Dinesh D’ Souza Wretched Of The Earth

One of the fascinating things in the article was the author’s admission of coming from a country –India– that was colonized and raped of its resources by the West. However, his words suggest that he worships the oppressor. Perhaps this ambivalence about whom he is as a person accounts for the confusion of his article.

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The article by Dinesh D’ Souza that was printed on September 27, 2010 in Forbes Magazine, “How Obama Thinks”, is quite easily the most misleading and incoherent written concoction of words that was published for public reading. 

D’ Souza’s pseudo-intellectual rants were also tainted with racism and Islamic phobia. He blamed President Obama for everything ranging from the economic decline to global imperialism. He began by calling Obama “the most anti business president in a generation.” He criticized the president for supporting the $100 million dollar Cultural Center which will include a mosque and will generate jobs; it’s to be built soon in lower Manhattan. 

D’Souza compared the unemployment rate under the Bush regime, 7.7%, in January 2009, when Bush left office, to the current rate of 9.5%; yet Obama has been president for less than two years and has been trying to undo the damage of Bushes’ eight years. He fails to mention that the rate of unemployment in the U.S. was 3.9% in December of 2000, just one month before Bush took office.

D’Souza also neglected to mention –or perhaps he just did not know– that Bush was greeted with a $422 billion surplus when he entered the white house but left a  $ 5.1 trillion deficit for Obama to contend with. Perhaps President Obama has not yet proven to be the best pro-business president to occupy the White House but he certainly is not the worst.

In his book, “Running on Empty”, former aide to ex-president Richard Nixon, P. Peterson, wrote: “Most of today’s debts are by Reagan and the Bushes.” He cited Reagan’s excessive tax cuts for the rich which were supposed to fix the economy through “trickle down economics.” However, the display of raw capitalism under Reagan and George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush proved to be the country’s worst nightmare in terms of finance. 

The U.S. economy has never recovered from the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980’s and the robbery of the American taxpayers to finance two illegal wars in the beginning of the 21st century have all but bankrupted the country. According to Peterson:  “There is also the fact that the reputation of American financial markets has been damaged by fraud and abuse….namely the prevalence of criminal practices among companies with close ties to Mr. Bush,  Enron, whose CEO was one of his largest contributors is one of the most notable examples.”

President Obama’s proposal, during his campaign, for a Keynesian economic paradigm is much more sensible and feasible for putting U.S. citizens back to work and improving the economy as opposed to the Republicans’ model of less tax for the rich and less government intervention for the poor which is supported by Souza. In his book “The American Economic Problem”, James K. Gailbraith, wrote: “Big increase in government spending is a fast and efficient way to pump up the economic growth rate.” 

Souza attempted to defend the idea of not increasing the taxes on the rich by claiming the top 1% pay 40% of the taxes and the top 9% pay 30%. Therefore, claiming that the rich pay 70% of the country’s taxes. That assertion is a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people into believing that the poor and middleclass are getting the biggest tax breaks. However, I am certain that Mr. D’Souza would rather be in a tax bracket which would require him to pay a 40% tax rate than earn $20,000 a year and only be taxed 10%. What’s more, how can we defend income inequality whereby the richest 20 percent collect about half the wage income and control about 84 percent of all forms of wealth.

Another example of what appears to be an effort by D’Souza to be intentionally misleading is his continuous referral to the planned, Islamic Cultural Center, which is a number of blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood as the “Mosque at Ground Zero.” 

He appears to use that phrase to justify his support of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he made a malicious attempt to connect President Obama to the invasions. He wrote: “Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan.” 

He inferred that Obama is a socialist and imperialist, motivated by an Afrocentric revolutionary mindset that he inherited from his Kenyan father. He named African ancestors, who are also icons to Blacks throughout the Diaspora, such as Dr. King, Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon as Obama’s role models. Although there is nothing wrong with being the protégé of such men the connotation that was applied to them by D’Souza suggested that their struggle for Black liberation is taboo and hostile to Western interests. 

One of the fascinating things in the article was the author’s admission of coming from a country –India– that was colonized and raped of its resources by the West. However, his words suggest that he worships the oppressor. Perhaps this ambivalence about whom he is as a person accounts for the confusion of his article.

“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

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