254 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyvast and disciplined crowd standing in long, silent lines, like those old photos of British
colonials reviewing the Zulus. They are rooting for him to say something big, something
feeling, about Africa, about the relation between America and Kenya, about the way history is
beginning to shift. Obama, instead, backs away. “I don’t come here as a grandson but as a U.S.
senator,” he tells them. “My time is not my own. Don’t expect me to come back here very
often.” And then again: “I’m not going to be here all the time.” He goes on in this vein: He
wants to help Kenyans, but he also wants them to help themselves. He begins to sound like any
other politician, a deputy to the trade commissioner. The crowd, full of hope, almost visibly
deflates. (Wallace Wells, “Destiny’s Child,” Rolling Stone, February 27, 2007)
Not a very promising beginning, but also perhaps a fair reflection of the predicament of Anglo-
American imperialism in Africa today.
GETTING RICH IN THE MILLIONAIRE’S CLUB
Obama and his wife are trying to cultivate the public image of an anti-materialist power couple
were urging young people to choose the path of idealism and not pecuniary aggrandizement. This is
a public relations ploy doubtless invented by Axelrod, and it is a cruel sham. One of Obama’s first
preoccupations upon arriving in the Senate was how to begin amassing wealth into a considerable
fortune as soon as he could:
Less than two months after ascending to the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama bought more than
$50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of
his biggest political donors. One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to
develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its
shares, Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.
He also bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose
principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his
political committees. A spokesman for Obama says the senator did not know that he had
invested in either company.^114
The perfect Master was too much involved in his idealistic meditations to ever think about all
that filthy lucre he was amassing by means of classical graft.
OBAMA REFUSES TO HELP END THE IRAQ WAR
Obama’s elusive October 2002 antiwar speech has remained for many years an isolated and
impotent gesture, clearly conceived and executed as part of a cynical marketing strategy as a means
of jumpstarting Barky’s Senate campaign by mobilizing a brigade old SDS leftists. in 2005 in
2006, Bush could count on Obama as a reliable vote in favor of the continued funding of the Iraq
war and against impeachment, which by late 2006 had become a genuine mass movement,
especially in the middle class. Even Obama’s allies in the controlled corporate media began to take
notice of his duplicity:
Campaigning for the Illinois Senate seat in 2003 and 2004, Obama scolded Bush for invading
Iraq and vowed he would “unequivocally” vote against an additional $87 billion to pay for it.
Yet since taking office in January 2005, he has voted for four separate war appropriations,
totaling more than $300 billion. Last June [2006], Obama voted no to Senator John F. Kerry’s
proposal to remove most combat troops from Iraq by July 2007, warning that an “arbitrary
deadline” could “compound” the Bush administration’s mistake. And now he’s voted for a
Republican-sponsored resolution that stated the Senate would not cut off funding for troops in