[News] To Celebrate Obama Day, Here are Barack’s Greatest Hits (Wars, Coups, Slavery, Sanctions, al-Qaeda, Colonialism)

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://orinocotribune.com/to-celebrate-obama-day-here-are-baracks-greatest-hits-wars-coups-slavery-sanctions-al-qaeda-colonialism/
To
Celebrate Obama Day, Here are Barack’s Greatest Hits (Wars, Coups, Slavery,
Sanctions, al-Qaeda, Colonialism)
Republicans and democrats are the same
<https://orinocotribune.com/tag/republicans-and-democrats-are-the-same/>, stop
being so naive thinking that a democrat will fix things
<https://orinocotribune.com/tag/stop-being-so-naive-thinking-that-a-democrat-will-fix-things/>,
US decline <https://orinocotribune.com/tag/us-decline/>, US Imperialism
<https://orinocotribune.com/tag/us-imperialism/>
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In parts of the United States and the bottomless pit of the internet,
today, June 14, is considered “Barack Obama Day.” On social media, the
hashtag #ObamaDayJune14th is going viral.

By Ben Norton  –  14 June 2020

So I thought I would commemorate this day by listing some of the former
Democratic president’s many accomplishments.

As his supporters are so keen to point out, Obama had no major scandals,
you see, except for:

   - wearing that tan suit one time
   - deporting more people than any other president, 2.7 million, earning
   the ignominious title “deporter in chief”
   - dropping 26,171 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries in his last
   year in office alone
   - overseeing a genocidal war in Yemen that has killed hundreds of
   thousands of people and unleashed the largest humanitarian catastrophe on
   Earth
   - supporting al-Qaeda in Syria, funneling billions of dollars of weapons
   to hardened Salafi-jihadist fanatics to try to destroy the country, and
   fueling the rise of ISIS
   arming al-Qaeda in Yemen as well
   - destroying Libya, once the most prosperous country in Africa, leaving
   behind a failed state with open-air slave markets
   - giving the Israeli apartheid regime $38 billion in unconditional
   military aid and arming it as it bombed civilians in Gaza (in three
   separate, barbaric wars: 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014)
   - creating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a neoliberal “free
   trade” monstrosity that would have ensured even more dystopian corporate
   tyranny over the global political and economic system

Oh yeah, and here are some more unforgettable classics from Obama:

   - sponsoring the military coup in Honduras, overthrowing its
   democratically elected left-leaning government and installing a far-right
   narco-dictatorship led by a
   - neoliberal autocrat whose drug lord brother smuggled thousands of tons
   of cocaine and machine guns
   - managing Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which
   the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent thousands
   of guns to murderous drug cartels in Mexico
   - backing the parliamentary coup in Brazil, removing the democratically
   elected Workers’ Party government and paving the way for the fascist
   Bolsonaro regime
   - supporting a soft coup against the democratically elected government
   in Paraguay
   overseeing a violent coup against Ukraine’s Russia-leaning elected
   government with the “Euromaidan” movement, in which neo-Nazis and other
   fascists played a significant role
   - subsequently arming the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine
   - prolonging the military occupation of Afghanistan, after promising
   dozens of times he would end the war by 2014
   - maintaining a daily “kill list” (known euphemistically as the
   “disposition matrix”) in which the US president personally approved
   extrajudicial assassinations of thousands of people, via a covert drone
   warfare program spanning multiple continents, regularly bombing countries
   including, but not limited to, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,
   Syria, and Iraq

And be sure not to forget these other timeless hits from Obama:

   - bailing out Wall Street with trillions of dollars of tax dollars, not
   sending a single corporate executive to prison for blowing up the global
   economy, while overseeing one of the largest transfers of wealth from poor
   workers to rich capitalists
   - using the World War I-era Espionage Act (passed in order to throw
   anti-war activists like socialist Eugene Debs in prison) to prosecute
   whistleblowers who leaked to journalists more than all previous presidents
   combined
   - installing a neocolonial unelected “junta” (yes, that’s the real name)
   in Puerto Rico, which controls the debt-ridden colony’s finances and
   imposes suffocating austerity to wring wealth out of the Puerto Rican people
   - imposing sanctions on Venezuela and declaring its democratically
   elected socialist government to be an “extraordinary threat to the national
   security of the United States,” setting the stage for Donald Trump’s
   full-on economic embargo and coup attempts
   - letting police and mercenaries terrorize Indigenous water protectors
   at the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas, on behalf of a corporate
   fossil-fuel pipeline
   - letting police terrorize Black, Brown, and poor people all across the
   United States, doing nothing as Black Lives Matter and the movement against
   systemic police brutality and state violence swept the country
   - doing nothing to get clean water for the mostly Black residents of
   Flint, Michigan, then visiting the city and pretending to drink the
   poisoned water and acting as if everything were okay

This last act in Flint is especially symbolic, and instructive. Watch video
of it below, and you can see how the beloved 44th president cared just as
little about his own population as he did the imperial subjects he bombed
across the planet.

Obama did this repeatedly, just to rub it in.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised; you can’t be commander in chief of the
US empire without being a murderous sociopath. It is the most important job
requirement.

Obama certainly isn’t alone when it comes to being an unrepentant war
criminal; every modern US president is. Barry just managed to pull it off
with style.

*

(PS, Some critics might ask, at a time when the far-right Trump regime is
terrorizing the planet with criminal wars of aggression and murderous
sanctions, what is the point of writing articles like this? The answer is
it’s to remind people that Trump did not come out of nowhere: neoliberal
imperialists like Obama, and George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and the fellow
war criminals who preceded them, all set the stage for Trump. At the end of
the day, their policies were not very different. They all terrorize the
planet. Trump is just more blatant about it.)

(Ben Norton’s blog <https://bennorton.com/obama-day-wars-coups-colonialism>)


Ben Norton

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone,
and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max
Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
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