Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (12 page)

Rogers has known Mr. and Mrs. O. for more than a decade. How did they meet? You can thank those Ivy League connections—the same connections that Michelle Obama griped would keep her “on the periphery.” Rogers’s ex-husband, John W. Rogers Jr., chief executive of multi-billion-dollar Ariel Capital Management, played basketball with Michelle O.’s brother, Craig Robinson, at Princeton. Mr. Rogers also served as a campaign finance bundler for Team Obama. The Rogerses were among seventy-nine top fundraisers who, according to the
Washington Post
, tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each. The bundlers recruited a total of more than 27,000 donors to write maximum-limit checks for $2,300 each.
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These deep-pocketed rainmakers represent one of the endless, glaring examples of Obama-pocrisy. In 2007, then Senator Barack Obama boldly declared in a
Chicago Tribune
op-ed piece:

To set an example in the 2008 presidential election, I am refusing to accept campaign contributions from registered federal lobbyists, political-action committees, and I won’t take contributions bundled by lobbyists. I’m also reporting any contributions that are bundled—whether it’s from a small-town doctor or a chief executive officer. If we can open up the system and pull aside the curtain of secrecy, then we might be able to start changing the way Washington works.
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But of course, “no lobbyist money” depends on the meaning of “lobbyist.” The Obama campaign sheepishly “clarified that the policy of Obama’s campaign is to not accept campaign contributions from registered federal lobbyists. He is accepting contributions from registered state lobbyists.” Ah. Obama himself explained the quid pro quos of bundled donations, put together by “bundlers” who amass campaign contributions for politicians, in his column assailing this disclosure-evading campaign finance practice: “These lobbyists are delivering millions in bundled contributions to the very politicians from whom they are seeking favorable votes or legislation. . . . It is no coincidence that the best bundlers are often granted the greatest access, and access is power in Washington.”

Indeed, “it is no coincidence” that Mrs. Obama is now using her perch in the White House to reward wheeler-dealers like Desirée Rogers who helped pave her husband’s path to power—and her own. And it is no coincidence that the Obamas’ water-carriers in Congress are fighting reasonable proposals to keep the First Lady’s public policy-related meetings transparent to the public. Preemptively playing the victim card on Mrs. O.’s behalf, Democrat Congressman William Clay argued in a heated House debate in March 2009 that a Republican open-meetings amendment would be seen by the president as “an attack on his wife.”
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Remember: In Chicago politics and in Obama-land, there are no coincidences.

VALERIE JARRETT: GODMOTHER, CONFIDANTE, SLUMLORD

After graduating from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, the bitterly oppressed Michelle Obama headed back to her native Chicago to join the high-powered law firm of Sidley Austin—the fifth-largest in the world. There, she griped about having to do the duties of a second-year associate while she was a second-year associate—demonstrating the trademark attitude of entitlement and inflated ego that led the law partner who recruited her to later describe her as “perennially dissatisfied.”
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At Sidley Austin, she mentored and dated Barack Obama. She also schmoozed an elite mover and shaker who would become the Obamas’ consigliere for life.

Democrat activist and real estate mogul Valerie Jarrett was a protégée of Chicago mayor Richard Daley. A member of Hyde Park’s upper crust who hobnobbed with other wealthy black families in Martha’s Vineyard, Jarrett later closely consulted with her great uncle and Clinton crony super-lobbyist Vernon Jordan for campaign advice. The Obamas don’t make a move without Jarrett. She has been dubbed “the other side of Barack’s brain”
²¹
and “Barack’s Rock.”
²²
In an October 2008 interview with the
Chicago Tribune
, President Obama said of his relationship with Jarrett: “I trust her completely.”
²³

Michelle Obama shares that same reverence and devotion. “I can count on someone like Valerie to take my hand and say, ‘You need to think about these three things,’” she told the
New York Times
. “Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.”
²⁴
Fellow Chicago crony Rahm Emanuel said on ABC News’s
This Week
with George Stephanopoulos: “People should know that Valerie Jarrett is—and people do know—she is a very dear friend of the president-elect and a valuable ally of his, not only prior to running for president, in his Senate life, and just personally for Michelle and Barack.”
²⁵
Jarrett is also tight with Desirée Rogers.
Chicago
magazine reported in 2000 that Jarrett and Rogers were two-thirds of a “high-profile Chicago sisterhood,” along with publishing heir Linda Johnson Rice (who featured Mrs. Obama on the covers of
Ebony
and
Jet
magazines, donated $18,500 to the Obama Victory Fund, and kicked in $50,000 for the presidential inauguration).
Chicago Reporter
publisher Laura Washington called the women “politically savvy, tough-as-nails operators.”
²⁶

After serving as finance committee chair for Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, senior advisor to the presidential campaign, and co-chair of the Obama-Biden presidential transition team, Jarrett was named “Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison.”
²⁷
Whatever her title, Jarrett is the Obamas’ political godmother.

Jarrett’s father was a renowned hematologist/pathologist, her mother a child development expert. Her maternal grandfather, Robert Rochon Taylor, was the first black man to head the Chicago Housing Authority, and his father was the first black graduate of M.I.T., who went on to hold a top position at the Tuskegee Institute.
²⁸
Educated at Stanford and University of Michigan Law School, Jarrett eschewed corporate law after a stint in the 1980s and instead became immersed in the Chicago political scene. As Daley’s deputy chief of staff, Jarrett met Michelle Robinson (then engaged to Barack Obama) and persuaded her to leave her private law firm for a public-sector stint as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. According to Obama lore, Michelle didn’t take the job until Jarrett agreed to meet Barack for a two-hour “grilling” in July 1991.
²⁹
With characteristic narcissism, Mrs. Obama reportedly told Jarrett: “My fiancé wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive.”
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Ask not what you can do for your law firm, but what your law firm can do for you!

From then on, everywhere that Jarrett went, Michelle Obama was sure to go. As the
New York Times
admiringly put it: “Ms. Jarrett swept the young lawyers under her wing, introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own, and eventually secured contacts and money essential to Mr. Obama’s long-shot Senate victory.” As we shall see, those contacts were also essential to Michelle Obama’s career. When Jarrett left Mayor Daley’s office to chair the Chicago Transit Authority, Mrs. Obama trailed her and finagled a job as head of a citizens’ advisory board. When Daley promoted Jarrett to head the Department of Planning and Development, Obama (with no expertise or training in planning or development) followed her again.

Jarrett served on numerous boards, including a prestigious position as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago Medical Center. She began serving on the board in 1996, ascended to vice-chair in 2002, and took the helm as Chair in 2006. Jarrett was also Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees at the University of Chicago, which she first joined in 2001. It is no coincidence that Mrs. Obama soon found herself smack dab in the middle of the university/corporate/community-organizing nexus forged by Jarrett.

What fawning social magazine profiles and fashion photo spreads of Jarrett leave out is the abominable history of her failures and neglect as a developer and manager of low-income housing. Jarrett’s official White House biography proclaims that she “became the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Habitat Company on January 31, 2007. She had served as Executive Vice President of Habitat for 12 years.”
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You will not, however, find pictures on the White House website of the dilapidated Grove Parc Plaza apartment complex that Jarrett’s Habitat Company oversaw. Located just south of the University of Chicago, the federal Section 8 residential development had been built in the 1960s to address affordable housing demands. Today, the Grove Parc units are virtually uninhabitable and facing demolition.

Three cheers for community organizing, eh?

In an uncommonly hard-hitting investigative piece, the
Boston Globe
’s Binyamin Appelbaum blew the whistle on the rodent-infested, sewage-clogged Chicago slums run by the Obamas’ most trusted confidante. Jarrett refused to answer any questions about Grove Parc, “citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat’s former business partners.” A “continuing duty,” presumably, to whitewash the inconvenient truth about the failed public-private partnerships the Obamas continue to promote in the White House:

“They are rapidly displacing poor people, and these companies are profiting from this displacement,” said Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle of Southside Together Organizing for Power, a community group that seeks to help tenants stay in the same neighborhoods.

“The same exact people who ran these places into the ground,” the private companies paid to build and manage the city’s affordable housing, “now are profiting by redeveloping them.”
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In 2006, while Valerie Jarrett was executive vice president of Grove Parc’s management firm Habitat Company, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex a bottom-of-the-barrel 11 on a 100-point scale. Another Habitat-mismanaged property called Lawndale Restoration was so run-down that city officials urged the federal government to take over the complex.

Jamie Kalven, a veteran Chicago housing activist, told the
Boston Globe
about Barack Obama: “I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his involvement with that community.” Kalven’s hopes will likely be dashed. As Chicago goes, so goes the nation. Obama has made a career of rewarding failure, and no amount of overhyped “Hope” will change that. He sponsored a plethora of bills in the state Senate benefitting affordable housing developers.
³³
In February 2009, he unveiled a plan to set up a $1 billion Housing Trust Fund “to rehabilitate housing in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods.”
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“Trust Fund?” Try slush fund, bottomless pit, and eternal stimulus for the real estate moguls posing as saviors of urban America.

In one of those endless Chicago coincidences, Grove Parc Plaza Apartments—now targeted for demolition as a result of years of neglect by Obama’s developer friends—sits in the shadows of the site that was proposed for the city’s 2016 Olympics Stadium. Jarrett served as vice chair of Chicago’s 2016 Summer Olympics bid committee before moving to the White House, where she headed a new “White House Office on Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Sport” with an undisclosed budget and staff. In September 2009, Jarrett and the Chicago boys and girls at the White House pulled out all the stops to win the 2016 Summer Games bid. It was the vision of Jarrett and Mrs. Obama’s former boss, Mayor Richard M. Daley, to cap off his graft-tainted career with a glorious bread and circuses production.

The head of the Chicago 2016 bid committee was Patrick Ryan, chairman of the Aon Corporation and a co-chair of Obama’s deep-pocketed presidential inaugural committee. (Under Ryan’s watch at Aon, the company settled a massive corruption probe with three states for $190 million.
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) Also on both of those committees: Obama confidante Penny Pritzker, who in addition chairs the Olympic Village Subcommittee and is president of Pritzker Realty Group—a mega-developer in Illinois that stood to reap untold millions in project work if the Daley Machine/White House campaign succeeded. Former Pritzker executive and Obama campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt was also on the bid committee—and serves as Mayor Daley’s chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.

The price tag for Chicago residents—whose city faced a half-billion budget deficit as their government overlords pursued their Olympic-sized folly: at least $5 billion in taxpayer funds.
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As sports subsidy watchdog Neil deMause properly characterized the Olympic pursuit: “The winner gets to be on the hook for billions in dollars worth of velodromes and infrastructure; the losers get to watch on TV for free.”
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Jarrett used her position at the White House to try and finagle federal Housing and Urban Development subsidies to bolster the Obamalypics bid.
³⁸
Despite overwhelming opposition from Chicago residents, Jarrett marshaled every last crony to the cause and organized a celebrity-studded junket to Copenhagen to pitch the International Olympics Committee. President Obama, Mrs. Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jarrett, and Mayor Daley were among those who flew to Denmark in confident anticipation of clinching the Games. On October 2, 2009, after “emotional” pitches from the Obamas, the IOC eliminated Chicago in the first round of voting. Chicago politico David Axelrod blamed “long-standing interpersonal relationships” among IOC members and bidders from other countries, and others griped about politically correct desires to “spread the Olympic wealth” beyond the United States.