Barack Obama

Barack Obama
Barack Obama speaking in 2022
44th President of the United States
In office January 20, 2009 – January 20, 2017
Vice President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	George W. Bush
Succeeded by	Donald Trump
United States Senator from Illinois
In office January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Preceded by	Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by	Roland Burris
Member of the Illinois Senate from the 13th district
In office January 8, 1997 – November 4, 2004
Preceded by	Alice Palmer
Succeeded by	Kwame Raoul
Personal details
Born	Barack Hussein Obama II (1961-08-04) August 4, 1961 Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Michelle Robinson ​ (m. 1992)​
Children	Malia Sasha
Parents	Barack Obama Sr. Ann Dunham
Residence(s)	Kalorama (Washington, D.C.)
Alma mater	Occidental College Columbia University (BA) Harvard University (JD)
Occupation	Politician lawyer author
Website	Official website Obama Foundation White House Archives

Barack Hussein Obama II, born August 4, 1961, is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. He was previously a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004. He is member of the Democratic Party and the first African-American president of the United States.

In the 2008 presidential election, Obama was involved in a close and heated Democratic primary race against establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. Obama benefited from an image as a young, Black newcomer to politics in contrast to the white veteran politicians Clinton, Joe Biden, and John McCain as well as the unpopular outgoing president George W. Bush of the influential Bush family. He also received crucial support from progressive, liberal, and grassroots organizations, including ACORN, the anti-war group MoveOn.org, and a number of influential labor unions such as the Teamsters. Obama's political messaging and slogans were also highly effective, with marketing magazine Advertising Age calling the date of his election victory "the biggest day in the history of marketing" and naming him their 2008 "Marketer of the Year".

Although his campaign had benefited from a progressive image, Obama largely continued the neoliberal and imperialistic policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations. Obama's administration kept US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, started wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, supported a weak stimulus package which led to a historic upward transfer of wealth, increased tensions and military buildup in the Pacific region, appointed Wall Street executives to his cabinet and retained Bush's secretary of defense, cracked down on the Occupy Wall Street protests, authorized thousands of killings through drone strikes, deported more immigrants than any previous administration in history, and expanded mass surveillance in the United States. In 2009, after less than a year in office, Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for creating "a new climate in international politics" in which "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that.... international institutions can play".

Since leaving office, Obama has successfully maintained a positive public image among liberal Americans, many of whom emphasize his lack of major scandals in the American press, his cool demeanor and public speaking ability, and the Supreme Court decision that enshrined gay marriage rights during his tenure. Obama has leveraged this influence to weaken progressive influence in the United States, including by coordinating Democratic resistance to the Bernie Sanders 2020 election campaign and criticizing the tactics of the 2020 George Floyd protests.

Obama's failure to cause the promised fundamental shift in American politics was likely a factor in Donald Trump's reactionary 2016 election victory over Hillary Clinton, and Obama's policies have been cited as contributing to a general disillusionment among Millennials and Generation Z toward liberals and the Democratic Party.

Biography

Relationship to US government agencies

Several authors have argued that Obama's childhood and family background imply connections with the CIA and other US imperialist agencies.

Monthly Review contributor Jeremy Kuzmarov argues that Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, was likely connected to the CIA or even worked for the agency. According to Kuzmarov, Dunham was an employee of NGOs like the Ford Foundation, the Asia Foundation, DAI Global, and USAID, all of which have been connected with the CIA, and she worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia during the 1960s and 1970s, coinciding with a period of immense CIA involvement in the region. According to Kuzmarov, much of her anthropological and consulting field work was carried out in East and Central Java, a hotbed of support for the Communist Party of Indonesia—including among members of the Javanese women's association and labor federation. The CIA at this time employed anthropologists and development workers as undercover agents to gather information on villagers’ political affiliations, in which Ann, according to her thesis advisor, had taken an interest. Kuzmarov argues that development projects of the type Dunham was involved in were explicitly designed to pry villagers away from the PKI orbit.

Also according to Kuzmarov:

• Dunham worked on microfinancing projects to help turn traditional craft industries into sustainable businesses, which had the effect of “tether[ing] Third World masses to the mentality of finance capitalism,” as Obama's unauthorized biographer put it.
• Dunham's boss at USAID during her time in Indonesia was alleged to be a CIA agent in the book Who's Who in the CIA.
• In her graduate thesis, Dunham wrote that Indonesian villagers were dynamic and could produce greater wealth if they had access to market incentives and capital.
• After her arrival in Indonesia, Dunham taught English at the American embassy in Jakarta, which also housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia and had significant satellite stations on Java and Sumatra. Dunham also worked for the Indonesian-American Friendship Institute in Jakarta, a suspected CIA front. One of her closest colleagues, Adi Sasono, had been the leader of the Muslim students during the overthrow of Sukarno.
• In March 1965, Dunham married the Indonesian lieutenant colonel Lolo Soetoro. A friend of Dunham's told her biographer that the marriage to Lolo was arranged, suggesting that Dunham may have acted as a female “honeypot” for the CIA whose job was to recruit assets and help them obtain U.S. citizenship.
• Hailing from an aristocratic family which lost out in Sukarno's land reform, Soetoro was recalled to active duty in July 1965 before General Suharto's right-wing coup and worked as an army geographer in Java and Papua New Guinea, where the Indonesian army brutally suppressed popular revolts. Soetoro went on to become an executive at Mobil Oil and its liaison to Suharto, whose economic policies Dunham praised.
• Dunham and Soetoro evidently met at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center, which had been described as a “kinder, gentler version of the School of the Americas” by one writer and a “cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to create agent nets” by U.S. Information Service director Frank Scotten. The head of the East-West Center in 1965 was Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia from 1958 to 1965, who had been present in Jakarta as Suharto and his CIA-backed military officers planned the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno.

Obama claimed in his 2020 memoir that his mother had been unaware of the atrocities committed by the Suharto regime.

Kuzmarov goes on to claim that Obama's grandfather and grandmother also had suggestive connections and rose to certain positions of influence under suspicious circumstances.

Political career

In 1995, the Marxist political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. produced an analysis of Obama's political style and presentation when he was elected to the Illinois state senate:

In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.

— Adolph Reed Jr., 1995

Atrocities and war crimes

• Appointing several Wall Street executives to office, one of which was literally a Monsanto executive who was put in the FDA and deregulated GMO safety testing
• Supporting the bailout of Wall Street proposed by George W. Bush at the expense of the people during the 2008 financial crisis. Interestingly, during his 2008 campaign Obama received more money from Wall Street than Bush in his last term — even accounting for inflation.
• Failing to mitigate America's foreclosure crisis that disproportionately affected people of color
• Cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street movement
• Continuing the War on Terror and the War on Drugs
• Persecution of whistleblowers
• Normalizing and expanding upon the massive surveillance state developed under Bush
• Neglecting the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (which is also a majority black city, even though many black people thought that Obama would do better for them than previous presidents)
  • On two occasions he made a show of drinking water that he said was local to Flint, on one of them making it out as though he really needed some water and both times stating that it was not a stunt, though with neither of the glasses of water being demonstrated to have been actually sourced from the area — both times furthermore he hardly even wet his lips with them. This was after officials had declared the local water safe to drink, though many residents doubted this was the case and refused to use it.
• Opening up the Arctic for drilling twice, along with issuing a myriad of executive orders for individual pipeline segment construction which complete the entire Alberta tar sands-to-Gulf Coast pipeline. All this in spite of that phony cynical veto of the Keystone XL segment.
• Getting everyone's hopes up about prosecuting the Bush administration for war crimes and holding Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis, but ended up "turning the page"
• Oversaw the biggest transfer of wealth to the capitalist class in history
• Deporting a record number of refugees
• Making Bush's tax cuts permanent after campaigning on returning to Clinton's tax rates
• Going out of his way to help kill Bernie's campaign in 2020 and hand the nomination to Joe Biden, who would prevent people from getting healthcare, prevent the youth from getting out of debt, ensure the wars and corporate plunder would continue without obstacle, and keep his "legacy" of Obamacare in place.
• Developing neoliberal trade deals with "investment protection clauses" which enslaved Global South countries to corporations
• Developing relations with Saudi Arabia
• His "Asian Pivot", which planted the seeds for the new Cold War with China
• Crushing what remained of the Pink Tide
• Colluding with the right wing in Brazil to stage fraudulent corruption trials to that paved the way for a right-wing rise to power
• Supporting a right wing coup in Honduras
• Repealing habeas corpus with his signing of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, paving the way for such events as the kidnapping of people by federal officers in Portland in 2020
• Overthrowing the Gaddafi government in Libya, plunging the country into deep poverty, splitting it into various warlord and Islamist factions, creating an open slave trade, and causing a major flood of refugees into Europe and other places
• Expanding the wars in Afghanistan, North-West Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq (technically he ended one war with Iraq three years into his term, which he promised to do in six months, but followed it up soon with another new war)
• Starting wars in Syria (where he started by funding rebel militants), Yemen, and Libya
• Doubling down on sanctions on Venezuela, which exacerbated its domestic situation and which only plunged Venezuelans deeper towards poverty
• Continuing and adding sanctions on the DPRK
• Supporting regime change in Ukraine and Georgia
• Arming Ukrainian fascists and other far right-wing groups
• And various war crimes, such as:
  • Drone strikes in Yemen, which had a 90% civilian kill rate. Conveniently, this serves to further radicalize the population and thus justify further "counter-terrorism" operations.

It is bad enough that he did all these things, but he did all this when he had the potential to be FDR and then some. Democrats had a filibuster-proof supermajority in US Congress for the first two years and all he used it for was getting Romneycare (the heavily watered-down version of Obamacare first proposed) passed. Everyone remembers the congressional supermajority he wasted, but for some reason, we never talk about how Democrats also had a majority in governorship and state legislatures as well, so he could have dictated anything we wanted onto the states from Washington and he did nothing. With the worst financial crisis since the 30s, the material conditions were ripe for some massive Keynesian projects and the people would have supported him. Much of his base are Bernie supporters as well, and Obama had them and many more, and after getting elected he did literally nothing to mobilize the millions of email addresses belonging to devoted grassroots activists who had campaigned for him — in fact, he disbanded this grassroots army. Even for a neoliberal Democrat, he had underperformed — Bill Clinton at least got a couple things passed through Congress, even if they were minor, and was relatively dovish on foreign policy. Obama couldn't even do that.

To be fair, he did do a few good things:

• Signing the nuclear deal with Iran which is still blackmail but at least lifted some sanctions
• Lifting some sanctions on Cuba and met with Raoul Castro
• Rolling out his stimulus package in response to the Great Recession, which was a better response than the German-enforced-style austerity in the EU
• Reforming mandatory minimum sentencing laws that previously have dramatically increased the number of non-violent offenders in prisons

Legacy

Influence over Democratic politics

Opposition to leftist insurgency

If Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something. But I don’t think that’s likely. It’s not happening.

Obama has remained a reactionary force in the party and is privately opposed to nearly all policies or movements further left than his own. During the 2016 election, Obama reportedly said that a Warren presidential run could mean a "repudiation" of his legacy, especially his response to the economic crisis of 2008, as "inadequate". In the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Obama exerted his tremendous influence as a popular former president to thwart a potential Bernie Sanders nomination. Early in the race, Politico magazine had already quoted Obama advisors stating that the former president would only remain neutral until Sanders became a serious contender, at which point he would directly intervene. By Super Tuesday, a crucial day in the US primary process in which several states hold simultaneous votes, Obama almost certainly played a role in "signalling" that establishment candidates must drop out in favor of Biden in order to stop Bernie, which they did just in time for the election. Several close associates of Obama also coordinated to endorse Biden on Super Tuesday. Notably, Elizabeth Warren, Sanders's main competitor for progressive support, did not drop out until well after the crucial election.

External links

• PolitiFact's examination of how Obama kept his campaign promises
• Ben Norton's list of Obama's atrocities

See also

• George W. Bush
• Donald Trump