The first and only president in US history to be at war every single day of his administration. ibid.
‘President Obama’s action … is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law’. ibid. ACLU 31st December 2011
Just look at the warmongers and criminals that he and his financial and corporate stringpullers stuffed into his administration. ibid.
Obamacare was written by the insurance companies themselves. ibid.
He [Obama] was sold as some sort of messiah … In the hysteria of the 2008 campaign Obama wasn’t received by the public as a political candidate with a series of policy prescriptions for improving the country, he was the god from the machine. The Corbett Report: James Corbett on Obama, Trump, Q, Musk & Hopium, James Corbett online 2023
Barack Obama has stretched beyond anything that was thought possible the definition of who can be an American president. The American Future A History by Simon Schama 4/4, BBC 2008
‘It’s the largest takeover of any organisation not only on the planet but in history.’ The End: Inside the Last Days of the Obama White House, Max Stier, CNN 2017
Obama promised to usher in a major change from the old ways of the Bush administration: no more cowboy diplomacy, no more pre-emptive war or secret prisons, no more illegal domestic spying without a warrant … Unfortunately, Obama ended up carrying over most of Bush’s policies in regards to fighting the logically problematic war on terror. Obama even increased the use of illegally dubious methods of stemming terrorists such as targeted drone assassinations and domestic digital surveillance dragnets. A Very Heavy Agenda II: How We Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Neo-Cons, 2015
George W Bush’s Neo-Con colleagues praised Obama’s foreign policy actions during his first term as president. ibid.
The worst thing that President Obama did was pave the way for Donald Trump. Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, 2018
Under President Obama it became OK to imprison whistleblowers more than all previous presidents combined; he used drone strikes to bomb civilian populations; and he deported a record number of immigrants and refugees: what Flint needed was for President Obama to dig up the toxic pipes and have them replaced, but instead of sending in the army corps of engineers, he just sent in the army. ibid.
The scare campaign wasn’t working. In fact the more they called Obama a socialist the more he went ahead in the poles. Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, 2009
‘Why under Barack Obama was their voodoo in the White House?’ The World According to Putin, Russian bird presenter, Channel 4 2019
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America: The problem is not capitalism; it is our markets. Markets that Obama screwed up … The political problem we face today – in Appalachia and elsewhere – boils down to a debate over socialism versus capitalism, but to something simpler. Obama was a really important president at a pivotal moment in history, where a financial crisis gave him wide latitude to restructure our social obligations. And he screwed it up. Some 10 million foreclosures and no Wall Street felons. There are a lot of other ways he restructured society to make it less free and more unequal. For example, because of the way bailouts were structured, black-owned banks were a tenth likely to get bailout money as other banks. Obama’s antitrust officials allowed mergers in telecoms, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and tech platforms, concentrating power in radical ways. Obama negotiated a bill to hand over Puerto Rico to hedge funds. And what did Obama do about opioids in rural America? A friend of mind in the administration told me that when the White House finally noticed the AIDS-level epidemic death too, the suggestions proffered were … roundtables. She might have been exaggerating, but not by much … The gist is that Obama reorganized our markets to push wealth and power upward, and to subvert our liberties. It is not, however, a complex one. In 2008 we thought we were electing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but really we elected Herbert Hoover. Matt Stoller, Boston Review online, cited Keiser Show 2020
America first deployed its new secret weapon under George W but now Obama decided to ratchet up the use of these pilotless aircraft. Peter Taylor, The Secret War on Terror I, BBC 2011
President Obama has authorised more than a hundred and sixty drone strikes ... But there’s a down-side to drone attacks: hundreds of civilians have been killed. ibid.
The notion that the Obama Administration has carried out drone strikes only when there is ‘near-certainty of no collateral damage’ is easily disproved propaganda. America hasn’t killed a handful of innocents or a few dozen in the last eight years. Credible, independent attempts to determine how many civilians the Obama administration has killed arrived at numbers in the hundreds or low thousands. And there is good reason to believe that they undercount the civilians killed.
Why the disparity between what American officials claim and what others report? The New York Times provided a first clue back in 2012, when it reported that the US ‘in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent’. The same sort of dishonest standard was described last last year when a whistleblower provided The Intercept with a cache of documents detailing the US military’s drone killings in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The Atlantic online report report Conor Friedersdorf 14th March 2016, ‘The Obama Administration’s Drone-Strike Dissembling’
ABC News Washington Post Poll 30th September 2007: Clinton 53%; Obama 20%; Edwards 13%. cited The 2000s: The Platinum Age of Television VII, Barack Obama
The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d’etat. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless. Chris Hedges, Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion, 2014
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather … I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave-owners. Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union I, Sky Documentaries 2021
Once he made his decision to join the church, you could see a marked difference in his roundedness. Prior to that Obama was searching for himself. ibid. minister
I ended up deciding that my individual fate had to be tied to something larger than myself. ibid. Barack’s lecture
I supported President Clinton … One of the toughest decisions of my political life. Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union II, John Lewis
I never thought that I would live to see a black man or a black woman as president of the United States of America. ibid. Lewis
The disrespect that was shown to this black man because that’s who he was for them, he was not the president. And it was despicable. Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union III, Sherrilyn Ifill
He weaponised the birther movement: the pernicious lie that Barack Obama was not born in America. Tonight: Trump and the Truth: America’s Conspiracy Wars, ITV 2018
Say what you will about President Obama but his class and eloquence really made the deportation of 2.5 million illegal immigrants, the bombing of 7 Muslim countries, the whitewashing of torture under Bush, the continuation of the Drug War, the rampant prosecution of government whistleblowers, and his expansion of government surveillance, go down smooth. Gritty is the Way tweet 4th July 2023
The enthusiasm was something I hadn’t witnessed in the United States amongst young people since the ’60s and ’70s. Tariq Ali on the Obama Syndrome, lecture Perth Writers Festival 2011, Youtube 1.13.21
Bush decided that the main thing to be done was to bail it [Wall Street] out and Obama carried on. ibid.
If that is your aim to be like Reagan and rule for the whole people, then what it does is debases politics. ibid.
Politicians let the people down and they stopped voting. ibid.
The woman who was drafted in to finally write the health bill was a woman who had worked for these insurance companies and was a leading lobbyist for them. ibid.
[Arne] Duncan has only been to private schools; he has no experience of the state system but he’s a great believer in corporatizing education. ibid.
There has been no break with the previous administration … Absolutely nothing’s happened. ibid.
Obama went on his knees before the big Israeli lobby. ibid.