The Roots of Obama's Rage (21 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Election night was an eerie moment—at least for Obama. Put yourself in his place. Here you are, the insecure, rotund kid who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia. Your life has been shaped by a father you barely knew, a man who grew up in a hut and had multiple wives and drank himself to death. Your ideology, inherited from that strange man, could scarcely be more remote from what most Americans care about. Yet here you are, right in the center of everything, just elected forty-fourth president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. What a feat! What a consummation! Now, finally, the dream can become a reality. Now, at last, the rage can find its true object. Putting on his calmest expression, Obama promised the American people that “change has come to America.”
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He wasn’t kidding.
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He wasn’t kidding.
CHAPTER 8
HUMBLING THE OVERCLASS
I
f we want to understand what kind of change has come to America, we should begin with Barack Obama. No, not
that
Barack Obama. I mean Barack Obama Sr. If we consider the senior Obama’s anti-colonial philosophy, and once again take up his 1965 paper on African socialism, we will find ourselves with a very useful guide to the current goings-on in the White House. The ideology of the father is the key to the public policy actions of the son. So let’s consider how the senior Obama might view the challenges and opportunities of the American presidency. In a word, what would this Luo tribesman do if he were making decisions in the Oval Office?
f we want to understand what kind of change has come to America, we should begin with Barack Obama. No, not
that
Barack Obama. I mean Barack Obama Sr. If we consider the senior Obama’s anti-colonial philosophy, and once again take up his 1965 paper on African socialism, we will find ourselves with a very useful guide to the current goings-on in the White House. The ideology of the father is the key to the public policy actions of the son. So let’s consider how the senior Obama might view the challenges and opportunities of the American presidency. In a word, what would this Luo tribesman do if he were making decisions in the Oval Office?
In this chapter we focus on economic change. For Barack Obama Sr. that would raise the issue of neocolonialism. Recall that neocolonialism is the situation facing a country when actual colonialism has ended; neocolonialism is the economic exploitation that remains even after political independence. Barack Obama Sr. would have agreed with the anti-colonial writer Amilcar Cabral that “national liberation exists when and only when the national productive forces have been completely freed from all kinds of foreign domination.” And he would have seconded Frantz Fanon’s contention that “colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces.” Rather, these oppressors have to realize that “the wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too.... For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries.... Europe is literally a creation of the Third World.” This awareness, Fanon concludes, produces a “double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due and the realization by the capitalist powers that they must pay.”
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These anti-colonial writers were focused on Europe as the colonial power, as it was in their time. But when Barack Obama Sr. came to America, he recognized that all of this was changing. Even in the 1950s, the United States was becoming the power to be reckoned with; American domination has only increased in the ensuing decades. Applying the senior Obama’s anti-colonial model to the United States, we would expect him to have advocated that everything possible be done to weaken the economic hegemony of America, to achieve a more equitable world where the weaker nations become stronger and the strong ones weaker, and he would have supported massive transfers of wealth from America to formerly colonized nations.
The critique of neocolonialism espoused by Obama’s father operates on the conviction that Western banks, investment houses, insurance companies, oil and mineral companies, and—we can add for good measure—the automobile and the pharmaceutical industries, are owned and operated by rich fat cats. This group—let’s call it the overclass—achieves its position by exploiting the weak and the poor. As he argued in his paper, Obama Sr. sought to use the power of the state to bring down this overclass. Certainly the senior Obama’s socialism wasn’t doctrinaire. While the hard-line socialists wanted to abolish private property and equalize wealth and income, Obama Sr.’s goals were narrower: subduing neocolonial institutions mattered more to him than making everything equal. Obama Sr. would have attempted to wring the colonialism out of American society by curbing the wealth of the overclass and by bringing corporate America under state control. Let us examine how all of this squares with the agenda of the younger Obama—our President Obama.
I’d like to begin with a story from the August 18, 2009, issue of the
Wall Street Journal
. The headline reads, “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Obama administration supports offshore drilling. But it’s drilling off the shore of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import bank offered two billion dollars in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Apparently Petrobras would like even more money, and so the Obama administration is considering increasing the amount. Note that Obama is not funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil ends up in the United States; he is funding Brazilian exploration for the oil to stay in Brazil.
Wall Street Journal
. The headline reads, “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Obama administration supports offshore drilling. But it’s drilling off the shore of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import bank offered two billion dollars in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Apparently Petrobras would like even more money, and so the Obama administration is considering increasing the amount. Note that Obama is not funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil ends up in the United States; he is funding Brazilian exploration for the oil to stay in Brazil.
Now consider the fact that the Obama administration has been working overtime to block offshore drilling in the United States. First Obama issued a decree outlawing all drilling below a depth of 500 feet—in other words, the majority of all new offshore drilling in America. When a federal court judge blocked this order, the Obama administration got around the ruling by issuing a new decree banning all drilling from floating platforms. Actually this was an even more sweeping ban than the one that the court had struck down. The effect of Obama’s offshore drilling ban is not only to put thousands of Americans out of work, but also to force drilling companies to move their assets to other parts of the world. The entire American energy infrastructure has been harmed by Obama’s drilling moratorium.
Given these facts, the editorial writers at the
Wall Street Journal
are baffled by Obama’s subsidy for Petrobras. They write, “Americans are right to wonder why Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won’t allow at home.”
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This seems like a double standard, but usually behind every double standard is a single standard waiting to be uncovered. In this case the bafflement disappears when we apply the senior Obama’s anti-colonial perspective. This model predicts that President Obama would do everything he can to transfer wealth from the colonizers to the colonized. Evidently Obama wants America to curtail its energy consumption so that developing countries like Brazil can enjoy greater access to cheap energy. The issue, you see, has nothing to do with drilling per se or even protecting the environment; it’s all about shifting the balance of energy consumption away from the West and toward the developing world.
Wall Street Journal
are baffled by Obama’s subsidy for Petrobras. They write, “Americans are right to wonder why Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won’t allow at home.”
2
This seems like a double standard, but usually behind every double standard is a single standard waiting to be uncovered. In this case the bafflement disappears when we apply the senior Obama’s anti-colonial perspective. This model predicts that President Obama would do everything he can to transfer wealth from the colonizers to the colonized. Evidently Obama wants America to curtail its energy consumption so that developing countries like Brazil can enjoy greater access to cheap energy. The issue, you see, has nothing to do with drilling per se or even protecting the environment; it’s all about shifting the balance of energy consumption away from the West and toward the developing world.
I admit it is a little frightening to contemplate the prospect of a U.S. president assiduously working to reduce America’s standard of living. But as we’ll see, it’s part of a consistent pattern that we can now begin to chart. Obama’s Petrobras decision is part of his broader energy and environmental policy. The cornerstone of that policy is his cap and trade legislation. Obama’s proposal is for the government to sell carbon permits that would restrict carbon emissions by making companies pay for the right to release carbon into the atmosphere. The House has already passed a version of Obama’s cap and trade legislation, although it is stalled in the Senate. Obama seems determined to make this a major initiative if he can move the Senate to change its mind. Obama’s energy secretary has already declared carbon a “pollutant,” even though without carbon no life forms on earth would exist. But this way Obama can achieve through regulation what Congress has so far refused to approve through legislation, and the net effect of this would be to put strong curbs on America’s energy production and consumption.
Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy.
These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.
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The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now?
3
The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now?
Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then.
How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”
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4
Isn’t Obama supposed to be in favor of change? Well, not in this case apparently. He wants the earth to stop changing like this. Perhaps he is right and man-made global warming is a problem. But even if it is, the question to consider is whether it’s worth spending the money to try to stop the warming, or whether we should learn how to adapt to it. Human life on earth is not likely to be jeopardized if the planet is a few degrees warmer one hundred or two hundred years from now. Eminent scientists such as Freeman Dyson of Princeton and Richard Lindzen of MIT have pointed out that living creatures have adapted to all kinds of temperature variations in the course of history. It also seems likely that people living fifty or one hundred years from now will be much richer than we are and have much better technology to deal with the possibility of global warming.
How does Obama view the issue? Speaking before the United Nations Summit on Climate Change in September 2009, Obama did his best Al Gore imitation. “Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict.... The security and stability of each nation and all peoples—our prosperity, our health, our safety—are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.” Obama did not offer a shred of evidence that any of this is imminent.
Rather, Obama’s goal seemed to be one of whipping up frenzy for the purpose of . . . well, here is where it gets interesting, and where the Obama agenda and the Gore agenda diverge. Gore basically wants everyone in the world to curb their standard of living to save the planet. That’s not going to happen, but at least it’s consistent. Obama has a different idea. He certainly wants America to make significant sacrifices to combat global warming. Not only does he seek to raise business costs, but he recognizes that those costs are likely to be passed on to the consumer. Carbon taxes are going to make most everything cost more because nearly all goods and services require energy to produce. Obama acknowledges that Americans are likely to have “doubts and difficulties” about such a course, especially because “we seek sweeping but necessary change in the midst of a global recession.” Still, Obama is determined to move ahead. “Difficulty is no excuse for complacency.” And Obama wants the European countries to join America in this project.
Given Obama’s emphasis on America and the West, one might think that America was the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world. But no. The
New York Times
reports that in 2007 China overtook the United States as the world’s leading producer of carbon dioxide. In fact, China accounted for two thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions.
5
Of course China needs more energy because of its fast-growing economy. In this respect it is joined by India, whose demand for energy is also rapidly increasing. Economist Martin Feldstein pointed out the obvious implication: whatever America does to reduce carbon emissions is likely to prove useless because it will be more than canceled out by increased emissions in China and India.
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So what does Obama intend to do about Chinese and Indian emissions? Well, he intends to give them both some stern advice. They should, he tells the United Nations, “do their part.” Actually India’s environmental minister Jairam Ramesh has already informed the U.S. State Department that India has no interest in abiding by carbon emissions targets.
New York Times
reports that in 2007 China overtook the United States as the world’s leading producer of carbon dioxide. In fact, China accounted for two thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions.
5
Of course China needs more energy because of its fast-growing economy. In this respect it is joined by India, whose demand for energy is also rapidly increasing. Economist Martin Feldstein pointed out the obvious implication: whatever America does to reduce carbon emissions is likely to prove useless because it will be more than canceled out by increased emissions in China and India.
6
So what does Obama intend to do about Chinese and Indian emissions? Well, he intends to give them both some stern advice. They should, he tells the United Nations, “do their part.” Actually India’s environmental minister Jairam Ramesh has already informed the U.S. State Department that India has no interest in abiding by carbon emissions targets.
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