Barack Obama -- February 16, 2009

February 16, 2009

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"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal"

Barack Hussein Obama

event	description
Welfare Spendathon	Ronald Reagan started it, Bill Clinton finished it and last week Obama was accused of engineering its destruction. One of the few undisputed triumphs of American government of the past 20 years -- the sweeping welfare reform program that sent millions of dole claimants back to work – has been plunged into jeopardy by billions of dollars in state handouts included in the president’s controversial economic stimulus package. As Obama celebrated Valentine’s Day yesterday with a return to his Chicago home for a private weekend with family and friends, his success in piloting a $785 billion stimulus package through Congress was being overshadowed by warnings that an unprecedented increase in welfare spending would undermine two decades of bipartisan attempts to reduce dependency on government handouts. Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama’s stimulus plan was a "welfare spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history. Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads. Rector, a senior scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued that Obama’s spending proposals in effect encouraged individual states to add more families to their welfare rolls; the more Americans sign on to the dole, the more state budgets will benefit from US Treasury payouts. "They have completely overturned the fiscal and policy foundations of welfare reform," Rector complained. Reparations and redistribution by another name.
Obama Holds Fast to State Secrets Privilege	While Obama has denounced many of the policies of the Bush administration, he will not change litigation tactics in defending lawsuits challenging those policies. The Obama administration is invoking the state secrets privilege for the second time this week, this time in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. The move, which the judge in the case rejected Friday afternoon, came days after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the department was reviewing all the litigation it inherited from the Bush administration in which the privilege was invoked. Also this week, the Justice Department invoked the privilege before a federal appeals court to scuttle a case brought by five U.S. prisoners who claim the CIA was behind their kidnapping, which brought them overseas where they claim they were tortured. Fine for me, if not for thee.
Obama Lifts Stem Cell Ban	Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W Bush, according to a senior adviser. "We're going to be doing something on that soon, I think. The president is considering that right now," David Axelrod said on Fox News Sunday.
Is Obama A Marxist?	Congratulations on an extraordinary history making election! We can think back with pride to decades of hard work toward our strategic goal of a big enough, broad enough and united enough labor and all-people’s movement that could overcome the ultra-right blockage to all progress. That the people’s movement has come to life, it is dynamic and it has the potential to keep growing. The election of Barack Obama and a strengthened Congress creates new conditions in our country. There is now the possibility to shift gears and move forward. This new day requires us to further develop our tactics in order to continue to deepen and broaden labor and people’s unity. There are thousands of experiences that we all have had in these momentous days, some large, some small, all of which express the enormity of change in thinking and readiness for involvement that is underway and that steels us for the battles ahead. The tears of joy we all shared as crowds gathered to watch the election results here and throughout the world dramatize the new moment we are in. When communists start crying "tears of joy," it certainly removes all doubt, doesn't it?