Did you know that Barack Obama was a member of the leading socialist party? In a small omission, Barack Obama apparently forgot to include in his resume, he entered politics as a socialist. This just keeps getting better and better. Barack Obama was active participant in the 1990s of the Chicago New Party and, importantly, the Chicago DSA, a group of socialists affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.
Barack Obama attended and participated in meetings the Chicago New Party and the Chicago DSA, the local affiliate of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Barack Obama sought the endorsement of the Chicago DSA.
Barack Obama actively used the endorsement from the Chicago DSA.
Barack Obama won his DSA-endorsed and backed campaign to secure his seat in the Illinois State Senate.
Barack Obama continued his involvement with the Chicago DSA and received their endorsements in subsequent campaigns.
‘You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” So began an April 1995 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that went on to direct prospective home-buyers fitting this profile to a group of far-left “community organizers” called ACORN, for assistance. In retrospect, of course, encouraging customers like this to buy homes seems little short of madness.
Militant ACORN
At the time, however, that 1995 Chicago newspaper article represented something of a triumph for Barack Obama. That same year, as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.
I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists…the only truly radical community organization.”
The Associated Press has probed Barack Obama’s earmarking activities in the Illinois state senate and discovered two grants that put state money in the hands of Michelle Obama’s cousin. Capers Funnye received $75,000 from Obama for his organization, Blue Gargoyle, for adult literacy and youth group activities:
As a state senator, Democrat Barack Obama awarded $75,000 in government grants to a Chicago social service organization led by a rabbi who is also his wife’s cousin, records show.
In 1999, Obama arranged for $50,000 for adult literacy and counseling services offered on Chicago’s South Side by a group called Blue Gargoyle. A $25,000 grant for the group’s youth services followed the next year.
The group’s executive director when the grants were awarded was Capers Funnye, a South Side rabbi and Michelle Obama’s first cousin once removed.
Funnye (pronounced fun-NAY) said Monday there was nothing improper about the way Blue Gargoyle obtained the grants. Obama did not encourage him to apply for the money, he said, and Funnye denied using family connections to pressure Obama to approve the application.
So Obama had no idea that his wife’s cousin ran this group when he earmarked the money? That seems very, very difficult to believe. Funnye had to apply for the grants, and his name would have been on the application. Just the act of filing that application with Obama makes it clear that he sought favors from Obama, specifically Obama, and that Obama granted them.
Funnye claims that the earmarks (called “member initiatives” in Illinois) met legislative guidelines, but none existed during that period for earmarks. Legislators could spend taxpayer money without restriction and used the system to reward constituencies — and cronies. The governor wanted a major public-works bill passed, and in order to get that, made hundreds of millions of dollars available for politicians like Obama to spread around. In other words, the governor (Republican Jim Edgar at that time) paid off the legislature with earmarks that strengthened their political standing in their districts.
Nothing demonstrates the corrosive nature of earmarking, and why that process leads to runaway government spending, better than this example. Edgar couldn’t get that public-works bill passed without spreading pork around the legislature. (It should be remembered, though, that Edgar is known for having reduced government overall.) Pork greases the gears that allow big spending bills to pass, and even worse, it creates a permanent class of legislators who rarely face significant challenges in their districts. It’s not the amount of money wasted in pork spending that undermines democracy — it’s the mechanism itself.
Barack Obama reveled in that system. He sent money to friends and family (Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright were two more recipients of his largesse) as an Illinois state senator, and as a US Senator, he sent money to his wife’s employer. Obama requested more than a million dollars a day in earmarks in his first three years in the Senate. He’s not part of the solution to Washington’s corruption — he’s part of the problem.
Prosecutors move to delay Rezko sentencing
By MIKE ROBINSON – 14 hours ago
CHICAGO (AP) — Federal prosecutors have asked to delay the sentencing of convicted fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko indefinitely.
The motion filed Monday afternoon signals the key fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Barack Obama and other Illinois Domocrats may be telling prosecutors what he knows about corruption in state government.
It asks U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve to delay the sentencing “while the parties engage in discussions that could affect their sentencing postures.” The language is all but an acknowledgment that Rezko is talking.
Rezko was convicted of launching a $7 million scheme to use his clout with Blagojevich’s administration to pressure a contractor and firms wanting to do business with the state for kickbacks.
From NoQuarter: No Quarter has a huge dosier on the subject of Obama and Rezko.
And yes, Obama was involved in Illinois state government in 2003 through 2005, the time during which Rezko was defrauding the Illinois State Teachers’ Pension fund and bankrolling certain politicians. I quote what I wrote in my last essay on this subject:
2005 is the year Rezko helped Obama purchase the mansion in the Kenwood neighborhood in inner city Chicago. And 2003 is the year Rezko held a fundraiser for US Senate candidate Barack Obama at his posh home in Wilmette, Illinois. Another event of significance in 2003 is Illinois Governor Blagojevich’s appointment of Rezko to the Board that oversees the $30 billlion dollar teachers’ pension fund. This is the same year during which Barack Obama was appointed to the Illinois state Senate Committee on Pensions and Investments by his friend and mentor state Senator Emil Jones. According to the Superseding Indictment filed by Fitzgerald in December 2006, Obama’s appointment to this state Senate committee coincided with Rezko’s attempts to leverage his influence with “high-ranking State of Illinois officials” to oppose a pension consolidation plan that would complicate the efforts of Rezko and Levine to defraud investment firms and the pensions funds of Illinois. Notice also how Obama sat on the state Senate Pensions and Investments Board when Rezko funneled money he defrauded from an investment firm that sought access to the Illinois pensions fund to Obama through Joseph Aramanda, whose son worked as an intern in Obama’s US Senate office in 2005, the year Rezko advised and assisted the Obamas when they purchased the Kenwood mansion they could not afford.
I guess there will be surprises in October. And Obama thought Ayers was his only problem. Let us reintroduce the electorate to Antoin “Tony” Rezko.
Why would the NYT want to whitewash the obvious long-running friendship between Ayers and Obama? Win or lose, all the dirt on BO will come out, but having him as POTUS will make their subscriptions soar and the MSM’s ratings skyrocket.
As others have noted, today’s New York Times carries a story on the relationship between Barack Obama and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist, Bill Ayers. The piece serves as a platform for the Obama campaign and Obama’s friends and allies. Obama’s spokesman and supporters’ names are named and their versions of events are presented in detail, with quotes. Yet the article makes no serious attempt to present the views of Obama critics who have worked to uncover the true nature of the relationship. That makes this piece irresponsible journalism, and an obvious effort by the former paper of record to protect Obama from the coming McCain onslaught.
The title of the article when it first appeared on the web last night was, “Obama Had Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close.” That was quickly changed to, “Obama and the ‘60’s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths.” Perhaps the first headline made the paper’s agenda a bit too obvious. Even so, the new title simply parrots the line of Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt that the two first met through an early “education project” and since have simply “encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood.” Or, as New York Times reporter Scott Shane puts it at the head of his article, since an initial lunchtime meeting in 1995, “their paths have crossed sporadically…at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project (i.e. the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.”
There is nothing “sporadic” about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here, one that does not depend on the quality of personal friendship or number of hours spent in the same room together (although the article greatly underestimates that as well).
Shane’s article buys the spin on Ayers’ supposed rehabilitation offered by the Obama campaign and Ayers’ supporters in Chicago. In this view, whatever Ayers did in the 1960’s has somehow been redeemed by Ayers’ later turn to education work. As the Times quotes Mayor Daley saying, “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.” The trouble with this is that Ayers doesn’t view his terrorism as a mistake. How can he be forgiven when he’s not repentant? Nor does Ayers see his education work as a repudiation of his early radicalism. On the contrary, Ayers sees his education work as carrying on his radicalism in a new guise. The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ “small schools” project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.
Obama was perfectly aware of Ayers’ radical views, since he read and publically endorsed, without qualification, Ayers’ book on juvenile crime. That book is quite radical, expressing doubts about whether we ought to have a prison system at all, comparing America to South Africa’s apartheid system, and contemptuously dismissing the idea of the United States as a kind or just country. Shane mentions the book endorsement, yet says nothing about the book’s actual content. Nor does Shane mention the panel about Ayers’ book, on which Obama spoke as part of a joint Ayers-Obama effort to sink the 1998 Illinois juvenile crime bill. Again, we have unmistakable evidence of a substantial political working relationship. (I’ve described it in detail here in “Barack Obama’s Lost Years.”
The Times article purports to resolve the matter of Ayers’ possible involvement in Obama’s choice to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, yet in no way does so. Clearly, the article sides with those who claim that Ayers was not involved. Yet the piece has no credibility because it simply refuses to present the arguments of those who say that Ayers almost surely had a significant role in Obama’s final choice.
Glad to see CNN report on this. Obviously, Anderson didn’t listen to the piece when Kurtz talked about how Obama and Ayers were going to “improve” education. They also didn’t get into how the CAC blew millions of dollars. Oh well, it’s a start.
