So... there was a little buzz about Obama over the last couple pages, but I was disappointed by how it played out. I know I've weighed on this before in the early days of this thread, so I'll try to make it worthwhile by being more informative.
I'm not sure you can exactly say that he's expanded the scope and powers of the intelligence community, but he has actively worked to maintain the unhealthy level of power that the Bush administration set up before him. Then there's that whole secrecy thing...
Most notably, the infamous Patriot Act used to require yearly extensions, and in 2011 many republicans were even beginning to question its legitimacy after 10 years of being highly controversial and well known as a source of abuse. Then Obama himself said '
Hey let's go ahead and extend that for 4 years this time', and signed that extension a couple months later, without even making any significant attempt to reform the act in the process as far as I'm aware.
The
ratio of Freedom of Information Act requests denied by the government has significantly increased under Obama as compared to Bush. You could say that this would be a failure but not necessarily a misdeed on his part, but then I don't understand why he would blatantly lie about the actions and achievements of his administration when confronted on the issue. There have been many complaints about agencies, including some which Obama should have significant influence over as commander-in-chief, adopting extremely prohibitive new FOIA request processes since he took office.
Most alarmingly,
the DoJ tried to push a new set of rules for FOIA requests in 2011, most infamously including the ability to respond to a request as if the documents in question don't even exist. There's a good summary of the implications of this
here.
There are two problems with the Obama proposal to allow federal officials to affirmatively assert that a requested document doesn't exist when it does. First, by not citing a specific exemption allowed under the FOIA as grounds for denying a request, the proposal would cut off a requestor from appealing to the courts. By thus creating an area of federal activity that is completely exempt from judicial review, the proposal undercuts due process and other constitutional protections. Second, by creating a justification for government lying to FOIA requestors in one area, a legal precedent is created that sooner or later will be asserted by the government in other areas as well.
This is widely considered to directly reflect Obama's personal stance, since the people responsible for this proposal were appointed by and directly report to him.
So the only sources of information on government (and corporate in areas where the lines between the two tend to blur) behavior we're left with are what they feel like telling us and whistleblowers. Great, because
Obama pledged to improve protections for whistleblowers, right?Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
Actually, his administration has been the harshest on whistleblowers
in American history by every possible metric. Bradley Manning may be the highest profile case, where Obama has been explicity approving of his inhumane treatment and
has even lied about the circumstances of the case, but
he is far from the only one. Apparently
the information you expose to the public doesn't even have to be classified (
though it's a miracle if you find anything that isn't).
Not bad for someone who proclaimed government transparency to be one of his major platforms, and who still claims to have succeeded at giving us the most transparent government in history...
Just for fun, I'll throw in his escalation of drone warfare, which is a
human rights disaster.
The war in Iraq is not over, as much as Obama loves to take credit for that.
It's just being fought almost exclusively by mercenaries like Blackwater now. Blackwater themselves are getting contracts again, too, but under the name Academi. They have to change names every couple years because their extralegal violence is so infamous.
Hell of a comforting thought, right?And on the corporate alliance/fuck-the-environment-for-profit side of things, we have stuff like a
top Monsanto VP being appointed senior food safety adviser to the FDA and
approving 27 offshore drilling projects in the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The reason I'm putting so much effort into this is
he genuinely fucking scares me. People who I normally consider to be well informed and intelligent actually trust him, and it scares me. He can directly lie to the public and undermine our ability to defend ourselves against corruption, and look like some kind of superhero while he's doing it. I don't think he's actually actually as corrupt as a republican and I do think he's actually done some good things... but all the good things he's done are related to temporary good fortunes, while the civil protections he's undermining take decades of fighting tooth and nail to get back once they're gone. He's also setting the stage for his successors to do even more horrible things.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 721035 times)