PROGRESSIVE CRITICS Vs. PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENT

This could be an open letter to liberal news commentators; the people I listen to the most often: +Steve Kornacki, +Chris Matthews, +Chris Hayes, +Rachel Maddow, and +Lawrence O’Donnell. I will include the vocal critic +Amy Goodman, who is not a news commentator but is often in the news as a critic of almost everything. They are progressives but are collective out of step with the President.  Let me explain.

President Obama is advancing a foreign policy that is new for America. It is a policy of all nations being free from fear of the United States gobbling them up as part of a business empire. That was the policy of America of the past but it is not the policy of America under Obama. Both Democratic and Republican presidents from our inception as a nation followed this policy. They were drive by business interests. Author Stephen Kinzer in his book Overthrown described the results of that policy in recent time, at least from the time we gobbling up Hawaii over pineapples and Panama over a canal. Naomi Klein described the cruelness of that policy in graphic terms in her book Shock Doctrine. The most recent uncontrolled neo-con greed associated with Iraq has been the subject of many books. Military aggression by the United States has always been aimed controlling resources and markets through procurement or protection. The strange thing is that those news commentators mentioned were the strongest critics of such a policy.

President Clinton, much to his credit, started used political pressure to support independence and territorial integrity of Bosnia/Herzegovina and used military action in Kosovo not for protecting business interests but for protecting our humanitarian ideals in both places. Then came the Arab Spring. President Obama, like Clinton, initiated military action to prevent the killing of civilians by a dictator, not to protect oil and other business interests, only this time it was Libya. What made the Obama progressive foreign policy movement clearer was Egypt. Clearly, the message to the Egyptian rioters was that the Untied States would support democracy but with out hegemony. We would support the replacement of caliphates with elected governments to help the people. We would not fight to gain the spoils of war, which would be their resources nor would we expect favored business status because U.S. companies would owned the major businesses in their country's post war period. The countries that elected governments would be truly free. Best business practices would win over might. We would no longer support dictators because they were “our dictators”.

It seems the progressive critics listed do not believe what a progressive president is doing or that he is not sincere. They should step back and look at what the reactions of “big business” will be when they figure it out. They might even think he is supporting Palestinians over Israeli or even say he is not an American, he is Kenyan born, he is not acting like a legitimate president, and they might even say that their primary task is to prevent him from having a second third term.  

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