Economics 101: Did Obama Pass it?
Posted by americana83 on July 14, 2008
In his book, Dreams From My Father, Obama makes this commentary regarding the release of a line of bathroom products by the Nation of Islam (Power brand) and advertised in it’s Newspaper, The Final Call:
The newspaper also carried…promotions for a line of toiletries–toothpaste and the like–that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community.
After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest. That the POWER campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business–the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years. (Page 201)
The problems an upstart company faces going against an established giant like Crest in its mainstay product would be the same for anyone! No upstart could instantly gain the brand loyalty, quality and economies of scale that an established firm has. Further “you” haven’t been kept out of the game for over 300 years. Anyone who has never been exposed to invention techniques, college, or who didn’t have parents who ran a business are just as economically impared as those who can trace their family line back 300+ years. Why? Because economic sense and entreprenuership are NOT genetic, they are learned!
Further, Obama neglects some important factors regarding the fizzle of the Nation of Islam(NOI)’s POWER line:
The parent company, NOI is widely considered racist and antisemitic
The target market is going to be very small
The brand loyalty of Crest is well established
They could never match the price as an upstart and make money
Their radicalism alienated many potential customers
As a side note, Obama noted that he “would occasionally pick up the (NOI’s) paper” p201, and yet it must have been quite frequently because he goes on to note the gradual diminishing of the ads for the POWER line.
On page 202, he goes on to lament that the “unifying furvor” garnered from Farrakhan’s speeches wasn’t able to carry over into the every day choices of blacks, and he blames this on “decisions forced by a market economy.”
If this is the “economic prowess” that Obama will bring to the white house, that race and the free market are the sum of the problem, then how on earth will he lead this country out of a recession? With the taxes and governmental spending explosions he promotes? Coupled with his radical mentality, I do believe he will take this country’s economy out of the recession…
and bury it in a coffin.
This entry was posted on July 14, 2008 at 9:52 AM and is filed under Barack Obama, communism, Election, Election 2008, Islam, Obama, Presidential, Racism, social spending. Tagged: barack, capitalism, communism, deficit, Dreams from my father, Economics, Election, Farrakhan, free market, Islam, Lois, Nation of Islam, NoI, Obama, power, race, Racism, radical, Recession, socialism, spending. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
