UPDATE: Later that day, I stand corrected, Obamas Father was a Socialist, I just received this email from someone who shared some more information with me.
"Jenny, I appreciate your blog's efforts to expose Obama, the stealth candidate. However, it is a mistake to accept Raymond Omwami’s denial that Obama Sr. was a socialist.
In fact, like the nominee of our nation’s socialist party Obama Sr. was a Marxist himself. Even Dreams From My Father hints at this in its account that he was ousted from his government job when Kenyas president cracked down on communist agitators (pp. 214-215).
In his July 1965 East Africa Journal essay “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” Obama Sr. contended that Kenyas government should use compulsory force to impose collective ownership of property:
We have to look at priorities in terms of what is good for society and on this basis we may find it necessary to force people to do things they would not do otherwise.
[If need be, government should] force people to consolidate through the easiest way, which, I think, would be through clan co-operatives rather than through individual initiative.
… the society, through the government, which is its instrument, should enforce means by which this growth and change can be brought about.
The dad of Barry’s dreams argued that individual rights must be subordinated to the collective good, and economic equality imposed:
If the government should, however, feel that individual ownership is the best policy to take in order to bring development, then it should restrict the size of farms that can be owned by one individual throughout the country and this should apply to everybody from the President to the ordinary man.
… we also 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. It is a case of cure and prevention and not prevention alone. . . .
[S]o long as we maintain free enterprise one cannot deny that some will accumulate more than others.
Obama Sr. claimed that even 100% percent taxation would be justified as long as the government redistributes benefits fairly. He called for nationalization of Kenyas industries, with even hotel rates set by the government. To justify his views, he appealed to what Marx had written on economic and political power. He objected that the moderate socialism proposed in the Kenyan government’s position paper is inconsistent with Marx: “one who has read Marx cannot fail to see that corporations are not only what Marx referred to as the advanced stage of capitalism but Marx even called it finance capitalism by which a few would control the finances of so many and through this have not only economic power but political power as well” (pp. 29-32, italics supplied).
Alex (Thanks Alex, for the information, I really appreciate it! Jen)
Glenn Back and Jonah Goldberg discuss Chavez style of leadership! 