~ Barack Obama - The Early Years ~
Posted on 07/28/2012 4:21:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
While the President continues to bristle at the notion that people should pay attention to his "You didn't build that" comments and his supporters insists we're reading too much into it, a look at Barack Obama's younger self tells a different story. Just how does he view business owners and capitalists in general? One peek into the inner thought process which formed his world view can be found in a book released earlier this year by David Maraniss titled, Barack Obama: The Story. I confess I missed this one when it came out, but a friend has been reading it and pointed out some rather telling passages, particularly in light of the recent flap. But I wasn't the only one to notice, nor the first. The Washington Examiner's Byron York picked up on it last month.
Obama spent very little time in business, but he did have a job at a company called Business International for about a year after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. The book contains new details about the future president's brief stint in corporate America.
Obama was a low-level editor in Reference Services, working on reports describing economic conditions in various foreign countries. By all accounts, he disliked the work, not just because it was pedestrian and boring, but because it was in business.
“He calls it working for the enemy,” Obama’s mother, Ann, wrote after a phone conversation with her son, “because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in [Third World] countries.”
The book goes on to point out that this information came from a letter his mother wrote to her mentor, Alice Dewey, in Honolulu. In addition to that call, Maraniss notes that the same theme was repeated in a call to this then girlfriend.
“Obama wrote a letter to his former girlfriend, Alex McNear, during that period, the last he would write to her. As in his telephone conversation with his mother, he expressed a distaste for the corporate world. He wrote Alex on Business International stationery, but crossed out the logo on the envelope and scribbled in his own address on West 114th Street.”
But wait… the book has a few other goodies. While it’s true that Obama did work briefly at B.I. and mentions it in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, his description of his position there was, shall we say, a case of taking a bit of literary license at best. (Taken from page 484 of the hardcover version of Barack Obama: The Story.)
“In his book Obama described B.I. as a ‘consulting house’ to multinational corporations. ‘I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors – see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand – and for a split second, I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.’ It was an exaggeration to define B.I. as a consulting house. One of his former colleagues described it as ‘a small company that published newsletters on international business. . . . It was a bit of a sweatshop. . . . Sure we all wished we were high-priced consultants to internationals.’ Another called it ‘high school with ashtrays.’ Obama’s office was the size of a cubicle, barely large enough to fit a desk, and faced an interior hallway; he had no secretary, and the dress code was informal; people in his position rarely if ever wore suits. ‘He dressed like a college kid,’ said Lou Celi, who had an image in his mind’s eye of Obama coming to work now and then in white pants. One colleague remembered Obama wearing the same dark pants, nondescript shirt, and narrow tie day after day, like a uniform.”
None of this is illegal, of course, nor even immoral. But it does provide a yet another look into the formative process that the President went through as a young man, which certainly speaks to his opinions later in life. Is it really such a stretch to assert that he’s not exactly a fan of private business and capitalism? B.I. was self-described as a firm with a goal, “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” And this is the company which, after giving the young Obama a job, he described as, “The Enemy.”
I’ll leave it to you to make the call. Then again, I’m a well known trouble maker so I’m probably reading too much into this too, right?
No surprise - he considers his current employer the enemy, too.
Excellent post.
Obummer is a consummate bullshit artist. If he hadn’t gone to college he would have ended up as a larcenous used car salesman.
everything Obama says is a lie. Every word.
The more interesting part to me is how he embellished the job in his biography. Really, nothing about this guy is real, it’s all a lie.
Boy, this sounds like almost every ENTRY LEVEL JOB that college kids in the late 70s and 80s would take. I worked for a company for a year out of college that I could describe in similar terms.
The only difference is that I, like many others in similar positions to me, used that job as a learning tool and a springboard to something more palatable and profitable.
~ Barack Obama - The Early Years ~
I suspect some psycho-biographer will or maybe already has made the point that Barry was a spoiled, only child and that was the reason he considered his employer to be the enemy.
Most of us worked hard without resentment toward those paying us. I mowed lawns all summer when I was 10 years old for 50 cents a pop. I’m sure you have a similar story and expect Mitt Romney does too.
Obama’s not of us or one of us. Screw sitting out.
Let’s resolve to toss him out this fall. No one could be worse.
If Willard’s no better, we can toss him in 2016.
This Dumb *SS sure loves the fruit of Capitalism though, Doesn’t he?
OK, so, if he worked for the enemy, then communism is better?
I mean, what a deal, right? Some get to take care of this, others that, and his life is taken care of by others, since otherwise he is a coke head without a rudder, with everyone to his skills set.
ANd, yet, he does not like business taking care of the third world?
What a communist idiot in practice... he does not even know what he is talking about or saying. He has no hope. He is a cynic. He has no propect of change in his soul. He is a terminally mentally ill basket case of resignation to hate and cursing of life.
Some hope and change we got there.
Bump for later “in”digestion.
A manipulated whore who follows only his feel good and bad instincts as to who cares or does not care... this guy is so easy.
He is a Manchurian candidate who is used by someone else. He is betraying everything for it. He probably knows it too he is an a$$ hole somewhere. He just does not care.
There, the gay galore for all to see. The right hand knows not what the left is doing, he does not want to be scrutinized, but yet wants to be used, ie. he only wants to endure and not know what is done to him, and requires of others he can handle as objects to also submit to this kind of “philosophy”.
These people are beasts.
You wrote the post that I should have. Thank You! My thoughts exactly.
Well said.
Does not surprise me in the least. Too bad our illustrious media didn’t bother vetting the one like Freepers did.
FUBO
It was my understanding that 0bama’s first job was dishing up ice cream at a Baskin Robbin’s in Honolulu, and that by his own admission he gave away free ice cream to his friends, kinda like the way he gives away free money to his political supporters today.
Thanks SeekAndFind.
And, what Skeeter said.
Of course, he made it sounds like it was only for a few CIA agents.
There is probably some Operation Mockingbird stuff in there with BIC. Courtesy of Clinton's handler, Cord Meyer.
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