A Peoples’ History of the Obama Presidency

Obama - Trump

In two and one-half years, the Trump house of horrors has produced poisonous legislation to further oppress millions of poor and working class Americans and erode what’s left of the fraying social safety net. Even the Obama administration is starting to look good in retrospect instead of what it really was a business-as-usual administration whose campaign was big on promises — affordable, universal healthcare, legislation to advance labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively, and curtailment of the militarized surveillance state and its corollary perpetual war —and whose presidency was a repudiation of all that came before — expanding two wars to seven, becoming the official deporter-in-chief, selecting targets for assassination on Terror Tuesdays, including an American teenager, using a 1917 law passed by another failed president to lock up whistleblowers, passing a corporate welfare bill promoted as universal healthcare and generally selling out the hope and change promises candidate Obama had made. Can we be hornswoggled again, this time by his partner in crime, Joe Biden? Want to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself? Read “A Peoples’ History of the Obama Presidency” to see how it could.

For a more exhaustive examination of eight years of a failed Obama presidency, read SA’s Legacy: Obama’s & Ours

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Perpetual War Abroad, Mass Shootings at Home: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s America the Beautiful

War Comes Home 2019

People mowed down shopping for back-to-school supplies for their kids. Thirteen hours later and fifteen hundred miles away revelers enjoying a night of fun and frolic run for their lives as an assault rifle shatters the peaceful night. Thirty-one will pay the ultimate price. The rest will remember the terror and the horror forever. Grieving relatives will mourn and through their tears ask why. Life in 21st century America is risky business. The specter of fearful American parents buying bullet-proof back packs for their elementary school children should shock all Americans. A reflection of our foreign policy, perhaps, as the global image of America spirals downward from freedom and democracy to violence and militarism. The corporate media doesn’t like to talk about it, but endless war is eating us alive. U.S. diplomats have been outsourced by generals and admirals, strategic policy-making replaced by deadly threats and sanctions, and the passage of sky-high military budgets pays for seven wars and 800 military bases We live in a country falling apart where millions face economic ruin and social programs are dying on the vine while the U.S. war machine rolls merrily along. What’s wrong with this picture? We make a stab at the answer in “Perpetual War Abroad, Mass Shootings at Home: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s America the Beautiful”

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Will a Charm Offensive and Oodles of Money Land Pete Buttigieg in the Oval Office? Ask Barack Obama

Obama Remembered

Here we go again. In an eerie reprise of 2008, along comes Pete Buttigieg with good looks crowd-pleasing rhetoric, the right credentials and most important the staffers and big-time donors who won it for Obama. Mayor Pete is running a campaign large on half-truths, misdirection, and feel-good platitudes and short on principled policy positions. His big donor fetes are drawing the cream of the oligarchic crop. They are the real engine driving his campaign. His “meet and greets” with ordinary Americans are window dressing. Like his mentor, he’s not for a national healthcare system, free college tuition, scaling back a hopelessly bloated military, restoring sanity to a surveillance-obsessed government, or putting a dagger in the heart of income equality. We aren’t the first to point out the resemblance but we are the first to do it in living color with actual quotes from the horses’ mouths. Ready for eight more years of Obama? Before you drink the Kool-Aid, read “Will a Charm Offensive and Oodles of Money Land Pete Buttigieg in the Oval Office? Ask Barack Obama

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