The Legacy of the Barack Obama
In January, Barack Obama addressed the nation to deliver his farewell address. People across the globe, not just Americans, took to social media to share vernerative missives about the President. Many praised him for repairing America's image around the world, while others commended him for his tact during the administration of a "scandal-free" presidency. Later that month, Donald Trump was inaugurated amidst a wave of public outrage from the left who largely viewed him as a radical and dangerous departure from the trajectory that the US had assumed under Obama's leadership. While there are a myriad of reasons for the left's acrimony towards the new administration (I will address these in a separate post), perhaps the most significant is what I consider to be a profound misinterpretation of the true legacy of Barack Obama. His admiration among people on the left seems to be more a result of the successful marketing of a brilliant and charismatic black president than it is a response to his actual policy positions. In reality, the man advertised as the "hope and change" president failed repeatedly to deliver on his campaign promises and ended up leaving a dark and perilous legacy for his successors.
During the 2016 presidential election, Wikileaks began publishing an assortment of personal emails from John Podesta who served notably as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and the co-chair of president-elect Barack Obama's transition team. While the emails proved to be highly damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign due to Podesta's proximity to the candidate, they also contained an immensely underreported revelation about the Obama administration. A series of the published emails came from Michael Froman, a former Citibank executive who went on to become a US trade representative. While Obama campaigned as the "main street" president against the backdrop of the financial meltdown of 2008, the emails showed quite the opposite--almost the entirety of his cabinet was selected in advance by Citigroup, which unsurprisingly became the largest recipient of federal funds during the bailout. New Republic writes,
Despite the rhetoric about income disparity and economic predation that flourished in the wake of the financial collapse, an examination of Obama's fiscal policy ultimately reveals a resolute commitment to serving the financial overclass that had funded his campaign and engineered his administration. Obama presided over the single largest transfer of wealth in human history. Taxpayers were forced to foot the bill as over $4.5 trillion was given to Wall Street through the administration's Quantitative Easing program. Because these funds went directly to the banks whose errant policy had essentially created the crisis, it did nothing to affect jobs or wages. The banks quietly invested the money to keep the stock market functioning. As The New York Post noted, the bailout simply "funded company mergers, company debt offerings and stock buybacks. This activity kept the money sequestered and allowed a greater return for the banks." On paper, the economy appeared to be recovering, but it essentially did so at the expense of the middle class which was decimated. The only real benefactors were the 1%.
Another facet of the Obama administration that illustrates a remarkable divergence from the professed progressive values sold to the public is his unprecedented federal crackdown on whistleblowers. In a 2009 memorandum issued shortly after taking office, Obama asserted, "The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears." In contrast, during his two terms in office, Obama's Justice Department spearheaded more Espionage Act prosecutions than all US administrations combined. Journalists were also targeted as investigators sought phone records for AP journalists, threatened to jail investigative reporters, and even named a Fox News reporter as a co-conspirator in a leak case. In Texas, a journalist became the focus of a federal prosecution for investigating private defense contractors and was initially charged for simply sharing a link that contained hacked information that was already available to the public at the time of publication.
Journalists' concerns about their rights became such an important issue in this atmosphere that Obama's first Attorney General, Eric Holder, was actually forced to publicly affirm that reporters wouldn't be jailed for simply reporting the news saying, "As long as I'm attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail." New York Times reporter James Risen even went as far as to declare Obama "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation." In 2009, after Obama took office, the US slid down 29 spots on the annual Reporters without Borders ranking. Officials cited Obama's "ongoing conflict" with whistleblowers for the decline.
Even customary access that White House correspondents had enjoyed for decades was disrupted. ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton, who had covered every president since Gerald Ford, told reporters in a scathing indictment by the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013, "In the past, we would often be called into the Roosevelt Room at the beginning of meetings to hear the president's opening remarks and see who's in the meeting, and then we could talk to some of them outside on the driveway afterward. This president has wiped all that coverage off the map. He's the least transparent of the seven presidents I've covered in terms of how he does his daily business." And while Trump's treatment of the press has come under increasing scrutiny, Obama has largely been spared any significant criticism. In actuality, the Obama administration is guilty of seriously undermining vital constitutional protections, including the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Possible rationale for the Obama administration's preoccupation with secrecy came in 2013 when The Guardian began to publish information leaked by Edward Snowden. The initial reports from the Guardian showed that the NSA was collecting phone records of millions of Americans indiscriminately. The Washington Post followed the next day by publishing a story asserting that the NSA and FBI were tapping into the central servers of nine leading internet companies and "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs." Together, these stories began to paint a picture of the largest and most invasive domestic surveillance program in human history, the true scope of which has yet to be fully revealed. In his first comments after the story broke, Obama insinuated that he inherited the program from Bush but concluded that ultimately it helped to prevent terrorist attacks.
The following year, the administration outlined reforms for the data collection program. The phone data would no longer stay in the hands of the NSA. Instead, phone companies would warehouse the data themselves. In order to access it, the government would first need a judge's permission. The proclamations of the administration, however, are inconsistent with what we know about the "Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center" in Utah, which went online in 2013. The Utah data center, operated by the NSA, is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. As Wired noted in 2012, "Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails..." It's worth pointing out here that Wired's reporting took place before Snowden's revelations.
In March, Wikileaks began to publish its "Vault 7" documents. Among other things, the publications show that, over the past several years, the CIA has developed their own domestic spying program in parallel to the NSA programs that were made public by Edward Snowden. The CIA's operations, even more than the NSA's, which had attracted public scrutiny in wake of Snowden's leaks, are completely unfettered by any legislative or executive oversight. And although the origins of both of these programs are likely seated in the Bush years, they continued to expand with, at minimum, the tacit approval of the Obama administration--a fact which has drawn exceptionally scant criticism, particularly from the left.
The real danger of these surveillance programs was highlighted when reports appeared that suggested Obama's former National Security, Susan Rice, had ordered the "unmasking" of Trump officials who were under investigation. Whether or not identifying the targets was legal or ethical is irrelevant. What's important, and unsurprisingly absent from the media's reporting of the event, is that it exposed precisely how the surveillance apparatus could be used for political objectives. The almost incomprehensible reach of the government spying program that has been assembled over the last decade is available to the executive branch to be used as it sees fit. There are certainly benign applications, but it can additionally be used to collect information about political opponents, which can then be identified and, as was the case with the Susan Rice episode, leaked to the press to damage them publicly. And while Obama may be exonerated for his role in the scandal due to Trump's alleged ties to Russia, the full capability of the spying infrastructure is now available to the all future presidents, a prospect which should be alarming to all, particularly those who view Trump as an unpredictable authoritarian or foreign agent.
Like with the development of the domestic surveillance policy, the equivocal specter of terrorism also served as the pretext for Obama's White House to expand their extrajudicial drone assassination program, another ominous trend that established a dangerous precedent for future presidents. During Obama's tenure, thousands of drone killings were carried out without any judicial or legislative oversight. In addition to millions of dollars of collateral damage to infrastructure and innocent lives, the administration also targeted at least two American citizens abroad. Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, both US citizens, became the victims of American strikes in Yemen. A federal judge even threw out a case which sought to block the assassination of al-Awlaki. The ruling served as a significant victory in the Obama administration's efforts to shield the program from judicial review. The judge also determined that it would "be inappropriate to second-guess, ahead of time, national-security officials' evaluation of whether intelligence showed that some overseas person--even a United States citizen--poses such a threat that the person should be killed." This has legally established that it is within the power of the executive branch to evade the constitutional protections of American citizens to execute them without oversight at any level, public or private. The Onion even went on to make light of Obama's extensive use of drones with the headline "Departing Obama Tearfully Shoos Away Loyal Drone Following Him Out of White House," while Obama himself joked about drone strikes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The frivolity of our public acknowledgement of this issue is a tragedy. Through our silence and failure to examine or criticize the legal and moral grounds of this issue publicly, we have tacitly approved this enterprise and passed it on to subsequent administrations. This is deeply unsettling. Unsurprisingly, these strikes have continued, and even increased in frequency, under the new administration.
Finally, I would be remiss to end without noting the wretched horror that was Obama's foreign policy. I have written at length about the aims of America's 21st century foreign policy here, so for the sake of brevity, I won't go into great detail. It is, however, worth mentioning that Barack Obama was a president that campaigned on ending two wars but ended up embroiling the country in many more. He was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who became the first president in history to be at war for the entirety of both of his terms in office. To this day, there are detachments of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under his leadership, the US backed militant groups in Libya to topple the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. That conflict segued into a covert war in Syria where the US continued to arm and fund jihadis to destabilize the Syrian government in a bid to secure access for an oil pipeline. In 2014, it also appears as though the US was involved in the coup to topple Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych and install our "Ukraine insider," Petro Poroshenko. The administration's efforts abroad destroyed the lives of millions of people and left us on the brink with Russia, but Obama's legacy abroad is seldom the object of criticism or scrutiny.
Today, many Americans, particularly on the left, have become consumed by the notion that Donald Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, a "fascist" who represents a real, existential threat to American democracy. While it's certain that Trump exhibits some authoritarian inclinations, the notion that, in contrast to Obama, he represents a legitimate danger to American democracy seems to stem from an appalling ignorance of, or unwillingness to critically examine, the real legacy the last administration. In reality, despite differences on social issues, the Obama administration continued to expand much of the alarming policies that had taken root during the Bush years. He presided over the development of the most extensive and invasive surveillance structure in the world. His administration, chosen by Wall Street, administered the greatest transfer of wealth in human history to the bankers whose unremitting greed had caused the financial collapse. In the wake of the crisis, he declined to prosecute a single individual for wrongdoing but went on to conduct a ruthless campaign against would-be government whistleblowers who sought to reveal wrongdoing to the public. Americans like Chelsea Manning were kept as political prisoners. Civil rights advocates decried her treatment as she was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked without blankets or pillows and restricted from physical recreation or access to television or newspapers, while Edward Snowden was forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution for his role in revealing the illegal and unconstitutional spying program. Even journalists became the target of federal prosecutors in an effort to stifle opposition. All of this, of course, unfolded against the backdrop of an unending series of wars spanning multiple countries that shattered uncounted lives in an effort to essentially protect America's economic interests abroad. People are angry and scared that it was Trump to inherit the office, but the appropriate time for vigilance was long ago.
"The cabinet list ended up being almost entirely on the money. It correctly identified Eric Holder for the Justice Department, Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security, Robert Gates for Defense, Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff, Peter Orszag for the Office of Management and Budget, Arne Duncan for Education, Eric Shinseki for Veterans Affairs, Kathleen Sebelius for Health and Human Services, Melody Barnes for the Domestic Policy Council, and more. For the Treasury, three possibilities were on the list: Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Timothy Geithner.
This was October 6. The election was November 4. And yet Froman, an executive at Citigroup, which would ultimately become the recipient of the largest bailout from the federal government during the financial crisis, had mapped out virtually the entire Obama cabinet, a month before votes were counted. And according to the Froman/Podesta emails, lists were floating around even before that."The email chain in question, which was also laughably sent from Froman's Citibank email address, showed an apparent concern with crafting a "progressive" facade for Obama's cabinet. It included "a list of African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level, plus a list of Native American, Arab/Muslim American and disabled American candidates." The duplicity illustrated in these emails exemplifies the true essence of Obama's administration. Obama campaigned as a champion of main street. He was a bright, charismatic black man painted as a political outsider and harbinger of change. Meanwhile, Wall Street funneled an unprecedented amount of money into his campaign and worked to manufacture a diverse cabinet that would provide the artifice of progressive values for his voters when, in actuality, they were simply Wall Street appointees who were there in service to corporate interest.
Despite the rhetoric about income disparity and economic predation that flourished in the wake of the financial collapse, an examination of Obama's fiscal policy ultimately reveals a resolute commitment to serving the financial overclass that had funded his campaign and engineered his administration. Obama presided over the single largest transfer of wealth in human history. Taxpayers were forced to foot the bill as over $4.5 trillion was given to Wall Street through the administration's Quantitative Easing program. Because these funds went directly to the banks whose errant policy had essentially created the crisis, it did nothing to affect jobs or wages. The banks quietly invested the money to keep the stock market functioning. As The New York Post noted, the bailout simply "funded company mergers, company debt offerings and stock buybacks. This activity kept the money sequestered and allowed a greater return for the banks." On paper, the economy appeared to be recovering, but it essentially did so at the expense of the middle class which was decimated. The only real benefactors were the 1%.
Another facet of the Obama administration that illustrates a remarkable divergence from the professed progressive values sold to the public is his unprecedented federal crackdown on whistleblowers. In a 2009 memorandum issued shortly after taking office, Obama asserted, "The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears." In contrast, during his two terms in office, Obama's Justice Department spearheaded more Espionage Act prosecutions than all US administrations combined. Journalists were also targeted as investigators sought phone records for AP journalists, threatened to jail investigative reporters, and even named a Fox News reporter as a co-conspirator in a leak case. In Texas, a journalist became the focus of a federal prosecution for investigating private defense contractors and was initially charged for simply sharing a link that contained hacked information that was already available to the public at the time of publication.
Journalists' concerns about their rights became such an important issue in this atmosphere that Obama's first Attorney General, Eric Holder, was actually forced to publicly affirm that reporters wouldn't be jailed for simply reporting the news saying, "As long as I'm attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail." New York Times reporter James Risen even went as far as to declare Obama "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation." In 2009, after Obama took office, the US slid down 29 spots on the annual Reporters without Borders ranking. Officials cited Obama's "ongoing conflict" with whistleblowers for the decline.
Even customary access that White House correspondents had enjoyed for decades was disrupted. ABC News White House correspondent Ann Compton, who had covered every president since Gerald Ford, told reporters in a scathing indictment by the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013, "In the past, we would often be called into the Roosevelt Room at the beginning of meetings to hear the president's opening remarks and see who's in the meeting, and then we could talk to some of them outside on the driveway afterward. This president has wiped all that coverage off the map. He's the least transparent of the seven presidents I've covered in terms of how he does his daily business." And while Trump's treatment of the press has come under increasing scrutiny, Obama has largely been spared any significant criticism. In actuality, the Obama administration is guilty of seriously undermining vital constitutional protections, including the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Possible rationale for the Obama administration's preoccupation with secrecy came in 2013 when The Guardian began to publish information leaked by Edward Snowden. The initial reports from the Guardian showed that the NSA was collecting phone records of millions of Americans indiscriminately. The Washington Post followed the next day by publishing a story asserting that the NSA and FBI were tapping into the central servers of nine leading internet companies and "extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs." Together, these stories began to paint a picture of the largest and most invasive domestic surveillance program in human history, the true scope of which has yet to be fully revealed. In his first comments after the story broke, Obama insinuated that he inherited the program from Bush but concluded that ultimately it helped to prevent terrorist attacks.
The following year, the administration outlined reforms for the data collection program. The phone data would no longer stay in the hands of the NSA. Instead, phone companies would warehouse the data themselves. In order to access it, the government would first need a judge's permission. The proclamations of the administration, however, are inconsistent with what we know about the "Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center" in Utah, which went online in 2013. The Utah data center, operated by the NSA, is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. As Wired noted in 2012, "Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails..." It's worth pointing out here that Wired's reporting took place before Snowden's revelations.
In March, Wikileaks began to publish its "Vault 7" documents. Among other things, the publications show that, over the past several years, the CIA has developed their own domestic spying program in parallel to the NSA programs that were made public by Edward Snowden. The CIA's operations, even more than the NSA's, which had attracted public scrutiny in wake of Snowden's leaks, are completely unfettered by any legislative or executive oversight. And although the origins of both of these programs are likely seated in the Bush years, they continued to expand with, at minimum, the tacit approval of the Obama administration--a fact which has drawn exceptionally scant criticism, particularly from the left.
The real danger of these surveillance programs was highlighted when reports appeared that suggested Obama's former National Security, Susan Rice, had ordered the "unmasking" of Trump officials who were under investigation. Whether or not identifying the targets was legal or ethical is irrelevant. What's important, and unsurprisingly absent from the media's reporting of the event, is that it exposed precisely how the surveillance apparatus could be used for political objectives. The almost incomprehensible reach of the government spying program that has been assembled over the last decade is available to the executive branch to be used as it sees fit. There are certainly benign applications, but it can additionally be used to collect information about political opponents, which can then be identified and, as was the case with the Susan Rice episode, leaked to the press to damage them publicly. And while Obama may be exonerated for his role in the scandal due to Trump's alleged ties to Russia, the full capability of the spying infrastructure is now available to the all future presidents, a prospect which should be alarming to all, particularly those who view Trump as an unpredictable authoritarian or foreign agent.
Like with the development of the domestic surveillance policy, the equivocal specter of terrorism also served as the pretext for Obama's White House to expand their extrajudicial drone assassination program, another ominous trend that established a dangerous precedent for future presidents. During Obama's tenure, thousands of drone killings were carried out without any judicial or legislative oversight. In addition to millions of dollars of collateral damage to infrastructure and innocent lives, the administration also targeted at least two American citizens abroad. Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, both US citizens, became the victims of American strikes in Yemen. A federal judge even threw out a case which sought to block the assassination of al-Awlaki. The ruling served as a significant victory in the Obama administration's efforts to shield the program from judicial review. The judge also determined that it would "be inappropriate to second-guess, ahead of time, national-security officials' evaluation of whether intelligence showed that some overseas person--even a United States citizen--poses such a threat that the person should be killed." This has legally established that it is within the power of the executive branch to evade the constitutional protections of American citizens to execute them without oversight at any level, public or private. The Onion even went on to make light of Obama's extensive use of drones with the headline "Departing Obama Tearfully Shoos Away Loyal Drone Following Him Out of White House," while Obama himself joked about drone strikes at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The frivolity of our public acknowledgement of this issue is a tragedy. Through our silence and failure to examine or criticize the legal and moral grounds of this issue publicly, we have tacitly approved this enterprise and passed it on to subsequent administrations. This is deeply unsettling. Unsurprisingly, these strikes have continued, and even increased in frequency, under the new administration.
Finally, I would be remiss to end without noting the wretched horror that was Obama's foreign policy. I have written at length about the aims of America's 21st century foreign policy here, so for the sake of brevity, I won't go into great detail. It is, however, worth mentioning that Barack Obama was a president that campaigned on ending two wars but ended up embroiling the country in many more. He was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who became the first president in history to be at war for the entirety of both of his terms in office. To this day, there are detachments of American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Under his leadership, the US backed militant groups in Libya to topple the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. That conflict segued into a covert war in Syria where the US continued to arm and fund jihadis to destabilize the Syrian government in a bid to secure access for an oil pipeline. In 2014, it also appears as though the US was involved in the coup to topple Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych and install our "Ukraine insider," Petro Poroshenko. The administration's efforts abroad destroyed the lives of millions of people and left us on the brink with Russia, but Obama's legacy abroad is seldom the object of criticism or scrutiny.
Today, many Americans, particularly on the left, have become consumed by the notion that Donald Trump is a dangerous authoritarian, a "fascist" who represents a real, existential threat to American democracy. While it's certain that Trump exhibits some authoritarian inclinations, the notion that, in contrast to Obama, he represents a legitimate danger to American democracy seems to stem from an appalling ignorance of, or unwillingness to critically examine, the real legacy the last administration. In reality, despite differences on social issues, the Obama administration continued to expand much of the alarming policies that had taken root during the Bush years. He presided over the development of the most extensive and invasive surveillance structure in the world. His administration, chosen by Wall Street, administered the greatest transfer of wealth in human history to the bankers whose unremitting greed had caused the financial collapse. In the wake of the crisis, he declined to prosecute a single individual for wrongdoing but went on to conduct a ruthless campaign against would-be government whistleblowers who sought to reveal wrongdoing to the public. Americans like Chelsea Manning were kept as political prisoners. Civil rights advocates decried her treatment as she was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, forced to sleep naked without blankets or pillows and restricted from physical recreation or access to television or newspapers, while Edward Snowden was forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution for his role in revealing the illegal and unconstitutional spying program. Even journalists became the target of federal prosecutors in an effort to stifle opposition. All of this, of course, unfolded against the backdrop of an unending series of wars spanning multiple countries that shattered uncounted lives in an effort to essentially protect America's economic interests abroad. People are angry and scared that it was Trump to inherit the office, but the appropriate time for vigilance was long ago.
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