During the first year of his administration, Barack Obama followed Bush regime policies in most major areas, while making a number of small concessions to try to mollify Democratic voters. Here are some examples of major policy continuity:

1) Increasing total occupying forces in Iraq (troops plus mercenaries)

2) Continuing the policy of kidnapping people and sending them to other countries to be tortured ("extraordinary rendition")

3) Keeping the torture center in Guantanamo open

4) Expanding the Bush regime's hate based initiatives to take federal grant money from inclusive nonprofits and give it to nonprofits that discriminate on the basis of religion.

5) Continuing the policy of creating AFRICOM.

6) Refusing to withdraw from the World Trade Organization

7) Refusing to negotiate the end of corporate controlled trade agreements such as NAFTA

8) Attending "National Prayer Breakfasts"

9) Expaning the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan

10) Supporting a huge corporate giveaway in the name of "healthcare reform" (remember the Bush regime's Medicare changes?)

11) Refusing to support legislation cracking down on bankster and brokester bonuses.

12) Continuing illegal spying on Americans without warrants.

I could go on, and on, and on, but you get the point. This year's administration budget proposal includes some important continuity with the Bush regime. Obama wants domestic spending (including veterans benefits) frozen while continuing enormous increases of military spending. The proposal does nothing to cut off funding for the illegal war on Iraq that goes against American values.

Yet, there is an aspect of the budget that actually does represent a major break with the policies of the Bush regime. President Obama is calling for Bush's tax cuts for the rich to expire. Even when the tax breaks expire, the parasitical rich in this country won't be paying anywhere near their fair share in taxes. But, any progress in this area is critically important. It represents a break with 30 years of corrupt policies that have robbed the poor and middle class to benefit wealthy campaign donors.

We need to pressure President Obama to break with more Bush regime policies. This is a good start, but Obama has a long way to go before he can call himself a Real Democrat.

 

These are listed in alphabetical order, since it just isn't worth trying to decide which one is the worst. Nutty rightist policies are just as nutty regardless of the political affiliations of the people who shove them down our throats.

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG
Micheal Bloomberg isn't just the most execrable mayor in NYC history, he has been one of the biggest driving forces in bringing our economy to its knees. His Bloomberg media empire constantly pushed short term profits over long term security to bankers, brokers, and to CEOs in companies that actually produce value in the economy. If his media assets had acted rationally and responsibly, we would be in a much smaller economic whole.

GEORGE W. BUSH
The Iraq War has been a huge drag on our economy during its long, disgusting time. It also has massively increased our foreign debt, a major problem during a liquidity crisis. Bush's tax cuts for the rich financed massive speculation which expanded and burst several bubbles when the money should have gone to a better social safety net for middle class and poor Americans. This corrupt and unelected regime also refused to enforce the limited financial market regulations that hadn't been wiped out by the previous administration and its collaborators.

BILL CLINTON
This alleged "Democrat" pushed hard for financial deregulation which enabled the wave of irresponsible behavior on Wall St. The Internet bubble happened on his watch, and the economic conditions Clinton pushed created a climate for bubble hopping (dot coms to gold to real estate etc.,) which continued after his miserable presidency was cut off due to term limits. Clinton also made his top policy priority pushing corporate controlled trade initiatives such as NAFTA and the WTO which dramatically increased our trade deficits (causing massive borrowing from foreign interests). These corrupt trade arrangements shipped a lot of decent making jobs overseas, making it harder for Americans to afford mortgages. Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" created a climate of scapegoating for women of color which made it more socially acceptable for them to be targeted for predatory and downright fraudulent subprime mortgages.

HENRY PAULSON
This schmuck refused to take the regulatory responsibilities of Treasury Secretary even remotely seriously. Even worse were his actions as Goldman Sachs' CEO. In a previous posting, I quoted Naomi Klein on Democracy Now! Her quote is equally valid today.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, Amy, I don’t think we can stress this enough. Henry Paulson is one of the key people, the top people, responsible for creating the crisis that he is now claiming he will solve, you know, and this is—if we think about the 9/11 analogy and, you know, the state of shock that Americans were in after 9/11 and the emergence of Rudy Giuliani as the savior—and, you know, people have so much regret about that. And in the book, I write about this as the state of regression that we go into when we’re frightened. And I think Henry Paulson has really been cast in this role as an economic Rudy Giuliani, saving the day, impartial, bipartisan, a strong leader.

I found this article in BusinessWeek that ran when Paulson was appointed to the Treasury, and I just want to read you one sentence, because I think it’s all we need to know about Henry Paulson. This is from BusinessWeek, when he got the appointment as Treasury Secretary in 2006. The headline of the article is “Mr. Risk Goes to Washington.” It says, “Think of Paulson as Mr. Risk. He’s one of the key architects of a more daring Wall Street, where securities firms are taking greater and greater chances in [their] pursuit of profits. By some key measures, the securities industry is more leveraged now than it was at the height of the 1990s boom.”

Then it goes on to say that when Paulson took over Goldman Sachs in 1999, they had $20 billion in debts. When he—in these high-risk gambles. When he left, they had $100 billion, which means he took their risk level from $20 billion to $100 billion. So it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Henry Paulson, far from speaking for Main Street, is actually bailing out his colleagues for some of the very debts that he himself accumulated. This is an extraordinary conflict of interest.

I would say that a fox was watching the chicken coop, but foxes are too clever for this metaphor to really work.

LARRY SUMMERS
I still can't believe this sick joke is Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers was the architect of the economic equivalent of the Minnesota bridge collapse: Bill Clinton's trade and deregulation policies. Anyone who took the trouble of reading an American History book that covers the 20th Century would have known that unregulated financial markets were the main cause of the Crash of 1929, which was a major cause of the Great Depression. No responsible economist would have supported the lunatic economics of Bill Clinton's misadministration.

 

Image: ozma

Here are last year's top five censored news stories, according to Project Censored. You might also be interested in their Top 25 Censored Archive.

These lists of censored news stories should be cautionary to liberal bloggers. It is far too easy to let the subject matter of political blogs be driven too much by the corporate media, who themselves have a rightist bias.

1: Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
Read More

2: Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA

Leaders of Canada, the US, and Mexico have been meeting to secretly expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with “deep integration” of a more militarized tri-national Homeland Security force. Taking shape under the radar of the respective governments and without public knowledge or consideration, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)—headquartered in Washington—aims to integrate the three nations into a single political, economic, and security bloc.

The SPP was launched at a meeting of Presidents George W. Bush and Vicente Fox, and Prime Minister Paul Martin, in Waco, Texas, on March 31, 2005. The official US web page describes the SPP as “. . . a White House-led initiative among the United States and Canada and Mexico to increase security and to enhance prosperity . . .” The SPP is not a law, or a treaty, or even a signed agreement. All these would require public debate and participation of Congress.

Read More

3: InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business

More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect and provide information on fellow Americans. In return, members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate Total Information Awareness program (TIPS), turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” according to an ACLU report titled “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.”
Read More

4: ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?

A resurgence of US-backed militarism threatens peace and democracy in Latin America. By 2005, US military aid to Latin America had increased by thirty-four times the amount spent in 2000. In a marked shift in US military strategy, secretive training of Latin American military and police personnel that used to just take place at the notorious School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia—including torture and execution techniques—is now decentralized. The 2008 US federal budget includes $16.5 million to fund an International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador, with satellite operations in Peru. With provision of immunity from charges of crimes against humanity, each academy will train an average of 1,500 police officers, judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials throughout Latin America per year in “counterterrorism techniques.”
Read More

5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets

President Bush has signed two executive orders that would allow the US Treasury Department to seize the property of any person perceived to, directly or indirectly, pose a threat to US operations in the Middle East.

The first of these executive orders, titled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq,” signed by Bush on July 17, 2007, authorizes the Secretary of Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, to confiscate the assets of US citizens and organizations who “directly or indirectly” pose a risk to US operations in Iraq. Bush’s order states:

I have issued an Executive Order blocking property of persons determined 1) to have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq . . . or 2) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order . . .
Read More

Commentary

Item 2
Lou Dobbs has gone on and on about a NAFTA highway. In the process, he has botched the real story here. That clown screws up everything he touches.

Item 3
The fact that the same corporations that own the government are supplying it with information on the private lives of Americans doesn't surprise me. However, that doesn't make it even slightly less dangerous.

Item 5
The policy of a possible seizure of assets of people who disagree with the Bush regime shows the growing totalitarianism in this country. No wonder the corporate media largely ignored this story.


Previous Censored News Stories:

6-10

11-15

16-20

21-25

 

An exchange between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in today's Democratic presidential debate shows that Ms. Clinton is starting to see political danger in her vote for war with Iran.

"Declaring a military group sponsored by the state of Iran a terrorist organization, that's supposed to be diplomacy?" Edwards interjected. "This has to be considered in the context that Senator Clinton has said she agrees with George Bush terminology that we're in a global war on terror, then she voted to declare a military group in Iran a terrorist organization. What possible conclusion can you reach other than we are at war?"

Clinton objected. "You know I understand politics and I understand making outlandish political charges, but this really goes way too far," said the New York senator. She is locked in a tight three-way race with Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, and Obama, a senator from Illinois, in this first-voting state.

"None of us is advocating a rush to war," Clinton said.

In the weird world of politics, telling the truth is often considered something that "goes way too far." Iran's Revolutionary Guard is an arm of the Iranian state. Declaring it a terrorist organization at a time when this country is at a state of war with all terrorist organizations is a de facto war authorization by Congress, though a somewhat sneaky one. For Hillary Clinton to deny that the vote was anything other than an effort to start a war with Iran insults the intelligence of Democratic primary voters.

Another statement by Ms. Clinton at the debate shows that her testing of political winds has moved her in a different direction than when she voted for war with Iran.

I have for two years advocated diplomatic engagement with Iran and I think that's what the president should do. He should seize this opportunity and engage in serious diplomacy using both carrots and sticks.

This invokes mixed emotions on my part. It is good to see that the efforts to sell a lunatic war with Iran are failing to win over the American people. On the other hand, Ms. Clinton's lying about her vote brings back bad memories of her horrible, horrible husband lying on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the deceptively named version of the military ban which succeeded in increasing the numbers of discharges and witchhunts for queers in the military.

It also reminds me of how Bill Clinton repeatedly lied about NAFTA, trying to claim that NAFTA would create American jobs, rather than exporting them, and exporting US jobs is exactly what NAFTA did. The dishonesty of the Clintons may not be on the same level of that of the Bushes, but our country deserves more ethical leadership than merely being less mendacious than the leader of an unelected regime and a father who was involved in Iran-Contra.

This is from Democracy Now a while back, but it still is relevant today. Kucinich makes an excellent point about how NAFTA and the WTO create poverty in Mexico which in turn forces many people there to immigrate to the US. It would be nice if the only people migrating to the US from Mexico and other countries were coming here because they wanted to, not due to artificially generated, desperate poverty.



A similar point can be made about Haiti. If "our" government would stop supporting the murderous oligarchs and overthrowing democratically elected governments there, far fewer Haitians would be fleeing political persecution and horrific poverty.

The October 29, 2005 New York Times article, “Extension Sought in Canada Lumber Fight,” details a dispute where the Canadian government is pushing for an end to U.S. tariffs on Canadian lumber, a dispute where the Bush Administration is delaying the inevitable end of the tariffs.

What is lost in this Business section coverage is the environmental impact. Thanks to NAFTA, prices for lumber will go down, resulting in more trees being cut down in Canada. In addition to generally being bad for the environment, the additional loss of trees will add to global warming.

The Democrats need to find some backbone and call for the repeal of NAFTA. Katrina and other hurricanes this year show that global warming is more important than sucking up to corporate interests.