"Matt Taibbi" - Obama and Jobs -- Why I Don't Believe Him Anymore

Published on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 by Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-and-jobs-why-i-dont-believe-him-anymore-20110906

by Matt Taibbi

I was in an airport in Florida yesterday and was forced into a terrible, Sophie's Choice-type choice.

I was hours early for a flight and stuck in a relatively small terminal crammed with people. Only one area in the whole wing had empty seats; an unused gate that contained a TV blaring the CNN broadcast of Obama's Labor Day speech at full volume.

So it was either sit underneath a full-volume broadcast of our fearless president bellowing out his latest hollow promises, or the hellish alternative: retreat to gates full of screaming five year-old children, all of them jacked up on sugar and bawling their eyes out because it was the end of Labor Day weekend and their cruel parents were dragging them home from Disneyworld.

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"Mark Engler" - Dramatizing Obama's Climate Dilemma

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-6

Published on Friday, August 26, 2011 by Dissent

by Mark Engler

President Obama now has a clear choice on climate change. Major energy corporations are seeking to build a 1700-mile oil pipeline from Canada’s tar sands to refineries in Texas. The Keystone XL Pipeline would itself carry social and environmental costs: cutting through fragile ecosystems, creating risk of spills, and negatively affecting indigenous communities. But, most significantly, it would be a boon to efforts to exploit the tar sands.

The Canadian tar sands are a particularly dirty source of fossil fuels that could produce egregious carbon emissions. As Elizabeth Kolbert reported at the New Yorker:

[B]ecause tar-sands oil is so heavy, it has to be very heavily processed, which requires tremendous amounts of energy, usually in the form of natural gas. It’s been estimated that, on what’s known as a well-to-tank basis, tar-sands oil is responsible for eighty percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than ordinary crude.

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"Karen Greenberg"- How Washington Lost Faith in America's Courts

By Karen J. Greenberg

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus.  The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize.  On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.

If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.

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"Ken Thomas"- US Liberals Complain About Obama

by: Ken Thomas

WASHINGTON  — Liberals argue that he gave in on the great debate over the debt ceiling. Unions are upset over his handling of unemployment and labor issues. Hispanics brought the immigration debate directly to his campaign doorstep.

President Barack Obama's summer of discontent has been marked by rumblings within his Democratic party political base over his willingness to fight congressional Republicans and his approach to fixing the economy.

Liberals disappointed with Obama for compromising with the Republicans during the debt-ceiling showdown now are calling on him to hold firm against Republicans this autumn. They want him to push a bold jobs agenda while drawing a strong line on taxes and protecting social benefit programs for the elderly.

In recent weeks, the gripes have become so loud that the president himself acknowledged them during his Midwest bus tour this week.

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"Tom Engelhardt" - An Obituary for Change in Washington

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/20-1

Published on Saturday, August 20, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

by Tom Engelhardt

Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.”  It was an open-and-shut case, so to speak, part of what CNN called “a clean break from the Bush administration.”  On that same day, as part of that same break, the president signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda hailing a “new era of openness,” of sunshine and transparency in government.  As the president put it, "Every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."

Of course, nothing could have been more Bushian, if you were thinking about “clean breaks,” than America’s wars in the Greater Middle East. When it came to the Iraq War, at least, President Obama arrived in office with another goal and another promise that couldn’t have been more open and shut (or so his supporters thought), not just drawing down Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, but “ending” it “responsibly.”  (Admittedly, he was also muttering quietly about “residual forces” there, but who noticed?)

Two and a half years later, Guantanamo remains thrivingly open, while all discussion of ever closing it has long since ended; the administration has, in those same years, gained a fierce reputation as an enforcer of government secrecy and, while it has prosecuted neither torturers, nor financial titans, it has gone after government whistleblowers with a passion.  In the meantime, the Iraq War was indeed wound down “responsibly” (which turned out to mean incredibly slowly), but in recent months, as U.S. casualties again rose, the Obama administration and the U.S. military have visibly been in a desperate search for ways to keep sizeable numbers of American forces there as “trainers,” while also militarizing a vast State Department mission in Baghdad and outfitting it for the long haul with more than 5,000 armed mercenaries as well as a mini-air force.

Promises? As Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman used to say: What? Me worry? As it happens, David Bromwich, essayist for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books, does worry. In “George W. Obama?” he offers a new yardstick for measuring the promises of, and the nature of, the Obama administration, as well as the nature of its “break” with the Bush era ; or rather think of his post as an obituary for the possibility of change in Washington.

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His most recent book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books.) His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

Bill McKibben: A Watershed Moment for Obama on Climate Change

Published on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 by The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-watershed-moment-for-obama-on-climate-change/2011/08/16/gIQAGX3zJJ_story.html

by Bill McKibben

Ain’t eBay grand? For $10 you can buy a sack of 50 assorted Obama ’08 buttons, and that’s what I’ve been doing. If you look closely, you might see them this weekend on the lapels of some of the global warming protesters holding a sit-in outside the White House.

Already, more than a thousand people have signed up to be arrested over two weeks beginning Aug. 20 — the biggest display of civil disobedience in the environmental movement in decades and one of the largest nonviolent direct actions since the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle back before Sept. 11. (Among the first 500 to sign up, the biggest cohort was born in the Truman administration, followed closely by FDR babies and Eisenhower kids. These seniors contradict the stereotype of greedy geezers who care only about their own future.)

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"Dean Baker" - President Obama Joins the Cult of Economics Deniers

Published on Monday, August 15, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/15/president-obama-reelection-economic-policy

President Obama has abandoned evidence-based economics to return the US to growth in favour of the politics of deficit-cutting

by Dean Baker

A front page story in Sunday's New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street.

The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programmes like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: "A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth."

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"Mike Adams" - Obamacare ruled unconstitutional by federal appeals court

by Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com 

http://www.naturalnews.com/033307_Obamacare_unconstitutional.html

(NaturalNews) The 11th circuit appeals court ruled today that Obama's health care mandate -- which forced Americans to purchase an insurance product that many did not want or need -- was unconstitutional and that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in passing such a law. The rest of the health care reform law was not struck down, however, and indications are that the final legality of the so-called "individual mandate" will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The federal government's requirement that private citizens purchase products and services from a particular industry is, on its face, blatantly unconstitutional. If this mandate holds, the federal government could invoke the same power to require all Americans to purchase an automobile from General Motors, for example, as part of an auto industry bailout mandate. Or the feds could require all parents to purchase vaccines for their children, citing public health concerns. In fact, there is no limit to the things the federal government could require Americans to purchase, including new homes to "boost the economy." (Buy a home or go to jail!)

A malicious misinterpretation of the Commerce Clause

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution limits the power of the federal government to regulate private purchasing decisions, but the government has consistently and maliciously misinterpreted this clause to mean is has absolute power over all commerce taking place across the entire nation. This is what led the federal government to order one farmer to destroy all his wheat crops, claiming that his growing of wheat "interfered with interstate commerce" even though he was only feeding that wheat to his own chickens. Wickard vs. Filburn (http://www.naturalnews.com/030799_f...).

The pattern we're witnessing over the last couple of decades is that the federal government routinely seeks to expand its own power and authority, taking over huge sectors of what used to be a private economy (lenders and banks, for example). It then seeks to direct consumer behavior in a command economy dictatorship that forces people to financially support a system of failed health care that doesn't even work to prevent disease or make people healthier.

Since Obama pushed for his health care reform, the U.S. economy has imploded in record debt, huge job losses, a ratings downgrade of its financial solvency, and an evacuation of companies from the USA to open offices in other countries. Obamacare has devastated small businesses and American workers, increased the cost of health care and made it nearly impossible for U.S. companies to compete in the global marketplace. And yet it's not even the worst part of what is increasingly becoming a failed Presidency that has left the country in far worse shape than it was when Obama was sworn into office.

As the job losses mount, the national debt explodes, and the health care crises grows even worse, people are finally starting to wake up and realize that Big Government is the PROBLEM in America, not the answer. The real answer to affordable healthcare is to get the government out of the business of health care, shutter the FDA, legalize free speech for nutritional supplements and end the state medical board tyrannies that criminalize the practicing of alternative and holistic medicine. Only the freedom to heal can reverse America's downward spiral of disease and debt, and this means ending the FDA, shutting down the DEA, radically cutting the size of government and restoring liberty to our farmers, herbalists, chiropractors and consumers.

Obamacare is a complete disaster. HOPE, it seems did not result in positive CHANGE. Instead, everything is now worse. Maybe it's time to try something different than merely expanding the size and power of a government that openly engages in acts of terrorism against its own people



"Paul Street" - The Economics of Barack O'Hoover

By PAUL STREET

http://counterpunch.org/street08122011.html

Pity the poor, powerless, increasingly unpopular president – a pitiful pawn of the plutocrats and the profits system he has done so much to serve and protect.  Nearly five years ago, in the misleadingly titled book that pre-announced the launching of his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama grounded the United States’ supposed distinctive “greatness” in its “free market” capitalist system and “business culture.”  The American over-class should have been gratified by Obama’s paean to American “free-market” capitalism in The Audacity of Hope:

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"The Hill" - Nader looks for Obama 2012 challengers

The Hill - 07/27/11 06:00 AM ET

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/173723-nader-to-look-for-primary-challengers-for-obama-in-12

Consumer activist Ralph Nader said Tuesday that he’ll launch an initiative soon to field primary challenges to President Obama in key states. 

Nader, who waged two presidential campaigns as a third-party candidate, is working with a group of frustrated Democrats who are hoping to turn up the heat on Obama from the left. 

“It’s an initiative to scan the possibilities of people who may run,” Nader said in a phone interview. “My guess is that it’s almost 100 percent sure there’s going to be a primary challenge to Obama from somebody or somebodies — plural — in some states.”

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