Obama Kicks Off Re-election Bid by Shitting on His Voting Base: (you paying attention Liberals?)

I despise that sanctimonious hypocrite. I have for a long time now. But I want to draw people's attention to these two stories:

1. Via Glenn Greenwald and Rachael Maddow - Obama betrays the idealism of US-Americans who believed him when he said he'd close the human rights travesty of the Guantanamo prison. Now he will hold his perverted show-trials there!

A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties -- he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office -- and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort.

2. Obama, who has done practically nothing for organized labour, is gratuitously angering them by pursuing a free trade deal with the narco-gangsters in the Colombian government/business elite.

The AFL-CIO expressed deep disappointment with the decision, which pits Obama against a core part of his political base the same week he announced his 2012 reelection campaign.

“The action plan does not go nearly far enough in laying out concrete benchmarks for progress in the areas of violence and impunity, nor does it address many of the ways in which Colombian labor law falls short of international standards,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement.

...

Labor officials in the U.S. predicted a stormy and uncomfortable debate for the administration.

“People feel passionately about it and yes, we’re going to fight hard. We just think it’s wrong,” one union official said.

Trumka said 51 union organizers had been killed in Colombia last year. He said he doubted the agreement would be moving forward if it had been 51 CEOs who were killed.

Pay attention to this Buzz Hargrove: This is what 21st-Century liberals do. This is how progressives are treated in "big-tent" pro-capitalist parties when the real leaders decide that their votes can be taken for granted. One of the factors that has prevented Canada from becoming nothing more than a colder version of the USA, ... in fact, one of the things that helped prevent the weakening of broadcasting standards to accommodate "FOX-News North" is the strength of social democracy and the challenge of Quebec nationalism.

The Liberals already worked with the harpercons to ram through a free trade deal with the union-murderers in Colombia. The Liberal leadership had no intention of depriving human rights abusing Canadian mining firms of public tax dollars and so allowed their progressive MP's bill to die. Chretien defended mass-murdering klepocrat Suharto against the Charter rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens. Paul Martin helped murder democracy in Haiti.

Sure, the NDP would betray its values upon gaining power. Rae, Doer, Romanow provide historical evidence of this (although they were all more compassionate managers of neo-liberalism than are out-and-out liberals). But for the sake of progressive values it is important that we preserve the NDP, if only to challenge the Liberals on their left so that they understand that we cannot be taken for granted.