Peyvast

I am 56 years old and live in a very red, rural area of West Texas. I have met many Obama supporters here, and

Barack Obama did.

(International Herald Tribune)  KOGELO, Kenya: A barefoot old woman in a ripped dress is sitting on a log in front of her tin-roof bungalow in this remote village in western Kenya, jovially greeting visitors.

Mama Sarah, as she is known around here, lives without electricity or running water. She is illiterate and doesn’t know when she was born. Yet she may have a seat of honor at the next presidential inauguration in Washington - depending on what happens to her step-grandson, Barack Obama.

Mama Sarah cannot communicate with Obama, who calls her his grandmother, because she speaks only her Luo tribal language and a little Swahili. Obama’s Luo is pretty much limited to “musawa,” meaning “how are you?”

People around here are giddy at the prospect of a President Obama.

“I’m up at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. to listen to BBC news and get the latest on the campaign,” said Nicholas Rajula, who describes himself as a cousin of the senator. “By the way, what’s the latest news about the superdelegates?” 

You might think that all Kenyans would be vigorously supporting Obama. But Kenya has been fractured along ethnic lines in the last two months, so now Obama draws frenzied support from the Luo ethnic group of his ancestors, while many members of the rival Kikuyu group fervently support Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Obamas are better off than most in the area, for Mama Sarah’s house has a tin roof - a step up from the mud huts with thatch roofs that are common in the village. Mama Sarah also has a cell phone, which she charges from a solar panel, and a radio that she uses to follow primaries in America.

But the poverty is unmistakable. Jane Raila, who says she is another relative of the senator’s, was hobbling barefoot with a homemade crutch, for she had been crippled by polio as a child.

“We’re all very excited by the news from the U.S.,” she said. “We stay up late to listen to the news bulletins.”

Obama’s late grandfather is said to have been the first person in the area to wear Western clothes rather than just a loincloth. For a time he converted to Christianity and adopted the family name Johnson.

Later he converted to Islam, taking four wives. Obama’s father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Roman Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Obama’s mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.

The father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, was as much of a pathbreaker as his son. He went from herding goats in Kogelo to studying in Hawaii and at Harvard, even if his career as an economist was frustrated in part by ethnic rivalries.

Obama barely knew his father and does not know his Kenyan relatives well. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently very briefly in 2006.

On his last visit, Obama visited two area schools that had been renamed for him. The intention in renaming the schools seems to have been partly to attract funding. One person after another noted pointedly that it was a shame that a school named for a great American should be so dilapidated.

Some of Obama’s innumerable relatives also see him as a meal ticket. They have made arrangements with a tour group to bring buses of visitors to have tea with Mama Sarah.

They are also trying to raise money from interviews with her. I had made arrangements to visit Mama Sarah weeks ago, and she had agreed to speak. But when I showed up, she said that her children had told her to keep quiet. Frantic phone calls. Fierce arguments. Hints that money might make an interview possible. I didn’t pay. I didn’t get the interview.

That’s O.K. Having seen the poverty in Kogelo, I’m less offended by the outstretched palms than awed by the distance that the Obama family spans.

Frankly, I worry that enemies of Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather’s Islamic faith or his father’s polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values. But snobbishness and paranoia ill-become a nation of immigrants, where one of our truest values is to judge people by their own merits, not their pedigrees. If we call ourselves a land of opportunity, then Obama’s heritage doesn’t threaten American values but showcases them.

The step-grandson of an illiterate, barefoot woman in this village of mud huts in Africa may be the next president of the United States.

Such mobility - powered by education, immigration and hard work - is cause not for disparagement but for celebration.

The policies of Federal Reserve Board as a governing financial power of the US and the WORLD (along with few other central banks) , baseless printing of dollar, the formation of European Union, export of US jobs abroad, End of Soviet Empire and cold war, Chinese elite’s entrance to the global capitalistic market , NAFTA and many other such globalizations are the results of a major shift of dominance of FINANCIAL ELITE from US and Western Europe to a borderless global elite who also now include the Oil rich sheiks of middle east, Russians, Chinese and other billionaires who no longer see their interest in the nationalistic pursuit of capital and in competition with one another, but as one global elite who JOINTLY control the financial resources of our world.

In this path former US elite! no longer feel the need to have a financial hegemony but the elite of the world will. The red white and blue has mixed with the green and yellow and others and an American citizen is no longer more important than a Chinese or Arab as far as they are concerned. Wherever there is a more opportunity to PROFIT is where THEY will be or already are! Obviously the greed will create frictions among the elite too but no longer at the cost of jeopordizing their own wealth. After all they enjoy each others company in yachts and glamerous private gatherings more than the company of the THE PEOPLE. The political and religious leaders have always been the tools of the few to control the masses and they will continue to serve their purpose or forced to be changed as needed! The Media is the new tool of the new world order and not tanks.

The matured Western economies with legal, labor and environmental restrictions no longer provide the same opportunities for the rich elite as the newly formed middle classes of South America, Asia, and Middle East and in this process we will continue to see a shift of economic power to those areas where the investor capital will also follow.

Therefore the current economic problems were not a surprise WHATSOEVER to many but an intended outcome of creating more stable and fertile worldwide grounds for new horizons for creation of wealth for a very limited few who control the financial markets of our planet and therefore in charge of the new world order.

The concept of one world government has already been formed financially and the political process is in the works too.

This is not a conspiracy theory but a factual observation based on what has already happened!. The drop in value of real estate and equities or the recession will only hurt the middle class but it does not effect the elite and actually provides opportunity for those who have unlimited cash reserve to acquire the assets of the middle class at substantial discounts, not to mention that Americans have been rubbed of the value of their assets simply by intentional Fed sponsored drop of dollar. The current US deficit and payment of interest by the tax payer to the elite is also serving as this shift of wealth from the middle class to the few.

The beneficiary of wars such as Iraq have been the elite but the ones burdening the costs will remian to be the taxpayers soon. The next rounds of these shift will be served by increase in taxes as well as possible bail outs to be formulated by the soon to be democrat US president.

What one hears on those such as CNBC (owned by GE), the elite and corporate controlled major media may only be what they want us to hear and believe. The newly acquired wall street journal owned by Newscorp, the soon to be centralized stock market with mergers of the exchanges (eg: NYSE/AMEX ) and the formation of International Equity and Hedge Funds, the congressional approvals of the homeland security and wiretapping etc etc are all playing a role in the centralization of power at the cost of loss of individual economic and political liberties.

Yes America WAS beautiful!