Barack Hussein Obama and Indonesia: there's no place like home
Once he lands at Jakarta, capital of the world's largest Muslim state, he probably won't make the same mistake he made a few years ago in Kenya, when he let himself be photographed wearing a turban. Still, he may find it hard to resist the urge to go native.
One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama's childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.
What's this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with 'America's first black president' that they haven't been able to see what he really is: America's first Third World president.
If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner's call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we've heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn't mean anything.
Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.
I've just been in touch with Dr James Lucier, a former US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff Director, about all this. He tells me: 'Culturally, Obama detests Great Britain. He sent the bust of Churchill back without a fig leaf of an excuse. He insulted the Queen and the Prime Minister, giving them ridiculous gifts.' At one point, 'he refused to meet the prime minister.'
Here is what is happening, though the British Government seems oblivious of it. The Obama administration is ready to dump the Old World in pursuit of the One World.
Britain is being dumped. The special relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. Britain losing control of the Falklands to Argentina would just be collateral damage.
But France is being dumped, too. Obama's ostentatious refusal to have dinner with President Sarkozy during his visit to France last year was no accident. Rather than meet the French president, Obama went off to a restaurant with his wife Michelle.
Germany is being dumped. Obama has been little more than dismissive of Chancellor Merkel. Russia in turn will be waved aside.
Most spectacularly of all, the European Union has now been comprehensively dumped. The American president has refused to attend what is supposed to be a US-EU Madrid summit in May.
What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn't yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America's relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.
He believes that the US -- yes, his own country -- and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.
And Obama is America's first Third World president.
Forget Obama's Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image.
What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president's personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.
Chicago is not Obama's homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president's world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.
You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president's manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier.
What's going on? According to Dr Lucier, Obama's policy is to disestablish the United States, Great Britain and Europe from the hegemony of world power, and elevate in their place the hegemony of the Third World under international governance.
Remember, Obama is a deracinated individual. He has no roots. He is a man from an Asian-Pacific background bred to no admiration for the ancient constitutional history which, until now, has reached across the Atlantic to bind America and Britain.
The president actually feels that the US Constitution, which grew out of Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, is 'inadequate.'
Indeed, Obama has stated that, because the US Constitution guarantees only 'negative rights' -- that is, establishes what the US Government may not do to individuals or to the sovereign states -- instead of giving people guarantees of food, shelter education and health care and the rest, it is 'inadequate.'
That is one reason he has worked so hard to get the health care legislation through Congress. It is undoubtedly unconstitutional. Already, the attorneys-general of Florida and South Carolina are poised to challenge its constitutionality in court. At least another dozen state attorneys-general may join in the suit.
Obama has made it clear he despises both the US Constitution and the British tradition from which it springs.
His decision to send his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, to Argentina to give support to President Kirchner is part of this anti-British atttitude. Mrs Clinton has supported President Kirchner's demands that the fate of the Falklands be decided by the United Nations decolonisation committee.
It is all part of the same Obama world-view. This interference in South American affairs is not part of the old yankee -- yanqui -- imperialism. The important thing to note is that the Obama administration is not stepping in to decide the fate of the Falklands itself.
No, it wants to turn the dispute over to a Third World-dominated instrument of international governance, the UN.
One might imagine that Obama is willing to back Argentina over the Falklands because he thinks America has something to gain from it. That is not the reason. There is no profit for the US in cultivating the Latino presidents, and there is no particular policy to do so.
Rather, US support for Kirchner's demand that the Falklands question be turned over to the UN is just another opportunity for Obama to strengthen the ideological world system which he hopes will one day overwhelm the old Anglo-Saxon Common Law America.
His vision is for the US to abandon its Constitution and its laws, which are tied to Britain, the country for which he has shown such disdain.
'Lagarde correct: Germany is crushing Europe'
Within hours the Germans were dismissing her criticism that their years of keeping wage costs low had raised the competitiveness of Germany industry at the expense of everyone else. They insisted the solution to Euro-sclerosis is for everyone else to be like them.
You could call the argument a draw, except that Charles Dumas of the heavy-hitting Lombard Street Research has just this afternoon released notes which he says show that Lagarde is correct: 'Germany is crushing Europe.' Dumas, as usual, has it right.
'Against US and Spanish growth of 16 percent over the past eight-year cycle,' he writes, 'and British and French 10-11 percent, Germany has only managed 3.5 percent, half-way between sick-man Japan's 6.5 percent and sick-man Italy's half-percent.'
'Such growth as it had required others unwisely to run up debts to pay for its exports. This will happen much less in future, so German growth will be even worse. German domination of Euroland is a disaster.'
'The comic aspect of the attempts by Germany to make the rest of Europe converge on German practice is that the German economic performance has been dismal. What is now being enforced is that nobody else in the Eurozone -- or its irrational aspirant members -- is to be allowed any growth either. Europe is being forced into a German lowest common denominator.'
The fact is that Germany depends for its demand on other people being willing to run up debts. Now the Eurozone policies are making sure nobody can.
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