178 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyenthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just
be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.”^64
This very imprudent outburst reveals much about the characteristic outlook of the foundation-
funded political intellectual in the United States today. First of all, this utterance is dripping with
patronizing condescension and contempt for the people he is describing. Obama, well-trained by
his procommunist anthropologist mother, has been in effect on fieldwork in Ohio and Pennsylvania,
and is reporting to a group of his peers about the strange mores of the peculiar populations he has
been attempting to profile and manipulate, with limited success. Obama is trying as hard as he can
to treat the American people like malleable ethnographic material, but they have realized this and
do not like it.
Obama does not mention that the deindustrialization of the United States, and thus the
destruction of the economic viability of the communities he has visited, were the direct result of the
policies imposed by his own Trilateral Commission backers back at the time almost 30 years ago
when Trilateral member Jimmy Carter, probably acting at the prodding of Trilateral member
Zbigniew Brzezinski, place Trilateral member Paul Adolph Volcker at the helm of the Federal
Reserve; it was Volcker’s 22% prime rate which effectively destroyed the industrial infrastructure
of the United States, including especially its export industries. This kind of historical background is
seldom included in the analysis developed by a bankers’ boy when it comes time to assign the
blame.
It is not surprising that Obama is contemptuous of religion, gun ownership, and sports shooting.
The reference to “antipathy” obviously suggests that the people he is dealing with really are racists
after all. Most interesting of all is the reference to “anti-trade,” since the suggestion here is that
anyone who disagrees with economic and financial globalization is somehow irrational, anti-social,
or even paranoid. This puts Obama’s statement closely in line with the classics of academic and
foundation-backed anti-worker ideology. We will not try to develop here the case that economic and
financial globalization have effectively wrecked the world economy, leading to an overall world
immiseration in the form of declining standards of living, and declining economic opportunity. We
have made this case already in Surviving the Cataclysm. Today, the financial order of globalization
is dissolving before the horrified eyes of world public opinion, with the entire system going to the
brink of a systemic explosion of the world banking system on the Ides of March with the looming
bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, which threatened to set off chain reaction bankruptcies throughout the
world financial community in 2008.
One of the sources for the idea that anyone who opposes the prevailing economic and financial
line of Wall Street, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve is suffering from some form of
psychopathology is the work of the deeply dishonest and much reviled Columbia University
historian, Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter was the author of “The Paranoid Style in American
Politics,” (Harper’s, 1964), and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He was especially brutal in
his slanders of the late 19th century protest movement among farmers who called themselves the
Populists. Hofstadter was one of the leaders of the school of “consensus historians,” an approach
which he described with the remark that “It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot
hang together at all unless there is some kind of consensus running through it.” His favorite
technique was to psychoanalyze protest movements, always coming to the conclusion that the
dissidents and critics of the established regime were hopelessly irrational, after probing into their
unconscious psychological motives, status anxieties, hatreds, and paranoia, presenting these
syndromes as the real cause for their political discontent. His favorite way of dismissing a critic was