It’s painful to watch Obama’s repeated lies that health insurance costs would be, on average, $2,500 lower for family plans, when in fact, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation report, they are up $4,865. When his presidency is finally over, he will leave office with the lowest credibility since Nixon and Johnson. The man is a liar.
This is a different, and undoubtedly controversial, take on President Obama’s foreign policy. It may provoke some discussion. From Alfred McCoy and Tom Englehardt at antiwar.org:
It could be a joke of the “a penguin, a rabbi, and a priest walked into a bar” variety, but this one would start, “five Chinese naval vessels operating in the Bering Sea sailed into U.S. territorial waters, coming within 12 miles of the U.S. coast…” And the punch line would be yours to come up with. Certainly, that “event,” which did indeed occur recently (without notification to U.S. authorities), caused a small news flap here, in part because President Obama was then visiting Alaska. Not since German U-boats prowled off the East Coast of the U.S. during World War II had such a thing happened and though American officials reported that the Chinese had done nothing illegal or that failed to comply with international law, it still had a certain shock effect in a country that’s used to its own navy traveling the world’s waters at will.
No one would think to report similarly on U.S. ships transiting global waters of every sort (often with the urge to impress or issue a warning). It’s the norm of our world that the U.S. can travel the waters of its choice, including Chinese territorial ones, without comment or prior notification to anybody, and that it can build strings of bases and garrisons to “contain” China, and determine which waters off China’s coasts are “Chinese” and which are, in effect, American. This is commonplace and so hardly news here.
Any Chinese attempt to challenge this, however symbolically – and those five ships were clearly meant to tweak the maritime nose of the globe’s “sole superpower” – is news indeed. That includes, of course, the giant, grim, militaristic parade the Chinese leadership recently organized in the streets of Beijing, which U.S. news reports left you feeling had taken place, like the brief voyage of those five ships, somewhere in close proximity to U.S. territory. There’s no question that, despite recent economic setbacks, the Chinese still consider themselves the rising power on planet Earth, and are increasingly eager to draw some aggressive boundaries in the Pacific, while challenging a country that is “pivoting” directly into its neighborhood in a very public way. Get used to all this. It’s the beginning of what could prove to be a decades-long militarized contest between two bulked-up powers, each eager enough to be off the coast of the other one (though the only coast China is likely to be off in a serious way for a long time to come is the cyber-coast of America).
Fortunately, TomDispatch has Alfred McCoy, a veteran empire watcher, keeping an eye on all of this. Recently, he wrote a much-noted piece, “The Geopolitics of American Global Decline,” on Chinese attempts to reorganize the “world island” of Eurasia and break the encircling bounds of American power. Today, in what is in essence part two, he turns to the other side of the equation, American power (never to be underestimated), and suggests that, in the imperial sweepstakes that have been the essence of global politics since at least the sixteenth century, the most underestimated figure of our moment may be President Barack Obama. The question McCoy raises: Might Obama’s global policies, much derided here, actually extend the American “century” deep into the twenty-first? ~ Tom
Grandmaster of the Great Game
Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China
By Alfred W. McCoy
In ways that have eluded Washington pundits and policymakers, President Barack Obama is deploying a subtle geopolitical strategy that, if successful, might give Washington a fighting chance to extend its global hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. After six years of silent, sometimes secret preparations, the Obama White House has recently unveiled some bold diplomatic initiatives whose sum is nothing less than a tri-continental strategy to check Beijing’s rise. As these moves unfold, Obama is revealing himself as one of those rare grandmasters who appear every generation or two with an ability to go beyond mere foreign policy and play that ruthless global game called geopolitics.
Since he took office in 2009, Obama has faced an unremitting chorus of criticism, left and right, domestic and foreign, dismissing him as hapless, even hopeless. “He’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” said Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chavez, just months after Obama’s inauguration. “I think he has projected a position of weakness and… a lack of leadership,” claimed Republican Senator John McCain in 2012. “After six years,” opined a commentator from the conservative Heritage Foundation last April, “he still displays a troubling misunderstanding of power and the leadership role the United States plays in the international system.” Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter recently dismissed Obama’s foreign policy achievements as “minimal.” Voicing the views of many Americans, Donald Trump derided his global vision this way: “We have a president who doesn’t have a clue.”
But let’s give credit where it’s due. Without proclaiming a presumptuously labeled policy such as “triangulation,” “the Nixon Doctrine,” or even a “freedom agenda,” Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence.
To continue reading: Maintaining American Supremacy in the Twenty-First Century
Pity those who place their hope in politicians. From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:
They were supposed to be different: Republicans for peace, conservatives against empire, leading a grassroots insurrection to overthrow the neocons and restore the Republic. It was Mr. Libertarian goes to Washington. Mr. Frodo goes to Mordor.
Yet, when the chips were down in a crucial contest, they all folded. Senator Rand Paul and the entire Congressional “Liberty Caucus” (including Rep. Justin Amash, and Rep. Thomas Massie) have now all yielded to the War Party and ultimately opposed the Iran nuclear deal.
Of all foreign policy issues, this should have been the easiest on which to stand fast. Opposition to the Iraq War is an essential, distinguishing position of “liberty Republicans.” And in so many ways, the anti-Iran campaign is a rerun of the march to war on Iraq.
The same rogues gallery of Israel-firsters and imperialists are leading the march. The media are helping them propagate the same lies and hysteria over a fabricated WMD crisis and trumped up terror ties.
The same child-sickening and civil society-debilitating sanctions are being imposed. It is all with the same ultimate aim of bombing, regime-changing, and likely invading and occupying a Middle Eastern country that does not totally bend its knee to Washington and Tel Aviv.
And if not obstructed, it will again culminate in the chaotic ruin of a civilization, the killing of hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of millions, and a further massive squandering of American blood and treasure. Only this time would be even worse, because it would involve a nation of 77 million.
To put it in perspective, with these clear parallels in mind, imagine if President Clinton had tried to thaw relations with Baghdad in the 90s, which would have knocked the wind out of the neocons’ push for war on Iraq throughout and following that decade.
Now imagine if “non-interventionist libertarians” in Congress then worked against the detente that would have prevented the Iraq War: the worst disaster and atrocity of recent times.
That is how serious and unforgivable the opposition of Rand Paul and the Liberty Caucus to the Iran deal is. That is how foolish it is to rest your hopes for peace on politicians.
He was supposed to be different: a hero for hope; a champion of change; a one-man rebuke to the bellicose jingoism and unilateral arrogance of the Bush administration. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term on his perceived promise alone.
Yet, Obama only perpetuated and expanded the Long War that Bush began.
He launched a futile “surge” in Afghanistan that squandered over 1,500 American lives (74% of total U.S. casualties in that war ).
He had hardly “ended” Iraq War II before launching Iraq War III (the War on ISIS) over a handful of foreign-soil murders and internet snuff films.
When the Arab Spring emerged, he did not welcome it as an assertion of self-determination and a cue for the US empire to exit graciously, as some of his supporters might have expected their “peace President” to do.
Instead, when the Arab Spring reached the US client states of Egypt and Yemen, he supported counter-revolutions to reimpose dictatorship and restore their client status. And now that the new puppet ruler of Yemen has been overthrown, he is backing a vicious Saudi war to reinstall him.
And when the Arab Spring reached “rogue states” Libya and Syria (global empires see every non-client as a rogue), he co-opted, militarized, and radicalized the uprisings. He armed and abetted jihadists, sending both countries spiraling into civil war and chaos, and forcing hundreds of thousands to either flee into Europe or drown in the Mediterranean Sea trying.
On top of all this, he launched multiple drone wars (which have set precedents for the assassination of American citizens and the routine assassination of anonymous targets), imperialist pivots to Asia and Africa, and a new cold war with nuclear Russia after fomenting a civil war in Ukraine.
Far from fulfilling Hope for peace and delivering a Change in US foreign policy, Barack Obama has joined the likes of Henry Kissinger as just one more war criminal with a Peace Prize.
To continue reading: No Peace Through Politics
Patrick Buchanan tells Obama to man up. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:
In his desperation to sink the Iran nuclear deal, Bibi Netanyahu is taking a hellish gamble.
Israel depends upon the United States for $3 billion a year in military aid and diplomatic cover in forums where she is often treated like a pariah state. Israel has also been the beneficiary of almost all the U.S. vetoes in the Security Council.
America is indispensable to Israel. The reverse is not true.
Yet, without telling the White House, Bibi had his U.S. ambassador arrange for him to address a joint session of Congress in March — to rip up the president’s Iran nuclear deal before it was even completed.
The day the deal was signed, using what The Washington Post calls “stark apocalyptic language,” Bibi accused John Kerry of giving the mullahs a “sure path to a nuclear weapon” and a “cash bonanza of hundreds of billions of dollars … to pursue its aggression and terror.”
Bibi has since inspired and led the campaign to get Congress to kill the deal, the altarpiece of the Obama presidency.
Israel Ambassador Ron Dermer, a former Republican operative now cast in the role of “Citizen Genet,” has intensively lobbied the Hill to get Congress to pass a resolution of rejection.
If that resolution passes, as it appears it will, Obama will veto it.
Then Israel, the Israeli lobby AIPAC, and all its allies and auxiliaries in the think tanks and on op-ed pages will conduct a full-court press to have Congress override the Obama veto and kill his nuclear deal.
Has Bibi, have the Israelis, considered what would happen should they succeed? Certainly, there would be rejoicing in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and Bibi would be crowned King of Capitol Hill.
But they will have humiliated an American president by crushing him by two-to-one in his own legislature. Such a defeat could break the Obama presidency and force the resignation of John Kerry, who would have become a laughing stock in international forums.
The message would go out to the world. In any clash between the United States and Israel over U.S. policy in the Middle East, bet on Bibi. Bet on Israel. America is Israel’s poodle now.
To continue reading: Obama v. Bibi—Fight to the Finish
Posted in Foreign Policy, Other Views
Tagged Iran, Netanyahu, Nuclear Negotiations, President Obama
From Micheal Snyder, at theeconomiccollapseblog.com:
Is Barack Obama trying to kill the economy on purpose? On Sunday, we learned that Obama is imposing a nationwide 32 percent carbon dioxide emission reduction from 2005 levels by the year 2030. When it was first proposed last year, Obama’s plan called for a 30 percent reduction, but the final version is even more dramatic. The Obama administration admits that this is going to cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year and that electricity rates for many Americans are going to rise substantially. And what Obama is not telling us is that this plan is going to kill what is left of our coal industry and will destroy countless numbers of American jobs. The Republicans in Congress hate this plan, state governments across the country hate this plan, and thousands of business owners hate this plan. But since Barack Obama has decided that this is a good idea, he is imposing it on all of us anyway.
So how can Obama get away with doing this without congressional approval?
Well, he is using the “regulatory power” of the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress is increasingly becoming irrelevant as federal agencies issue thousands of new rules and regulations each and every year. The IRS, for example, issues countless numbers of new rules and regulations each year without every consulting Congress. Government bureaucracy has spun wildly out of control, and most Americans don’t even realize what is happening.
In the last 15 days of 2014 alone, 1,200 new government regulations were published. We are literally being strangled with red tape, and it has gotten worse year after year no matter which political party has been in power.
These new greenhouse gas regulations are terrible. The following is a summary of what Obama is now imposing on the entire country…
Last year, the Obama administration proposed the first greenhouse gas limits on existing power plants in U.S. history, triggering a yearlong review and 4 million public comments to the Environmental Protection Agency. In a video posted to Facebook, Obama said he would announce the final rule at a White House event on Monday, calling it the biggest step the U.S. has ever taken on climate change.
The final version imposes stricter carbon dioxide limits on states than was previously expected: a 32 percent cut by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, senior administration officials said. Obama’s proposed version last year called only for a 30 percent cut.
In America today, the burning of coal produces approximately 40 percent of the electrical power used by Americans each year.
So what is this going to do to our electricity bills?
You guessed it – at this point even the Obama administration is admitting that they are going to go up. The following comes from Fox News…
The Obama administration previously predicted emissions limits will cost up to $8.8 billion annually by 2030, though it says those costs will be far outweighed by health savings from fewer asthma attacks and other benefits. The actual price is unknown until states decide how they’ll reach their targets, but the administration has projected the rule would raise electricity prices about 4.9 percent by 2020 and prompt coal-fired power plants to close.
In the works for years, the power plant rule forms the cornerstone of Obama’s plan to curb U.S. emissions and keep global temperatures from climbing, and its success is pivotal to the legacy Obama hopes to leave on climate change. Never before has the U.S. sought to restrict carbon dioxide from existing power plants.
And we must keep in mind that government projections are always way too optimistic. The real numbers would almost surely turn out to be far, far worse than this.
To continue reading: Another Nail In The Coffin for the U.S. Economy
Posted in Economy, Energy, Environment, Government, Other Views
Tagged Coal, President Obama
Michael Goodwin raises the possibility that Hillary’s lies may catch up to her, and that her legal torment originates with the Obama administration. However, the betting here is that unless Hillary is actually convicted and in jail come November, 2016, she’ll be the Democratic candidate. Who else do they have? Anyway, as humor, a Hillary-Obama battle might be right up there with good little Republicans squirming over bad boy Trump. From Goodwin at nypost.com:
If Hillary Clinton were a cartoon character, she’d be Snidely Whiplash, forever muttering to herself, “Curses, foiled again.” And she’d be right.
The lady in waiting will have to keep waiting. Probably forever. Fate has spoken.
Already threatened by a growing trust deficit with voters, her would-be majesty now faces an even more lethal adversary. It’s called the truth, though she probably sees it as a vast, left-wing conspiracy.
The news that two inspectors general from the Obama administration want the Justice Department to investigate her handling of classified material is a potential game changer. For many Democrats, it will serve as final proof she is fatally flawed.
Her standing will further erode, turning her coronation plans into a long, hot summer. The drip, drip, drip of details will produce new polls showing a bleeding of support, which will entice other candidates into the race. Look for Vice President Joe Biden to jump in soon, and lefty Sen. Elizabeth Warren might also take the leap.
Meanwhile, Clinton must play defense against her former colleagues in the State Department and intelligence agencies.
Actually, it’s worse. She’s almost certainly up against the White House.
Somebody very high in the food chain leaked the memos requesting the probe. The New York Times, which broke the story, identified its source only as “a senior government official.”
My money is on Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ Rasputin, who is known to despise Clinton. If it was Jarrett, she would not do this against the president’s wishes.
That also would be true for any “senior government official” who leaked the memos. Targets don’t get any bigger than Hillary Clinton, so this was not a rogue operation. This was an approved hit.
Clinton has an enemies list — and it looks like she’s on Obama’s. It’s also possible the White House is using the issue to keep her in line on the Iranian nuke deal. The implied threat is “look what happened to Robert Menendez.”
To keep reading: Hillary faces dangerous enemy in the Obama administration
If you have not heard about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulations (SLL had not) it’s time to bring yourself up to speed. These regulations that my have as wide reaching and pernicious impact as Obamacare. From Stanley Kurtz, via a guest post on theburningplatform.com:
It’s difficult to say what’s more striking about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation:its breathtaking radicalism, the refusal of the press to cover it, or its potential political ramifications. The danger AFFH poses to Democrats explains why the press barely mentions it. This lack of curiosity, in turn, explains why the revolutionary nature of the rule has not been properly understood. Ultimately, the regulation amounts to back-door annexation, a way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of nearby cities.
This has been Obama’s purpose from the start. In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, I explain how a young Barack Obama turned against the suburbs and threw in his lot with a group of Alinsky-style community organizers who blamed suburban tax-flight for urban decay. Their bible was Cities Without Suburbs, by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk. Rusk, who works closely with Obama’s Alinskyite mentors and now advises the Obama administration, initially called on cities to annex their surrounding suburbs. When it became clear that outright annexation was a political non-starter, Rusk and his followers settled on a series of measures designed to achieve de facto annexation over time.
The plan has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and when possible encourage suburban re-migration to cities. This can be achieved, for example, through regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by relative neglect of highway-building and repair in favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban poor into the suburbs through the imposition of low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional tax-base sharing,” where a state forces upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul).
If you press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money to cities, you have effectively abolished the suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call themselves “regionalists.”
AFFH goes a long way toward achieving the regionalist program of Obama and his organizing mentors. In significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto regional annexation of America’s suburbs. To see why, let’s have a look at the rule.
To continue reading: Attention America’s Suburbs
Posted in Government, Law, Other Views
Tagged AFFH, Cities, President Obama, Suburbs
Between President Obama’s make-them-up-he-goes-along amendments to the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court’s revisions to make it Constitutionally permissable, at least by its tortured reading of that document, any resemblance between the original law and what we actually have is coincidental. From Michael F. Cannon at washingtonexaminer.com, via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
Obamacare supporters are mistaken if they think the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell ruling settles the issue. Even in defeat, King threatens Obamacare’s survival, because it exposes Obamacare as an illegitimate law.
Say what you will about the Affordable Care Act. Democrats passed it in haste. In desperation. Without knowing what was in it. With no bipartisan support. By one vote. In the dead of night. Over public opposition. Using lies. With disdain for “the stupidity of the American voter.” Still, barring some constitutional defect, the ACA as enacted was the law of the land.
Yet President Obama and the Supreme Court now have amended the ACA to the point where it has been transformed into something no Congress ever enacted — indeed that no Congress ever had the votes to enact. The executive and the judiciary have effectively repealed the ACA and replaced it with “Obamacare,” which enjoys no such legitimacy.
Before the ink was dry on the Affordable Care Act, President Obama began amending it in dozens of ways that only Congress is authorized to do. Simply usurping Congress’ legislative powers would have been bad enough. But Obama’s changes were designed to prevent Congress from legislating.
The ACA immediately threw members of Congress out of their health plans, effectively cutting their pay by $10,000. Obamacare, in contrast, gives Congress a special exemption that lets them keep their health plans and slips $10,000 per year into the pockets of lawmakers, without the constitutional hassles of an act of Congress and an intervening election.
The ACA required many employers to buy more robust health plans six months after enactment. Obamacare, on the other hand, offered waivers to politically connected employers and union plans, lest they lobby Congress for relief.
The ACA requires large employers to buy coverage for their workers beginning in 2014. Obamacare, on the other hand, delays that mandate by up to two years, lest a backlash give rise to legislation. (Even Obamacare’s supporters had trouble stomaching that one.)
The ACA threw millions out of their health plans in 2014. But Obamacare allows people to keep the very health plans Congress outlawed. Obama even threatened to veto bipartisan legislation that would have done the same thing, but legally.
Congress forgot to appropriate $135 billion for cost-sharing subsidies. Obamacare spends that trifling sum without an appropriation. And the list goes on…
The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has done even more to amend the ACA.
To continue reading: The ACA Is Dead
Posted in Law, Medicine, Other Views
Tagged Obamacare, President Obama, Supreme Court
If you don’t know where the title or the cartoon comes from, Google Aretha Franklin and Rodney Dangerfield.
President Obama personally appealed to Democratic representatives not to vote against a job-retraining bill. They rejected the appeal and voted against the bill, defeating it. This puts a big crimp in Obama’s and Congressional Republicans’ hopes of passing a bill to “fast track” three trade bills. From Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.:
He’s ignored Congress and disrespected Congress for years, and then comes to the caucus and lectures us for 40 minutes about his values and whether or not we’re being honest by using legislative tactics to try and stop something which we believe is a horrible mistake for the United States of America, and questions our integrity. It wasn’t the greatest strategy.
This is from a Democratic representative. Something about things that go around eventually coming around comes to mind. For more on the trade legislation, see “Paul Ryan Channels Pelosi on the TPP – You Have to Pass Obamatrade to See What’s in Obamatrade,” SLL, 6/11/15
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