Record Speaks for Itself: How Obama Brought 'Hope' and 'Change' to the American People

Stopwar.org.uk
Extracted from Glenn Greenwald
Salon
January 2, 2011.

Barack Obama's record over the past three years speaks for itself when deciding whether he deserves a second term as president.

• He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack.
• He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs.
• He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield.
• He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers.
• He has enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it.
• His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act when compliance became inconvenient.
• He has entrenched for a generation the Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law.
• He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability.
• He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason.
• He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists.
• He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities.
• He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government.
• His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
• He has made America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war more robust than ever before.
• He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed“a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight.
• His “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.