OBAMA LIST

• Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign?

• Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against -- from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions?

• Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes?

• Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN?

• Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to "surge" in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam?

• Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama's detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House"?

How far we've fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson: "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

Obama's domestic policies are equally suspect, if not wholly corrupt:

• His education policy, under Kommandant Arne Duncan, is pure, test-driven, militaristic corporatism and charter schools where the rules can be suspended.
• He's not even trying to rein in the Wall Street banksters, who have ALREADY begun to spin the next bubbles; he has not re-engineered any separation between commercial and investment banks; indeed, if anything, he's made them MORE intertwined.
• Don't even get me started on the gigantic, epochal, astonishingly vulgar and felonious corpoRat clusterfuck that is the "health-care-reform" effort. When the final vote comes, in January, after the SoTU (so the fucktards and the Pukes can smirk about it) it will not be ANY different than if it had been held a year earlier.
• He's not given any indication he'll try to block the NBC/Comcast merger, so he's not gonna use the FCC to block further media monopolism "consolidation."
• He's still pursuing Bushevik challenges to laws and regulations of dubious constitutionality to begin with into the Supreme Court.

And now, he's gonna put another 30K poor, dumb-fuck GIs in harm's way in Central Asia, entirely at the behest of the Military/Industrial complex.

• and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt,

• how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus,

• end torture in our offshore penal colonies,

• abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or

• halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens?

• The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush.

• It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite.

• It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby,

• refuses to enact serious environmental or

• health care reform,

• regulate Wall Street,

• end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or

• stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry.

It’s a dangerous precedent for the people of Latin America when President Barack Obama sides with coup-mongering oligarchs, as he did in recognizing the tainted presidential elections in Honduras. But it’s an even more dangerous precedent for the world, because it shows how easily he caves in to right-wing extremists in Washington.

What happened? According to Jim DeMint, conservative firebrand senator from South Carolina, Obama caved. DeMint is one of the domino-minded Republicans who seem to live in fear of the spread of Chavez’s social programs. Zelaya had begun helping the poor, such as raising the minimum wage 60 percent and offering discounted energy. DeMint sees that and thinks Stalin.