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<h1 class="print-title">The Obama Legacy, Pt 1 of Many: Top Ten Things Black America Will Have To Show For 8 Years of President Obama</h1>
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<div class="submitted">Wed, 04/24/2013 - 16:21 — Bruce A. Dixon</div>
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<div class="filefield-file"><img class="filefield-icon field-icon-image-jpeg" alt="image/jpeg icon" src="http://blackagendareport.com/sites/all/modules/filefield/icons/image-x-generic.png"><a href="http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/barack_hoover_obama_hope_1.jpg" type="image/jpeg; length=39612">barack_hoover_obama_hope.jpg</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></div> </div>
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</div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon</b></font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">When
Barack Obama leaves the White House in January 2017, what will black
America, his earliest and most consistent supporters, have to show for
making his political career possible. We'll have the T-shirts and
buttons and posters, the souvenirs. That will be the good news. The bad
news is what else we'll have.... and not. </font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>The Obama Legacy, Pt 1: Top Ten Things Black America Will Have To Show For 8 Years of President Obama</b></font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon</b></font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">To
hear our black political class tell it, the election of the first black
US president was its ultimate achievement to date, a giant step toward
fulfillment of a previous generation's insurgent agenda for social
transformation. Is that real? Has the career of Barack Hussein Obama
really advanced any of the historic goals of the Freedom Movement? Is
the question even fair?</font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">With
corporate media already speculating about next year's midterm
elections, and the presidential contest of 2016, it's entirely
appropriate to discuss the president's legacy. And fair is fair --- the
black political class doesn't want its meager achievements compared to
the agenda of those who fought for our freedom a half century ago, it
probably ought to abandon its ceaseless self-promotion as the inheritors
of that tradition. </font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">It
was the overwhelming black and brown vote, along with the utter,
unwavering and uncritical support of African America which made
President Obama's career possible. When he leaves office in January
2017, what will be the top ten things we can say black America gained or
lost from his two terms in the White House?</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><strong><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">10.</font></font></strong></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>We'</b><b>ll </b><b>still </b><b>have Obamacare, the cynically misnamed </b><b>“Affordable Care Act”.</b> </font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The problem is that
Obamacare was written by a health insurance company lobbyist to prolong
his employer's parasitic business model, not to make health care
available or affordable. A third of the health care dollar goes to
advertising, profits, fat executive salaries, lobbying and the paperwork
occasioned by thousands of insurers who make more money denying care
than providing it, instead of a single payer, like Canada, Medicare, or
social security. As <a href="http://www.pnhp.org/" target="_blank">Physicians for a National Health Plan</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span>
point out, Obamacare will not curb medical costs or stem the tide of
bankruptcies caused by health care bills. It won't force most employers
who now don't offer affordable coverage to offer it in the future,
because the administration is allowing employers to write its
enforcement regulations, and it will leave millions more, all poor and
disproportionately people of color, uncovered altogether. </font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Worst of all,
Obamacare's 2016 effective date reveals it as a promise the
administration never intended to keep. Back in 1965, when computers with
less power than today's laptops were the size of boxcars, the Johnson
administration passed Medicare and put it into effect the same year.
That's the real comparison between the achievement of Obamacare and the
effective results of a previous generation's struggle.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">9.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>We'll probably have
reductions in social security proposed and enacted by a Democrat,
something no Republican could have initiated, that sets the stage for
further reductions in benefit by either party.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">In the tradition of
Democrat Bill Clinton, who did what Republicans tried and failed to do,
“ending welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, Barack Obama has promised
Wall Street that he would curb “entitlements” the code word for cutting
Medicare, Medicaid and social security. </font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">With poverty at record
levels, the ending of many defined benefit pension plans and the broken
promise of retirement security from 401K plans looming black seniors
will still be more dependent on social security than anybody, and the
value of real benefits will be declining, if Barack's first negotiating
offer to Republicans is any indication of his stance on this issue.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">8.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>We'll have solidly
in place a new tradition of bailing out banksters and speculators, and
lots more immunity from prosecution for corporate scofflaws.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The so-called “Bush
bailout” was only accomplished when George W. Bush in the last weeks of
his presidency, and opposed by Democratic majorities in both houses of
Congress called candidate Barack Obama to Washington to persuade
reluctant Democrats to vote for it. After failing to pass the first
time, Obama swung half the black caucus and enough Democrats overall to
secure the passage of the $3 trillion Bush bailout. Once Obama assumed
office, the $3 trillion became $16 trillion, with a free pass for the
Federal Reserve to shovel more public money at Wall Street at will.</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">And for corporat
lawbreakers, whether you were Goldman Sachs, knowingly peddling
worthless securities to pension funds, or Bank of America, which
foreclosing and evicting tens of thousands in cases where it couldn't
prove actual ownership, a phone, cable or internet provider handing over
access to billions of calls and emails, or British Petroleum, murdering
its Gulf Coast ecosystems, livelihoods and its own workers, the Obama
administration's Justice Department has come up with infinitesimal fines
and immunity from prosecution for past and future crimes as the answer.
</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">7.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>When Obama leaves office, we'll still have gentrification as the only model of urban economic development.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">To be fair, this isn't
the exclusive failure of President Obama, it's the failure of vision of
the entire black misleadership class, stretching over decades. But as
the most powerful actor in the land, the man whose career is the
crowning achievement so far of the black political class, Obama
absolutely deserves to wear the jacket for leaving things as bad as or
worse than the day he assumed office.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">6.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>The day Barack Obama
leaves the White House we'll still have the world's biggest prison
state, with three quarters of its inmates black and brown, the insane 40
years War On Drugs, and a black person murdered by police, private
security or vigilantes every day or so.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The best the Obama
administration and its allies in Congress could do to address the 100 to
1 cocaine to crack penalty disparity was cutting it to 18 to 1 without
changing the sentence of a single person already serving unjust time.
Hundreds of thousands of black and brown youth are still doing years for
mere grams of crack or minute scraps of marijuana. The police and
prison state will, as before, remain the nation's preferred means to
address poverty, homelessness, mental illness, immigration and many
other social, economic and medical conditions. </font></font></p><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>5.</b></font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>We'll have US troops
in more than thirty African countries enforcing Western land grabs and
the corporate neoliberal order, and keeping Africa barefoot, sick,
hungry and afraid, but well-armed. And we'll have an even larger overall
military budget with more troops and more overseas bases than under
George Bush.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">During the Clinton and
second Bush administrations, the US bankrolled, trained and supplied the
armies of 52 out of 54 African nations to ensure that the continent
remained the poorest and most war-torn on earth. Under its first black
president, the US has stepped up the game with actual deployments of
drones, mercenaries, special forces and other US military units in more
than thirty African countries to enforce the neoliberal order in which
Africa's wealth is diverted from its people into the economies and
overseas bank accounts of the West and a handful of native kleptocrats.</font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Martin Luther King told
us decades ago that the number one purveyor of violence on this planet
was the US government. Barack Obama, who many fancifully associate with
King, hasn't changed that one iota.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>4.</b></font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>When Obama leaves
office, it will be legal and acceptable for US presidents to
unilaterally murder with or without announcement of cause anybody,
anyplace on the planet within the reach of US drones, special operators
and mercenaries.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">When Obama assumed
office the US was secretly imprisoning and torturing thousands in at
least a dozen countries around the world. We are told now that torture
and secret jails are used less often now, that the preferred expedient
being simple murder via special ops team or drone.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">3.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>The Obama administration will have closed and privatized more public schools than at any time in US history.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">This is already an
accomplished fact. Under President Obama, the US Department of Education
has extended the authority to certify school systems to private
agencies controlled by champions of privatization like the Gates, Walton
Family, and Eli Broad Foundations, and allowed the same actors to write
its Race To The Top program, which allocates federal education dollars
to the school systems that disband, privatize, and hand over their
assets to private actors the quickest.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">2.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>We can cherish the
memory of 8 years of watching that pretty brown family in that big White
House, along with unprecedented black unemployment, declining real
wages, and the most drastic shrinkage of black family wealth since we
began tracking and comparing black and white wealth.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Who needs economic
progress when millions can take down those old pictures of Martin, and
the Kennedy boys, and replace them with the likeness of Barack and
Michelle.</font></font></p>
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<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="27"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">1.</font></font></p>
</td>
<td style="border: none; padding: 0in" width="621"><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>After 8 years of
Barack Obama, black leadership and black America will have decisively
lost and forgotten the habit, the inclination, even the example of
standing against unjust and abusive power, and our former reputation
around the world as a people of struggle.</b></font></font></p><p><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The height of the black
Freedom Movement was only about 8 or 10 years, but it left an example
of what it was to stand for justice and righteousness against bad laws
and bad governance that inspired us and the rest of the world. Black
youth who will reach maturity in the middle of this decade have no
examples of struggle to look up to, only accommodations to power and
excuses for inaction and ineffectiveness on every front.</font></font></p><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
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</table><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">All
in all, it's not an inspiring legacy. For Latinos, the Obama era will
mark historic broken promises on a path to citizenship for the
undocumented, and the largest number of deportations by far of any
administration in history. For labor, the biggest single broken promises
are the failure to push through laws that would make the organization
of unions easier, or the renegotiation of NAFTA. For media activists,
there are the broken promises on network neutrality and freedom of the
internet. </font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">White
America gets its card stamped as officially anti-racist ---- there are
black CEOs, black admirals and generals, 40-some blacks in Congress and
there's been a black president, after all. When the accounting is done,
and Obama leaves the White House, everybody gets something.</font></font></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in"><font color="#800000"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>Bruce
A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state
committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near
Marietta GA and can be contacted at bruce.dixon(at)<a href="http://blackagendareport.com">blackagendareport.com</a>
or via this site's contact page.</i></font></font></font></p><div style="margin-bottom: 0.06in; ">
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