28 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographythe future president’s mother. Bill Clinton’s need to obtain the validation of his ego from the well-
known parade of women requires no further comment. Bill Clinton’s philandering clearly resulted
from a lack of ego strength: no matter how much he achieved in life, he always needed to be
assured of his personal worth by a parade of women, one of whom turned out to be Miss Lewinsky.
However, there is already evidence that before all is said and done, it will become evident that Bill
Clinton has done a much better job of controlling his own compulsive urges than Obama has, since
there is evidence that the Illinois Senator has veered recklessly into the world of bisexuality.
As the columnist Spengler of the Asia Times points out, Michelle Obama – who often sounds
like a feminist when she is talking about her own immediate concerns – shows no indignation about
the tragic spousal abuse which Ann was willing to undergo: ‘Michelle Obama speaks with greater
warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. “She was kind of a dreamer, his mother,”
Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. “She wanted the world to be open to
her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because
sometimes dreams don’t pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like
most of us don’t in this country.” How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to
raise her children on thin fare in pursuit of a political agenda. “Naivete” is a euphemism for Ann
Dunham’s motivation... Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them,
twice.’ (Asia Times, February 26, 2008) Indeed: what kind of left liberal feminist is going to accept
abandonment by a man whom she knew to be at least a bigamist?
ANN DUNHAM, FORD FOUNDATION OPERATIVE:
THE MICROLOAN RACKET
Ann Dunham became famous posthumously when Time Magazine placed a picture of her with
Barry (Obama) as a toddler – complete with halo – on the cover of its April 21, 2008 issue – in a
forlorn attempt to humanize the recently bittergated Obama just before the Pennsylvania primary.
The overall intent here is to whitewash this quasi-Marxist, Rousseauvian leftist anthropologist into a
sort of middle American humanitarian – an attempt so transparent that Time began receiving letters
impugning its journalistic integrity. Nevertheless, we do learn more about Ann’s later career as Ford
Foundation operative. Her specialty was the cynical financier racket known as microloans or
microcredits – tiny sums of money lent at substantial interest rates to tiny third world entrepreneurs,
with the classic case being the purchase of a cell phone to provide phone service to some rural
village – all in lieu of real communications and transportation infrastructure which the finance
oligarchs at the World Bank and the regional lending agencies had no intention of financing.
Microloans represented the World Bank’s notion of small is beautiful “appropriate technology” –
meaning that if you are a backward country, then backward, third-rate technology is all you will get,
so you had better take it with gratitude. Microloans also served to tether the third world masses to
the mentality of finance capital, familiarizing them with notions of interest rates, the deadlines for
installment payments, and all the dreary apparatus of usury. This entire cynical enterprise reached a
paroxysm a decade after Ann Dunham’s death, when Muhammad Yunus of the Bangladeshi
Grameen Bank won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in pioneering micro-credits. By this
time, the micro-credit was widespread, with a 2004 report showing that some 3,200 micro-credit
institutions were reaching more than 92 million clients, mainly in the poorest countries of the
underdeveloped world. It was an exercise in loan sharking and predatory lending to the most
desperate people in the world, the most defenseless victims of economic globalization. When Yunus
won his Nobel, he was widely praised: “Muhammad Yunus is a revolutionary in the best sense of
the word,” said Sam Daley-Harris, director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign in Washington,