Earned Success Versus You Are Nothing Without Big Government!

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Two fascinating and insightful articles.  (See 1 and 1a below.)

the second was of particular interest for several reasons.

First, because I just completed a booklet for parents offering life learned lessons  how this Conservative Capitalist helped raise his children. After it is edited and refined for publishing I plan to market it, in part, for the benefit of "The Wounded Warrior Project."

Second, I believe Murray has put his finger on why Capitalism is struggling to redeem its image..

In my view, in a world of big government only big businesses ultimately survive because small businesses cannot afford the egregious impact and amoebic creep of the insidiousness of  big government. Eventually only big business with political connections and clout can afford the deleterious effect of big government.

The bigger the business, like big and distant government, the more disconnected it is seen as contributing to society.  Decisions that exclusively relate to growth and expansion lose sight of the impact those decisions might have locally and on society in general.

When a town or city loses a corporate office, charitable contributions and other worthy endeavors the local headquartered company generally supported end or become radically altered.

Murray addresses the failure of old fashion Capitalists to defend the system and to speak against the greed and corrupt behaviour that has been allowed to tag Capitalism.

I urge everyone to read these two articles.

Murray writes, " Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty" and asserts that Capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty than any system yet devised by man.  "Earned" success" is Capitalism's  ultimate accomplishment.
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Few voters would drink beer with 1 1/2% alcohol so why are they willing to tolerate a president whose policies deliver that level of growth?

More and more articles are appearing about Obama's possible election defeat.  Even the local paper had one such today.  Momentum is gathering as to why Obama will be, as he himself predicted, a one term president.  (See 2 below.)

And he basically sees business as the enemy.  (See 2a below.)
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Finally, if you want more evidence who government, not business, is the true enemy of free people click on: http://www.staged.com/video?v=Klmb
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Have a nice weekend and remember you are nothing without big government!
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Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Charles Hill: The Empire Strikes Back

One of American's foremost strategists says the era of liberal democracy is in jeopardy, and the historical norm of dominance by great powers will return if the U.S. fails to lead.

By ROBERT L. POLLOCK

Yale Prof. Charles Hill is often called a "conservative." But he is one of the foremost students and advocates of what he calls the "liberal" ("in the finest sense of the word") world order. And he is worried that Americans increasingly don't understand how special the modern era has been or their own crucial role in developing and securing it.

To some, the Obama's administration's desire to "lead from behind" and seek United Nations approval for actions abroad represents an appropriate retreat to a more humble American posture. Mr. Hill, by contrast, sees the possible end of a great era of human rights and democracy promotion the likes of which the planet has never seen.

Our world has "been increasingly tolerant and increasingly trying to eradicate racism and increasingly trying to expand freedom. And it can come to an end," he says.

What might replace it? "Spheres of influence." Or to use a more archaic term, "empire."

Mr. Hill is the all-too-rare professor with an extensive background outside of academia. He made his career in the U.S. foreign service working on China and the Middle East, among other issues. He has advised secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and served as a policy consultant to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali. His ability to combine real-world experience with appreciation of the intellectual currents animating history—Dickens comes up during our discussion of the anti-slavery movement in 19th-century Britain—has made his courses some of the most popular at Yale.

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Ken Fallin

So what makes our era unique and valuable? And how did we get here? To understand the road we've travelled, we have to go back—a long way.

"The way the world through almost all of history has been ordered is through empires. The empire was the normal unit of rule. So it was the Chinese empire, the Mughal empire, the Persian empire, and the Roman empire, the Mayan empire."

What changed this was the Thirty Years War in Europe in the 17th century. "That was a war between the Holy Roman Empire and states, and states were new. They had come forward in northern Italy in the Renaissance and now they were taking hold in what we think of as a state-sized entity. The Netherlands and Sweden and France were among these. . . . France was both an empire and a state—and the key was when [Cardinal] Richelieu took France to the side of the states, which was shocking because France was Catholic and the empire was Catholic and the states were Protestant."

Our modern concept that war should be governed by law dates from the era. "It was so awful that it produced Grotius," the Dutch philosopher of international law.

It also produced the Treaty of Westphalia. "What they did in creating something to prevent another Thirty Years War, they put in place what would develop into the international state system. . . . This is a work of genius, probably inadvertent in some sense," Mr. Hill says. "To be a good member of the international club you had to follow minimal procedures. . . . You could be Catholic or Protestant, but you had to be a state. So the state then replaces the empire as the fundamental unit of world affairs."

The next major event is the Congress of Vienna in 1814, when the powers that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte put their own stamp on the system. Meanwhile, the procedural norms for membership in the international club—such as hosting and protecting ambassadors—are being supplemented by more substantive and moral-sounding requirements.

"The Ottomans are an empire and there's kind of a back and forth across the 19th century—it's kind of a precursor to the Turkish thing of the 20th century—of European statesmen saying, well, yeah, you can come in to it but you have polygamy, you have slavery, so you can't be all the way in," the 76-year-old Mr. Hill says.

"My view is that every major modern war has been waged against this international system. That is, the empire strikes back. World War I is a war of empires which comes to its culmination point when a state gets into it. That's the United States." And then we get something very interesting added: "That's Woodrow Wilson and [the promotion of] democracy."

"World War II, and I think this is uncomprehended although it's perfectly clear, . . . World War II is a war of empires against the state system. It's Hitler's Third Reich. It's Imperial Japan." The Axis goal "is to establish an empire. The Nazi empire would be Europe going eastward into the Slavic lands. The Japanese empire in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as they called it."

Is the story uncomplicated? Of course not. One of the most important developments was the rise of the British navy—the "empire" on which "the sun never set"—in the mid-19th century. But that so-called empire arguably was the global rules-based system, committed to abolishing slavery and to free trade and free movement on the seas.

So too for the United States, as it assumed responsibility for protecting the air and sea lanes while the British pulled back after World War II. "The grand strategy of the U.S. since Harry Truman," says Mr. Hill, has been the establishment of a rules-based system built on institutions like the U.N. and NATO. It's a system designed to protect the rights of states to Wilsonian "self determination," not to subject them to the will of the strongest.

Mr. Hill is neither a U.N. basher nor romantic about the institution. "The U.N. is a very useful organization. Its usefulness goes up or down" depending on "whether it is used within the boundaries it was designed to be used. . . . When the states themselves don't want to get involved and hand something over to the U.N., then it always goes wrong." He cites Bosnia, and now Syria, as examples.

On former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's mission in Syria: "What he's doing is very detrimental. By its own design it can't do anything but serve as a kind of rescue mission for Bashar Assad." Mr. Annan "takes a U.N. approach to this that says what you want to do is stop the fighting. Well, if you stop the fighting you're serving Assad."

And then there is the misimpression that the U.N. is itself a global governing body, rather than an instrument of the state system.

"Model U.N. is very deleterious. It has been educating now two or more generations of high school and college students about a U.N. that isn't really the U.N. Now when people talk about the U.N. they talk about something that doesn't exist. They talk about it as though it's a kind of untethered international governing body," he says. "So you've got 4,000 high-school students coming in for a weekend at Yale" and "you give them 45 minutes for a little problem like Iran's nuclear program, and they solve it! And they wonder why, if we solved it this morning before lunch, why can't you solve it?"

The U.N. works, Mr. Hill says, when states take charge. "The point is not that the U.S. has to act unilaterally. . . . The point is will the U.S. take a leading role?" he says. "The whole system has been defended by the leadership of the U.S. and its allies. And the idea of open expression and open trade is the American way of seeing the world improve itself in the future. If America is not gonna do that, nobody else is gonna do it. And that's what's happening now."

Mr. Hill sees two very different kinds of challenges to the liberal, state-based world order. One, the aggressive kind, is exemplified by China. The other, very different, can be seen in the European Union.

China has been a believer in the international system in recent decades, he says. It has seen advantages in the doctrine of state equality (which it uses to defend against human-rights complaints) and has gained from the liberalization of trade. But as the U.S. pulls back—a shrinking Navy, President Obama's foreign policy—things are starting to change.

The Chinese are talking about how they used to approach the world in the dynastic era, says Mr. Hill. "'[We] know that states are not equal and therefore we need a world order in which that reality is recognized.' This meme is getting around in China and is what accounts for statements starting two years ago as regards the South China Sea to Vietnam or the Philippines saying openly 'We are a big power and you're not a big power and therefore you should follow what we say.'"

The problem of the European Union, by contrast, is not the over-assertion of state power but the abdication of it without a suitable replacement. Of the current troubles in Europe, Mr. Hill says, "They took away the sovereign powers of the states" but they "didn't take enough power to Brussels to be able to run the Continent under crisis situations."

Why did Europe do that? Mr. Hill suggests that German and other war guilt was a big factor. "It so sickened the European intelligentsia" that "it was almost as though they said, yes, Europe has been the cause of all the world's problems. Napoleon and colonialism and imperialism and Stalin and Marx and Lenin and Hitler and the Holocaust. But no more. Now we're going to be the most moral people in the world. And the Americans who have been causing these problems along with us? They represent the past, we represent the future."

In short, "the European vision is we're just going to be nice" and "people will follow our lead. The Chinese view is why should we not do what we want to do with these little people who used to pay us tribute?"

What amazes Mr. Hill is how much of a break the Obama foreign policy represents compared with the bipartisan consensus stretching back to Truman. That culminated in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address, which he likens to an "emancipation proclamation for the world." But, he says, "The democracy wave that began 20 years ago [at the end of the Cold War] is now turning backward." Why? "The conduct of the Obama administration."

So the future is still very much a choice, not an inevitability, I ask.

"Absolutely. It's been a choice," he says. "I'm not so sure now that people even see the choice because the mentalities are shifting. . . . What I'm beginning to see is that when you try to explain something like this to someone, they don't have any idea what you're talking about. They just don't get it. But you wrecked your educational system the way we have. I'm talking about fourth grade, not higher education."

He talks about his aunt, who was principal of a middle school. The library was "incredible." Students read "Tacitus or Horace or Caesar's 'Gallic Wars.' Now we don't teach that. And we don't teach American history."

I ask about other possible future spheres of influence if the international system breaks down. If Europe doesn't get its act together, "the sphere of influence is going to be run from Moscow," Mr. Hill says. "There is an Indian sphere of influence" and "you look this way to Bali and this way to Zanzibar." Is Brazil a power of the future? "As they say, it always will be," he chuckles, alluding to a well-known joke about the country.

But the message remains dead serious. The "battle" for liberal democracy and some semblance of international order "has been being won because the U.S. has been putting out the effort for it," he says. "And now we're not."

Mr. Pollock is the Journal's editorial features editor.


1a)Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem

Charles Murray examines the cloud now hanging over American business—and what today's capitalists can do about i

By CHARLES MURRAY

MMitt Romney's résumé at Bain should be a slam dunk. He has been a successful capitalist, and capitalism is the best thing that has ever happened to the material condition of the human race. From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.

Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?

Yet it hasn't worked out that way for Mr. Romney. "Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer.

What happened to turn the mood of the country so far from our historic celebration of economic success?

Two important changes in objective conditions have contributed to this change in mood. One is the rise of collusive capitalism. Part of that phenomenon involves crony capitalism, whereby the people on top take care of each other at shareholder expense (search on "golden parachutes").

But the problem of crony capitalism is trivial compared with the collusion engendered by government. In today's world, every business's operations and bottom line are affected by rules set by legislators and bureaucrats. The result has been corruption on a massive scale. Sometimes the corruption is retail, whereby a single corporation creates a competitive advantage through the cooperation of regulators or politicians (search on "earmarks"). Sometimes the corruption is wholesale, creating an industrywide potential for profit that would not exist in the absence of government subsidies or regulations (like ethanol used to fuel cars and low-interest mortgages for people who are unlikely to pay them back). Collusive capitalism has become visible to the public and increasingly defines capitalism in the public mind.

Another change in objective conditions has been the emergence of great fortunes made quickly in the financial markets. It has always been easy for Americans to applaud people who get rich by creating products and services that people want to buy. That is why Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were American heroes a century ago, and Steve Jobs was one when he died last year.

When great wealth is generated instead by making smart buy and sell decisions in the markets, it smacks of inside knowledge, arcane financial instruments, opportunities that aren't accessible to ordinary people, and hocus-pocus. The good that these rich people have done in the process of getting rich is obscure. The benefits of more efficient allocation of capital are huge, but they are really, really hard to explain simply and persuasively. It looks to a large proportion of the public as if we've got some fabulously wealthy people who haven't done anything to deserve their wealth.

The objective changes in capitalism as it is practiced plausibly account for much of the hostility toward capitalism. But they don't account for the unwillingness of capitalists who are getting rich the old-fashioned way—earning it—to defend themselves.

I assign that timidity to two other causes. First, large numbers of today's successful capitalists are people of the political left who may think their own work is legitimate but feel no allegiance to capitalism as a system or kinship with capitalists on the other side of the political fence. Furthermore, these capitalists of the left are concentrated where it counts most. The most visible entrepreneurs of the high-tech industry are predominantly liberal. So are most of the people who run the entertainment and news industries. Even leaders of the financial industry increasingly share the politics of George Soros. Whether measured by fundraising data or by the members of Congress elected from the ZIP Codes where they live, the elite centers with the most clout in the culture are filled with people who are embarrassed to identify themselves as capitalists, and it shows in the cultural effect of their work.

Another factor is the segregation of capitalism from virtue. Historically, the merits of free enterprise and the obligations of success were intertwined in the national catechism. McGuffey's Readers, the books on which generations of American children were raised, have plenty of stories treating initiative, hard work and entrepreneurialism as virtues, but just as many stories praising the virtues of self-restraint, personal integrity and concern for those who depend on you. The freedom to act and a stern moral obligation to act in certain ways were seen as two sides of the same American coin. Little of that has survived.

To accept the concept of virtue requires that you believe some ways of behaving are right and others are wrong always and everywhere. That openly judgmental stand is no longer acceptable in America's schools nor in many American homes. Correspondingly, we have watched the deterioration of the sense of stewardship that once was so widespread among the most successful Americans and the near disappearance of the sense of seemliness that led successful capitalists to be obedient to unenforceable standards of propriety. Many senior figures in the financial world were appalled by what was going on during the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008. Why were they so silent before and after the catastrophe? Capitalists who behave honorably and with restraint no longer have either the platform or the vocabulary to preach their own standards and to condemn capitalists who behave dishonorably and recklessly.

And so capitalism's reputation has fallen on hard times and the principled case for capitalism must be made anew. That case has been made brilliantly and often in the past, with Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom" being my own favorite. But in today's political climate, updating the case for capitalism requires a restatement of old truths in ways that Americans from across the political spectrum can accept. Here is my best effort:

The U.S. was created to foster human flourishing. The means to that end was the exercise of liberty in the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.

"Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole" is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements "earned success." Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.

Earning a living for yourself and your family through your own efforts is the most elemental form of earned success. Successfully starting a business, no matter how small, is an act of creating something out of nothing that carries satisfactions far beyond those of the money it brings in. Finding work that not only pays the bills but that you enjoy is a crucially important resource for earned success.

Making a living, starting a business and finding work that you enjoy all depend on freedom to act in the economic realm. What government can do to help is establish the rule of law so that informed and voluntary trades can take place. More formally, government can vigorously enforce laws against the use of force, fraud and criminal collusion, and use tort law to hold people liable for harm they cause others.

Everything else the government does inherently restricts economic freedom to act in pursuit of earned success. I am a libertarian and think that almost none of those restrictions are justified. But accepting the case for capitalism doesn't require you to be a libertarian. You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don't need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.

People with a wide range of political views can also acknowledge that these interventions do the most harm to individuals and small enterprises. Huge banks can, albeit at great expense, cope with the Dodd-Frank law's absurd regulatory burdens; many small banks cannot. Huge corporations can cope with the myriad rules issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and their state-level counterparts. The same rules can crush small businesses and individuals trying to start small businesses.

Finally, people with a wide range of political views can acknowledge that what has happened incrementally over the past half-century has led to a labyrinthine regulatory system, irrational liability law and a corrupt tax code. Sweeping simplifications and rationalizations of all these systems are possible in ways that even moderate Democrats could accept in a less polarized political environment.

To put it another way, it should be possible to revive a national consensus affirming that capitalism embraces the best and most essential things about American life; that freeing capitalism to do what it does best won't just create national wealth and reduce poverty, but expand the ability of Americans to achieve earned success—to pursue happiness.

Reviving that consensus also requires us to return to the vocabulary of virtue when we talk about capitalism. Personal integrity, a sense of seemliness and concern for those who depend on us are not "values" that are no better or worse than other values. Historically, they have been deeply embedded in the American version of capitalism. If it is necessary to remind the middle class and working class that the rich are not their enemies, it is equally necessary to remind the most successful among us that their obligations are not to be measured in terms of their tax bills. Their principled stewardship can nurture and restore our heritage of liberty. Their indifference to that heritage can destroy it.

—Mr. Murray is the author of "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010" and the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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2)The 1.5% Presidency

Growth stumbles for the third time in this Less Than Great Recovery.

President Obama didn't comment on Friday's report of declining growth in the second quarter, and that's no surprise. The economic story of his Presidency is by now familiar: a plodding recovery that has taken its third dip in three years and is barely raising incomes for most Americans.

"We're still in a position where we are pulling ourselves out of the very deep hole caused by the Great Recession, and there is still—of course—a great deal of anxiety in the country about the economy,'' said White House press secretary Jay Carney. He's right about the anxiety, but if only we were "pulling ourselves out."

The reality is that the Great Recession ended three long years ago. In this Less Than Great Recovery, the economy shows promise for one good quarter then slows back down. As the nearby chart shows, this is the third straight year of sputtering recovery. Growth of 4.1% in the fourth quarter declined to 2% in the first and now 1.5% in the second. The stock market rose as investors bet that the lousy growth will inspire more Federal Reserve easing.

Related Video

Editorial board member Steve Moore on the second quarter GDP report that shows slowing growth. Photos: Getty Images

The sliver of good news is that private growth, which is what really matters, was up a slightly less anemic 1.8%, and government spending fell by a minus-1.4% from the first quarter. Housing is also now less of a drag on GDP. But this makes the paltry 1.5% growth more disconcerting, because it means that other parts of the economy are growing less rapidly than they ought to be.

Consumption ticked up only 1.5%, for example, down from 2.4% in the first quarter. This may reflect that wages and salaries are barely keeping pace with inflation. Another negative is that business inventories climbed unexpectedly in the second quarter, which often presages a decline in business spending in the next quarter to clear the shelves.

It's important to understand how unusual this kind of weak recovery is. Deep recessions like the one from December 2007 to June 2009 are typically followed by stronger recoveries, as there is more lost ground to make up.

The most recent comparable recession occurred in 1981-1982. Yet as the nearby chart shows, the Reagan expansion exploded with a 9.3% quarter and kept up a robust pace for years. By the 12th quarter of expansion, growth popped up to 6.4.%. At this stage of the Reagan expansion, overall GDP was 18.5% higher versus 6.7% for the Obama recovery, according to Congress's Joint Economic Committee.

Even comparing this recovery with the average since the end of World War II, the Obama growth rate is well below the norm of 15.2%. The U.S. is running about $1.5 trillion of economic output behind where it should be.

This may sound like an abstraction, but it is the difference between a robust job market and lost opportunity for millions of Americans. It is the difference between a small federal budget deficit and more than $1 trillion for four straight years. It is the difference between a rising or falling poverty rate.

Mr. Obama is running for re-election as a tribune of the middle-class against "millionaires and billionaires," but his Presidency has been the worst for the middle class and the poor in decades.

By the way, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis chose this quarter to revise the post-2008 GDP numbers based on more detailed data, and it shows that the recovery was even weaker in 2010 than previously estimated. The growth rate for the first two quarters of 2010 were revised sharply downward, and for the year to 2.4% from 3%. The revisions also show the trough in 2009 was not as deep as originally thought.

This further discredits the value of the government's 2009-2010 stimulus spending bonanza. Business investment and inventory buildup were both revised downward for 2010, which suggests that the stimulus did very little to boost business confidence.

The Keynesian theory is that government spending will boost consumer demand in a way that spurs more business spending to meet it. But instead the $830 billion stimulus seems to have created a short-term GDP blip based on government expenditures, but no growth takeoff. In return for blowing out the federal balance sheet, Americans got more debt but not more growth. And Mr. Obama says he wants $100 billion in more stimulus now?

The tragedy of the Obama Presidency is that it ignored the supply side: the producers, the risk-takers, the salary earners who put in 50 and 60 hours a week to get ahead. They have been battered by Washington, and no matter how much government tries to conjure growth with more spending and easier monetary policy, businesses won't produce and workers won't work if government threatens to confiscate returns.

Banks aren't lending as much as they might in no small part because of Dodd-Frank's penalties and regulations. Investors aren't investing or are sending their money abroad because the President is promising to wallop them with huge tax increases on January 1. Businesses aren't purchasing as much new equipment, or hiring as many workers, because they don't know what the real costs will be from new regulation and ObamaCare.

A new report by the Progressive Policy Institute—run by Democrats—finds that if business investment had tracked the normal trend rate during this recovery, investment would be $1.4 trillion higher. The report fingers regulation on business and American investors finding better returns abroad. Yet Mr. Obama's solution is to raise the capital gains and dividend tax rates.

In this policy environment, the miracle is that the U.S. economy is still growing as much as it is. That is a tribute to the natural desire of Americans to better themselves, to create the next Apple, or to discover the next technique for pulling natural gas out of shale rock.

Added to the record of the last four years, the 1.5% second quarter should solidify in the public mind that President Obama has failed on the economy. The challenge for Mitt Romney and the Republicans is to explain how we got to this pass—going back to the mistakes of the Bush years—why Mr. Obama's policies failed, and why their ideas can restore a prosperity that we once took for granted.


2a)  A younger Obama considered his first employer, “the enemy”
By Jazz Shaw

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.”

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