Obama is as bad as Bush
UTS: Australian news coverage of climate change is seriously unbalanced. No prizes for guessing the worst culprit.
Monbiot: EU farm subsidies continue to give tens of billions to the wealthy, which isn't a problem because Europe is of course swimming in cash at the moment.
New Matilda: What is happening at Sydney University? Nothing other than one battle in an ongoing war for the soul of the university occurring in most societies dominated by current economic orthodoxies.
UN: New FAO report says that 25% of the world's land area is "highly degraded" from human activities.
Independent: The dying Dead Sea.
Guardian: UK government secretly supporting Canadian tar sands - yet another piece of disconnected thinking from the "greenest government ever".
Gittins: What does it profit a corporation to gain the whole world and lose the souls of all its employees and customers? Gittins thinks Michael Schluter from the Relationships Forum is a genius.
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23 comments:
Do I get any points for guessing where the picture is taken? :-)
Guardian: 75% of UK butterfly species in decline.
I'll give you five point if you can tell me what footwear I had on when I took the shot.
Damian Carrington: UK naïve over tar sands lobbying.
CD: Policies of Republican presidential frontrunners.
We may look back with nostalgia on the good old days of the Bush-Obama administration...
Obama has been a disappointment, but I think it goes too far to say that he has been as bad as Bush.
Bush started off in a reasonably good situation and made a big mess of things. Obama started with a fairly bad situation and hasn't managed to meet his potential.
Yes Barack Obama has turned out to be a disappointment.
But perhaps the people of hope, goodwill and optimism who were rightly elated when he was elected as President under-estimated the almost unstoppable destructive momentum of the USA system altogether. We were naive to think that one man's hope and optimism could turn around such a powerful system in an afternoon as it were.
My Spiritual Master was elated when Obama was elected, but he also stated that Obama would have to really strap his balls on if he was going to make any real difference. It seems that Obama failed to do that.
Yes Byron you are completely correct how disastrous things will inevitably become if any of these ding-bat GOP candidates get to be the President.
But imagine too how hugely worse the situation would already be if the McCain/Palin ticket had won the last election.
Milan and Anon - I have no wish to have been in a McCain/Palin universe, and was one of those outsiders who was quietly pleased that Obama beat them, though I warned back then that his Achilles' heel was already quite visible (and even during the campaign).
As President, he has achieved a few worthy things (see last paragraph), but on nearly all the big ticket items that got people (ok me) excited about his campaign (climate action, lobbying reform, government transparency, health care), he has been a failure or worse than a failure. He has shown himself to be nothing other than what we might have expected - a Wall St president.
Note however, that my title in this post is a shortening of the first article, which is speaking specifically about his environmental record (and viewed through one particular lens if you read the linked article). On that score he has been a particular disappointment. Overall, I agree with Milan, that the US in 2008 was not the US in 2000, and with Anon that a single man and his ambitions cannot always prevail against an unjust system (though I would question whether Obama's administration is best characterised as a benevolent impotence - that is an extremely charitable reading).
Paul Krugman: Cain was no accident, instead he represents the outcome when a party is committed to false beliefs. The only potential candidates are either clueless (Cain) or cynical (Romney).
I am also amazed at how little reference there is to the fact that Gitmo is still open for business. If McCain was in, and Gitmo was still open, people would be outraged.
Rory Shiner
Rory - You're right. I forgot to list that as one of the big ticket items where Obama has been a big disappointment. He's also been worse than Bush at punishing and suppressing whistleblowers.
Or perhaps Obama is not so bad after all...
Guardian: Obama caves in again.
"Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay."
Actually, he didn't cave it, having read a little more about this. His objection to the bill was not the idea of indefinite detention of US citizens by the military without charge or recourse to the legal system (already true for non-US citizens), but that his executive powers were undermined. Now that he has a little more say, he's happy with locking up his own citizens for as long as he likes on almost whatever pretext.
"In fact, the heads of several security agencies, including the FBI, CIA, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general objected to the legislation. The Pentagon also said it was against the bill."
How long before this legislation is applied to domestic activists such as Occupy? (Remember, the Met in London recently issued advice to local businesspeople that spoke of Occupy and al-Qaeda in the same breath).
*cave it = cave in
Onion: Obama's new One Goddam Reason campaign.
Climate Progress: More coverage of the report from the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS about the coverage of the carbon price in Australian Newspapers. "Murdoch Press coverage is so negative it's fair to say they've campaigned against it."
A while back, I linked to this site, which now has an answer here.
Freedland: Obama three years on. A summary of some of the achievements and failures of the last three years.
CD: 10 reasons the US is no longer land of the free. Most of these have either been introduced or continued by Obama, whose record on civil liberties is not pretty.
Mongabay:
A new study suggesting that tar sands emissions have been underestimated since the destruction of peat bog required for mining has not been included.
DD: Human destruction of Dead Sea mimics a severe dry period.
Guardian: Israel accused of pillaging Dead Sea.
Grist: The Dead Sea dropped by 1.5 metres in the last 12 months, the fastest decline since records began in 1950.
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