Young Barack Obama had seen what this dynamic did to his stepfather. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” Lolo told Barack’s mother. Lolo did understand. “She didn’t know what it is like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself… without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.”2 There’s a term that broadly describes this kind of economic arrangement. The people of Indonesia and Brazil lived under “crony capitalism.”
