Legislative Update: February 19, 2012

TPP Legislative Update & Newsletter

Compliments of Tea Party Patriots

February 19, 2012

Passion to Action
Your fellow patriots in Wisconsin desperately need your help to verify signatures in the recall elections!! From True the Vote: “We need your help! All we ask for is 100 minutes. In 100 minutes you can enter data for approximately 100 petition signatures. Nearly 13,000 volunteers from 49 states have signed up to participate in this recall effort. This is the real deal - citizens are taking control - let's stand together!” They are only 75% done and the deadline is February 27th!! Can you help?? If so, please click here to fill out the volunteer form and PLEASE FORWARD THIS!!!

Federal Budget
 

 No Budget: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 marks the 1028th day since the Senate has passed a budget under the leadership of Harry Reid (D-NV). Do not buy the spin that the Democrats passed a budget when they passed the debt ceiling deal. When we asked the RSC for a good explanation about why the debt ceiling deal was not a budget, this was their response:

• “The Budget Control Act is technically, functionally, and politically different from a budget. A budget is a ten-year document that lays out both a spending and policy direction for the country that includes spending, revenues, and economic projections—among other things. It is a message to the American people that outlines the direction that we think the country should go, and forces us to articulate and defend our choices. The only way that the Budget Control Act is all like a national budget is that it sets a top line spending figure for 2012 and 2013. But to call that a budget would be like a family sitting down at the beginning of the year and just saying, this is how much we want to spend this year, and leaving it at that. No discussion of how much money they expect to earn, where they need to make tough choices on cutting spending, or of the economic reality they expect to face”

 Payroll Deal: From Bob Williams of State Budget Solutions: “The recent payroll tax deal increases the national debt by $100 billion and is in violation of the PAYGO rules. Not only does it increase the national debt by $100 billion, but it also moves up the bankruptcy of the social security fund. Of course, Congress simply ignored the PAYGO rules. Repeatedly Speaker Boehner has caved in on principles and has been responsible for increasing the national debt. The Congressional Budget Office released a study showing than the Social Security Trust Fund had $1 billion less than expected. So rather than trying to put social security on a sound actuary basis Boehner caved in to the Democrats and once again raided the social security fund by cutting the payroll tax.”


 Rotten Highway Bill: According to Jim DeMint, the highway bill represents another example of DC politicians’ addiction to big spending. And he states, “Despite all the hyperventilating about a tea party takeover in Congress, the sad truth is that in 2011 Congress increased spending from the year before, raised the debt limit by $2 trillion, and funded ObamaCare.”

 No Solutions: Watch Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laugh about the fact that the President’s budget doesn’t address our out-of-control debt, and admit that they have no solutions.
 
 Obama’s Budget: The President finally released his budget today, and as expected, it would give us deeper deficits, increased spending, bigger government, and higher taxes. Key facts from his budget:

• Spends Too Much:

               $47 trillion of government spending over the next decade
               Proposes a net increase over current spending projections

• Taxes Too Much:

              $1.9 trillion in new taxes
              Raises taxes, not to pay down the debt, but to fuel more government
                spending

• Borrows Too Much:

             Four straight years of trillion-dollar-plus deficits;
                no plan to reduce the debt
             Gross debt at the end of FY22: $25.9 trillion

• Budget Gimmicks & Broken Promises

             Overstates new deficit reduction by taking credit for savings already
                enacted
             Exploits discredited budget gimmick by “not spending” nearly $1
                trillion that was never going to be spent

Read more about President Obama’s budget here. And don’t forget, Obama has missed the budget deadline three out of four years. If you’d like to read the President’s one-pager on his budget, click here. Mercatus Center’s analysis is here.

 Crony Capitalist: Check out this graphic that shows the connections (i.e. flow of money) between the Obama administration and his cronies. (Note: It’s a graphic put out by the GOP and at the bottom they ask for donations. Including this graphic in TPP’s newsletter is not an endorsement or statement of support of the GOP. It’s just a good graphic to share.)

 Deficit Spending: Read a couple of good analyses of President Obama’s budget here and here. Also, check out this chart that highlights average annual deficit spending as a percentage of GDP.

Regulations & Jobs

• Stimulus Failure: Also from the RSC is a graph showing the jobs situation in relation to the stimulus. And read this report from the CBO on the failure of the stimulus.

Obamacare


Visit http://www.roadtorepeal.com/ to get info on the TPP rally in DC on 3/24!!!

• HSA Coalition files amicus brief
• Milliman, Inc. releases study of Medical Loss Ratio effects
• Sign the Virginia Tea Party Federation’s petition to repeal Obamacare!!
• Obama gives cabinet secretaries ability to fundraise for political organizations
• OMB Chief Contradicts Obama Brief: It's a Penalty, Not a Tax
• Payroll tax deal held some minor cuts to Obamacare
• Budgetary fraud
• Obama’s continued war on religious liberty: Chaplains treasonous?
• 45 Conservative leaders and organizations oppose HHS regulations
• Obamacare hurts small businesses hiring prospects
• United States Preventative Services Task Force – more bureaucrat control
•  Major “oops” in the law – don’t set up the state-based exchanges!!
• ACOs: HMOs Déjà Vu All Over Again
• AAPS opposes the individual mandate and filed an amicus brief
• Hidden mortgage tax

Education

• Disgraced Teacher Retires from NY City Schools. Former NYC "rubber room" teacher Alan Rosenfeld retires after making $100k a year since being removed from the classroom in 2001. NYC taxpayers will be on the hook to pay Rosenfeld $85,400 per year in retirement earnings plus health benefits for the rest of his life.
• Get Involved: Articles such as this demonstrate yet another symptom of a failed public education system. Rather than putting band-aids on the symptoms, why not join us at TEA for Education in our campaign to transform education? We are currently represented in 12 states and call on all concerned patriots to help us make education about the children. We cannot afford to waste another generation: get involved now!

Sustainable Development and Property Rights

• States Fighting Back: Tennessee is working on a bill to define
• Executive Order: Sign the petition opposing President Obama’s Executive Order that allows for the further implementation of Agenda 21.
• People Power: Vista, CA is no longer a part of ICLEI due to pressure from the citizens! Congrats!
• Get Involved: For more information on any of these issues, check out http://www.agenda21today.com/.

Illegal Immigration

• Documentary: TPP North Carolina State Coordinator Mark Hager assisted with the documentary titled, “Invasion: Freedom Under Fire!” about the struggles of American citizens who live along the southern border. If you would like to order a copy, please click here for more information.
• Waivermania: Kansas’ Agriculture Secretary is asking the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver so that agricultural businesses in Kansas could hire illegal immigrants. The agriculture businesses and others in the business community are supporting this effort. So far the Obama administration have handed out healthcare waivers and educational waivers. Are illegal immigrant waivers next? When waivers become the law of the land, there is no law.
• Alabama Too: The Attorney General in Alabama is trying to get the legislature to gut their new, stricter laws dealing with illegal aliens because he doesn’t want to have to go to court to fight for it. The Chamber of Commerce and the agricultural businesses are also supportive of the attempt to gut the laws.

Constitutional Issues

• New Website: Please check out a new website called the Intolerable Acts at http://www.theintolerableacts.org/. There you will find resources to fight against the unconstitutional provisions embedded within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). There are a number of states that are fighting back by passing resolutions. You can find templates, etc. on the website to use with your own local and state elected officials.
• Still Confused? Are you still confused about NDAA? Click here for a good explanation of why it’s so bad. And there’s more info here from the Tenth Amendment Center, refuting claims from pro-NDAA members of Congress.
• States Fighting Back: Tennessee (again!) is fighting back with legislation to help protect their residents from NDAA. North Carolina and Oklahoma are also fighting back against NDAA.
• Repeal: Ron Paul has a bill that would repeal NDAA, which would allow Congress to rewrite the funding portion of the bill without the unconstitutional portions.
• Enemy Expatriation Act: Read about it here.
• Fast and Furious: This larger-than-life scandal appears to run deep through three departments.

House of Representatives

Weekly Wrap Up – provided by the RSC

• Domestic Energy Production — Last week, the House approved H.R. 3408, Protecting Investment in Oil Shale the Next Generation of Environmental, Energy, and Resource Security (PIONEERS) Act, by a vote of 237-187. As you may have seen, the transportation bill was broken into several sections earlier in the week. The PIONEERS Act was the energy portion of the bill. The highway portion will likely be on the floor the week after recess. The following provisions in this legislation might be of interest to you:

           Keystone XL Pipeline - The legislation directs the Federal Energy Regulatory
           Commission (FERC) to, within 30 days, issue a permit for the construction for
           the Keystone XL Pipeline Project. If FERC does not issue this permit within 30
           days then the permit is deemed to have been issued.
           Oil Shale Leasing – It directs the Secretary of the Interior to conduct at least
           15 commercial lease sales for oil shale development. According to Section
           17003, each sale must consist of 25,000 acres. The legislation also codifies the
           2008 regulations by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the November
           17, 2008 BLM Resource Management Plan Amendments. These both pertain to
           oil shale leasing on federal lands.
           Offshore Oil and Gas Leasing – It also directs the Secretary to conduct
           several oil and gas lease sales off the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the Gulf
           of Mexico, offshore Virginia, and offshore southern California. However, oil
           and gas exploration off the coast of California must be done with existing
           offshore infrastructure or from onshore-based drilling. The legislation also
           opens for development approximately 1,350 square miles in the Eastern Gulf of
           Mexico. The Eastern Gulf is currently closed to oil and gas development.
           Further, the legislation requires the Secretary to conduct the proposed lease sale
           in the North Aleutian Basin, in the Bering Sea off the Alaskan coast. The
           legislation also establishes guidelines for revenue sharing for coastal states. Of
           revenues received by the United States, 37.5% shall be allocated to coastal
           states that are affected by the lease sale.
           Alaska Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing – The legislation also repeals the
           ban on, and directs the Secretary to implement, an oil and gas leasing program
           for the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The
           Secretary is also directed to conduct oil and gas lease sales for no less than
           50,000 acres in ANWR, within 22 months of enactment. The Secretary is also
           required to lease oil and gas lease sales of an additional 50,000 acres (at a
           minimum), at 6, 12, and 18-month intervals. The Secretary is allowed to
          designate up to 45,000 acres as “special areas” that are off limits for oil and gas
          exploration. This legislation also requires that 50% of the amount of bonus, rent,
          and royalty revenues from oil and gas leases in the Coastal Plain be deposited in
          the Treasury.

• Payroll Tax Cut Deal — Friday, the House approved a Conference Report to H.R. 3630 (see attached), the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act by a vote of 293-192. The deal reached will provide an extension of the current payroll tax rates for the remainder of calendar year 2012. In addition, it provides a fully offset delay in the implementation of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (the so-called “Doc-fix”) and extends federally funded Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits (for the tenth time since 2008) for the remainder of calendar year 2012. Many conservatives argue that extending unemployment benefits creates incentives to delay returning to work, which has a negative effect on the economy. It offsets the cost of extended UI benefits and the Doc-fix with a number of provisions to reduce the deficit, including increasing pension contributions for new federal employees, cutting some funding of Obamacare, and auctioning spectrum frequencies. Some conservatives may be concerned that the new revenues generated from these provisions, rather than being used to pay down the national debt, are instead being used for new spending. In addition, the bill reforms the federal UI benefit structure by lowering the maximum number of weeks of UI eligibility and allowing states to require drug testing and job training. (NOTE: RSC Chairman Jordan voted against the conference report.)

            According to CBO, the Conference Report increases the deficit by $101.1
            billion in fiscal year 2012, and $89.3 billion over the 2012-2022 period. The bill
            reduces revenues by $77.6 billion over the 2012-2022 period and increases
            spending by $11.7 billion over the same period, according to CBO’s and
            JCT’s estimates. H.R. 3630 was approved in the House on December 13, 2011
            by a vote of 234–193. Currently these programs are operating under a
            two-month extension (H.R. 3765) set to expire on February 29, 2012.

The Week Ahead

The House will not be in session this coming week.

Senate:  No update has been sent as of this weekend. The Senate will not be in session this coming week.

• Read Mercatus Center’s "Blueprint for Regulatory Reform" and their analysis of the jobs situation. And here are a couple of their charts on employment/unemployment.

Wall Street Journal: A Fairness Quiz for the President

Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama's largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees?.

By STEPHEN MOORE

President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria?

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country's income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?

Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?

Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

Is it fair that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel and other leading Democrats who preach tax fairness underpaid their own taxes?

Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?

Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?

Is it fair that the three counties with America's highest median family income just happen to be located in the Washington, D.C., metro area?

CONTINUED:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204369404577206980068367936.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#printMode

What Happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund?

Here’s how President Barack Obama answered CBS’s Scott Pelley’s question about whether he could guarantee that Social Security checks would go out on August 3, the day after the government is supposed to reach its debt limit: “I cannot guarantee that those checks [he included veterans and the disabled, in addition to Social Security] go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”


And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed the president on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday implying that if a budget deal isn’t reached by August 2, seniors might not get their Social Security checks.

Click here for the full article:  http://blogs.forbes.com/merrillmatthews/2011/07/13/what-happened-to-the-2-6-trillion-social-security-trust-fund/

Dopey Deadlines & Deadbeat Democrats

By Alan Caruba, Tea Party Nation


Is Tim Geithner the most clueless Secretary of the Treasury this nation has ever had? Is he the Eddie Haskell of national debt, so eager to please Obama that he has been a party to driving it up by trillions since his master took the oath of office?

Now, we are all forced to witness the idiotic political machinations of the White House trying desperately to put off the greatest financial debacle to face the nation in its entire history. It’s so bad that Moody’s Investor service has the U.S. “under review” to take away our unparalleled triple-A rating.

What makes his August 2nd deadline to raise the debt ceiling particularly obscene is that it is the anniversary of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence.

For you history buffs, August 2nd was also the date in 1934 that Adolf Hitler became the Fuhrer of Germany and the same day, five years later in 1939 that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to begin developing an atomic bomb.

It makes you wonder if history isn’t just a record of wars won and lost, along with an unbroken series of mistakes that would make any sane person scratch their head in bewilderment.

How did the United States of America go from Thomas Jefferson, the brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence to Timothy Geithner, a very upwardly mobile student of government and monetary affairs?


Suffice to say, as a public servant, he has served to the satisfaction of his mentors in numerous positions and also in liberal enclaves such as the Council on Foreign Affairs and a three-year stint at Kissinger Associates, learning from one of the most Machiavellian characters of the modern era. At the tender age of 42, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The liberal elite take care of its own.

Geithner is the ying to Obama’s yang. They are perfectly suited to each other because both get their jollies playing the great game of state, although it should be said that Geithner is far better prepared for that role having studied abroad, including two years, 1981-2 studying Mandarin at Peking University and Beijing Normal University. His M.A. is in international economics and Asian studies from John Hopkins University School of advanced International Studies.

Obama’s education ended with a law degree from Harvard. Nobody knows what grades he made at Occidental, Columbia University or Harvard. He is often mistakenly referred to as a former professor of constitutional law at Chicago University, but in fact he was akin to a teaching assistant or adjunct, the lowest end of the academic ladder.

Obama’s mentors included a known member of the Communist Party when he was growing up in Hawaii, various “Marxist professors” at Occidental and Columbia University, and Bill Ayers who gained fame as a domestic terrorist, a member of the Weather Underground who describes himself as a “Communist with a small c.” To bring matters full circle, Ayers is a retired University of Chicago professor.


All this is by way of background to suggest that the debt ceiling will be increased because there is no alternative.

The Washington Posts’ Jennifer Rubin, a White House reporter, posted this on their blog on July 13th.

“Today’s White House meeting suggests there is no deal remotely in sight on the debt ceiling. A GOP aide familiar with the talks told me, “Today was the most tense meeting of the week. In fact, the president ended the meeting by abruptly leaving the room. During the meeting, the speaker challenged the president to offer real spending cuts. He said the gimmicks and accounting tricks that Washington has used for decades are not applicable here.” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has had enough. “When White House officials attempted to justify budgetary gimmicks, the speaker said pointedly ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’”

At some point you wonder what is the point of keeping the talks from public scrutiny. The pathetically passive media is not demanding particulars from the White House. So, Obama sits back, refusing to present any significant cuts. He’s serious about three things: making the Republicans out to be the bad guys, doing nothing to upset his base and insisting on tax hikes. If this is where he really stands, it’s time, perhaps, to pull the plug or pull back the curtain on the charade.”

The only thing on Obama’s mind is how to position himself as the hero that saved America from the tripling of a huge debt that is mostly his making and to make the Republicans look like horrible people for insisting that the government stop spending money faster than Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve can print it.


As Karl Rove recent wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “The president has not only governed as a liberal—he’s governed as an incompetent liberal, thereby reminding voters that electing a Republican Congress and president next year is the only way to change direction.” A recent Gallup poll has Obama losing to any generic Republican candidate!

Little of this before, on, or after August 2, 2011 has anything to do with a responsible response by the Democrats in Congress or the White House to a huge debt that just keeps getting bigger with every passing day.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, once said, “It's not tyranny we desire; it's a just, limited, federal government.” Americans, since the beginning of the 20th century have been suffering the tyranny of socialism and a bloated government with seemingly no limits on its growth or its spending.


© Alan Caruba, 2011

http://www.teapartynation.com/profiles/blogs/dopey-deadlines-amp-deadbeat

Forbes.com

How Obama Thinks


Dinesh D'Souza, 09.09.10, 05:40 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated September 27, 2010

The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.
 
Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.


The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?


The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.


One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.


A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.


Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.


I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.


Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."


Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.


For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.


If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.


Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"


The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.


But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).

Forbes.com

How Obama Thinks

The President isn't exactly a socialist. So what's driving his hostility to private enterprise? Look to his roots.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government's control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.


The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?


The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.

The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.

Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.


One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

Theories abound to explain the President's goals and actions. Critics in the business community--including some Obama voters who now have buyer's remorse--tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist--not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.

These theories aren't wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama's domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse--much worse. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.


A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?

It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.


Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.

What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.

So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.

An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.


I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.

Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."

Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.


Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"

As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.


While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."

From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.


For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.


If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.


Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."

But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"


The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."

In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.


But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

Dinesh D'Souza, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).

The Hill

Regulators to hash out major new finance regulations this month

Financial regulators are set this month for a series of crucial meetings and decisions as they hash out major new U.S. and international rules that might govern the financial world for years to come.


And as they convene in Washington and Basel, Switzerland, regulators from around the world are coming under heavy lobbying pressure by the financial industry not to overreach while the global economy remains weak.


In the United States, regulators are starting to lay out how they will oversee "systemic risk" and firms deemed "too big to fail." The Obama administration is also facing pressure from Democrats and consumer advocates to quickly nominate the first head of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created as part of the Wall Street reform bill.


In Basel, international regulators aim to strike a deal on new capital standards — known as Basel III — that will impact the world's largest banks and financial firms.

"Everything else flows from here," said Scott Talbott, senior vice president at the Financial Services Roundtable. "Once you have a CFPB head, you can start defining rules. Once you have Basel III, we'll know capital levels. And once you have the systemic risk council, the regulations can flow. These are major milestones."

The Basel discussions might receive the most attention as financial officials look to forge standards before the heads of the G-20 nations meet in November in Seoul. Discussions are set for Tuesday, with U.S. officials urging higher capital and liquidity standards and requirements for banks to hold more capital.

"Stronger capital standards are absolutely essential as one of the key components going forward to assure the safety of the system," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified to a commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis.

But overcoming international differences is a formidable obstacle, with various governments looking to shape the rules so they do not disproportionately hurt their domestic financial markets.

Meanwhile, a U.S. council of financial regulators charged with overseeing "systemic risk" is set to meet for the first time in September. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who serves as chairman of the council, said in August he planned to use the first meeting to lay out a roadmap for implementing new regulations.

The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other regulators have already begun to hold meetings, propose new rules and, in some cases, adopt new regulations. But the council meeting will mark the first time regulators meet in full as a public body.

Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president at the American Bankers Association, said the council meeting will be an important juncture to understand how regulators attempt to collaborate as they implement new rules.

"The council was not given the responsibility to coordinate the implementation of Dodd-Frank," he said, using the shorthand for the financial reform bill. "I think there has been an effort by Geithner to step into that role."

The council also holds the power to determine whether large non-bank financial companies should face more stringent oversight from the Federal Reserve. The council will base its determinations on 11 factors, including a firm's leverage, interconnectedness and the value of its assets.

The financial industry is closely watching those deliberations. Companies including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Ford Motor Credit have already begun meeting with the Federal Reserve and other regulators as they look to enact new rules on derivatives and other financial products.

The administration will also face renewed calls in September from Democratic allies to nominate a consumer agency head before the party suffers expected losses in the midterm elections.

Many congressional Democrats, labor unions and consumer advocates have been pushing hard for Obama to nominate Elizabeth Warren.

But Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has publicly questioned if Warren, a Harvard professor and champion of the agency, could win the 60 votes necessary to overcome procedural hurdles.

The White House has said repeatedly she is among the candidates under consideration but the president has not yet made a decision.

The Senate would have about a month to consider a potential nomination before recessing for the elections. If the Senate does not act before the recess, the stakes might quickly increase after Election Day.

Winners in special Senate elections in Delaware, Illinois and West Virginia will be seated immediately after Election Day, rather than in January.

Republican Rep. Mike Castle is considered the frontrunner for the Delaware seat and the Illinois race is a tossup, meaning Democrats might hold two fewer votes for a confirmation battle in a lame-duck session of Congress.


http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/corporate-governance/117331-regulators-to-hash-out-major-new-finance-rules-this-month