Cornel West, Cynthia McKinney, Cindy Sheehan & Others Calling for Protests Against President Barack Obama's Policies

Cornel West, who has been very critical of President Obama, joins campaign to protest his policies saying he is worse than George W. Bush.

Is President Barack Obama really bad for America? Well, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Reports, Cynthia McKinney, Cindy Sheehan (surprise, surprise), Immanuel Wallerstein and others have signed a letter calling for protests against President Barack Obama's policies (protestobama.org). Here is an excerpt from open letter to the left:

With the Obama administration beginning its third year, it is by now painfully obvious that the predictions of even the most sober Obama supporters were overly optimistic. Rather than an ally, the administration has shown itself to be an implacable enemy of reform.

It has advanced repeated assaults on the New Deal safety net (including the previously sacrosanct Social Security trust fund), jettisoned any hope for substantive health care reform, attacked civil rights and environmental protections, and expanded a massive bailout further enriching an already bloated financial services and insurance industry. It has continued the occupation of Iraq and expanded the war in Afghanistan as well as our government’s covert and overt wars in South Asia and around the globe.

Along the way, the Obama administration, which referred to its left detractors as “f***ing retarded” individuals that required “drug testing,” stepped up the prosecution of federal war crime whistleblowers, and unleashed the FBI on those protesting the escalation of an insane war. Obama’s recent announcement of a federal worker pay freeze is cynical, mean-spirited “deficit-reduction theater”. Slashing Bush’s plutocratic tax cuts would have made a much more significant contribution to deficit reduction but all signs are that the “progressive” president will cave to Republican demands for the preservation of George W. Bush’s tax breaks for the wealthy Few. Instead Obama’s tax cut plan would raise taxes for the poorest people in our country.

Er, how can you possibly compare Barack Obama to his predecessor George W. Bush? Hell would have frozen over before Bush would have signed any document to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It would have been a cold day in hell if he had pushed for an extension of unemployment benefits for the millions of unemployed workers in the United States. It would have even been a long-shot for him to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the timetable this group is calling for. Covert operations overseas is nothing new and why this group of people expect it to end under Obama's watch is ridiculous. Sorry, but this is an enormous waste of everyone's time and amounts to the whining of a bunch of disgruntled supporters who felt the president, once in office, was to live up to the true meaning of the word Socialism.