loans for at-risk borrowers, but the companies alone, not the government, made the decisions on whom to aid and whom to cast off. . . . The program arguably created more foreclosures than it stopped, as it put homeowners through a maze of deception designed mainly to maximize mortgage industry profits. More about how HAMP worked, or didn’t, in a moment.

HAMP cannot be justified by the usual Obama-era logic, that it represented the best possible outcome in a captured Washington with Republican obstruction and supermajority hurdles. Before Obama’s election, Congress specifically authorized the executive branch, through the $700 billion bank bailout known as TARP, to “prevent avoidable foreclosures.” And Congress pointedly left the details up to the next president. Swing senators like Olympia Snowe (Maine), Ben Nelson (Nebraska) and Susan Collins (Maine) played no role in HAMP’s design. It was entirely a product of the administration’s economic team, working with the financial industry, so it represents the purest indication of how they prioritized the health of financial institutions over the lives of homeowners.

Obama and his administration must live with the consequences of that original sin, which contrasts with so many of the goals they claim to hold dear. “It’s a terrible irony,” said Damon Silvers, policy director and special counsel for the AFL-CIO, who served as deputy chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. “This man who represents so much to people of color has presided over more wealth destruction of people of color than anyone in American history” (29).

It is noteworthy that key figures of Obama’s economic team who presided over this travesty (Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers) came from the Citigroup list of personnel recommendations. Unsurprisingly, the fraud that created the crisis went unpunished by Obama and his Citigroup-vetted administrators:

[T]he Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.

What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.

Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions (30).

Are we noticing a pattern yet? One wonders how the loyal Democrats who so blithely passed over this massive crime against the American people would have reacted had the perpetrators been the Bush or Trump administrations. The fact that it was forgiven and forgotten by so many on team blue is a testament to the strength of Obama’s carefully managed cult of personality. Ever cognizant of shaping his legacy, Obama shamelessly attempted to revise his record to appear more in favor of the little guy and less a willful servant of big finance:

Former President Barack Obama wants you to now believe that he was actually mad about giant Wall Street handouts that he voted for, then arm twisted lawmakers to expand—and then rescinded when some of the money might have gone to help homeowners. Obama’s foray into pure fiction is not only absurd—it is a reminder that history can repeat itself if we allow reality to be memory-holed. . . . During the 2008 campaign, he made a public spectacle of leaving the campaign trail to cast a Senate vote for the no-strings-attached bank bailout. . . . Then, Obama held a White House meeting with bank CEOs to tell them “help me help you.” He used his bully pulpit to stop his own party's efforts to prevent the bailout from subsidizing massive bonus payouts to AIG. And when some of that bank bailout money might have been redirected into helping Americans who were getting thrown out of their homes, Obama signed legislation to rescind his own authority to spend the cash on such a priority. . . . [W]e are led to believe that Wall Street was not enthusiastically rewarded for destroying the global economy—and we are asked to forget that the whole grotesque orgy of avarice and corruption ended up setting the conditions for the rise of the Tea Party and then Donald Trump. Indeed, Obama seems to imply that Trump’s election was a weird anomaly rather than a product of a backlash. . . . Somehow, we are all supposed to forget that the Obama era was defined by one of the largest drops in workers’ share of corporate income in the modern history of the United States. . . . That decline was punctuated by huge Democratic electoral losses—which strongly suggests not coincidence, but causation. It suggests that the Obama-led Democratic Party kicking the working class in the face while enriching finance billionaires prompted a political backlash that ended up (misguidedly) benefiting the GOP (31).

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Obama assumed the role of public relations tool for Wall St. Former bank regulator, white collar crime expert and professor of economics and law, William K. Black, made this observation about Obama at the end of his presidency:

Senator Obama was accomplishing something unprecedented. He was not only raising more money from Wall Street than the Republicans were, he was doing so in the context of a nomination battle with (then) Senator Hillary Clinton. The Clintons were both preeminent leaders of the “New Democrats.” They crafted the coalition of conservative (on economics and national security issues) Democrats. The New Democrat’s apparatus was funded overwhelmingly by Wall Street and President Bill Clinton was famous for championing the three “de’s”—financial deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization. Even if Wall Street was willing to reverse decades of contributing primarily to Republicans, why would they choose Senator Obama over their great ally, Senator Hillary Clinton? Tom predicted that Obama would win the nomination and the election—and would reject emulating President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and its transformation of finance. All three predictions proved accurate. . . . President Obama exemplifies the problem. There are zero prosecutions of any Wall Street official who played even a modest role leading the three fraud epidemics that caused the financial crisis. The pinnacle of Obama’s denunciation, in eight years, was that he opposed some unspecified actions by some unidentified “fat cat bankers.”

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”

Obama made that milk toast non-denunciation exactly once—in 2009—and never again roused. Instead, Obama’s comments emphasized (without the benefit of investigation) that any problems caused by Wall Street were probably simply mistakes. . . . Obama was the first President in over 60 years to have both the ability to achieve fundamental financial reforms analogous to the New Deal and the political need for change arising from public demand to achieve such a reform. But Dodd-Frank compelled nothing fundamental. It did not mandate that the regulators transform Wall Street’s corrupt culture. The most you can say is that it provided increased authority to allow the Obama administration to act against that culture should it muster the will to do so. . . . Further, the Obama administration has not taken any fundamental action to end the corrupt culture of Wall Street. It has not prosecuted. It has not forced the systemically dangerous institutions that pose global systemic risks to shrink to the point that they no longer pose a global systemic risk. It has not fundamentally changed executive and professional compensation even though they are intensely criminogenic. Obama has appointed a series of weak regulatory leaders. Yes, Dodd-Frank allowed Obama and his regulators to take more effective actions. But Obama and those he appointed have lacked the will to even try to make fundamental changes and restore the rule of law to Wall Street. Wall Street remains rigged and its central business strategy remains fraud and ripping off its customers (32).

It is no surprise, then, that his relationship with organized labor failed to live up to his professed principles as presidential candidate:

American unions lost half a million members while Obama occupied the White House, even as America’s workforce grew by more than 9 million workers.

At a rally in 2007, Obama said if American workers were being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain, as president he’d put on comfortable shoes and walk the picket line with them. That never happened. Obama did and said nothing when Wisconsin stripped 175,000 public employees of collective bargaining rights, or when Michigan and three other states passed anti-union right-to-work laws. And he said nothing when 30,000 teachers went on strike in 2012—against Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff.

Obama fought tooth and nail for his NAFTA-style Trans-Pacific trade pact (it failed) but kept his powder dry when it came to raising the federal minimum wage, still at $7.25 after eight years of his presidency. He never lifted a finger to help with labor’s top priority, the game-changing labor legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made it easier for workers to unionize and get a first contract. In fact, Obama aides told labor to cool its heels on the bill until after Congress passed health care legislation. By the time that was done, Democrats had lost their filibuster-proof Senate supermajority (33).

Obama surely doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact that the supposed recovery over which he presided was in large part the emergence of the “gig economy” as a 2016 joint Harvard-Princeton study of the American workforce exposed:

The findings point to a significant rise in the incidence of alternative work arrangements in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015. The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements—defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers—rose from 10.1 percent in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015. The percentage of workers hired out through contract companies showed the sharpest rise increasing from 0.6 percent in 2005 to 3.1 percent in 2015. Workers who provide services through online intermediaries, such as Uber or Task Rabbit, accounted for 0.5 percent of all workers in 2015. About twice as many workers selling goods or services directly to customers reported finding customers through offline intermediaries than through online intermediaries (34).

A new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton indicates that 94% of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were temporary positions. The study shows that the jobs were temporary, contract positions, or part-time "gig" jobs in a variety of fields. Female workers suffered most heavily in this economy, as work in traditionally feminine fields, like education and medicine, declined during the era. The research by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that the proportion of workers throughout the U.S., during the Obama era, who were working in these kinds of temporary jobs, increased from 10.7% of the population to 15.8%. Krueger, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was surprised by the finding. The disappearance of conventional full-time work, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work, has hit every demographic. “Workers seeking full-time, steady work have lost,” said Krueger (35).

While not completely under his ability to control, this unfortunate evolution of the economy was midwifed by Obama, who made no substantive moves to reverse it. It stands as one president’s episode within a longer trajectory to ever-increasing levels of wealth inequality that continued throughout his tenure:

These trends show that wealth has become more concentrated and more people are deemed by the government to be poor. . . . In 2008, Obama spoke of hope for a better future. If the wealthy hoped for a greater share of the nation’s wealth, their hope was fulfilled while the wealth conditions of most everyone else have declined. . . . While wealth inequality has increased, the number of people living in poverty has also generally increased. . . . As of 2014, some six years after the beginning of the recession and during a period of “recovery,” the rate of poverty remains high at 14.8%. In fact, according to these government statistics, the rate of poverty for every year Obama has been president is higher than it was for every year during George W. Bush’s presidency. . . . What is most disturbing is the percent of the population living in extreme poverty, or having an income at 50% or lower than the poverty level. Every year that Obama has been president, the percent of the population at that level of income has been over 6% and, as of 2014, consisted of over 20 million people. . . . [D]uring the time Obama has been president and statistics are available, 2009-2014, the population has grown by 11.98 million. . . . Yet, the number of people deemed to be living in poverty has not declined, but has increased by more than 3 million. . . . If, in 2008, one hoped for the presence of more poor people and for a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, so far, during Obama’s presidency, these hopes have been fulfilled (36).

Considering who Obama entrusted to oversee the “recovery”, is it any wonder that inequality continued to increase as the gig economy filled the vacuum left by the wreckage of the 2008 financial collapse? President Obama’s indignant cry, “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street” (32), is exposed as more hollow posing when you recall his campaign effectively charged a Citigroup executive with staffing his cabinet. The fact that Citigroup “would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis” (11) makes it apparent that Obama did run for office to help a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall St. His public lamentations to the contrary were purely an exercise in legacy management. It comes as no surprise that the idea of nationalizing Citigroup was dismissed as a politically explosive move that could cause a run on the banks—even when the percentage of Americans who had “very little confidence” in banks was increasing (37). Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted the Obama Administration had an ideological committment that kept bank nationalization off the table after the financial crisis: “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system” (38). The system Geithner and Obama chose to preserve included impunity for reckless behavior and white collar crime in the financial sector.

5. Transparency, Whistleblowers and Civil Liberties

How did the Obama Administration do with Civil Liberties? Perhaps this is one area in which he was able to stand up for liberal values:

At first, it seemed as though the new president was fully prepared to take the high road. He immediately signed an executive order banning torture and detention by the CIA. This move effectively shuttered the secret prisons the CIA was running to conduct its own foreign policy. And, with a stroke of the pen, he closed Guantanamo, the very not-secret place where all manner of abuses have taken place.

Unfortunately, Congress pushed back against the Guantanamo closure, forcing the administration to opt for Plan B by releasing the detainees in dribs and drabs. The Senate eventually voted to ban torture earlier this year, codifying the president’s order. But because the president didn’t fully repudiate the legal memorandum that authorized the torture programs—the “gloves come off” Memorandum of Notification (MON) of September 17, 2001—he left open the possibility that the United States could again use such extreme tactics.

Indeed, the administration hasn’t revised or removed Appendix M, which authorizes a variety of abusive techniques and which the Bush administration added to the Army’s interrogation manual. Also, exploiting the same arguments used in the notorious MON, the administration expanded drone strikes, which eliminated the need for torture by eliminating the suspects altogether. . . . But one of the most perplexing paradoxes of the administration has been its attitude toward whistleblowers. Surely if Obama the candidate was willing to take these moral positions on torture and secrecy, he would embrace all the people in government who risked their livelihoods to do the right thing. And yet the Obama administration has been ruthless in its prosecution of whistleblowers. . . . John Kiriakou, Jesselyn Radack, and Tom Drake all tried to address impropriety through the proper channels. John Kiriakou raised his concerns about torture within the CIA, Tom Drake alerted higher-ups within the NSA about illegal surveillance, and Jesselyn Radack communicated her discomfort about the interrogation of the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh to her supervisor at the Justice Department. Frustrated by the lack of response—or, rather, by the very negative response—of the institutions where they worked, they risked everything to expose the misconduct. . . . [A]ll three whistleblowers paid very high prices for their courage. They lost their jobs. They found it extremely difficult to get new ones. They were threatened with legal action.

Kiriakou and Drake were even charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. Of the 10 cases of people charged under this act in U.S. history, the Obama administration is responsible for seven of them (including Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning). . . . What’s particularly disturbing about these cases is that the people responsible for the illegalities—the torturers and the officials who authorized illegal surveillance—have not been charged with anything.

Shortly after taking office, as journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Obama “decreed absolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush Department of Justice lawyers which authorized certain techniques.”

As for those who went beyond the lax rules of the DOJ lawyers, and who were responsible for the deaths of as many as 100 detainees, they too would eventually receive absolution. In 2012, the Justice Department wrapped up two last cases involving torture, involving the death of an Afghan detainee at a CIA prison near Kabul in one instance and an Iraqi detainee at Guantanamo in the other, without any convictions. Instead of throwing the book at the torturers and the handlers who enabled them, the Justice Department closed the book on the legal proceedings.

In May 2015, meanwhile, a federal court ruled that the NSA metadata collection was illegal. Thanks to Edward Snowden and subsequent revelations, we know that the extent of NSA surveillance goes well beyond metadata to truly mind-boggling operations, from TREASUREMAP’s mapping of the Internet connections of everyone on the planet to the agency’s depositing of malware in more than 50,000 locations around the world. But not a single person engaged in the violation of the civil rights of Americans in these programs has been punished.

The Obama administration justified this effective amnesty of all government officials involved in the “dark side”—from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney all the way down to the guys who did the waterboarding and administered the illegal data collection—as a way to focus on the future and not the past (39).

What accounts for this contrast?

[T]he Barack Obama who ran for president was a different person than the one who occupied the Oval Office. As soon as he entered the White House and received his first top-secret briefing, the president was ushered into a new fraternity. He was dazzled by the potential of raw executive power, the godlike ability to determine life and death, as when the president conducts a weekly meeting to review the “kill list” of drone targets.

The president, in other words, was initiated into what amounts to a cult of national security. The first rule of this cult is to preserve its existence at all costs. Those who threaten the cult are, like any apostates, to be dealt with as ruthlessly as possible. After all, cult members who break the law are still acting according to the principles of the cult; apostates, however, challenge the very legitimacy of the cult.

The world of checks-and-balances, of an executive branch bounded by Congress and the court system, is meaningless to the national security state. This “deep state” remains impervious to elections, partisan passions, congressional inquiries, and legal challenges. It’s not a conspiracy any more than the Vatican is a conspiracy. It’s simply an institution with an imperative: to survive.

Obama’s commitment to the preservation of the national security state can be seen in his approach to secrecy in general. “Despite Barack Obama’s promises of a more transparent government, 76.7 million documents were classified in 2010, compared with 8.6 million in 2001 and 23.4 million in 2008, the first and last years of George W. Bush’s administration,” writes Andy Greenberg in his book This Machine Kills Secrets.

Obama’s cult membership explains his fiscal commitment to keeping the national security state flush with a trillion dollars of annual funding. The administration has upped the “black budget” for non-military intelligence agencies from $50.4 billion in 2015 to a proposed $53.9 billion for 2016. It would be nice to be able to tell you how that money is apportioned to the NSA, the CIA, and so on. But the Obama administration has refused to disclose that information.

It also explains why the Obama administration has not only gone after whistleblowers but also the press. It targeted both James Rosen and James Risen, attempted to smear USA Today journalists digging into Pentagon propaganda, and spied on a variety of reporters (Ibid.).

Perhaps Obama’s cowardly acquiescence to the defense establishment and his assimilation into its authoritarian culture explains the reactionary hardline position he adopted against basic civil liberties:

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. . . . “President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war. “We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today” (40).

It was eventually revealed that Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) were violating Americans’ right to privacy through their abuse of surveillance powers:

The National Security Agency and FBI violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama administration by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules. . . . They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department’s national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016. . . . “Americans should be alarmed that the NSA is vacuuming up their emails and phone calls without a warrant,” said Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney in New York who helped pursue the FOIA litigation. “The NSA claims it has rules to protect our privacy, but it turns out those rules are weak, full of loopholes, and violated again and again.”. . . [T]he government admitted improperly searching the NSA’s foreign intercept data on multiple occasions, including one instance in which an analyst ran the same search query about an American “every workday” for a period between 2013 and 2014. There also were several instances in which Americans’ unmasked names were improperly shared inside the intelligence community without being redacted, a violation of the so-called minimization procedures that Obama loosened in 2011 that are supposed to protect Americans’ identity from disclosure when they are intercepted without a warrant (41).

It must be remembered that these two agencies (the NSA and FBI) fall under executive branch authority and, therefore, the president has oversight responsibility (including the ability to initiate change of leadership).

How did the Obama administration handle the right to freely assemble and peacefully protest? The Occupy movement emerged in the summer of 2011 in response to the increasingly egregious economic disparities following the 2007-8 financial collapse and the undemocratic influence of money in politics. Obama’s public statements indicate a clarity of comprehension on his part:

The president, speaking at a press conference, said he had heard about and seen television reports on the recent protests on Wall Street, and noted that "I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel."

"We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression - huge collateral damage throughout the country, all across main street. And yet, you are still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us in the situation in the first place," Mr. Obama told reporters. "I think people are frustrated” (42).

In contrast, his administration treated the protestors as enemies that evoked intense suspicion and surveillance—presumably because they represented a potential threat to the plutonomic status quo that Obama’s backers fervently wished to preserve:

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests following evictions of Occupy encampments across the nation. . . . The documents show coordination and intelligence monitoring by the DHS [Department of Homeland Security], the FBI, the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies of “Occupy-type” protests. . . . FBI documents revealed that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat, even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at Occupy protests. FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country (43).

Documents released show coordination between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector . . .” (44).

While the details remain murky, it is evident that Obama’s DHS and FBI struck an adversarial pose when it came to the Occupy movement: “[T]hroughout the materials, there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, American intelligence agencies really working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against” (45).

A declassified document revealed FBI knowledge of a plot to assassinate Occupy leaders:

An identified [redacted] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary. An identified [redacted] had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin Texas. [Redacted] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles (46).

While the redactions obfuscate the identities of the plotters, it does show that it was someone who “planned to gather intelligence . . . and obtain photographs”. This sounds like the work of law enforcement, private security operatives, or federal agents. Within the documents, no indication is given that the FBI intended to interfere or prevent the execution of this blatant act of terrorism, should it have proceeded:

Paul Kennedy, the National Lawyers Guild attorney in Houston who represented a number of Occupy Houston activists arrested during the protests, had not heard of the sniper plot, but said, “I find it hard to believe that such information would have been known to the FBI and that we would not have been told about it.” He then added darkly, “If it had been some right-wing group plotting such an action, something would have been done. But if it is something law enforcement was planning, then nothing would have been done. It might seem hard to believe that a law enforcement agency would do such a thing, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”

He adds, “The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED]” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists (47).

Without clarity on the identity of the potential perpetrators, this ominous sub-plot of the Occupy arc shows the antagonistic climate that existed towards the movement. What we know for sure is that state and coporate power rallied to control and squelch the grassroots movement:

Government documents released in December 2012 pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal FBI monitoring of what became known as the Occupy movement since at least August 2011, a month before the protests began. The FBI, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, local police, regional law enforcement "counterterrorism" fusion centers, and private security forces of major banks formed the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC) to collect and share information about, and to share plans to target and to arrest Occupy protesters. Banks met with the FBI to pool information about participants of the Occupy movement collected by corporate security, and the FBI offered to bank officials its plans to prevent Occupy events that were scheduled for a month later.

FBI officials met with New York Stock Exchange representatives on 19 August 2011, notifying them of planned peaceful protests. FBI officials later met with representatives of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Zions Bank about planned protests. The FBI used informants to infiltrate and monitor protests; information from informants and military intelligence units was passed to DSAC, which then gave updates to financial companies. Surveillance of protestors was also carried out by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. DSAC also coordinated with security firms hired by banks to target OWS leaders (48).

How different is this plain act of political repression (against a peaceful grassroots movement pushing for economic justice) from Trump’s more brazen deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to suppress anti-ICE protests in California? While the optics may not be equally stark, the anti-democratic substance of what happened is intolerably authoritarian in both the Occupy crackdown and the anti-ICE crackdown.

Following the dissolution and neutralization of Occupy, Obama signed off on further restrictions of the freedom of assembly, making public protest a more precarious endeavor:

When President Obama signed it on March 8, almost nobody seems to have cared. . . . [T]he law makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest. Period. It is a federal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison to protest anywhere the Secret Service might be guarding someone. For another, it’s almost impossible to predict what constitutes “disorderly or disruptive conduct” or what sorts of conduct authorities deem to “impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions. . . . The changes in Section 1752 thus really do matter because they permit those in power to relegate their detractors to perform their political speech in remote locations, far from the public and the press. They do so in the name of protecting the security of the government official, despite the fact that their actual motivation for doing so has everything to do with the message of their opponents. . . . It is tempting to dismiss the exile of protesters as a reasonable concession to security in what law enforcement would like you to believe is a new age of terrorism. After all, they will say, demonstrators are not being silenced; they are merely being denied access to the forum of their choice and the chance to amplify their own message by presenting it against the backdrop of the message they oppose. But that is precisely why we should be concerned. . . . [T]he presence of demonstrators at these events carries a powerful message in and of itself that cannot be delivered as effectively in any other place. Being permitted to deliver their message in the same forum and at the same time as the speaker they oppose highlights the passion and commitment that animates the protesters. It underscores the existence of dissent, which is precisely what those who would sanitize the space around high officials would have us forget (49).

On his way out of office, Obama further laid the groundwork for the authoritarian surveillance state:

President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people.

New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times.

That’s a huge and troubling shift in the way those intelligence agencies receive information collected by the NSA. Domestic agencies like the FBI are subject to more privacy protections, including warrant requirements. Previously, the NSA shared data with these agencies only after it had screened the data, filtering out unnecessary personal information, including about innocent people whose communications were swept up the NSA’s massive surveillance operations. . . . So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security (50).

These examples show that the Obama administration was willingly ramping up the security and surveillance state while chilling the possibilities of challenging it.

6. Foreign Policy

During the first year of his time in the White House, Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize (largely for his diplomatic overtures and humanitarian posturing)—before his actual polices had time to unfold and be fairly assessed. Perhaps the prestigious award was an exercise of wishful thinking intended to cajole the new leader of the free world to part with the catastrophic ways of his predecessors. To be fair, Obama exercised admirable restraint in his dealings with Syria during his second term. More significantly, some of this optimistic projection by the Norwegian Nobel Committee did come to fruition in 2015 with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in which Obama helped broker an agreement that forestalled Iran’s development of nuclear weapons (51).

Barring this laudable step towards denuclearization, how does the rest of Obama’s foreign policy stand up to moral scrutiny?

Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America’s grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing.

“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said in May 2013. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.”

But Obama leaves a very different legacy as he prepares to hand his commander-in-chief responsibilities to Donald Trump.

U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan (52).

The barbarity of Obama’s foreign policy even reached the level of war crimes:

President Obama would go on to approve more drone strikes in his first year in office than President Bush carried out during his entire administration. The alleged peacemaker, very much like his predecessors, should be considered for the label of international war criminal.

Let’s clarify: President Obama is not a pioneer of the illegal and offensive wars that the United States has engaged in during the last 20 years. Even still, he is an expansionist, reflected clearly in the development of his drone program. During his presidency, Obama approved the use of 563 drone strikes that killed approximately 3,797 people. In fact, Obama authorized 54 drone strikes alone in Pakistan during his first year in office. One of the first CIA drone strikes under President Obama was at a funeral, murdering as many as 41 Pakistani civilians. The following year, Obama led 128 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that killed at least 89 civilians. Just two years into his presidency, it was clear that the “hope” that President Obama offered during his 2008 campaign could not escape U.S. imperialism.

The drone operations extended to Somalia and Yemen in 2010 and 2011, resulting in more destructive results. Under the belief they were targeting al-Qaida, President Obama’s first strike on Yemen killed 55 people including 21 children, 10 of which were under the age of five. Additionally, 12 women, five of them pregnant, were also among those who were murdered in this strike. These blundered acts of murder by not only President Obama, but the U.S. government, are morally reprehensible.

Even more civilian casualties came out of Afghanistan throughout Barack Obama’s time in office. In 2014, Obama began removing troops currently deployed in the country. However, instead of this action by the president being one in a pursuit of peace and stability in the region, it only acted as an opportunity to drastically increase air warfare. Afghanistan had war rained upon them by U.S. bombardment, with the administration viciously dropping 1,337 weapons on Afghanistan in 2016. In total that year, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs (drone or otherwise) across seven countries: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. The U.S., in cooperation with its allies including the Afghan government, killed 582 civilians on average annually from 2007 to 2016.

In his recent self-aggrandizing memoir “A Promised Land,” Obama defends his drone program through a messiah complex; he writes, “I wanted somehow to save them. . . . And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.” President Obama would have the reader believe he wanted to help the suspected terrorist but simply couldn’t. In reality, he consciously and undemocratically decided the fates of thousands of lives, without due process.

With the exception of the wars themselves, the claim that former President Barack Obama is a war criminal also lies within the double-tap initiative. Double-tap drone strikes are as disturbing as they sound; these attacks are follow-up strikes on first responders as they rush to the bombed area trying to assist any survivors. In 2012, an attack on the Shawal Valley aimed at Taliban commander Sadiq Noor reportedly killed up to 14 people in a double-tap drone strike. These attacks are both morally and legally reprehensible, as they are conscious acts of murder against civilians.

These drone strikes make a strong case for categorizing Obama as an international war criminal (53).

Obama’s warfare doctrine pushed the boundaries of conventional legality:

The Obama administration's position is not consistent with international law which requires states to either declare war on a government or leave it to that government's responsibility to deal with armed threats emanating from its borders. To articulate a generalized right to strike within another state's territory, without first declaring war on that state, could be interpreted as an act of aggression unless the state granted consent to do so. . . . The policies employed by the Obama administration for drone-based targeted killings have begun to slowly erode some of the traditional legal and ethical restraints on the use of force, creating a growing gap between current American practice and how armed force should be used according to the law of armed conflict (54).

The Obama administration tried to hide the number of innocents that fell to American drones through a duplicitous method of categorizing “combatants”:

Conservatives and liberals alike might be surprised to learn that this idea was written into U.S. policy by former President Barack Obama. During drone campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration counted any "military-age" men in certain areas as enemy fighters, even if the U.S. government didn't know who those men were. The policy allowed Obama to lowball the number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes (55).

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. . . . It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent (56).

Libya

In 2011, Obama contributed military strikes and coordinated NATO operations against Libya for the stated purpose of protecting a pro-democracy insurgency from Omar Ghaddafi’s violent suppression. He bypassed Congressional approval and used the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as a basis for his executive prerogative to make war. Ironically, Bush used this same authority to fight against al-Qaeda but Obama used it to fight with al-Qaeda (57).

A closer look exposes a more thorough agenda of regime change, despite official denials of such an imperialist aspiration:

The Obama administration said it was just trying to protect civilians. Its actions reveal it was looking for regime change. . . . In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start. The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in retreat. . . .

The intervention in Libya shows that the slippery slope of allegedly limited interventions is most steep when there’s a significant gap between what policymakers say their objectives are and the orders they issue for the battlefield. Unfortunately, duplicity of this sort is a common practice in the U.S. military. Civilian and military officials are often instructed to use specific talking points to suggest the scope of particular operations is minimal relative to large-scale ground wars or that there is no war going on at all. . . . The gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention. . . . Yet, this was never the military mission that the Obama administration repeatedly told the world it had set out to achieve. It misled the American public, because while presidents attempt to frame their wars as narrow, limited, and essential, admitting to the honest objective in Libya—regime change—would have brought about more scrutiny and diminished public support. The conclusion is clear: While we should listen to what U.S. and Western officials claim are their military objectives, all that matters is what they authorize their militaries to actually do (58).

The pretext for intervention that ended up toppling the Ghaddafi regime turned out to be exaggerated to the point of fabrication, as revealed by a British Parliamentary investigation in 2016: “[T]he proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence” (59).

The same year the official UK investigation was published, a trove of (Obama’s secretary of state) Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails was made public by Wikileaks:

[H]istorians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be sure to notice a few of the truly explosive confirmations contained in the new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes, special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S. backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening European currency. . . .

Most astounding is the lengthy section delineating the huge threat that Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves, estimated at “143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver,” posed to the French franc (CFA) circulating as a prime African currency. In place of the noble sounding “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine fed to the public, there is this “confidential” explanation of what was really driving the war [emphasis mine]:

“This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

“(Source Comment: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.)”

Though this internal email aims to summarize the motivating factors driving France’s (and by implication NATO’s) intervention in Libya, it is interesting to note that saving civilian lives is conspicuously absent from the briefing.

Instead, the great fear reported is that Libya might lead North Africa into a high degree of economic independence with a new pan-African currency.

French intelligence “discovered” a Libyan initiative to freely compete with European currency through a local alternative, and this had to be subverted through military aggression (60).

Clinton’s actions contradicted the limited humanitarian mission offered as justification for the US-NATO intervention:

Qaddafi’s son Saif had hoped to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. government. Saif Qaddafi quietly opened up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Libyan government. “Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” a U.S. intelligence official told Saif.

In March, Secretary Clinton had called Muammar Qaddafi a “creature” “who has no conscience and will threaten anyone in his way.” Clinton, who played a leading role in pushing for the NATO bombing of Libya, claimed Qaddafi would do “terrible things” if he was not stopped.

From March to October 2011, NATO carried out a bombing campaign against Libyan government forces. . . . The [British parliamentary] Foreign Affairs Committee report points out, nonetheless, that, while the NATO intervention was sold as a humanitarian mission, its ostensible goal was accomplished in just one day. . . . Yet the military intervention carried on for several more months.

The report explains “the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change.” This view has been challenged, however, by Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko used NATO’s own materials to show that “the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.” (61).

While some of Gaddafi’s reputation as a sponsor of international terrorism has been manufactured (62), it is true that he ran a “divisive and authoritarian regime, which pitted Libya’s diverse factions against one another” and “harshly oppressed” some Islamic groups (63). Yet, this did not justify the state of affairs that followed the NATO intervention in which Obama played a pivotal role: “The fall of Gaddafi launched a geopolitical tsunami across Africa and into the Middle East. Libya is now home to the world’s largest loose arms cache, and its porous borders are routinely transited by a host of heavily armed non-state actors. . .” (Ibid.). Obama feigns the innocence of regret regarding Libya. Yet, the shedding of these crocodile tears does not excuse the ineptitude of allowing Hillary Clinton to steer the policy in service of Western (primarily French) economic interests on the basis of a false humanitarian pretext.

Obama admitted that the overthrow of the Libyan government was the “worst mistake” of his presidency. There is an argument to be made that it’s at least in the top five. Libya has been in chaos since the 2011 U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign overthrew Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, opening the door for human rights abuses like refugee slavery.

Qaddafi may have been a nondemocratic dictator and a human rights abuser, but he was also no direct threat to the United States and was a staunch advocate for African unity and Pan-Africanism. He spoke out about anti-black racism in the Arab community and was pushing for a single African currency. . . . This Libyan open-market slave trade did not exist under Qaddafi, and likely would not have, given his political might and advocacy of black and African liberation (64).

The civil war fueled by the Obama administration’s crucial role in the NATO intervention created a humanitarian crisis Libya:

With heavy interference from all of these relatively wealthy nations, the real cost of conflict becomes one that must be paid exclusively by the Libyan people. The ramifications of continued conflict in Libya are largely ignored by foreign countries eager to assert their interests in the region. The consequences are, indeed, devastating. According to the United Nations, the percent of Libya’s population that had access to electricity declined from 99.8 percent in 2000 to 70.15 percent in 2017. Considering that access to electricity has been rising globally, the decline in Libya is particularly concerning. Even worse, access to clean water and sanitation declined from almost 30 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2017. Let alone improving in terms of maintaining a safely managed sanitation system and access to clean water, which is essential for human life, Libya has experienced an overall decline in the quality and provision of these services. . . . Evidently, Libya has been unable to maintain basic infrastructure in the face of this crisis, leading to the degradation of many services that are essential for Libyans to be able to live healthy and prosperous lives.

The declining percent of citizens with access to basic services coupled with declining quality of those services leads to compounding effects on the national systems of healthcare and education in Libya. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that over 20 percent of all primary care facilities are closed, and only four of 97 hospitals are functional at 75 to 80 percent capacity. Moreover, Libya has been struck with a high infant mortality rate, a crucial indication of the quality of care, or lack thereof, that infants receive. . . . It has been almost 10 years since the death of Gaddafi, but life in Libya remains the same or worse for many Libyans. Access to electricity, clean water, and basic forms of communication are now luxuries for Libyans. Healthcare and education, perhaps two of the most vital services that a government should provide, have collapsed. The heavy international interference in the civil war is strengthening both sides of the conflict, leading to even more destruction in Libya (65).

Ukraine

Euope and the United States bare a heavy burden of responsibility for a decades-long provocation that finally resulted in the Russia-Ukraine conflict of 2022. However, the Obama administration played a nefarious role in destabilizing relations between the two countries at a key moment in 2014:

[E]ver since the 1990s, following the end of the Soviet Union, Washington has made clear that both EU and NATO expansion eastward should eventually include Ukraine, which was regarded as “the prize.” What precipitated the Ukrainian crisis was the EU “partnership” offered to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which he declined to sign in November 2013. (Actually, having learned the astronomical financial costs, he merely asked for more time to consider the terms.) Protests in Kiev, centered on Maidan Square, led to violence and eventually to Yanukovych’s overthrow and his replacement by the US-backed government in Kiev. . . . Putin and his ministers sought to persuade the EU to make the economic agreement with Ukraine “tripartite,” including Moscow so as not to disadvantage the very substantial trade relationship between Ukraine and Russia. The EU leadership, for whatever reason, refused, telling Kiev it had to choose between Russia and the West. For years, as all sides knew, Washington and other Western actors had been pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine to prepare it for the West’s “civilizational” values. That is, the “march” on Ukraine had long been under way. The EU agreement—purportedly only economic and civilizational—included provisions binding the new “partner” to NATO “military and security” policy. (The intent was clear, with President George W. Bush having proposed to fast-track NATO membership for Ukraine in 2008, only to be vetoed by Germany and France.) Moreover, during the years preceding the EU’s proposed agreement, President Yanukovych had not been “pro-Kremlin,” as regularly alleged in the US media, but had, on the advice of his American electoral adviser (the now-infamous Paul Manafort), “tilted” toward the West, toward the EU, in order to expand his electoral base beyond southeastern Ukraine. (Putin’s loathing for Yanukovych as a greedy and corrupt opportunist was well known in Moscow and Kiev, though evidently not by the US media.) As anyone who followed the unfolding of the crisis knows, prominent members of US officialdom—from the State Department, Congress, and the Obama administration—were persistently present throughout the Maidan events, publicly and privately urging a showdown with Yanukovych, the constitutionally elected president. (A phone conversation between the leading State Department official involved and the US ambassador to Ukraine plotting the makeup of a successor government became public.) Finally, the day before Yanukovych was forced to flee the country by an armed street mob, he signed an agreement, brokered by three EU foreign ministers, to end the crisis peacefully by forming a coalition government with opposition leaders and agreeing to an early presidential election. That is, a democratic resolution of the crisis, privately endorsed by President Putin and President Obama, was in hand. Why none of the Western parties defended their own agreement, insisting that it be honored, remains uncertain, though perhaps not a mystery. . . . [M]ost of the oligarchic powers that afflicted Ukraine before 2014 remain in place four years later, along with their corrupt practices. As for “democratic,” removing a legally elected president by threatening his life hardly qualifies. Nor does the peremptory way the new government was formed, the constitution changed, and pro-Yanukovych parties banned. Though the overthrow involved people in the streets, this was a coup. . . . [O]ne other myth needs to be dispelled. The rush to seize Yanukovych’s residence was triggered by snipers who killed some 80 or more protesters and policemen on Maidan. It was long said that the snipers had been sent by Yanukovych, but it has now been virtually proven that the shooters were instead from the neofascist group Right Sector among the protesters on the square (66).

It has come to light that this coup was being engineered by Washington, as made public by a former Ukranian diplomat who was close to the inner workings of the coup transition. Andrii Telizhenko was in a position to observe the nature of what was happening behind the scenes during this tumultuous period in Ukraine:

[R]ght after the Maidan, the coup, I was appointed as a senior policy advisor to the First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine on security issues, intelligence issues, military issues. Then I was appointed afterwards as an advisor and had a protocol to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, overseeing all the international connections within the Prosecutor General’s office and his personal political issues, and was involved working with US Embassy, Canadian Embassy, all the G7 embassies on working with the Ukrainian government. Afterwards became a diplomat at the Ukraine Embassy and worked very closely with the White House and on the US elections, which, when I saw the corruption involved in the interference of Ukraine in this, I resigned from the Embassy and left, after six months working there, and became a political consultant. Got involved working with Blue Star Strategies, a lobby firm from Washington, worked there for a year—the lobby firm which lobbied Burisma—and that’s how I saw everything on the inside. And when I understood what the shocking results that were happening for my country, for Ukraine—not only for Ukraine, for the corruption that was happening there—I came out with the truth (67).

The truth of what Telizhenko witnessed was what many people suspected after the leaked phone calls of Victoria Nuland (Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs) were made public.

Maidan was fully coordinated and controlled by the US government and the US Embassy in Kiev on the ground. They had the official side with the pro-Soros people who did the PR, but all those things behind closed doors were happening with the involvement of the US Embassy officials. So then came US government officials at the White House like Elisabeth Zentos, who I was continuing to do my work with while I was in the Ukraine Embassy in Washington, and she was part of the national security team of [Vice President] Joe Biden. . . . But this process started in 2014 when the war in Ukraine and the interference from the outside led to people dying on Maidan, led to people dying in Donbass, and let Ukraine be thrown under the bus and used as a rag for their corrupt scandals and corrupt schemes for Joe Biden, the Deep State, Clintons, Soros, and all you can name. They were all involved in Ukraine and had their money, just went through Ukraine like a Franklin Templeton situation, where the money laundering of several billion dollars went to the US company of Ukrainian loans. So, this process is all interconnected with what we see today, unfortunately. . . . They’re fully involved financially and operationally. When the US Ambassador comes to Maidan headquarters, the one where the opposition sat, he would make up decisions, and basically, he would officially not give orders, but he would recommend things. But everybody knew if he recommended things, this is how you have to do it. And coordination work on pushing on the Ukrainian government, the Yanukovych government, I witnessed this conversation when Nuland came to Kiev, and it was the first storming of Maidan at that time when the police tried to storm, when the people already gathered on Maidan, and this was mid-December, December 11th, I think, and I called Ambassador Pyatt. I said, ‘You have to stop this. Call the president of Ukraine so there won’t be bloodshed.’ And the meeting in the morning where we met Nuland and Pyatt, she said, “I called Yanukovych and ordered him to stop it, but he did not pick up the phone for three hours. But then when he picked up the phone, I told him, stop the process or we will destroy you politically, etc.”

So, they were there, they were controlling this process behind the closed doors. Yeah, it was all done in the hands of Ukrainians, but it was all prepared by the US Embassy, the US government, and US political advisors on the ground in Ukraine who worked there for years, for 20 years before, preparing this whole process, and with Soros-led groups who influenced the PR, who were taught how to influence the PR, and how to make this process likable for the public.

So, it was all interconnected, done with the Ukrainian hands, as it is right now. Ukrainians are fighting with spilling their blood and the Americans are fully behind it, helping Ukrainians financially and with the weapons, which are not leading to anything but just people getting killed. Instead of making peace, the same thing happened there. It was behind the closed doors where they were leading the Ukrainians to overthrow the government and to then have a new government which should be favorable in Washington (Ibid.).

Despite his more measured demeanor and tempered rhetoric, President Obama’s administration appears to have been deplorably interventionist and criminal in the foreign policy domain—as were his Republican predecessors.

7. Climate Policy

President Obama’s legacy on environmental policy and climate change is another case in which actions speak louder than words. Obama apparently did not commit himself to everything he could have done to stall climate change:

Once in office, Obama did push for a climate bill, but he pushed harder on health care, which was fine. It’s not entirely his fault that the Republican response to his Obamacare victory was to swerve hard to the right, blocking and demonizing the rest of his agenda, including anything climate-related.

Still, it’s telling that the president clammed up about the climate after that. He clearly viewed it as a losing issue for him and his party, and he cared more about not losing than he did about beating the drum on that greatest of threats to future generations. An environmental leader would not have pointed to his record of opening public lands for oil drilling when Romney charged that he had not been Mr. Oil, Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal. He would have said, “You’re right. I’m not Mr. Oil, Mr. Gas, or Mr. Coal, and here’s why.” Nor would an environmental leader have dithered for years on the Keystone pipeline, evading attempts to pin him to one side or the other of the most polarizing energy project of his presidency. . . . Make no mistake, as Obama would say: The United States has made significant progress on the climate over the course of his two terms. His sustained green jobs push has borne fruit, and his clean energy investments have helped to spur breakthroughs, like Tesla’s wildly successful electric cars. New efficiency standards and EPA regulations have also made a difference. In the end, even kicking the Keystone can down the road turned out to be exactly the right move. By the time he finally rejected it in November, collapsing oil prices had undercut the whole point of the project.

But surprisingly few of the environmental achievements he’s now touting are the result of his own efforts. U.S. emissions have plummeted—oil prices, too—as a direct result of a technological innovation that went unmentioned in Tuesday’s address and that was not a part of any Obama-led policy push. That would be fracking, and the domestic drilling boom it has made possible. The combination of cheap natural gas and increased domestic oil production has done more to cut U.S. dependency on foreign oil than anything the Oval Office has done (68).

He is frequently celebrated for committing the U.S. to the Paris Agreement with the goal of curbing carbon emissions and thereby reducing global temperature increases. Unfortunately, his other policies are at cross-purposes with the goal of this much-touted treaty: “[T]he Obama administration foolishly encouraged the lifting of a ban on crude oil exports, causing a spike in drilling, fracking and climate pollution for a temporary extension of modest clean energy tax credits” (69). Disappointingly, the Obama administration yielded to industry pressure on fracking regulations in 2013:

[A]nyone hoping the Obama Administration would protect our public lands and public health from fracking pollution got a sobering reality check late last week.

Proposed fracking regulations unveiled Friday by new Interior Secretary Sally Jewell would do little to safeguard our air, water or wildlife. This draft rule is even weaker than the first version of the regulations, withdrawn after the oil and gas industry threw a fit over not getting a free pass.

Fossil fuel executives can breathe easy now -- even if the rest of us choke on air pollution. The Bureau of Land Management's new draft fracking rule actually seems designed to encourage as much fracking as possible on public lands, while keeping the public in the dark about dangerous chemical use. . . . President Obama charged a Department of Energy advisory panel with making recommendations on how fracking should be regulated. Among the panel's recommendations: full disclosure of the chemicals used in fracking, collection of baseline data so impacts can actually be monitored, and a ban on fracking with diesel fuel, one of the most dangerous practices. Yet, inexplicably, the BLM has adopted none of these recommendations. That's an insult to those who served on this panel -- and a disturbing sign of how much these regulations cater to the oil and gas industry.

The best way to protect our environment from fracking would be to prohibit this inherently dangerous form of fossil fuel extraction. Of course, it's not surprising that the Obama Administration, with its "all of the above" energy strategy, has not proposed banning fracking on public lands.

But what is shocking is the utter inadequacy of the new proposed rule. If the Obama Administration wants to provide any real protection for our air, water and climate, Secretary Jewell should withdraw these regulations a second time and go back to the drawing board (70).

More appallingly, his government also spread deleterious hydrocarbon industrial activities across the globe:

Through the US Export-Import Bank, Barack Obama’s administration has spent nearly $34bn supporting 70 fossil fuel projects around the world. . . . This unprecedented backing of oil, coal and gas projects is an unexpected footnote to Obama’s own climate change legacy. The president has called global warming “terrifying” and helped broker the world’s first proper agreement to tackle it, yet his administration has poured money into developments that will push the planet even closer to climate disaster (71).

Obama’s accomodation of entrenched industrial interests appear to have undercut his supposed mission as champion of the biosphere’s preservation.

8. Conclusion

Many of Obama’s supporters are as guilty of falling for a cult of personality as are the MAGA hardliners who cling to Trump—mirror images of collective delusion emboldened by confirmation bias. The naively Pollyannaish slogans, “Hope and Change” and “Make America Great Again”, are shown to be equally fatuous. The hagiographical gloss through which the acolytes of both movements fawn over their respective messiahs is infused with hindsight romanticism. Partisan loyalty on both sides of the red-blue divide creates informational bubbles—echoe chambers of sanctioned perspectives that set the overton windows. “Party identification, or a voter’s psychological attachment to a party, is also a very important factor because close to ninety percent of voters vote for their respective parties in most presidential elections. Parties function as a filter through which trusted information passes to the party members, reinforcing party loyalty and motivating party affiliates to vote” (9).

Exposing a sacred cow of the Democratic Party as a mere charlatan is sure to evoke the usual accusations of being (at best) an unpragmatic idealist or (at worst) a veiled Republican. A common defense against criticisms of Obama is that he had to “play the game” in order to successfully navigate the electoral process and win the White House. Essentially, this means he made pragmatic calculations to compromise his convictions in order to succeed. Loyal acolytes will explain that Obama was politically savy enough to understand the necessity of genuflecting to the scions of instituional power (who act as gatekeepers of the American political system) so as to obtain the keys to high office. However, it is unclear that Obama had to follow such a “moderate” accomodation of elite interests once he attained the Oval Office. The amount of wind at his back in terms of a popular mandate for real systemic reform could have been harnassed by someone possessing a sincere intention to follow through. In such an opportune historical moment (following the war-torn Bush years and a cataclysmic financial meltdown), he could have turned his back on the big money backers who donated large sums to his campaign and, instead, used his popularity to forge a more progressive path forward—even against the advice of his own elite-sanctioned cabinet. President Obama could have tricked the ruling class the same way he duped the masses who supported the sanguine vision of deep change he shamelessly dangled in front of them. A politician driven by the convictions of sweeping reform intimated in Obama’s campaign rhetoric would have had no qualms with such deception. As political historian Thomas Frank noted:

In point of fact, there were plenty of things Obama’s Democrats could have done that might have put the right out of business once and for all—for example, by responding more aggressively to the Great Recession or by pounding relentlessly on the theme of middle-class economic distress. Acknowledging this possibility, however, has always been difficult for consensus-minded Democrats, and I suspect that in the official recounting of the Obama era, this troublesome possibility will disappear entirely. Instead, the terrifying Right-Wing Other will be cast in bronze at twice life-size, and made the excuse for the Administration’s every last failure of nerve, imagination and foresight. Demonizing the right will also allow the Obama legacy team to present his two electoral victories as ends in themselves, since they kept the White House out of the monster’s grasp—heroic triumphs that were truly worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize (72).

It is important to recall Obama’s ignominious role in rewarding the criminals of big finance with immense sums of cash while leaving millions of average citizens to lose their homes. This disaster “cannot be justified by the usual Obama-era logic, that it represented the best possible outcome in a captured Washington with Republican obstruction and supermajority hurdles” as “it was entirely a product of the administration’s economic team, working with the financial industry, so it represents the purest indication of how they prioritized the health of financial institutions over the lives of homeowners” (29). In reality, the integral involvement of CAP (10) and Citigroup (11) in selecting the administration’s top personnel signaled the hollowness of brand Obama. How could a candidate who allowed these Establishment organizations to create his cabinet sincerely complain that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision [which ruled that spending limitations on campaign finance was a violation of free speech] “has caused real harm to our democracy” (73)? Apparently, Obama’s political mission wasn’t really “about ending the failed system in Washington that produces those [failed] policies” of previous administrations, as he announced in his campaign speech. Sadly, this high-minded pledge turned out to be as vacuous and misleading as Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of D.C.—i.e., expell the lobbyists and entrenched special interests who pollute the political process (74). To be sure, Obama’s fortification of the corportocracy is entirely explicable and flows predictably from the crowd of appointed policy-makers to whom he chose to defer. In the final anaysis, his principled posturing was nullified by the actualities of his governance, revealing President Obama to be little more than a vassal for the neoliberal status quo—a cipher upon which a desperate people superimposed the image of a heroic savior.

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4.) Hall, Richard. “Trump’s Use of Military to Quell Protests Will Have a Chilling Effect on Free Speech, Experts Warn.” The Independent, 12 June 2025, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-ice-protests-los-angeles-b2768421.html. Accessed 1 July 2025.

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