III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 125concealment: Michelle cannot contain her own assiduously cultivated rage, even when the
expression of that rage becomes destructive to her and a threat to her consuming ambition.
National pride and national honor are not a bad thing. Honor, in fact, is the one ything that
humans cannot live without. Like everything else, much depends on how it is used. The American
New Deal state created by Franklin D. Roosevelt with the help of the sit-down strikers and the trade
union organizers represented the most advanced form of human organization ever seen. The New
Deal state battled the Great Depression, defeated Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, and fascism, kept the UK
and USSR on their feet through Lend-Lease, contained and frustrated Stalin and Mao, unlocked the
secrets of the atom, and put humans on the moon. Abraham Lincoln was the greatest man of the
nineteenth century, and, together with Russia and Prussia, saved the world from the uncontested
universal despotism of the British Empire under Lord Palmerston. There was a dark side – generally
the handiwork of the finance oligarchs, north and south, yet there was much to be proud of. But not
for the racist Michelle Obama, partly because Michelle is also a postmodernist and multiculturalist.
Postmodernism holds that any conception of human greatness is an illusion, an obscene distortion of
human pettiness, fecklessness, and mediocrity. Nobody is a hero to a postmodernist – not because
there are no heroes and heroines, but because the postmodernist is too crabbed, deformed, and
envious to admit the category of human greatness in any form. Michelle has a perfect right to her
wretched opinions, but she has no right to take them to the White House and make it into the
bordello of world history.
Why does the super-privileged wealthy elitist Michelle hate the United States and the American
people? Partly, one thinks, because she forgets the largesse and holds fast to the memory of the
adversities. On February 29, 2008 Michelle visited Zanesville, Ohio, where she greeted some local
women at a local day care center. Michelle launched into sententious nostrums sharply contradicted
by her own greedy, rapacious, and social-climbing lifestyle: “We left corporate America, which is a
lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women, not mentioning that she works
for the ultra-reactionary, Rockefeller-founded University of Chicago, and sits on the boards of job-
destroying corporations. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for
the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re
encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the
money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
During this same appearance, Michelle demonstrated how out-of-touch she is, by bemoaning the
amount of money she has to spend on piano, dance, and other lessons for her two daughters. The
sum she cited came to nearly one-third of the median household income in Zanesville, which was
$37,192 in 2004, which is below both the Ohio and national averages. Just 12.2 percent of adults in
that county have a bachelor’s degree or higher, also well below the state and national averages.
About 20 percent don’t have a high school degree. Michelle was a multi-millionairess; she was
indeed out of touch. And she wanted to stay that way. She expects the group of women, whom she
could buy many times over, to sympathize with her. ‘“Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women
in the audience, their first question for me is, ‘How on earth are you managing it, how are you
keeping it all together?’” she pontificated to the women of modest means in Zanesville.^28
One of Michelle’s favorite themes is that she had had to take out student loans to get through
Princeton and Harvard. She complains about how long it has taken her and Barry to pay off these
loans. She talks about how it has taken them years and years, well into middle age, to pay off their
debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still
paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” Michelle laments. “Barack and