I. Obama’s Roots in Polygamy and the Ford Foundation 31anthropological field work. At this point, Barack Obama, aged about 9, was left with his
grandparents. Abandonment by his father was now thus followed by prolonged separation from his
mother, leading to unpredictable psychological consequences. If Larry Sinclair’s allegations are
accurate, Barack Obama is a closet bisexual, and the resulting potential for the blackmailing of a
possible future president is an issue which voters will obviously need to consider very carefully
before putting such a person into the White House.^7
Alice Dewey further described Obama’s mother as ‘the most hardworking person I maybe ever
have met. And did it without seeming to. She was cheerful, down to earth. She absolutely was the
kind of person you wanted on your side in any situation, from a barroom brawl to an academic
argument, and she was always there for the little guy, particularly the little woman.” For most of the
1970s, 80s, and 90s, she shuttled between Hawaii and Indonesia, doing academic research and
paying the bills by teaching English or working for nonprofit organizations such as the Ford
Foundation.’ (Purdum, Vanity Fair, March 2008) The Ford Foundation looms large over Obama’s
life: it was his mother’s employer, and later the decisive influence over his church in Chicago.
ANN DUNHAM’S LATER YEARS: FORD FOUNDATION,
US AID, WORLD BANK OPERATIVE
Some journalistic accounts have correctly stressed that Ann Dunham in the latter part of her
career became a much more important person than is commonly recognized. One reason that she
has been underestimated is undoubtedly the attempt by the Obama campaign to make the
candidate’s mother appear as bland and conventional as possible. But she was in fact an
international civil servant who played a key role in developing the notion of microloans, one of the
main tokenist World Bank strategies for parrying the demand for real Third World economic and
infrastructural development under the reign of globalization. As Kim Chipman of Bloomberg
writes, ‘Barack Obama’s mother was most at home a world away from her Midwest roots, trekking
the old Silk Road or arranging small loans for weavers in Indonesia. “I’m so tired of seeing her
described as just a white woman from Kansas,” says Bronwen Solyom, 63, who first met Ann
Dunham in the 1970s when they were graduate students in anthropology at the University of Hawaii
in Honolulu. “She was much more than that.”’
Ann Dunham was also known for her later work as an anthropologist and social activist for Ford
Foundation counter-insurgency projects in Indonesia under the reactionary Suharto regime.
Chipman notes, ‘Terance Bigalke, who worked with Dunham at the Ford Foundation in Jakarta,
says she also fostered social activism in her children through her work on behalf of the world’s
poor. “She had such a strong concern for people who were in difficult circumstances economically,”
says Bigalke, 59. That concern led her to study the underground economy of Jakarta street vendors.’
Ann Dunham’s interest in anthropology had begun in Indonesia, Chipman found. Her first months
in Indonesia “sparked a lifelong passion that later led Dunham to return to Hawaii for graduate
studies in anthropology and an 800-page Ph.D. thesis on Indonesian blacksmithing. Her interest in
the local culture was aroused almost immediately, when she started teaching English to
Indonesians.” In effect, whatever her subjective intentions, Ann Dunham profiled the Indonesian
population for the United States Agency for International Development (US AID), the Ford
Foundation, the World Bank, all key institutions for dollar imperialism.
Chipman shows that Ann Dunham’s interest in anthropology was closely linked to her
contributions to imperialist strategy: ‘Friends say Dunham found her calling through her work,
which evolved from studying batik and ironwork to obtaining microfinancing for craftspeople,