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<font size="1"><a href="https://orinocotribune.com/to-celebrate-obama-day-here-are-baracks-greatest-hits-wars-coups-slavery-sanctions-al-qaeda-colonialism/">https://orinocotribune.com/to-celebrate-obama-day-here-are-baracks-greatest-hits-wars-coups-slavery-sanctions-al-qaeda-colonialism/</a></font>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">To Celebrate Obama Day, Here are Barack’s Greatest Hits (Wars, Coups, Slavery, Sanctions, al-Qaeda, Colonialism)</h1><div>
<span class="gmail-tag-links"> <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/tag/republicans-and-democrats-are-the-same/" rel="tag">Republicans and democrats are the same</a>, <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/tag/stop-being-so-naive-thinking-that-a-democrat-will-fix-things/" rel="tag">stop being so naive thinking that a democrat will fix things</a>, <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/tag/us-decline/" rel="tag">US decline</a>, <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/tag/us-imperialism/" rel="tag">US Imperialism</a></span>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-line-height4 gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>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.</p><p>By Ben Norton – 14 June 2020</p><p>So I thought I would commemorate this day by listing some of the former Democratic president’s many accomplishments.</p><p>As his supporters are so keen to point out, Obama had no major scandals, you see, except for:</p><ul><li>wearing that tan suit one time</li><li>deporting more people than any other president, 2.7 million, earning the ignominious title “deporter in chief”</li><li>dropping 26,171 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries in his last year in office alone</li><li>overseeing
a genocidal war in Yemen that has killed hundreds of thousands of
people and unleashed the largest humanitarian catastrophe on Earth</li><li>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<br> arming al-Qaeda in Yemen as well</li><li>destroying Libya, once the most prosperous country in Africa, leaving behind a failed state with open-air slave markets</li><li>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)</li><li>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</li></ul><p>Oh yeah, and here are some more unforgettable classics from Obama:</p><ul><li>sponsoring
the military coup in Honduras, overthrowing its democratically elected
left-leaning government and installing a far-right narco-dictatorship
led by a</li><li>neoliberal autocrat whose drug lord brother smuggled thousands of tons of cocaine and machine guns</li><li>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</li><li>backing the
parliamentary coup in Brazil, removing the democratically elected
Workers’ Party government and paving the way for the fascist Bolsonaro
regime</li><li>supporting a soft coup against the democratically elected government in Paraguay<br>
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</li><li>subsequently arming the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in Ukraine</li><li>prolonging the military occupation of Afghanistan, after promising dozens of times he would end the war by 2014</li><li>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</li></ul><p>And be sure not to forget these other timeless hits from Obama:</p><ul><li>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</li><li>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</li><li>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</li><li>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</li><li>letting police and
mercenaries terrorize Indigenous water protectors at the Standing Rock
Reservation in the Dakotas, on behalf of a corporate fossil-fuel
pipeline</li><li>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</li><li>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<br></li></ul><p>
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.</p><p>Obama did this repeatedly, just to rub it in.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>*</p><p>(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.)</p><p>(<a href="https://bennorton.com/obama-day-wars-coups-colonialism" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Norton’s blog</a>)</p><div id="gmail-mab-2579270322"><div><div><div><p><span> <br> </span></p><div><h5> <span> Ben Norton </span></h5><div><p>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.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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