Obama-Clinton foreign policy hypocrisy is noticed

Letter from Obama insults its recipients
By Zac Smith – The Oklahoma Daily – November 15, 2011

President Barack Obama:

I read your letter, published on Thursday in The Daily and other student papers, with great interest.

You express concern over the economic prospects of young Americans, and you preside over a country which, according to CIA surveys, suffers from a greater degree of class inequality than many developing African nations and former Soviet satellites. For most Americans born into the lower economic stratum of society, life outside of that stratum will be forever unattainable.

You criticize Wall Street organizations for their “failure to adapt,” precipitating the current financial crisis for which the American worker must foot the bill. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup were among the key Wall Street contributors to the crisis; as you’ll recall, they were also among your largest campaign contributors in 2008.

Goldman Sachs associates provided you with more than $1 million during the run-up to the election, according to records released by the Federal Election Commission and collated by the Center for Responsive Politics. Then, after you assumed office, you appointed former Goldman Sachs Co-Head of Finance Gary Gensler as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and former Goldman Sachs Vice Chairman Robert Hormats as Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs. Former Goldman Sachs Vice President Mark Patterson also became your administration’s treasury chief of staff.

Your discomfort with Wall Street’s failure to respond to public needs hasn’t prevented you either from accepting enormous sums of Wall Street money or appointing former Wall Street executives to high positions in your administration.

You emphasize that you are just like us, that you share our concerns about debt and the affordability of college. You are devoted to making certain that we all have a fair opportunity to obtain an education.

Oddly, this hasn’t stopped your administration from supporting regimes that deprive millions of people of education and other basic rights. Last year, your administration sold $60 billion worth of military aircraft to the Saudi Arabian government in what Al-Jazeera reported as the single largest U.S. arms sale in history. The dismal state of human rights under the Saudi monarchy is well-known; in 2010, the U.S. State Department admitted that the Saudi government subjected its citizens to “torture and physical abuse … arbitrary arrest and incommunicado detention … [and] restrictions on civil liberties such as freedoms of speech.” Saudi women are subject to a level of officially-sanctioned dehumanization virtually unknown in similarly developed nations.

Though the Saudi state educational system is relatively well-funded, its curricula are packed with stultifying religious dogma and Saudi women are often compelled by government-sanctioned societal conventions to avoid pursuing higher education. Thirty percent of Saudi women are illiterate, according to CIA figures. ...more