I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 29D.C. He was in fact a counter-revolutionary in the service of rapacious finance capital, and this was
a good description of the mature Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother. As for Ann, she no doubt
kept telling herself that she was doing something very radical.
The adulatory Time account tells us that after her divorce from her Indonesian second husband
Lolo Sotero or Soetero, Ann ‘took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at
the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she
had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on
women’s work. “She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace,” [her
acquaintance] Zurbuchen says, “where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs
who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce.” Ann thought the Ford
Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.’ In
other words, her programs would subvert the existing government by pretending to take the side of
the oppressed masses – just what Soros and the other Wall Street jackals would have desired. Ann’s
‘home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers,
musicians and labor organizers. “She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more
eclectic circle,” Zurbuchen says. “She brought unlikely conversation partners together.”’ These
eclectic and bohemian tastes live on in Barry. Time goes on: ‘Ann’s most lasting professional
legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to ‘92—
before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success
story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by
the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. “I would say her work had
a lot to do with the success of the program,” he says. Today Indonesia’s microfinance program is
No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance
Information Exchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit. [...] Every so often, Ann would leave
Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance
job.’ (Amanda Ripley, “Raising Obama,” Time, April 21, 2008) As for Barack Obama, his thoughts
were elsewhere; he writes that in these years of living in the ethnically diverse atmosphere of
Hawaii, “I was too young to know that I needed a race.” (Dreams 27) A strange attitude for a
candidate who now poses as being virtually trans-racial and even post-racial.
LOLO SOETERO AND INDONESIA:
COSMOPOLITANISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM
Obama’s mother Ann then remarried; her second husband was Lolo Soetero Mangunharjo, a
student from Indonesia who was also studying at the University of Hawaii. Lolo Soetero later
became an official of the Director General’s office in the TNI Topography division of the
Indonesian Army, and still later worked as an oil company executive in Indonesia. Soetero was
studying in Hawaii under a program sponsored by the Indonesian government. At first the
Indonesian government was that of Sukarno, who had led the independence struggle against Dutch
colonialism in the 1940s. Sukarno, along with Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, Tito of
Yugoslavia, and Nehru of India had founded the non-aligned movement at the Bandung conference
of 1955. This movement was made up of Third World developing countries who refused to
subordinate themselves permanently to the United States or the Soviet Union, but who tried to
constitute a third way in world affairs during the Cold War era.
In 1965, the CIA supported the Indonesian coup d’état of General Suharto, who overthrew the
Sukarno regime and initiated a bloody reign of terror which lasted for several years and which