Obama: America’s first Asian President

Obamadonna and child

Barack Obama is Asian.

Whoa!!!! you say. WTF!?!? Who you zoomin? You know Obama’s Black.

OK. If he looks “black” he is black. Yeah, he can shoot a lay-up from the top of the key. And he’s got that thug thing goin’ on. It’s got to be the “ghetto” in him rising to the surface like sweet cream.

Barack's earliest ghetto memory

However modern science instructs us in the inevitability of the below equation:

Mom

dad

Barack Jr

Taking this equation into account, it is clear that Obama Jr. is not white. Nor is he “Black” per se. Although he is blacker than he is whiter. So even if one were to attribute ALL of his egotism, deceitfulness and other nasty attitudes (and they are legion) to his black genetic portion, mathematically, he should still be only 50% unbearable.

But Obama is still black you whine, enough to be our African-American hero. You’re right. Here are a few photos of a black family just like Barack’s. I won’t make you sit through all million of them like he did. Asshole.

Lena Horne

Lena at home!

Yikes! It's Jeanne Kirkpatrick!

Dorothy Dandridge

Dorothy Dandridge

Modern science also suggests nurture plays a strong role in the development of character and personality.

Parenting, environment, family and peer relationships are important in the development of a child. Even Satan didn’t start out bad.

Obama's happy family

Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after it became a state. The population in Hawaii was 75% Asian of various types and 25% white. African-Americans were as rare as hen’s teeth. When he was six years old he was swept off toIndonesia to live with his new Indonesian step-father. He attended Christian ummm or err maybe uh Muslim or, maybe, home school. Obama was a chubby kid and probably would have fit in better at P.S. 42, the Bronx, but he had to learn to make friends and get along. Ann took a lot of pictures with the Indonesians. That’s probably why Obama became so comfortable with them.

Barack at home with Lolo, mom and baby sister

Mom in the village

And he’s calm. Like a Buddhist. Or maybe Beelzebub.

See how calm he is!

He didn’t learn to be calm like that in a madras or even in Chicago.

Finally, he got back to the mainland where he could meet up with some homies.

B.O. with his ghetto homies

He ran with a rough crowd, although it wasn’t really in his nature.

Obama with the other homies

Look at those pects!!!

Glossy, big pects!

How glossy and puffy. I’ve never seen pects like those on a black man, or even a white man. He must be an Asian!

The “Red” Dunhams of Washington State 1956

1956.  The year that the Dunham family, Stanley, Madelyn and Stanley Ann moved to Mercer Island, Washington State.

The official biographical sketch of the maternal family of Barack Obama has them uprooting from Texas or Oklahoma, moving to Washington, where Stanley could get a better salesman’s position in a better furniture store (yup), and StanleyAnn could enroll in a leftist high school.  The family moved because, we are told, the Dunhams were “red”, perhaps crypto-communists. It’s been said Stanley Ann was just an atheist, but in 1956 Godless atheism was as suspect as communism. Maybe more suspect.  Stanley Ann was 13 years old, already described by an unnamed source as a “fellow traveler”.  We’ve been told that Stanley Ann attended classes with highly influential, radical teachers where Marxism was discussed. The family attended the local Universalist Unitarian Church, aka “the little red church on the hill”.  Why this church was called “red” or why the Dunhams (strict Methodists) attended it, I don’t know.  However,  while the family remained in Washington for five years,  it is solely these anecdotal reports which link the Dunhams to any leftist organization, any leftist political group, labor union or feminist organization, let alone a communist group, not just then, but ever.  It seems utterly unbelievable to me that middle class parents would take on the expense of a cross country move just to enroll their 13 year old in a class for radicals and socialists.  How would the Dunhams have found out about this new school as far away as Washington State?  And if Stanley Ann were were truly a “red diaper” baby she wouldn’t have needed outside instruction.

careers at risk in red scare

Remember, this was 1956, and being a communist was illegal.  Being thought a “fellow traveler” was dangerous to health and freedom.  The red scare was in full swing, and mere suspicion of being communist affiliated could bring a visit from the FBI. A communist had to register with the federal government and risk being detained and interrogated regarding their associations.  The war and post war years saw a gradual tightening of laws designed to smoke out and hobble leftist activity.

First, there was the Smith Act, enacted in 1940.  From Wikipedia:

The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act (18 U.S.C. § 2385) of 1940 is a United States federal statute that makes it a criminal offense for anyone to

“

knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.

”

It also required all non-citizen adult residents to register with the government; within four months, 4,741,971 aliens had registered under the Act’s provisions.

The Act is best known for its use against political organizations and figures, mostly on the left. Prosecutions continued until a series of United States Supreme Court decisions in 1957 threw out numerous convictions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional. The statute remains on the books, however.

The Act was proposed by Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia, a Democrat and a leader of the “anti-labor” bloc of Congressmen. It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Washington State in the 1930’s and 1940’s was a hotbed of radical unionist activity.  But the FBI smashed most of the radical unions.  By 1950 the Communist press had been mostly shut down.  A show trial of leftist university professors in 1948, known as “the Seattle Ten”, ended with one leader committing suicide, while another turned FBI informant, implicating everyone she had ever had contact with, communist or not.  The rest of the “ten” were imprisoned and then blacklisted, some ending their careers as laborers.  So a person didn’t go about calling herself a communist or an atheist without thinking about consequences.

Calls that Canwell hearing was unconstitutional

There were loyalty boards and obligatory loyalty oaths. The FBI had expanded powers, opening more than 400,000 files on potential subversives.  Simple membership or advocacy of a banned organization could lead to imprisonment.  Life for “leftists” became marginally better after 1957 but it’s hard to fathom how Madelyn Dunham would have been allowed to become a high level bank official with rumors swirling around her of “communist” affiliation.  It’s hard to believe the official scenario as presented by the Obama resume enhancers.

For this and other reasons I will discuss later, I have trouble believing the Dunhams were “red”.

I have an alternate theory to explain the facts as they are so often presented.  I’m more than willing to be disproved but some of the “facts” just don’t make sense.

Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mama, was apparently born in a military hospital in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas in November 1942.  Her father, Stanley, was in the military, and there for the birth, though regularly assigned, it is said, to General Patton’s tank corp.  No military records can be found to establish the arena of Stanley’s war service.  Some reports say his military records were destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center.  That seems highly unlikely and, I suppose, that’s an attempt to wrap Stanley Dunham in the flag, for the sake of Obama’s image.  The problem is there has to be record of his service existing somewhere besides the World Trade Center. Madelyn Dunham refused all interviews, so she was not helpful in fleshing out any details. But perhaps one clue is that Ft. Leavenworth is also the headquarters of naval intelligence and the training center for SESKOAD, military center of the Indonesian officer corp in the 1950’s.  If you’ve read my previous posts I link Ann Dunham Soetoro to the Indonesian military officer corp (by marriage to Colonel Lolo Soetoro) and employment at the U.S. Embassy at the time of the great Indonesian communist massacres of 1965-1968.  Both the U.S. Embassy and the Indonesian officer corp was fully involved in the massacre. Read the full report here, Building an Elite for Indonesia.  Excerpts from this astounding article (please read it):

Education had long been an arm of statecraft, and it was Dean Rusk who spelled out its function in the Pacific in 1952, just months before resigning as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs to head up the Rockefeller Foundation. “Communist aggression” in Asia required not only that Americans be trained to combat it there, but “we must open our training facilities for increasing numbers of our friends from across the Pacific.”

and

Fortunately for Ford and its academic image there was yet another school at hand: SESKOAD, the Army Staff and Command School. Situated seventy miles southeast of Djakarta in cosmopolitan Bandung, SESKOAD was the Army’s nerve center. There, generals decided organizational and political matters; there, senior officers on regular rotation were “upgraded” with manuals and methods picked up during training in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas(emphasis mine).

So, back to Mercer Island.  Washington State is also a home of U.S. Naval Intelligence.  From Wikipedia:

Cryptanalytic problems facing the United States in the Pacific prior to World War II were largely those related to Japan. An early decision by OP-20-G in Washington divided responsibilities for them among CAST at Cavite and then Corregidor, in the Philippines, HYPO in Hawaii, and OP-20-G itself in Washington. Other Navy crypto stations, including Guam, Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island were tasked and staffed for signals interception and traffic analysis.

I noted in an above article that U.S. Naval Intelligence was sometimes associated with covert F.B.I. or C.I.A.  operations.  And sometimes normal seeming families were recruited by the F.B.I. to aid in  anti-communist intelligence gathering.

Next, the family lived in Berkeley for two years.  Berkeley, along with MIT, Cornell and Harvard, became the academic platforms funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations for the eventual ideological makeover for a military government in Indonesia. Madelyn Dunham attended Berkeley, taking no degree.   Here’s what Building an Elite for Indonesia says about the importance of Berkeley in the creation of an elite for Indonesia:

witnessed fall of Sukarno

MIT and Cornell made contacts, collected data, built up expertise. It was left to Berkeley to actually train most of the key Indonesians who would seize government power and put their pro-American lessons into practice. Dean Sumitro’s Faculty of Economics provided a perfect academic boot camp for these economic shock troops.

and

This time the professional touch and academic respectability were to be provided by Berkeley. The Berkeley team’s first task was to replace the Dutch professors, whose colonial influence and capitalist economics Sukarno was trying to phase out. The Berkeley team would also relieve Sumitro’s Indonesian junior faculty so that Ford could send them back to Berkeley for advanced credentials. …

While the Indonesian junior faculty studied American economics in Berkeley classrooms, the Berkeley professors turned the Faculty in Djakarta into an American-style school of economics, statistics, and business administration.

After a two year stint in Berkeley the Dunhams moved to Hawaii, where Stanley could build a better career selling furniture.  Madelyn got a job in a bank, where, without formal training, she eventually became Vice President at the Bank of Hawaii.  I guess Stanley kept selling furniture until he died.

Honolulu is headquarters of Naval Intelligence in the Pacific and headquarters of the Pacific Area Command, U.S.P.A.C.O.M.  I noted in an earlier post that Admiral Dennis Blair, President Obama’s appointee as Director of National Intelligence,  was the supreme commander of PACOM.  He and Obama’s mama have something in common:  they both attended the East-West center and studied Russian there, as the former USSR was the most important arena for intelligence gathering during the Cold War.  President Eisenhower funded the East-West center with contributions from the Ford Foundation after the annexation of Hawaii in 1959 for Cold War studies.  Senator and later president Johnson, advocated for it.  The Ford Foundation established a fellowship program for it.

Once established in Hawaii, Ann Dunham enrolled at the East-West Center.

To be continued…..

Who Are America’s Oligarchs?

Why is this man smiling?

Like his mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, the media has sold Barack Obama as a “Leftist”.  I don’t believe this story about mother or son. What better camouflage for a corporatist/opportunist/operative than soft focus “Leftist”?  While investigating the theory that Obama’s mama, Ann Dunham Soetoro, was a possible CIA covert operative stationed in Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan, I have been taken in many directions. Most investigative paths led back to Southeast Asia. After a coup  and the corporate “opening” of one of the most resource rich countries in the world, Indonesia became one of the poorest-per capita-nations in Asia, with low educational levels and enormous divisions between rich and poor .

Summarizing some of my earlier posts,

Poor area of Jakarta

I followed the connections between Peter Geithner (long time head of the Ford Foundation’s Asia Division) and Ann Soetero. The Ford Foundation in Asia is widely held to be connected to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.  Ann Dunham Soetoro worked extensively with the Ford Foundation as well as the U.S.A.I.D. and the World Bank, both considered sometime partners in covert operations. Barack Obama’s step-father, Lolo Soetoro was a high ranking military officer in Suharto’s Army and a government liaison between the Indonesian military government and the international oil industry.

Peter Geithner’s son Tim, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, was raised primarily in China and Southeast Asia. As Clinton undersecretary for Asian Affairs and high ranking officer in the International Monetary Fund, it was Geithner’s monetary medicine that led to a worsening of the Asian financial catastrophe — which wrecked the economies primarily of Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea.  Many experts believe Geithner’s monetary policy led to the crash of the Southeast Asian economies. Other factors in the collapse were overvalued real-estate assets and outside currency manipulations. Foreign capital had been pouring into the Southeast Asian economies, due to high interest rates relative to the dollar. When American interest rates began to rise, capital flowed toward American investments, out of Asia. Thailand was forced to “float” its currency against the dollar. This resulted in the crash of the value of the Asian currencies and a deep retrenchment of real estate values.  The financial collapse called for a massive infusion of IMF funds.

Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

The foreign ministers of the 10 ASEAN countries believed that the well co-ordinated manipulation of their currencies was a deliberate attempt to destabilize the ASEAN economies. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused George Soros of ruining Malaysia’s economy with “massive currency speculation.”

The economic crisis also led to a political upheaval, most notably culminating in the resignations of President Suharto in Indonesia and Prime Minister General Chavalit Yongchaiyudh in Thailand. There was a general rise in anti-Western sentiment, with George Soros and the IMF in particular singled out as targets of criticisms.

George Soros

Soros is also reviled in some quarters for his speculative manipulation shorting of the British Pound Sterling.  The British government fought back with massive central bank intervention but was unable to defend its currency which lost 20% of its value.  With this attack, Soros made (I won’t say earned) more than 1.1 billion dollars in a single day.

Soros doesn’t just anticipate currency devaluations, his hedge fund movements and his dire warnings often cause the events.

From Wikipedia:

When investment regulations restricted his ability to run the funds as he wished, he quit his position in 1973 and established a private investment company that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund.

Soros is also a former member of the Carlyle Group.  Recall that the Carlyle Group’s members include former defense department and CIA heads as well as members of the Saudi royal family.

According to Wikipedia this is the focus of the Carlyle Group’s financial interests:

Carlyle invests primarily in the following industries: aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer and retail, energy and power, health care, real estate, technology and business services, telecommunications and media, and transportation. The Carlyle Group’s investments are focused on East Asia, Europe and North America, with most investment money coming from the United States (65%), Europe (25%), Asia (6%), Latin America, and the Middle East. Defense investments represent about 1% of the group’s current portfolio; for example, Carlyle owns 33.8% of QinetiQ, the recently privatized British defense contractor.

Hmmm…CFR’s interests, healthcare, automotive, electric power,real estate, all Obama’s primary interests in the Economic stimulus package. And…
Interesting that Britain is also privatizing ITS military.

According to Wikipedia:

In late 2006, Soros bought about 2 million shares of Halliburton.

With this information on the table, tell me, do you think Obama is going to end the war? Or will he continue to fill the coffers of Halliburton?

From Chinadaily BBS

Soros likes to portray himself as an outsider, an independent-minded Hungarian emigre and philosopher-pundit who stands detached from the US military-industrial complex. But take a look at the board members of the NGOs he organises and finances. At Human Rights Watch, for example, there is Morton Abramowitz, US assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research from 1985-89, and now a fellow at the interventionist Council on Foreign Relations; ex-ambassador Warren Zimmerman (whose spell in Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of that country); and Paul Goble, director of communications at the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which Soros also funds). Soros’s International Crisis Group boasts such “independent” luminaries as the former national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Allen, as well as General Wesley Clark, once Nato supreme allied commander for Europe. The group’s vice-chairman is the former congressman Stephen Solarz, once described as “the Israel lobby’s chief legislative tactician on Capitol Hill” and a signatory, along with the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to a notorious letter to President Clinton in 1998 calling for a “comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime”.

George Soros was Barack Obama’s primary, early deep-pocket supporter through MoveOn.Org.  Is Soros a conventional “Leftist” or an opportunist who exploits the gaps caused by social transition and political instability?  My guess is that he’s the same type of “Leftist” as Obama.

Soros has also speculated that an international reserve currency will replace the dollar

China recently proposed greater use of Special Drawing Rights, possibly as an eventual global reserve currency. “In the long run, having an international accounting unit rather than the dollar may, in fact, be to our advantage …

Where is the “advantage” for the average American citizen?

So, Soros backed Obama. Then, Obama has chosen Tim Geithner (architect of the IMF collapse of the Indonesian and Thai economies) to rescue America from the financial collapse created by unregulated banks and hedge funds. Seems to me like a cluster fuck of the American taxpayer.

Soros and Geithner have something else in common. Both are members of the Council of Foreign Relations, which some believe to be the most influential private foreign policy group in the world.  CFR publishes Foreign Affairs.  It’s policy think tank is the Rockefeller Institute (closely allied with the Ford foundation). According to Wikipedia:

Journalist Joseph Kraft, a former member of both the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, said the Council “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook, shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes.”

Corporate members of the board of CFR

BC News Alcoa American Express AIG Bank of America Bloomberg L.P. Boeing BP CA, Inc. Chevron Citigroup Coca-Cola De Beers Deutsche Bank Duke Energy ExxonMobil FedEx Ford Motor General Electric GlaxoSmithKline Google

Halliburton Heinz Hess IBM JPMorgan Chase Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Lockheed Martin MasterCard McGraw-Hill McKinsey Merck Merrill Lynch Morgan Stanley Motorola NASDAQ News Corp Nike PepsiCo Pfizer

Shell Oil Sony Corporation of America Tata Group Time Warner Total S.A. Toyota Motor North America UBS United Technologies United States Chamber of Commerce U.S. Trust Corporation Verizon Visa[

One long term and influential member of the CFR is Henry Kissinger.  Timothy Geithner was an associate of Kissinger and Associates from 1986-1989.  Since Kissinger’s clients and activities are totally secret, we don’t know what Geithner actually did while with Kissinger and Associates.

the Times then-national security correspondent, Leslie Gelb, reported that the Midland Bank of Britain was also one of the special influence-purchasing clients of Kissinger Associates that paid Treasury Secretary-Designate Geithner and his colleagues “slightly more than $150,000 yearly for varying services.”

The new order is globalization: the sweeping away of national institutions and borders and transitioning to free trade, mobile international labor markets, mobility of capital movement, worldwide corporate structures.  Looking at your family and neighbors — how many are affected by NAFTA, immigration, job loss, outsourcing, …?

Is the U.S. just another country to be destabilized in the global leveling process?
In this article the author takes up globalization fostered by interests in both the political Left and the political Right.

In his book, Promoting Polyarchy, William Robinson describes the formation of a new hegemonic bloc that has emerged to lead the process of globalization. This bloc consists of various economic and political forces that have become the dominant sector of the ruling class throughout the developed world. The politics and policies of this ruling bloc are conditioned by the new global structure of accumulation and production. This historic bloc is composed of the transnational corporations and financial institutions, supranational economic planning agencies, major forces in the dominant political parties, media conglomerates, and technocratic elites in the Third World.

The new integrated circuits of world production and finance are possible because information technologies allow the centralization of decision making along with a geographic decentralization of production. The results are world mobility for investments, markets,and production, which leads globalists to harmonize a wide range of fiscal, monetary and industrial policies across national borders. Therefore, it is the logic of global accumulation, rather than national accumulation, that guides the political and economic behavior of the ruling bloc.   (Emphasis mine)

In the U.S., the globalist ruling bloc has three main factions: neo-liberal structuralists; free-market conservatives, and liberal regulationists. Their debates dominate Washington and don’t correspond to the familiar political categories of the industrial era. The same is true of the anti-globalist camp, which contains both the anti-imperialist left and the reactionary populous right.

The globalists consolidated ideologically in the early 1980s under the policy of the Washington Consensus. Developed to deal with the debt crisis in Latin America and Mexico, its main principles were privatization, free trade, high interest rates, and a sharply diminished role for the state in economic activity and social services. This became the policy mantra of the Reagan revolution, and a siren call for the new Democrats. However, the recent Asian crisis has exposed important contradictions and major splits in the globalists camp. Foremost is the question of how best to structure the new world economy, with the debate centered on IMF policies.

Obama’s mama had a cover:  a leftist do-gooder.  Obama’s acorn didn’t fall far from it’s tree. Left and Right have one goal – weilding power for the accumulation of riches.  Left and Right are embodied in one person, and that person is Barack Obama.

Obama Signals Turkey

America’s new boy king, Barack Obama, has brought his charm offensive to Turkey.  Wasn’t it just a few days ago that  he was posing for cameras at the G20 and offering half-baked ideas about rogue capitalism and stimulus packages, European cooperation and more NATO  troops for Afghanistan?   Later, to a swooning crowd, he offered a John Lennonish imagining about a nuclear free world.  Only not yet, he hastened to add.  That’s a lot on a plate for a boy king.

Before his detractors could scratch their groins and mumble WTF???? And even before his devoted followers could murmur “where in the world is Carmen San Diego? the boy king popped up on the red carpet in Ankara.  With great fanfare, and many more photo-ops he rejoiced that, unlike his first magical mystery tour  to Pakistan in 1981, he could  he could enter an Islamic country with an American passport.

Turkey and its neighbors

It’s easy to see why, like Bush before him, Obama is currying favor with the Turks.  The military and the oil men want him to.  Israel wants him to.  And why shouldn’t he smooth over the rift Bush opened with his disingenuous and poorly managed attack on Iraq?  There is still much to be gained in a Turkish deal:  NATO airbases for an attack on Iraq or Afghanistan or western Pakistan, the re-supply of our permanent troop support to protect the pipeline, and water, the watershed of the Tigris and Euphrates as it flows downstream from Turkey and through Iraq and Syria.  Perhaps a new water deal with thirsty Israel will be possible.

Turkey can be an interlocutor among Egypt, Hamas, Syria, Israel, Palestine.  Then, there’s pesky Iran.  Operation pincher.  Iran between the nutcrackers of Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan.  How long will it be before someone insists there, too, are weapons of mass destruction.

What does King Obama offer Turkey in exchange for her delights?  Entry into the European Union.  Obama has offered Turkey, in his churlishly arrogant way, Europe’s hand in marriage; whether the Europeans like it or not.  Europe has strongly intimated that it does not want a shotgun marriage.  Turkey is not Western enough and certainly not Christian.  Being tacitly secular, for a former Islamic state, is not enough.  Europe is full to the gills with undigested Muslims.  Why doesn’t Obama offer the Turks American citizenship?

One other pesky problem:  the Armenian genocide, which the Turks deny and the Armenians and the rest of the world avow.  During the campaign for the presidency, Obama’s website stated the the Armenian genocide was an “admitted fact”.  A House resolution is slated, yet again, to deal with the question of the massacres that cost 1.5 million Armenian lives during WWI. But it is currently being reported that “no one can predict” what the little king’s expedient stance will be now that he as been elected.

We all know how pretty little Obama can change his mind on matters that he used to be certain about.  He can keep mighty quiet about things like genocide-recall Indonesia 1965-1968 and East Timor 1975-1999.

It’s All About Oil. Part II … Venezuela

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Venezuela.  This is an interesting tale of a Latin American coup that failed. It was a garden variety coup like the failed Indonesian coup of 1958;  certainly not as horrifying as the 1965-1999 massacres and land grabs in Indonesia and East Timor, but definitely instructive in its political architecture.

Moreover, the cast of characters and their methods never really change. Breathtakingly, American political operatives are able to set policies, carry them out and then step back into the comfort and riches of defense contracts and think tanks.

The more things change…

Will Obama, President Fauxgressive, be any different?  So far, I’m thinking: NAAH!

Perhaps the most important thing to know about Venezuela is that it is an oil exporting country, the fifth largest in the world, with the largest reserves of conventional oil (light and heavy crude) in the western hemisphere and the largest reserves of non-conventional oil (extra-heavy crude) in the world.

Thus begins Gregory Wilpert’s 2003 article concerning the politics of Venezuelan oil and the April 2002 coup that briefly ousted President Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela’s oil boom years encompassed 1912-1943. Standard Oil and Shell Oil were the first companies to drill on Venezuelan soil. Things changed in 1943 with Venezuela’s  Hydrocarbons Act which declared that no foreign oil interest could make more profit on Venezuelan oil than the Venezuelan state. Oil revenues increased.   However, as oil production rose, other parts of the economy suffered and the populous became more dependent upon state services provided by oil revenues rather than income taxes.

In the 1950’s large international surpluses of oil (especially in the Middle East) drove  prices to record lows, causing social instability in a nation economically dependent on one resource. So

In 1960, the world’s main oil exporting countries, largely due to the prodding of the Venezuelan government, decided to form the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Also in 1960, Venezuela created the Venezuelan Oil Corporation, which later formed the basis for the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry.

Political stability in a petro state necessitated a “pacted democracy” which guaranteed proportional access to state produced wealth by oligarchs of both parties regardless of which was in power.

Sound familiar?

The 1973 embargo of Middle East oil had a huge impact on Venezuela, quadrupling its oil revenues. By 1976 the country moved to fully nationalize its oil industry with the creation of Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). PDVSA outsourced many of its general operations, including accounting and information technology.

The government promised to “sow the oil”, raising all boats in a nation coasting on oil. The article cited above also points out:

Critics of the nationalization process, such as Carlos Mendoza, say that the newly nationalized oil industry was nothing more than a Trojan Horse. Venezuela’s oil industry maintained an anti-statist and transnational corporatist management culture throughout its existence. The ties to the former owners of the nationalized Venezuelan companies were maintained primarily through technical assistance contracts with the former owners and through commercialization contracts, which heavily discounted the price of oil to their former owners.

By the 1990’s the world’s over-supply of oil had, once again, plunged Venezuela into the economic doldrums.

Hugo Chavez was elected by popular referendum in 1998. Almost immediately, Chavez pressured members of OPEC and the non-OPEC producers to hold the line on production quotas. When Chavez moved to replace the PDVSA board with other technical resources, PDVSA joined a work stoppage against the government. More from the article cited above –

Perhaps the most important instance of outsourcing, in terms of the management of PDVSA, is the joint venture it engaged in with the U.S.-based company SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) to create INTESA (Informática, Negocios, y Tecnología, S.A.) in 1996. INTESA was to manage all of PDVSA’s data processing needs.

A recent investigation into INTESA, and especially into its majority owner SAIC (60%), revealed some information that ought to be quite disturbing to the government of Hugo Chávez. That is, INTESA, which controlled all of PDVSA’s information, is in turn controlled by SAIC, a Fortune 500 company … that is deeply involved in the U.S. defense industry, particularly as it relates to nuclear technology, defense intelligence, and computing technology. Its managers included two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense (William Perry and Melvin Laird) and two former CIA directors (John Deutch and Robert Gates). Its current Board of Directors includes the former commander of the U.S. Special Forces (Wayne Downing), a former coordinator of the National Security Council (Jasper Welch), and the former director of the National Security Agency (Bobby Ray Inman)           (italics mine).

Recall that Robert Gates served in the Reagan and Bush II administrations. He now serves President Barack Obama’s as Defense Department chief.

The government moved from taxing oil industry profits to charging royalties, making oil extraction more expensive. Chavez also re-directed Venezuelan oil supplies to non-U.S. buyers.

Then in 2002 came the attempted coup.

2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

The Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 was a failed coup d’état on April 11, 2002 that lasted only 47 hours, whereby the head of state President Hugo Chávez was illegally detained, the National Assembly and the Supreme Court dissolved, and the country’s Constitution declared void.

Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras) president Pedro Carmona was installed as interim president. In Caracas, the coup led to a pro-Chávez uprising that the Metropolitan Police attempted to suppress. Key sectors of the military and parts of the anti-Chávez movement refused to back Carmona. The pro-Chávez Presidential Guard eventually retook the Miraflores presidential palace without firing a shot, leading to the collapse of the Carmona government and the re-installation of Chávez as president.

The coup was publicly condemned by Latin American nations (the Rio Group presidents were gathered together in San José, Costa Rica, at the time, and were able to issue a joint communiqué) and international organizations. The United States and Chile quickly acknowledged the de facto pro-US Carmona government, but ended up condemning the coup after it had been defeated.

And more from Gregory Wilpert in his 2003 article:

Matters reached a boiling point in April 2002 with the coup d’etat against Chavez Frias which surprisingly lasted only two days as millions of Venezuelan poor came to his defense. The 48-hour usurper, Carmona, moved almost instantaneously to turn around ChavezFrias’ Bolivarian policies and consolidate what amounts to an “oiligarchy.” Within 48 hours, he dissolved the parliament and the supreme court, dismissed all mayors and governors, stopped the shipment of oil to Cuba, and started a massive wave of repression across the country. But there is more…

According to the British paper The Observer

… one of those giving the nod to the attempted coup was Elliot Abrams, a member of the Reagan team involved in the dirty wars in Central America convicted over actions during the Iran-Contra Affair. He was later pardoned by George Bush, Sr. Another coup advocate was Cuban, Otto Reich, assistant administrator for USAID 1981-1983 and named ambassador to Caracas in 1986.

There it is again, USAID. For those of you who doubted USAID, a benevolent agency of the U.S. government, might be converted to covert uses, enjoy the view.  My previous post noted that Ann Dunham Soetoro was engaged in “microfinance” with USAID in Indonesia in the 1970’s and 1980’s  — during one of the worst human rights atrocities of the century — and perhaps Pakistan in the 1980’s.

Next step:  let’s see what the World Bank, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and East-West Center, University of Hawaii, were up to.

It’s All About Oil.

To quote the French:  The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Change you can believe in.

On January 28, 2009, Obama appointee, retired 4 star Admiral Dennis Blair was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Director of National Intelligence.  The DNI chief reports directly to the president and defense department chief and co-ordinates all other national intelligence agencies. It prepares the National Defense Estimate annual report to congress.  The office of DNI was created by the Bush administration in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Admiral Blair has an impressive resume: Rhodes Scholar, Russian speaker, attended East-West Center at the University of  Hawaii in 1968, former Commander-in -Chief of U.S. Pacific Command:

PACOM area of responsibility

From 2003 to 2007, Blair was president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation that manages federally funded national security research and development centers. He stepped down in the face of concerns that his positions on the boards of major defense contractors presented a conflict of interest.

Excerpt from article by

Author:	Joanna Klonsky, Associate Editor

updated: February 9, 2009

Retired four-star Admiral Dennis C. Blair is President Obama’s director of national intelligence (DNI)–confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 28, 2009. Blair, a thirty-four-year Navy veteran, is the former commander-in-chief of U.S. Pacific Command.

He also served as associate director of central intelligence for military support, coordinating intelligence and military operations under the Clinton administration. He was director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and commanded the Kitty Hawk Strike Group aircraft carrier and the destroyer Cochrane.

Admiral Blair advised congress in 1999 that U.S.-Indonesian  military co-ordination should be resumed. The above article does not mention that Admiral Blair’s 1999 advice came  just one day after the outbreak of an Indonesian Army massacre of civilians in Dili, East Timor.  Blair has contended that he was not aware of the Indonesian army’s  massacre, although evidence has been produced indicating that he did.  The army killings in Dili increased after the congressional approval of the new pact.  What is clear is that for some time the U.S. military and intelligence agencies have had a cordial relationship with Indonesia’s murderous dictators.

The massacre in Dili was about oil.

The top U.S. officer in the Pacific (unidentified, not Blair) met with Indonesia's president to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to the region and applaud Indonesia’s role in security initiatives.

Blair Senate Appearance.

In a 2007 appearance before the Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation,  retired admiral Dennis Blair urged the U.S. to pursue increased automobile mileage efficiency among the major auto makers in order to relieve stress on the military in the security of oil supplies.

Blair clearly emphasizes, throughout his senate testimony, that a large part of U.S. military commitment in the Pacific theater and Central Asia and the Middle East is the protection and preservation of energy (oil, natural gas) supplies.  In my post of March 1, 2009 I noted that the U.S. interest in Afghanistan and support of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan’s war with the invading Soviet Union  (which began in 1979-1980), included  an interest in extending an oil pipeline connecting the Middle East and Asia.  An effort to build the pipeline with the aid of trained Taliban workers was discontinued due to pressure from American feminist groups over the Taliban’s treatment of women.  Unocal attempted to take over the pipeline project from the U.S. Government but dropped the proposal.

It’s about oil.

Here’s an excerpt from Dennis Blair’s committee presentation:

In the late 1970s two serious threats to Persian Gulf oil were identified by the Carter Administration, which became seized by the issue. The first was a potential Soviet invasion from the north into the oil regions around the Gulf, a concern heightened by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The second was an aggressive and fundamentalist Iran, which was led by a regime that had permitted and then exploited the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran. In response, the department of defense created the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the RDJTF, a planning headquarters and contingency force that could quickly deploy to the Gulf to defeat a major land invasion.  In 1983 as part of its general military build up against the Soviet Union, the Reagan administration upgraded this task force to a regional command like the European Command and the Pacific Command, where I served and where I ultimately commanded. So this Central Command had full time responsibility for U.S. interests in the region.

U.S. interests in the region – does that mean oil?

This article has an interesting timeline of events for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.  I can’t vouch for all the facts but it is tantalizing.

Obama plans to send 17,000 additional troops into Afghanistan to beef up the “war on terror”.  Along with this change comes an offer by his administration to “negotiate” with the “moderate” factions of the Taliban.  Thus Obama can argue that he will have two options for bringing peace to Afghanistan, a carrot and stick approach, if you will:  more troops and more bombing, or a settlement of differences.  In addition to bringing peace, the carrot and stick will also help build a new pipeline.  I doubt that feminist groups  this time will be able to stand in the way of the pipeline — not under a “progressive, feminist friendly” president.

Recall Ann Dunham Soetoro’s resume of helping poor women:  with microloans in Pakistan and Indonesia, cataloging various native crafts during major massacres in Indonesia under the auspices of the Ford Foundation (working for Peter Geithner, the Treasury Secretary’s father), USAID, and the World Bank (all of which are widely believed to have CIA associations).  Ann Dunham Soetero’s connection to these mineral rich regions is Barack Obama’s connection to these mineral rich regions.

Here’s a little bit of history about past DNI chiefs:

George W. Bush’s first DNI chief was John Negroponte, who previously held a position under Condaleeza Rice when she was NSA chief.  Negroponte served under Ronald Reagan as ambassador to El Salvador during Reagan’s dirty wars in Central America in the 1980’s, and was implicated in the training of death squads and the cover-up to congress of their barbarous activities.  A staunch anti-communist, he was appointed ambassador to Mexico during the populist Chiapas uprising, and suspected of using ruthless countermeasures against them. George Bush’s second DNI chief was Mike McConnell, a member of the controversial and influential quasi-governmental body, the Carlyle Group. Recall that the Carlyle Group is a conglomerate of American defense department chiefs, the two Bush presidents, and Saudi oil interests, among others.

Dennis Blair is Obama’s new DNI chief –another man with a strong resume protecting oil.

The more things change … the more it’s still about oil.

The Soetoros and the Indonesian Massacres 1965-1999

No wonder Barack Obama didn’t write a book called Dreams from My Mother.

The president has said that he wished he had written a biography of  his mother, the late Ann Dunham Soetoro, rather than his father, Barack Obama, Sr.  And he might have done it well since he lived with her for lengthy periods. But perhaps that tome would have been called Nightmares from My Mother, or Bad Dreams from My Mother and Stepfather.  The more I read about the Dunham family the more fictionalized and fabricated they seem; Obama’s mother, in particular, since she is so often trotted out posthumously for photo ops.  Her story, as presented by Obama, is simple:  she was a free spirit who transcended type casting, spent her life doing for others and preserving native Indonesian crafts.  Lolo Soetoro was hardly worth mentioning.O.K., but this is the way it really was:

Indonesia 1965-1968. There was an ongoing massacre of PKI party communists and suspected communists in Jakarta and across Java by the Indonesian Army and anti-communist Muslim student jihadists. There is no doubt that the U.S. had strategic and economic interests in the Indonesia controlled by Sukarno, and those interests had a bloody reprise.

Time magazine described it this way: “Communists, Red sympathizers and their families are being massacred by the thousands…Army units executed thousands after interrogation in remote jails. Armed with wide-blade knives called parangs, Moslem bands crept at night into the homes of Communists, killing entire families, burying the bodies in shallow graves. The murder campaign became so brazen in parts of rural East Java that Moslem bands placed the heads of victims on poles and paraded them through villages….Travelers from these areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies, river transportation has at places been seriously impeded.”
Pretty horrific by any standards, even genocidal ones.
Yet, Ann Dunham Soetoro, according to all of the MSM hype and Obama’s whitewash of an autobiography, was teaching English as an American Embassy employee while her husband, Lolo, an Army Colonel under the monster Suharto was busy working as an oil company geologist cum government liaison. The Dark Side of Paradise, by Geoffrey Robinson, makes clear the implication of complicity in the monstrous events by both the Army and the U.S. Embassy.  I can’t link to p. 284 so I’ll quote: “the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta noted in a cable to the department of State…the U.S. government is generally admiring of what the army is doing”. Approval (for the killings) came from the U.S. Embassy.  Excerpt

Approval for the release of the names came from the
top U.S. Embassy officials, including former
Ambassador Marshall Green, deputy chief of mission
Jack Lydman and political section chief Edward
Masters, the three acknowledged in interviews.

Obama’s autobiography says little or nothing about the dread which must have been prevalent among the peasant populous during this period despite the fact that more than a million were imprisoned and used by the big corporations (timber, mining, oil) as slave laborers.  In his autobiography, Obama says virtually nothing about his step-father Colonel Lolo Soetoro, save that he was easygoing, friendly.

According to one fluff article available on the internet Obama returned to Indonesia for Christmas and summer holidays with his mother for many years.  During those years, Obama would have been mature enough to take note of the intense political oppression imposed by Suharto and the dread connected with reprisals directed at any party brave enough to criticize the regime.  The U.S. supported the dictator and Ann Soetoro went from her English teaching job with the embassy to employment with USAID and the (allegedly) CIA connected Ford Foundation in 1965 or this in 1966.

More questions than answers attach to Ann Soetoro during her lengthy stay in Indonesia.  The more one investigates the paucity of information about her activities the more one wonders about the lack of detail.  The blizzard of banal impressions about Ann Soetoro’s personality has buried or replaced the record of her life.  These are some of the nagging questions:

I have not been able to locate Ann Soetoro’s curriculum vitae.  Did she produce any scholarly work other than her long awaited dissertation?

Did Ann Soetoro work in Ghana and Thailand?  If so, during what years and for whom did she work?

What “scholarships” enabled young Obama to attend the prestigious and elite Punau school in Hawaii while his mother was “too poor” to afford it?  Ann Soetoro was also allegedly the recipient of a “scholarship” to continue her M.A. anthropology studies at the Univ. of Hawaii.

Why did she earn an undergraduate degree in math and then switch to anthropology?

Micro-financing of peasant women in East or West Timor seems like a front for something else (CIA?) since the massacres within that province wiped out nearly a third of the population and in many areas the gendercide of males was as high as 80%.  Much of the population of East Timor was relocated to West Timor.  (See my earlier posts on this subject).

To whom was Ann Soetoro teaching English while under U.S. Embassy auspices during the horrifying massacres and imprisonments during 1967-1968 and the decades long slave labor and torture regime?

Why would the Ford Foundation finance anthropological studies into native fabrics and iron working during this time? Or was this Ann Soetoro’s cover for another kind of research in the countryside?

And Obama says nothing about his mother’s residence in Indonesia during the brutal Suharto invasion and occupation of East Timor beginning in 1975.

My developing theory is that the important shaping of Obama’s character is connected to Indonesia, as much as or more than either Hawaii or Chicago.  If his step-father  was a top honcho in the brutal Suharto regime and Lolo had plenty of American military friends from the embassy, how might that have affected the boy?  If his mother’s work was of such great importance that she stayed on in Indonesia while her son returned home, are we to believe cataloging native crafts was this important work?

If Obama returned often to Indonesia to see his mother as he grew older wouldn’t he have been aware of the horrific events in Indonesia during his stays there and mentioned them as critical events in his otherwise superficial life story?

How are we to believe his stories of reacting strongly to racial and color slights when he lived in a land of genocide without being scarred or apparently even particularly moved by that fact?

And ,finally, what should one make of Obama’s appointment of Admiral Dennis Blair as the new Director of National Intelligence while it it is widely alleged that Blair helped win approval for a resumption of military cooperation with Indonesia  in  1999 despite yet another massacre carried out by Indonesian troops at Dili, East Timor?

Ann Dunham Soetoro in East Timor, Indonesia

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post summarizing some of the information collected about Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, her work history and residence in Indonesia.  Following the bread crumbs of an important public personage who accrued a long career in public agencies shouldn’t be difficult, but it is.  Although the mother of the president has had a lot written about her much of it is as inconsequential and not revealing as this, mostly fluff beyond a brief summary of countries and agencies.  I have found little in the way of job titles, bosses names, verifiable projects, specific accomplishments.

One thing does stand out sharply, the absence of the mention by Obama or Soetoro or any of the “friends” that claim to have been intimate with the family, of one of the great massacres of the twentieth century. As far as I know the MSM has also been strangely incurious about the context of Ann Soetoro and Barack Obama’s Indonesian existence, although some must be of an age to remember the events. Reports confirm that at least 500,000 suspected communists were slaughtered by the Indonesian military and religious militias between 1965 and 1968, most between 1965-1966.  Up to 2,000,000 were killed and imprisoned between 1965-1975.  Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, speaks about his personal awakening to “cruelty” during his four year residence in Jakarta, but does not discuss mass murder, murder and political opression that must have been facts of every day life.  Ann Soetoro, an anthropologist, focused specifically on poverty and women’s issues, while working in rural areas, could not have failed to register the murder and disappearance of so many victims during and after Suharto took power.

Ann Soetoro lived many years in Indonesia under the Suharto dictatorship.  Her husband had been an army engineer and later a government liaison to Mobil Oil Co.  As such the family must have been well positioned and well off in the employ of the Suharto government.  Ann returned to Hawaii, allegedly for educational purposes, several times but spent most of her career in Indonesia.  However, between 1960 and 1999 Indonesia remained a subject of controvery due to its egregious human rights violations.  Ann Soetoro and Obama make no mention of these horrors.

In 1975  Indonesia invaded East Timor, a small former colony of Portugal, and oil producing neighbor state.  A pattern of mass murder and male gendercide was quickly established by the invaders.  The slaughter and the logistical support given to it by the Ford administration were denounced by the United Nations.  Hundreds of thousands of East Timor residents were forceably displaced into West Timor.

See the report and documentaton here.  Excerpt:

East Timor Truth Commission report uses declassified U.S. documents to reveal support for Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 until U.N. sponsored vote in 1999

National Security Archive provides more than 1000 documents to East Timor Truth Commission after Bush Administration refuses cooperation

East Timorese youth being tortured and killed by member of the Indonesian military (Released by Mr. Jose Ramos-Horta in 1996)

“I’m assuming you’re really going to keep your mouth shut on this subject?”
– National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to his staff in October 1975 in response to reports that Indonesia had begun its attack on East Timor.

Washington, D.C., November 28, 2005 – Today, East Timorese President Xanana Gusmão transmits to Parliament the final report of East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) on human rights violations committed in East Timor between 1974 and 1999, and the National Security Archive is making available to the public some of the more than 1,000 formerly classified U.S. documents that it provided to assist the work of the CAVR.

A report from the University of Hawaii where Ann received received her PhD. indicate that Ann Soetoro was living in West Timor during this period while she pursued cultural preservation of native weaving and Obama visited her there on his way to Pakistan in 1981.

Curious.

Human Rights Case Against Exxon Mobil Goes Forward

http://i1.democracynow.org/1999/1/6/what_did_mobil_know_the_killing

The groups allege that the oil giant gave logistical support to the Indonesian Army, including lending excavating equipment to dig mass graves. Thus far, twelve mass graves have been dug up. An estimated 2,000 Acehnese torture victims have been buried in the Aceh area since 1990.

A federal judge Wednesday said there is sufficient evidence for a jury to decide whether Exxon should be held liable for the actions of Indonesian soldiers who, while guarding Exxon assets, allegedly beat, shot, tortured and raped villagers eight years ago.

Exxon lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison argue there is no evidence that the soldiers who reportedly injured the plaintiffs were the same guards assigned to protect gas fields and not among the thousands of other troops the Indonesian government deployed to the village of Aceh to restore order there. Exxon also disputes that it had control over the soldiers guarding Exxon facilities.

U.S. District Judge Louis Oberdorfer of the District of Columbia concluded a jury must decide whether to hold Exxon accountable for the alleged actions of the soldiers.

Mobil Oil’s presence goes back at least one hundred years.  The company’s operations expanded between 1965-1968.  During that period the Indonesia army and Islamic coup against Sukarno and the subsequent massacre of a half million to two million suspected leftist, described as one of the worst massacres in history.

An excerpt concerning the nation-wide catastrophe

Kenneth Orr uncovered some information about the killings while studying the Indonesian school system. The stories he recorded give a vivid picture of the different ways in which the killings affected individuals: a schoolteacher sitting on a hastily assembled investigating committee to decide which of his colleagues should die, helping to prevent completely uncontrolled slaughter by doing so; a clever “entrepreneur” making a fortune selling fake PNI membership cards to known PKI leaders; a massive shortage of teachers in the years following the killings; and a girl in the back row crying silently when the events of 1965 were discussed in a civics class in 1981.

Was Obama’s Mama a Spook?

Yes, I said it.  Do I have your attention?  Spook. From Merriam-Webster, ghost, undercover agent or spy.  Tip of the hat to Cinie’s World (2-27-09). An interesting post by this blogger, donning a tinfoil chapeau and heading where the bread crumbs crumble caused me to rush to my own way back machine to take a look at the  political connections of Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, aka S. Ann Dunham, Ann Soetoro, S. Ann Dunham Sutoro.

Obama’s maternal line, the Dunham family has been dredged ad nauseum by Obama in his two autobiographies, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. It has been discussed and analyzed by the MSM, in an effort to “acquaint” the electorate with a portrait of a non-threatening biracial man, palatable scion of an all-American, middle class family, roots planted firmly in the American mainstream. However, it seems the frequency of the retelling of Obama’s family story ensures only a repetition of a superficial, shopworn, schmaltzy story; a short-on-facts narrative of struggle courage, racial confusion, family contradictions  and mother love.  There’s a de rigeur narrative around Obama’s maternal grandmother but since she refused to give any interviews and is now  deceased, much is unknown.

Let’s go back to the early 1960s, the height of the Cold War. The Dunhams moved to the state of Washington and enrolled their daughter in a “progressive” high school where she stood out from the other students as quietly mature, a quirky free thinker and proto “feminist”. Ann next studied anthropology at the University of Hawaii. There, in a Russian language class, she met Barack Obama, Sr., a polygamous and already married Kenyan Muslim. Six months later Barack Jr. was born.

Barack Sr. soon abandoned Ann to continue earning his economics degree at Harvard University, later returning to Kenya and employed by Shell Oil. At some point Ann was employed by the Ford Foundation.

The Ford Foundation is alleged to have had connections to the CIA. Current Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner’s father, Peter Geithner was:

director of the Asia program at the Ford Foundation, a New World Order operation. Peter Geithner oversaw the “microfinance” programs developed in Indonesia by Ann Dunham-Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother. Geithner’s maternal grandfather, Charles F. Moore, was an adviser to President Eisenhower and vice president of Ford Motor Company.

See here. Ann Dunham went to work in the microfinance department headed by Geithner.

Skip ahead in time a couple of years to 1966. The U.S. has stepped up its involvement in the war in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson is President. Civil Rights activists, from SNCC to women’s liberation, are exploding into the streets. Cointelpro has been reformulated to infiltrate and undermine such protests.  But here is where it gets weird, requiring a tinfoil hat.  S. Ann Dunham has been tagged by the political right as a leftist, even a communist. There is no evidence that I know of that links Ann Dunham to any civil protest organization, political group or foundation.

Instead, Ann Dunham married foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, a well-to-do Indonesian Muslim she met upon her return to the University of Hawaii and in 1966 moved with him and seven year old Barack, to a newly Americanized Indonesia, finishing the throes of a human rights disaster.  Ann made no comment about the  massacres that had taken place the prior year, but continued to catalog local crafts.  Barack was officially adopted by Soetoro and remained in Indonesia for two-four years.

Indonesia is the fifth richest nation in the world in natural resources. It has abundant supplies of natural gas, copper, nickel, and oil. It is also the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Sukarno, Indonesia’s communist-leaning leader, had been overthrown the previous year and been replaced by a western leaning general, Suharto. Here’s an excerpt of the article describing the events surrounding Sukarno’s fall.

The situation varied across the country; in some areas the army organized civilian groups and local militias, in other areas communal vigilante action preceded the army.[16] The most widely accepted estimates are that at least half a million were killed.[17] Many others were also imprisoned and for the next ten years people were still being imprisoned as suspects. It is thought that as many as 1.5m were imprisoned at one stage or another.[18] As a result of the purge, one of Sukarno’s three pillars of support, the Indonesian Communist Party, had been effectively eliminated by the other two, the military and political Islam, although of the two, the military were in the position of unchallenged power.  According to Amnesty nternational, life went from bad to worse for the peasants of Indonesia.

Ann’s new husband, Lolo Soetoro, an army geologist, went to work for Mobil oil. Ann had one more child, Maya. Soetoro, a devout Muslim, wanted more children. Ann wanted to continue her work teaching English and to continue her anthropological studies. She returned to Hawaii with Barack and worked toward her PhD. Years later she returned to Indonesia to complete work on her dissertation. Barack, now a teenager, chose to remain in Hawaii.

Here there is a muddle. It isn’t clear to me, from anything I have read so far, what Ann Dunham Soetoro did for a living during this and subsequent trips other than teach English, or catalog native handicrafts. This is what confuses me: if Ann Dunham was a “leftist” and the Ford Foundation would certainly have been aware of her background, why would they hire her to work in a sensitive position? Would she, as a leftist, been willing to reside in a country that had just massacred hundreds of thousands of other leftists? Would she be willing to live with a former army landowner returning to a position with Mobil Oil?  Would she have two husbands who worked for oil companies?

Jump into the time machine again, and reset it to 1986. Ronald Reagan is the U.S. president. G. H. W. Bush is the V.P.  The White House is embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair. Here’s an excerpt of the article, describing other middle eastern the political complications involved in this scandal:

It began as an operation to improve U.S.-Iranian relations, wherein Israel would ship weapons to a relatively moderate, politically influential group of Iranians; the U.S. would then resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages, who were being held by the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah. The plan eventually deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.

The Russians remained mired in Afghanistan battling the Mujahadeen following their invasion of that country in 1980. 1986 was the year that the Afghan branch of the Taliban established hegemony in Afghanistan with the help of  Taliban operating in Pakistan. This is the year Ann Dunham arrived in Pakistan. This is also the year Osama Bin Laden was given sanctuary in Pakistan.  An Dunham Soetoro worked for microfinance departments of USAID, underwritten by the CIA.

Once again, the U.S. (as it had in indonesia) backed Islamic fundamentalists against communism. And, once again, Ann was employed as a USAID bank specialist in “microfinance” for poor women. I don’t know Ann Dunham’s level of skill in reading and speaking Russian, but there is an odd convergence for her

trip with her young daughter along the Silk Road in 1986 and

• Russian language studies,

• work for the Ford Foundation and USAID (also widely believed to be connected to the CIA)

• work financing projects for poor women in an exceedingly volatile anti-American period

• a detailed knowledge of Islamic cultural norms.

Not only was this dangerous duty, but must have been perhaps more hazardous  for a white Western woman in  fundamentalist Pakistan. Again, the same question: If Ann Dunham was a known and unrepentant leftist would USAID have hired her to perform services under these sensitive conditions?  Would the Ford Foundation have hired her and employed her for years as she cataloged handicrafts?

Back to the time machine. Reset the time machine backward to 1981. Barack Obama, Jr., before he moves on to Harvard University, travels to Pakistan to “visit friends”, although travel to Pakistan for American citizens is severely restricted. Does he travel on an American or an Indonesian passport?

I am puzzled by Ann Soetoro’s arrival in Indonesia and Pakistan during these very turbulent years.  This contact with two very divergent countries, and her son’s travel there in 1981 raise my eyebrows.  Maybe something there, maybe not.  Security conditions for a woman and a small girl child seem questionable. Here’s an excerpt from Windfalls of War

For 10 years, the Center received most of its Afghanistan education project funding from USAID. But after Congress ended government-sponsored aid to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, USAID stopped funding the Center. Still, it wasn’t without funding for long.

In 1997, Unocal, an American oil company, stepped in with an offer.

Unocal hoped to facilitate a business relationship with the Taliban in order to promote a natural gas pipeline project. The company was the development manager for the seven-member Central Asia Gas pipeline consortium that also included Saudi Arabia’s Delta Oil, Indonesia Petroleum, three other companies and the Turkmenistan government.

Unocal offered the Center an up-to-two-year contract worth as much $1.8 million to train Afghan men to build pipeline, which would run from Turkmenistan through a Taliban-controlled portion of Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it would be marketed. The pipeline could also be extended into India.

Well, both of Obama’s father figures were oil men.  Obama’s peculiar mixture of corporatism, pragmatism and tolerance for a weird combination of rightist and leftist political thinking come from somewhere.

Whatever Ann Dunham Soetoro thought about two of the huge political theaters of our time, she said nothing.

Jump ahead in the time machine to Obama’s sojourn at Harvard, his father’s alma mater, home of east coast movers and shakers, his do nothing tenure as editor of the Harvard Law Review and his selection as go-to guy by some of the biggest and most powerful investment bankers in the world.  But that’s another story.