Barack Obama accomplished one very important thing during his first months in office. He began to transform foreign policy language and ideology away from the proudly unilateralist militarism of George W. Bush. He spoke of the importance of diplomacy over military action, global cooperation rather than global domination, re-engaging with the Muslim world, and respecting the United Nations and perhaps even international law.

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Barack Obama raised the hopes of global justice advocates by committing to significant changes in our international economic policies. As president, however, his efforts to implement alternatives have been slow to get off the ground. When the economic crisis hit, the need to overhaul our whole approach to globalization became all the more urgent. Countries that had gone the furthest to liberalize trade and investment proved to be the most vulnerable to volatile global export and investment markets. Obama took the opposite view, pointing to the crisis as a reason for postponing promised reforms, such as renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

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When Barack Obama was elected president, many climate activists were thrilled. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere reaching dangerous levels, and Democrats controlling the House and Senate, hopes couldn’t have been higher among climate campaigners that Obama would act swiftly to make energy and climate change one of his top priorities.

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The Obama administration, mainstream Democrats, and even many progressives are asserting that we are on the verge of a historical step forward for health reform, bringing us closer to desired affordable quality health care for all. Obama deserves credit for making health reform his top priority and likely will preside over a bill that historically covers many of the 46 million Americans currently uninsured.

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In terms of domestic policy, Barack Obama has had the most successful first year of a presidency since Jimmy Carter. This might seem like damning with faint praise. Although he is not remembered as a very successful president, Carter pushed through important environmental regulation in his first year, such as the Clean Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Even more impressively, Congress that year passed major legislation regulating corporate behavior with the Corporate Reinvestment Act and the Unlawful Corporate Payments Act of 1977.

Obama likewise shepherded through important domestic legislation.

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In his first year in office, Barack Obama gave several exceptional speeches on foreign policy. In Prague, he endorsed nuclear disarmament. In Cairo, he called for a new engagement with the Islamic world. In Oslo, he repudiated torture. At these moments, the new president firmly broke with the policies of his predecessor and provided a glimpse of what a new, cooperative, just U.S. foreign policy could be.

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Resurrecting Glass-Steagall would reduce the need for the taxpayer bailouts that added between 9 percent and 49 percent to the profits of the 18 biggest U.S. banks in 2009, according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research in Washington.

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“Ask an Expert” is a recurring feature on Bucks in which you’ll have the opportunity to question big-brained individuals about a particular area of personal finance or consumer affairs.

This week, Ron Pollack, the founding executive director of Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy organization, is answering readers’ questions about Cobra health benefits and subsidies and unemployment-related Cobra issues.

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Despite this interest, small businesses may chafe at the plan. Micro-businesses (firms with fewer than 20 employees) would likely be left out, says Dean Baker, a co-director at the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. “Presumably, you would want to aid firms other than ones that employ close friends and family members,” he says. “Having a certain size minimum makes it more difficult to come up with some scam.”

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A report by the Free Press, a think tank that tracks media reform, says the deal would give Comcast too much control over the market, which would mean unregulated rate hikes for consumers.

“I don’t see it as concern as [to] whether consumers will pay for [content] or if it’s free, but [rather] how much will it cost,” says Ben Scott, policy director for the Free Press. “When you have that kind of market power, you can raise rates above what competition will normally produce in the free market.”

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