Stephen Lendman
Perhaps George Bernard Shaw was thinking of Obama's administration when he said, "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment of the corrupt few."
Obama upholds the tradition and then some, doing more harm globally in two years than most of history's tinpot despots in decades, yet most of it gets little attention. Imagine what's planned ahead. Already, his legacy includes:
● breaking every key promise he made across the board;
● looting the nation's wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;
● enacting greater Wall Street empowerment, disguised as financial reform;
● expanding unbridled militarism through continued foreign wars, occupations, and stepped up aggression on new fronts with the largest defense budget in history - greater than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;
● partnering with Israel's regional reign of terror, occupation, and imperial designs;
● presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;
● continuing the worst of the Bush administration's lawlessness and torture policies;
● targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;
● illegally spying on Americans as aggressively as George Bush;
● sacrificing Net Neutrality for greater corporate control and profits;
● destroying decades of hard won labor rights;
● eroding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other New Deal and Great Society social gains;
● trying to control the media more aggressively than Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;
● refusing help for budget-stricken states like California, Illinois, Michigan and New York; forcing them to impose austerity by gutting welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services at a time they're most needed;
● proliferating commodified education nationally, ending government responsibility for it, and making it another business profit center;
● enacting healthcare reform that taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, and makes a dysfunctional system worse;
● passing agribusiness empowerment at the expense of small farmers and consumers, disguised as food safety modernization;
● instituting coup d'état regime change in Honduras against its democratically elected president;
● plundering Haiti, ignoring its needs, rigging its elections, and refusing to let Jean-Bertrand Aristide return;
● supporting some of the world's most ruthless, corrupt tyrants; and
● planning American-style regime change in Egypt, its vice president of torture in charge; continuing old policies surrounded by Washington-controlled new faces, denying Egyptian masses freedoms they're willing to die for.
Since taking office, Obama fronted for wealth, power, and imperial poison globally, including hardline homeland control.
