Money may not be the root of all evil but is it possible to get a candidate of the people in a capitalistic democracy? Take the ever popular Obama as a case in point.
Obama projects a populist persona to the public, but is the Harvard trained lawyer with over $100,000 invested in JP Morgan Chase (According to his financial disclosure form filed in May of 2006) the real Obama?
This is the same JP Morgan company that has donated over $50,000 to Obama
according to Open Secrets.org.
The same JP Morgan Chase Company that is the largest financial backer of BlueLinx Holdings Inc., the largest wood distributor in the United States. The same BlueLinx that investigations by Greenpeace and Rainforset Action Network has shown is illegally exporting timber out of "Indonesia's critically endangered rainforests," according to CorpWatch.org.
A Business Week editorial in 2005 entitled "Indonesia's Chainsaw Massacre", stated that Indonesia's ravaged rainforests are "disappearing at the rate equivalent to the area of 300 soccer fields every hour. The country has lost 70% of the ancient forest already and, at the present rate what remains will be gone within 15 years." Before Senator Obama's two little girls will ever have a chance to see them. They will become like dreams of her father's childhood. However, according to returns on JP Morgan'as $165 million loan to BlueLinx they may benefit from their father's assests in the company that is paying for its destruction.
According to Ilyse Hogue director of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) "JP Morgan Chase has built its financial empire by making investments of mass destruction like BlueLinx. She says as quoted by CorpWatch, "Illegal logging in Indonesia is both an environmental and humanitarian crisis. It is morally reprehensible that America's second largest bank is connected with corrupt timber cartels that are directly responsible for the wholesale destruction of the most fragile and endangered forest ecosystem on Earth."
In his book "Dreams From My Father" Mr. Obama says of his boyhood in Indonesia, "That's how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy's life." It would seem that Senator Obama has the sensitivity and intelligence to know that an ancient rainforest holds an untold bountuy of its own. It would seem that he would have the sensibility to know that if you have assests in a company who supports and profits from the plunder of others that the dirt is also on your hands.
Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe when he learns of this he will sell his assests in JP Morgan, maybe he will send back their donations to his campaign. Maybe he will have the character he portrays. Maybe there really is only one Obama, the our nation needs so badly right now. One who is able to put character and integrity ahead of profit and personal gain.
Like a line in one of Paul Simon's songs, "A nation turns it's hungry eyes" to you, Mr. Obama. Don't let us down and turn out to be just another "hack politician."