Forum Post: paul street on obama - immigration and climate change

The Deporter-in-Chief

Compare Obama44’s war on immigrants with that of Bush43. Obama has managed to actually increase the number of immigrants deported from the US to record levels, forcing out 1. 6 million between 2009 and 2012 – quite a shock to civil rights activists enamored by candidate Obama’s promise of “real immigration reform”. But the new “Deporter-in-Chief” (some activists’ revealing term for the “liberal” president) has done this in a much quieter way than Bush43, (also a record-setting deporter in his day). In the final years of his administration, Bush undertook a harsh immigration crackdown replete with provocative military-style raids on US factories and farms. Candidate Obama attacked Bush’s raids for “terrorizing” Latino communities. As president, he prefers a stealthier, more behind-the-scenes approach, one that avoids high-profile armed-force assaults but yields a higher rate of family-shattering arrest and expulsion – this while he claims to favor “humane” reform and to be advancing a safe way for “Dreamers” (“illegal” immigrants who came to the US as children) to avoid expulsion.[8]

Green[house] Obama

Climate policy is another good example. By the estimation of leading US environmental activist Bill McKibben (depressingly deferential towards Obama over the years), Obama’s “biggest climate legacy is the US passing Russia and Saudi Arabia [before the end of his second term] in oil and gas production.” This great leap forward to so-called national energy independence has been achieved largely through the eco-exterminist practice of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), which pollutes and exhausts the nation’s endangered water supplies in order to extract vast quantities of carbon-rich methane gas for planet-baking sale and burning at home and abroad. Obama has celebrated the homeland’s “energy revolution,” boasting of America’s prodigious new fossil fuel production in glowing terms that Noam Chomsky has rightly described as an “eloquent death knell for the species.”[17]

I’m not sure I agree with McKibben: Obama’s top contribution to the Greenhouse-Gassing of Life on Earth may still be his almost single-handed undermining of binding global carbon-emission limits at the global climate summit in Copenhagen in December of 2009 [18]. But either way, Obama’s disastrous climate record is a far cry from his campaign promises to seriously tackle the looming specter of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Unlike the crude, oil-soaked Texan who preceded him in the oval office, however, Obama44 accepts the consensus findings of Earth science on humanity’s responsibility for climate change. He has advanced some outwardly eco-friendly fuel efficiency standards, new limits on coal plant pollution, and alternative fuel developments as part of his disastrous “all-of-the above” energy policy. This difference of eco-cidal style have permitted him to pose as an environmentalist while the United States’ still leading historical contribution to has expanded AGW thanks in no small part to his serial dissembling. Again the Machiavellian deception is enhanced by the right, which likes to portray the president as a left-liberal “tree hugger” who privileges elite environmental concerns over jobs and growth.