314 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyhealthcare through financial incentives; Liebman, the partial privatization of Social Security. Austan
Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago who calls himself a “centrist market
economist,” has been most directly involved with crafting Obama’s subprime agenda. In a column
last March in the New York Times, Goolsbee disputed whether “subprime lending was the leading
cause of foreclosure problems,” touted its benefits for credit-poor minority borrowers and warned
that “regulators should be mindful of the potential downside in tightening [the mortgage market] too
much.” In October, no less a conservative luminary than George Will devoted a whole column in
the Washington Post to saluting Goolsbee’s “nuanced understanding” of traditional Democratic
issues like globalization and income inequality and concluded that he “seems to be the sort of
fellow – amiable, empirical, and reasonable – you would want at the elbow of a Democratic
president, if such there must be.” ... Wall Street apparently has come to a similar conclusion.
Obama had received nearly $10 million in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate
sector through October, and he’s second among presidential candidates of either party in money
raised from commercial banks, trailing only Clinton. Goldman Sachs, which made $6 billion from
devalued mortgage securities in the first nine months of 2007, is Obama’s top contributor. When
asked if Obama would hold these financial institutions accountable for losses incurred by
homeowners and investors, his campaign refused to comment.’ (Max Fraser, “Sub-prime Obama”
The Nation, February 110, 2008) Soon Goolsbee went into eclipse because he had warned the
Canadian government that Obama’s criticism of free trade sellouts like NAFTA was just demagogy
for the campaign trail to edify the plebs. Goolsbee was then supplanted by Jason Furman, another
monetarist. Well-informed sources from Goldman Sachs reported that the word on the Street was
that Furman, like Jeffrey Liebman, was on board with the idea of privatizing Social Security as a
means of “saving” it – the same policy that Bush had tried and failed to impose in 2005.
OBAMA USES RACISM, HOMOPHOBIA TO WIN SOUTH CAROLINA
Desperate to rebuild the momentum of his coup after his loss to Clinton in New Hampshire,
Obama turned to the most disreputable allies and methods in his bid to win South Carolina. Obama
turned to Reverend McClurkin, a local Elmer Gantry, to whip up support among the black churches.
One commentator noted, ‘Obama’s reliance on McClurkin, a homophobic black minister, to deliver
the black vote in South Carolina was eye-opening. What’s even worse, McClurkin is gay.’ This
combination of public homophobia on the part of public figures who are themselves homosexual
has been one of the hallmarks of recent Republican rule, as the Mark Foley and Larry Craig
scandals have underlined; Obama represents more of the same in this department. Obama also
developed a coded speech with which to appeal to South Carolina black voters, using echoes of
speeches by Malcolm X which would be understood by some of his listeners, but not by others. It
was a two-tiered technique, and rightly merited the name of duplicity. Here is a sample: ‘As the
South Carolina primary campaign built to a climax, Obama addressed a largely African-American
audience in Sumter. ... Obama drops his eloquent Harvard accent, and says, “They’re trying to
bamboozle you. It’s the same old okie-dokie. — Y’all know about okie dokie, right? — They try to
bamboozle you. — Hoodwink ya. Try to hoodwink ya. Alright. — I’m having too much fun
here....” This speech had been borrowed from one of Obama’s heroes, Malcolm X, who said,
“You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, led amok.
You’ve been bamboozled.” It is strange that a candidate, who belongs to an “Afrocentric” church,
that bestows awards on Louis Farrakhan, would borrow from Malcolm X, who was a spokesman for
the Nation of Islam, right before complaining about e-mails claiming he is Muslim.’^167