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Obama

Trial Of Honduran Ex-President Reveals Washington’s Protection Of ‘Narco-State’

September 24, 2023 Alexander Rubenstein and Anya Parampil, The Grayzone. , , , , , ,
“Juan Orlando effectively operated Honduras as a narco-state, acquiring political power through narcotics-fueled bribes and maintaining it by allowing the free flow of drugs through Honduras,” US government prosecutors alleged in a May 1 motion filed in the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment targeting Hernández on April 21, 2022, the same day that Honduras extradited him to the US. He currently faces three drug and weapons smuggling charges in the Southern District of New York, including one count of conspiracy to import cocaine to the United States. His trial begins this week, on September 18.

For Biden’s Summit Of The Americas, Obama’s Handshake With Raúl Castro Shows the Way

May 18, 2022 Medea Benjamin, Popular Resistance. , , ,
On May 16, the Biden administration announced new measures to “increase support for the Cuban people.” They included easing travel restrictions and helping Cuban-Americans support and connect with their families. They mark a step forward but a baby step, given that most U.S. sanctions on Cuba remain in place. Also in place is a ridiculous Biden administration policy of trying to isolate Cuba, as well as Nicaragua and Venezuela, from the rest of the hemisphere by excluding them from the upcoming Summit of the Americas that will take place in June in Los Angeles. This is the first time since its inaugural gathering in 1994 that the event, which is held every three years, will take place on U.S. soil. But rather than bringing the Western Hemisphere together, the Biden administration seems intent on pulling it apart by threatening to exclude three nations that are certainly part of the Americas.

Obama Wants Censorship

April 30, 2022 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
On April 21, 2022 former president Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University on the subject of social media. In typical Obamaesque fashion, he didn’t state his point plainly. He used a lot of time, more than an hour, to advocate for social media censorship. He only used that word once, in order to deny that it was in fact what he meant, but the weasel words and obfuscation couldn’t hide what Obama was talking about. In 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, the candidate she thought easiest to beat, Obama first presented his lament about “disinformation” and “fake news.” His real concern was that Trump’s victory proved that millions of people paid no attention to or even scorned, corporate media.

Yemen Conflict: Blowback Of Obama’s Botched Syria Policy

January 24, 2022 Nauman Sadiq, Popular Resistance. , , ,
After Arab Spring protests erupted in the Middle East in 2011, toppling longtime dictators of the Arab World, including Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Yemenis also gathered in the capital’s squares demanding removal of Ali Abdullah Saleh. Instead of conceding to protesters’ fervent demand of holding free and fair elections to ascertain democratic aspirations of demonstrators, however, the Obama administration adopted the convenient course of replacing Yemen’s longtime autocrat with a Saudi stooge Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Having the reputation of a “wily Arabian fox” and being a Houthi himself, Ali Abdullah Saleh wasn’t the one to sit idly by and retire from politics in ignominy.

Immigration Rights Demonstrators Sit-In At Biden’s Headquarters

July 14, 2019 Adam Hermann, Philly Voice. , , ,
Six participants in a sit-in at Joe Biden's Centre Square campaign headquarters in Center City were arrested Wednesday afternoon, after hours of protests and demands for an apology from the former vice president of the United States. Movimiento Cosecha, an immigrant rights advocacy group, organized the sit-in protest at Biden's headquarters and was seeking an apology from the Democratic presidential hopeful for the deportation of 3 million immigrants during President Barack Obama's presidency.

Vichy Journalism On Steroids

February 4, 2018 Jon Jeter, MintPress News. , ,
In the decade since he stepped onto the national stage, Barack Obama has inspired a coterie of black writers like Coates who have largely foregone reportage and robust interrogation for a kind of anger management, in an apparent attempt to lower the public’s expectations of the 44th president — and to reassure African-Americans especially that, despite losing more of their wealth than at any time in history, everything is swell.  In his groundbreaking 1978 book, Orientalism, the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said posited that the West has historically sought to qualify its imperialism by assigning men of science and letters the exercise of shifting the blame for colonialism from the colonizer to the colonized.

The Political Economy Of Obama/Trump

October 15, 2017 Richard D. Wolff, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
By Richard D. Wolff for Counter Punch. US capitalism is again careening down blind alleys. Earlier it had crashed into the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933 before lurching into the New Deal. After 1945 it concentrated on rolling back the New Deal until it turned sharply to neoliberalism and “globalism” in the 1970s. That provided the comforting illusion of a few decades of “prosperous normalcy.” When the second major crash in 75 years hit in 2008, it exposed the debt-dependent reality of those decades. It also sent capitalism careening through a new depression followed by a devastating austerity regime. The economic careening provokes the political: its establishment center cannot hold.

NYT Claims US Opposed Honduran Coup It Actually Supported

August 20, 2017 Janine Jackson, www.fair.org , , ,
By Janine Jackson for FAIR. The August 14 New York Times reported that the threat by Donald Trump to use the US military against the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has brought together Latin American leaders, divided on other things, in opposition to US intervention. Along the way, reporter Nicholas Casey cites a regional expert who says, “An often ugly history of US interventions is vividly remembered in Latin America — even as we in the US have forgotten.” Which the Times followed thus: Under President Barack Obama, however, Washington aimed to get past the conflicts by building wider consensus over regional disputes. In 2009, after the Honduran military removed the leftist president Manuel Zelaya from power in a midnight coup, the United States joined other countries in trying to broker—albeit unsuccessfully—a deal for his return. There’s a word for that kind of statement, and the word is “lie.”

Afghanistan: From Soviet Occupation To American ‘Liberation’

June 18, 2017 Nauman Sadiq, www.popularresistance.org , , , ,
By Nauman Sadiq. The borders between Iraq and Syria are poorly guarded and highly porous. The Obama Administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014 was bound to backfire sooner or later. More to the point, however, when President Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, at the same time, he pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the purportedly “just war” in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan jumped from 30,000 during the Bush Administration to more than 100,000 during the supposedly “pacifist” Obama Administration. And now, the “steady hands” of the American deep state, the Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, have advised the Trump Administration to further escalate the conflict in Afghanistan by deploying 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops to a contingent of 8,500 US troops already stationed in Afghanistan as “trainers and advisors.”

This Is How We Win National Improved Medicare For All

January 27, 2017 Margaret Flowers, www.healthoverprofit.org , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers for Health Over Profit. Few people outside of single payer activist circles are aware that Senator Sanders introduced an amendment on the Senate floor in December 2009 that would have replaced the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with a single payer health system. It was the first time in the history of the United States that single payer legislation was brought to the floor for a vote. Sadly, it was a Republican doctor who killed the amendment. This happened during the height of the health reform process in the Senate; the House had already passed its version of the legislation. It was the result of a year of pressure to include a single payer health system, National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA), in the health reform debate, grassroots pressure that included nonviolent direct action.

Stunning Admission From Obama On Wikileaks

January 22, 2017 Craig Murray, www.informationclearinghouse.info , ,
By Craig Murray for Information Clearinghouse. In his final press conference, beginning around 8 minutes 30 seconds in, Obama admits that they have no evidence of how WikiLeaks got the DNC material. This undermines the stream of completely evidence-free nonsense that has been emerging from the US intelligence services this last two months, in which a series of suppositions have been strung together to make unfounded assertions that have been repeated again and again in the mainstream media. Most crucially of all Obama refers to “The DNC emails that were leaked”. Note “leaked” and not “hacked”. I have been repeating that this was a leak, not a hack, until I am blue in the face. William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, has asserted that were it a hack the NSA would be able to give the precise details down to the second it occurred.

Obama Leaves Office With Record Of War & Expanding Militarism

January 9, 2017 Micah Zenko, www.readersupportednews.org , , , ,
By Micah Zenko for Reader Supported News. As President Obama enters the final weeks of his presidency, there will be ample assessments of his foreign military approach, which has focused on reducing U.S. ground combat troops (with the notable exception of the Afghanistan surge), supporting local security partners, and authorizing the expansive use of air power. Whether this strategy “works”—i.e. reduces the threat posed by extremists operating from those countries and improves overall security and governance on the ground—is highly contested. Yet, for better or worse, these are the central tenants of the Obama doctrine. In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries.

Lessons To Shoulder Into 2017

January 1, 2017 Arnie Saiki, www.imipono.org , , ,
By Arnie Saiki for Imipono. As we move out of 2016, let us at least acknowledge that we have become estranged from the roots of democracy. Perhaps 2017 will reveal that our participation in social media and our willingness to provide streams of data driven information to the corporate plutocracy inhabits a different space in the world with people who are on the outside. Even if social media has been a tremendous tool for digging deeper and casting wider nets, it is not a replacement for our democratic institutions or practices. For as long as the U.S has capitalized from being an anti-communist, then unipolar hegemon, we’ve never been able to really live up to the fulfillment of equitable and democratic institutions. Now, much of the world seems to be moving in that direction, whereas the largest of the advanced economies seem to be moving in the opposite: towards greater nationalism, xenophobia and isolationism. How we reflect upon 2016 and what we carry into 2017 can make all the difference in the world.

Immigrants Urge Obama To End Legacy As ‘Deporter-In-Chief’

November 25, 2016 Kevin Thomas, www.dcmediagroup.us , , ,
By Kevin Thomas for DC Media Group. Washington, DC - Undocumented immigrants and their allies traveled this week from Trump Tower in New York City to the White House in Washington, DC, as part of a movement called “Caravan of Courage” to demand action from President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump. The Dream Action Coalition, a New York-based advocacy group, organized the march in the wake of Trump’s election and as Obama’s presidency, which has seen a record number of deportations, enters its final weeks. On their trip from Trump Tower to the White House, the group made stops along the route to support other activists, including organizers against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Philadelphia.

Violent Anti-Obama Protests Break Out In Athens

November 18, 2016 Staff, www.telegraph.co.uk , ,
By Staff of Telegraph Video, and AP - Greek riot police used tear gas and stun grenades in central Athens on Tuesday to disperse about 3,000 Left-wing marchers protesting a visit by President Barack Obama, after they tried to enter an area declared off-limits to demonstrators. No injuries or arrests were reported. The violence broke out as youths in motorcycle helmets and gas masks, armed with wooden clubs and petrol bombs, tried to break a police cordon in front of a barrier formed by police buses.
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