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Hedges: I don’t support Obama. You know, I wish somebody would make a documentary on what Obama’s done. I just sued the president in federal court over the National Defense Authorization Act, the assault on civil liberties under the Obama administration. This should not be a left-right divide. It has been far worse under Obama than it was under George W. Bush. And yet none of that is in the film. Obama’s refusal to restore habeas corpus. Obama’s supporting of the FISA Amendment Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our constitution—and I assume Dinesh is a constitutionalist — has traditionally been illegal. Warrantless wiretapping, monitoring, and eavesdropping of tens of millions of Americans. The use of the Espionage Act, six times, to shut down whistleblowers who have exposed, in some cases, war crimes committed by the U.S. government. And finally, the NDAA, Section 1021, which authorizes the U.S. military to carry out detentions, seizures, on American soil, strip American citizens of due process, and hold them in their offshore penal colonies. None of that’s in the film. The craven sort of obsequiousness on the part of the Obama administration to Wall Street. The expansion of our imperial wars. Our proxy wars in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen. I think these are pretty good criticisms of Obama. And in fact, a lie of omission is still a lie. And we can’t, you know, the fact that a young kid in college gravitates towards a Marxist professor is hardly fodder, I think, for discrediting someone, when you look closely at how obsequious the president has been to serving the military-industrial complex and Wall Street. I care about what he does. I don’t care about, I mean I actually think gravitating toward Marxist professors or reading Edward Said is a good thing. And I wish that Obama had kept that kind of commitment to the other, to the outsider, to those kinds of voices on the margin. But in fact, he has not.
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Hedges: “Because I’ve spoke to Edward about it before he died and he was not close to Obama at all. That’s just not true, Dinesh. I don’t know where you got it from. He hardly knew Obama. As far as this idea that Obama is serving the interest of, I assume you mean, developing countries in the third world, it just doesn’t play out in Obama policies. We have uprisings throughout the Muslim world because of the expanded occupation and reign of terror that has been visited upon Muslims. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed in Iraq, millions displaced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the drone strikes in Pakistan, the cross-border raids are disintegrating Pakistan as a country. The inability on the part of the Obama administration to do anything to alter the Israeli policies towards the Palestinians in particular in Gaza, the largest open air prison in the world. The facts don’t lay it out. I mean, what people’s rhetoric are, and i don’t trust Obama’s rhetoric anymore than I trust Romney or any other politician’s rhetoric.
We have to look at what they do and what Obama does is serve the centers of power, I think one could argue, in many ways more efficiently than Bush. You talk about energy and Obama has expanded drilling. He has supported half of the XL pipeline and i have a pretty good suspicion that once he’s elected, he’ll build the other half. The jobs bill, you talk about redistributing wealth. The jobs bill went nowhere. They cut unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans. We now have 47 million Americans who live in poverty. Tens of millions who live in a category called near-poverty. The Obama administration has done nothing to address the foreclosures, the bank repossessions. Obama care is a cooked-up version of Romney care, which came out of the Heritage Foundation. 447 billion dollars in subsidies to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. If you’re talking about re-distributing wealth, Obama’s done what Bush does, which is the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. I mean, those are the facts.”
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