Freedom Line Blog

Last week, President Obama made the surprising announcement that Dartmouth University President Jim Yong Kim — a relatively obscure figure — was his nominee to become the next President of the World Bank, the international organization that works to spur economic development throughout the world. Thanks to some careful digging by the NYU Development Research Institute, we’re now learning a bit more about Jim’s views — and the details are a little startling. The Ivy League executive seems to think of economic growth as a zero-sum game — and one in which the developed world has been consistently sticking it to the little guys. A few excerpts from his writing:

… the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.

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Using Cuba as an example, Chapter Thirteen makes the case that when leaders prioritize social equity and the fundamental right of all citizens to health care, even economically strapped governments can achieve improved and more equitable health outcomes.

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… [G]rowth – the market-led economic growth sought by governments, the growth in profits celebrated by businesses, and the growth in power and influence of transnational financial and corporate interests – often comes at the expense of the disenfranchised and vulnerable…  As the imperatives of growth at any cost increasingly determine economic and social policy and the behavior of global corporations, more people join the ranks of the poor and greater numbers suffer and die.

And if this isn’t bad enough, the final passage cited by the NYU group finds Jim quoting Noam Chomsky.

Dinesh D’Souza caught a lot of flak for positing in his book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” that the president’s ideology could be traced largely to the Kenyan anti-colonialism of his father. While I think that D’Souza overstated the case rather severely, instances like this one remind us of the germ of truth to his argument.

Whether Obama is decrying a world where international negotiations were “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” or picking a new World Bank President who seems to find the very practice of capitalism predatory, there seems to be a consistent suspicion that someone somewhere is being victimized. Should Jim Yong Kim become the head of the World Bank, it will be the people of the developing world — caught in the downward economic spiral that always accompanies attempts at implementing “social justice” — who will be the victims.

Best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza has an eye-popping theory that tries to explain President Barack Obama’s approaches to domestic and foreign policy.  In short, Obama appropriated a dream from his father that America – and the business leaders that make it prosperous – are to blame for the world’s problems.  And thus, they should be brought down a peg (or ten) to equalize the global ledger.

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.

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