US President Obama to give final State of the Union

World Today

With this year’s speech expected to focus on the future, with only a few policy proposals, U.S. President Barack Obama will give his final State of the Union address Tuesday evening to the U.S. public.

CCTV America’s Jessica Stone reports from Washington.

Barack Obama took office in 2009 with the United States fighting two wars overseas and facing recession and rising unemployment at home. A year later, with unemployment at 9.8 percent, Barack Obama proposed healthcare and financial reforms and a doubling of U.S. exports by 2015.

2010 brought the passage of both healthcare and financial reforms. In 2011, he would also make a similarly doomed effort to pass an immigration reform law, but when a congressional effort sputtered, Obama unilaterally expanded deferred deportations.


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The move is tied up in U.S. courts.

In 2012, Obama promised stiffer Iran sanctions, which congress passed.

Obama also began a pattern of unilateral action to fight climate change, allowing clean energy development on public lands. The White House would later impose pollution controls on cars and power plants, culminating in the Paris global climate change accord in 2015.


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As the U.S. economy improved, Obama began his second term focused on turning the page from military conflict to diplomatic engagement. November 2013 would bring an interim agreement with Iran to lift sanctions in exchange for rolling back Iran’s nuclear program. He pleaded with Congress not to pass new Iran sanctions.

Negotiations would last for more than a year, resulting in an agreement in March 2015, but Obama’s calls to close the prison for terror suspects in Cuba remains outstanding.

CCTV America