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Paul R. Hollrah
Nepotism, Obama Style
August 28, 2008
With the
possible exception of the mainstream media...who apparently believe that
Barack Obama’s wealth is not newsworthy, but the number of homes owned
by Cindy McCain’s is...there is much written these days about the dire
economic circumstances of Obama’s 25-year-old half brother, George
Hussein Onyango Obama.
According to press
reports, George Obama has been located by Italian Vanity Fair
living in a 6 ft. by 9 ft. makeshift hut on the outskirts of Nairobi,
Kenya, subsisting on less than $1 a month. He told reporters, "If anyone
says anything about my surname, I say we are not related. I am
ashamed...no one knows who I am. I have had to learn to live and take
what I need.”
Reading that response,
one might be led to believe that George Obama and his famous brother,
Barack, have never met...but that’s not the case. In his book, Dreams
from My Father (page 431), Barack writes of meeting his youngest
brother briefly in a schoolyard in Nairobi in 1988, a meeting that
Barack described as "a painful affair, arranged hastily and without his
mother’s knowledge.” Obama described his brother, then 5 years of age,
as a "handsome, round-headed (as opposed to square-headed?) boy with a
wary gaze.”
The two met a second
time in September 2006 as Obama junketed in African, beginning at Cape
Town and touring north through Kenya, the Congo, Djibouti, and Sudan. As
George Obama described that meeting, "It was very brief. We spoke for
just a few minutes. It was like meeting a complete stranger.”
But what seems to be of
greatest interest on this side of the Atlantic is the fact that, while
Barack Obama lives in a $2.6 million mansion on the south side of
Chicago, enjoying an annual income of well over $1 million, his brother
in Kenya lives on less than $12 a year. And while there is probably no
truth to the rumor that Barack recently sent his brother a $5 bill,
suggesting that he take a few months off, it is instructive to note that
he has done little to help his extended family. Always preferring to use
other people’s money to assuage their own feelings of guilt for living
in the U.S., the world’s most prosperous nation, it’s just not the kind
of thing that liberals do.
In his book, "Who
Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism,”
Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks uncovered some
interesting facts about the relative generosity of liberals and
conservatives. Professor Brooks found that:
▪ Although
liberal family incomes average 6 percent higher than those of
conservative families, conservative households give, on average, 30
percent more to charity than the average liberal household ($1,600 per
year, per family, vs. $1,227).
▪
Conservatives donate more time to community service and they give more
blood.
▪ George W.
Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above
average.
▪ In the 10
reddest states, where Bush received more than 60 percent of the vote,
the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5
percent.
▪ In the
bluest states, where John Kerry received more than 60 percent of the
vote, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was
just 1.9 percent.
▪
Conservatives, who reject the idea that government has a responsibility
to reduce income disparity between the rich and the poor, give, on
average, four times more than liberals who feel that government has
that responsibility.
Like most Americans,
Brooks had been conditioned to believe that, because liberals are always
harping about the plight of the poor, they must care more about the poor
than do conservatives. However, when his research proved otherwise he
checked and rechecked his findings, but the conclusion was always the
same: conservatives are far more generous than liberals.
To the liberal mind,
assigning the responsibility for helping the poor to government
bureaucrats makes assisting the poor much more "efficient.” And besides,
if we pass that responsibility off to government bureaucrats it’s not
necessary for us to get our hands dirty.
As a principal sponsor
of the Global Poverty Act (S.2433) now under consideration in the U.S.
Senate, Barack Obama has said, "Eliminating
global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges we face. With
billions of people around the world forced to live on just dollars a
day, we can – and must – make it a priority of our foreign policy to
commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food,
shelter, and clean drinking water...Our commitment to the global economy
has to extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing
corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers
everywhere.”
Obama fails to tell us
how American taxpayers ended up with the responsibility of eliminating
world poverty, why it must be a priority of American foreign policy to
ensure that every child in the world has food, shelter, and clean
drinking water, and just what part of job-creating trade agreements he
finds so objectionable. Perhaps he will let us all in on that mystery in
the months ahead
In the meantime, it is
estimated that Obama’s global outreach program will cost the American
taxpayer roughly $845 billion over a 13 year period. Spreading that
amount across the entire African population of 768 million, Obama’s bill
would give every man, woman, and child in Africa a windfall of just over
$1,100.
Obama learned
everything he knows about politics in the Democratic "welfare
plantation” of south Chicago. If his goal is to create a financial
windfall for his grandmother, his brother George, and the rest of his
extended family in Kenya, you’ve gotta’ give him credit. His plan to
eliminate poverty throughout the world is nepotism on a grand scale. |
