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Interesting viewpoint. David If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.--Mark Twain
September 10, 2010 The Grudge: Barry Soetoro's Indonesian Expatriate HellBy Thomas Lifson Where did Barack Obama
acquire the self-evident disdain he has for major corporations,
especially oil companies, and for the striving classes who have
made America prosperous and strong? Many conservatives have
noted Barack Obama's class envy, expressed both in his and his
bride's resentment over their education debts and desire to live
large in the White House, and in his intent, expressed to Joe the
Plumber, to "spread the wealth around."
Obama also has made it clear that he is no believer in American exceptionalism -- that we are no more different than Greeks who think Greece is special, or Britons who think that Britain is exceptional. And his commitment of billions to the International Monetary Fund for global income redistribution without any constitutional authorization bespeaks an attitude that America owes the world a share of its wealth -- that we do not deserve the prosperity we have enjoyed. He has in the past told us that we can't have houses as warm as we want, or cars as big as we prefer. We must make do with less so that others may enjoy some of the goodies, in effect. A few very astute observers have noted Barack
Obama's immersion in the anti-colonialist ideology championed
by his father, Barack Obama, Sr. On these pages, L.E. Ikenga explained in 2009 how
Obama's policies resemble those of post-colonial African
elites, full of resentment for the wealth allegedly drained
from their societies and anxious to remake them along
egalitarian lines with the state (i.e., themselves) in charge
of the readjustment.
Yesterday, in a much-noted article for Forbes,
Dinesh D'Souza lucidly used anti-colonialist ideology to
explain some of the seemingly self-contradictory Obama
policies, including the deep-water drilling ban for American
companies in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico while
simultaneously financing the deep-water drilling of
Brazilian oil company Petrobras in the South Atlantic, off Rio
de Janeiro. According to D'Souza, Obama thinks the USA
consumes too many resources that other countries deserve, that
we wield an unfair amount of weight in world affairs, and this
explains the moves which seem aimed at diminishing the power,
wealth, and stature of America. These are the very desires
which led Rush Limbaugh to hope that Obama fails.
I think that Ikenga, D'Souza, and Limbaugh are
all correct. Obama has a grudge against America and its
success. The Marxian anti-colonialist ideology he has
evidently embraced fits well with this grudge, but it does not
explain where it came from. To resent and wish to diminish the
power and wealth of one's native land is an extraordinary
thing, indicating a deep emotional alienation. People do not
usually come to such a disturbing stance for purely
intellectual reasons. In many cases, life's deepest
resentments are rooted in the formative years of childhood,
and it is in these years of Obama's life -- specifically the
ages six to ten -- in which we can find the sort of
experiences that could have produced a lifelong anger toward
America and its affluent classes.
It is well-known that after Barack Obama's
mother Stanley Ann Dunham married her second non-American
husband Lolo Soetoro, the family decamped to Jakarta,
Indonesia, where Obama's stepfather worked first for the
Indonesian government and later for an American company, Mobil
Oil. But beyond the bare facts of Obama's schooling in a
Catholic school (where he was registered as a Muslim),
there is almost no reporting or commentary on Obama's
experiences in Jakarta.
Obama stayed there from 1967-71. He was evidently so miserable that at age ten, he went back to America to take up residence with his grandparents in Honolulu, while his mother and stepsister Maya remained in Jakarta. What, aside from sheer self-centeredness or irresponsibility, could have induced his mother to fob off her son on her parents to raise, violating the strongest instinct known to womankind? Her son must have been very unhappy with his life there. To really understand Barry Soetoro's Jakarta
life, one must understand the socio-economic framework within
which the family lived. Stepfather Lolo may have worked for an
American oil company, but he was not an expatriate employee;
he was a local hire. His mother Stanley Ann reportedly taught
English, working for the United States Embassy, but also was
not an expatriate member of the diplomatic corps. This fact
meant that the family was embedded as lower caste members of
the Jakarta expatriate American community.
Few Americans who have not been or associated
with expatriates in poorer countries can grasp the immensity
of the gap which separates expatriate lifestyles from those of
the locals. When a company or the government sends an
executive-level employee overseas for an extended time
complete with family, immense resources are expended making
life overseas as close as possible to that at home, no matter
what the cost. Benefits include lavish housing allowances,
schooling allowances, and home leave. These and other benefits
place the expatriate families at the very peak of local
society economically.
The Americans for whom Obama's parents worked
undoubtedly enjoyed large, comfortable, air-conditioned
American-style housing, paid home leave, club membershsips,
and company-paid tuition at the best private schools, and most
of them would have had at least one chauffeur-driven car as
well as a staff of servants in the home. Meanwhile, Lolo's
salary as a locally hired Indonesian at Mobil Oil, while no
doubt much higher than the impoverished average of Jakarta,
could pay for none of these perks. I have studied and
consulted extensively on the issues of managing expatriate
executives, and I would be surprised if Soetoro received even
close to 10% of the total compensation of his Mobil Oil
American colleagues, despite being highly educated. That would
be enough to afford a bungalow, perhaps, but certainly not
American-style housing or even a car, most likely.
The cute, young Soetoro kids almost certainly
got invited to the Fourth of July parties at the U.S. Embassy
and quite probably spent some time at the American Club of Jakarta,
enjoying the pool and other sports facilities, lavish buffets,
and other comforts as guests of expatriate colleagues of
Lolo's. There they saw how the upper caste -- the Caucasian,
affluent executive-class expatriates and their families --
lived, untroubled by the heat, the open sewers, and the
unbelievable poverty of ordinary Indonesians.
Despite all the perquisites of expatriate
life, many Americans sent overseas by their employers do not
enjoy living away from home. Spouses and children often have a
difficult time adjusting, which is one of the reasons why so
much money is expended making life overseas as
comfortable as possible for them. Even so, it is not uncommon
for people forced to go overseas this way to develop rather
bad attitudes toward the locals, feeling and openly expressing
contempt for the local environment and people.
As it happens, during the years Barry Soetoro
spent in Jakarta, I spent significant amounts of time living
as an impecunious student in Tokyo (which was then far poorer
than America, though much richer than Indonesia). On occasion,
I interacted with embassy and corporate expatriates and saw
both the incomparably lavish lifestyles they lived (compared
to mine) and the disdain some (but by no means all) among them
expressed for the locals, up to and including casual use of
racial epithets. The food, comfort, and security they enjoyed
was like a dream for me, utterly inaccessible and startlingly
different from the lot of ordinary Japanese with whom I lived
"on the local economy." I know firsthand what kind of longing
and envy such an experience produces.
It is not hard to imagine that in the
occasional company of oil industry expatriates and their
children, young Barry Soetoro saw and heard things which made
him conclude that white, corporate America was unjustly
wealthy, unfair, and downright boorish. By virtue of
membership in the corporate world, the executives and their
children enjoyed ease and comfort beyond anything he had ever
seen or could experience on his own. Meanwhile, his parents
struggled both to live in Indonesian society as locals did and
to (obviously unsuccessfully) make their son happy and
comfortable there.
In his most formative years, the boy who
became President of the United States was, in other words,
subjected to humiliating, demeaning membership in a lower
caste and cognizant both of the seemingly undeserved
privileges of children born to high-caste expatriates and the
grinding poverty of ordinary Indonesians among whom his family
lived. That a deep anger and sense of unfairness would develop
in such a situation seems more than likely, laying the
groundwork for resentment of American power and wealth, and an
embrace of anti-colonialist ideologies which undergirded a
quest for political revenge, later in life.
It was not a pleasant life Barack Obama endured in Jakarta as the child Barry Soetoro. Regrettably, all Americans are now forced to share some of his pain. Thomas Lifson is editor and
publisher of American Thinker. Earlier in life, he was a
professor at Harvard Business School, researching global
corporations.
63 Comments on "The Grudge: Barry Soetoro's
Indonesian Expatriate Hell"
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