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.

 

A recent post on Preserve, Protect, and Defend does an excellent job of pointing out the frustrations Obama supporters have with his conservative critics in the corporate media and in Congress. I encourage you to read the whole post, part of which I'm excerpting here.

I'm so sick of all the talking-heads that spout only drivel, second-guessers, back-seat-drivers, know-nothings and do-nothings that I could vomit.

At the same time that they're telling Obama that he's not doing enough: that he should have solved the economic crisis by now— you know, the one that took at least all the years since Reagan took office to create —they're managing to tell him that he's doing too much. Somehow, they've managed to convince themselves he can do both simultaneously.
And they accuse us of calling him Superman.

What they're actually saying is that they don't want to save the environment and create sustainable energy sources. They don't want the rest of us to have affordable health care. They don't want to care for our veterans. They don't want to allow the children of us peons to receive an education. And they absolutely refuse to see how all these matters are related to each other and the economy.

It is understandable that people would be tired of the nihilism and opportunism of the right. However, we all have a responsibility to be "back seat drivers" and "second guessers." In a democracy , that is our responsiblity and inalienable right. We have to remember that politicians work for us, not the other way around.

There are critics on the left who are making legitimate points about the need for Obama to do more. He needs to do more, a lot more, in many areas. Here are some blatantly obvious examples.

- Budgeting a massive expansion of our nation's public transportation network

- Rapidly and completely withdrawing from a war on Iraq that is devastating our economy while destroying theirs

- Working for a moratorium on foreclosures

- Supporting HR 676, the single payer healthcare bill, rather than imperiously saying that single payer is "off the table"

- Restoring all the financial regulations that were included in the Glass-Steagall Act, which was slowly eviscerated by Republicans as well as Phonycrats like Bill Clinton

- Subjecting hedge funds to all the same transparency and regulations of regular mutual funds

- Repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich ASAP, given the easily observed fact that tax cuts for the rich slow the economy and helped to cause the crises we face

- Budgeting money for the Gulf Coast Civil Works Project

- Working in a calm, cooperative manner with the international community to repeal NAFTA and other corporate controlled trade agreements, including dissolving the World Trade Organization

- Strongly enforcing our nation's antitrust laws so we won't have the economic disruptions caused by huge corporations going under

- Firing Larry Summers, chief Clinton administration architect of financial deregulation and corporate controlled trade deals

These are just areas where there are deficiencies in Obama's economic policies. There are a lot of policy deficiencies in other areas too.

We need to push Obama hard, not blindly support a center-right Democrat like him. We can't afford to go along with too much of the same when the same is devastating our country. Liberals and progressives cannot afford to make the same mistake we made before of giving Bill Clinton a chance. That was a disaster. We need to fight hard no matter which politician is in office.

 

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.

 

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.