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While working as a community
organizer, Obama was repeatedly asked to join a Christian
congregation but begged off.
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WHAT Exactly Does A "Community
Organizer" Do? |
Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves
that question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community
organizers intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers
with poor credit. In the name of fairness to minorities, community
organizers occupy private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and
confront executives at their homes -- and thereby force financial
institutions to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to
low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help
to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a
sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and
funding the organizers who do it. |
|
New York |
|
Obama graduated from
Columbia College in 1983 and briefly entered the commercial world,
staying in New York for a
little more than a year after graduation. He
was employed by
Business International Corporation before moving to
the activist New York
Public Interest Research Group.
Business International Corporation (BI) was a publishing and advisory
firm dedicated to assisting American companies in operating abroad.
In 1986, Business International was acquired by The Economist Group in
London, and eventually merged with The Economist Intelligence Unit.
Obama's recollection of
this period demonstrates his tendency towards puffery, writing in
"Dreams...," (p. 135), that his first job after graduating Columbia was
as a "research assistant" in "a consulting house to multinational
corporations," with "my own office, my own secretary" and "myself in a
suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand."
But as one of his former
fellow workers (and an Obama supporter) has written, it wasn't a
consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on
international business, "a bit of a sweatshop" where casual attire and
low pay were the norm. His job was essentially copyediting "in the
cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen."
Here's an
interesting account of the BI period from several of Obama's
co-workers.
Obama rejected the commercial world and joined the agitators at
The New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Created by Ralph
Nader in the 1970s, NYPIRG is New York State's largest student-directed
consumer, environmental and government reform organization. It is
a not-for-profit group, established to effect policy reforms while
training students and other New Yorkers to be advocates. Since 1973, NYPIRG has played the key role in fighting for more than 120 public
interest laws and executive orders.
During this period, Obama spent three
months working for a NYPIRG offshoot up in Harlem, trying to convince
the minority students at City College about the importance of recycling. |
|
Why Chicago? |
| In 1984, after Columbia but before Harvard, Obama moved to Chicago.
"I came because of Harold Washington," he
says. "I wanted to do community organizing, and I couldn't
think of a better city than one as energized and hopeful as Chicago was
then." |
|
The
Project |
The Chicago Period began in 1985, when some
leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black
neighborhood in the south side of Chicago and
Obama applied for the position as a community organizer
for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community
Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. The "Project" was
funded with a $25,000 grant by Bill Ayers'
Woods Fund.
Here is an
account from the Gamaliel Foundation, another community organizing
group.
Obama was 24 years
old, unmarried, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine
African-American community.
Stories have varied wildly. Jerry Kellman, who hired him and is now a
strong supporter, says it was "$10,000 a year and a $2,000 car
allowance". Obama himself has given different numbers; his memoir
says $10,000 (as well as the car), in his "Wesleyan speech, he gave it
as "$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car", and when he
announced his candidacy for president, it was "a group of churches had
offered me a job as a community organizer for $13,000 a year".
However, Ryan Lizza, then at The New Republic, reported that "Jean Rudd
of the Woods Fund...had provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to
hire Obama". . Ari Berman reported in The Nation that the "[Woods Fund]
gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project, which hired
Obama CBS2 in Chicago ran a story with a document showing that Obama's
planned 1987 salary was $25,000, a number that the Obama campaign
confirmed whilst insisting that his original salary was $13,000.
So accounts, to put it mildly, vary. This isn't just a minor
discrepancy; Obama's entire campaign narrative begins with his
tremendous self-sacrifice in taking on what at the time was a reasonable
salary for a young college graduate. Either Obama has lied about
his starting salary or he has neglected to mention that his salary
nearly doubled within 18 months.
Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the
Alinsky model of community
agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to "rub raw the sores of
discontent," in Alinsky's words.
Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or
master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the
agendas of the People’s Organization. "The organizer," Alinsky
wrote, "is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man
can reach -- to create, to be a 'great creator,' to play God."
One of Obama's early mentors in the Alinsky method was Mike Kruglik, who
had
this to say to an interviewer of The New Republic, about Obama:
"He was a natural, the undisputed master of
agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a
rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not
living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be
aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal
questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing
down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they
could make things better."
The agitator's job, according to Alinsky, is first to bring folks to the
"realization" that they are indeed miserable, that their misery is the
fault of unresponsive governments or greedy corporations, then help them
to bond together to demand what they deserve, and to make such an
almighty stink that the dastardly governments and corporations
will see imminent "self-interest" in granting whatever it is that will
cause the harassment to cease.
In these methods, euphemistically labeled "community organizing," Obama
had a four-year education, which he often says was the best education he
ever got anywhere.
For
three years Barack Obama was the director of Developing Communities
Project, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago’s
far south side. He has also been a consultant and instructor for
the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute working throughout the
Midwest. |
|
Alinsky |
For those unfamiliar with Saul Alinsky, his writings on radicalism and
social change will chill the bones of not only conservatives, but more
moderate liberals:
"Any revolutionary CHANGE must be preceded by a
passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward CHANGE among the
mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so
lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to
let go of the past and CHANGE the future."
"This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.
To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the
system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American
families –- more than seventy million people -– whose income range from
$5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]."
And what word comes out of Obama's mouth the most -- why, CHANGE!
Here is a wonderful
backgrounder on Hillary, Obama and the cult of Alinsky -- the weird
thing, it's published in the Tehran Times in English. |
|
Gamaliel |
The connections are numerous. Gregory Galluzzo, Gamaliel's co-founder
and executive director, served as a trainer and mentor during Obama's
mid-1980s organizing days in Chicago. The Developing Communities
Project, which first hired Obama, is part of the Gamaliel network.
Obama became a consultant and eventually a trainer of community
organizers for Gamaliel. (He also served as a trainer for ACORN.)
And he has kept up his ties with Gamaliel during his time in the U.S.
Senate.
After hearing about Barack Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright,
Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and the militant
activists of ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now), it should be clear to everyone that his extremist roots run
deep.
But the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has yet another
connection with the world of far-Left radicalism. Obama has long
been linked -- through foundation grants, shared political activism,
collaboration on legislation and tactics, and mutual praise and support
-- with the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, one of the least known
yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based
"community organizers."
The same separatist, anti-American theology of liberation that was so
boldly and bitterly proclaimed by Obama's pastor is shared, if more
quietly, by Obama's Gamaliel colleagues. The operative word here
is "quietly." Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and
Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of
being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as
well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear
to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics.
Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth
techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his
position as a board member of Chicago's supposedly nonpartisan Woods
Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very
moment he most needed their support to boost his political career.
It's high time for these shadowy, perhaps improper, ties to receive a
dose of sunlight.
Read more --
Stanley Kurtz |
|
Friends
Of The
Parks |
Obama’s early Chicago days
opens with the touching story of his efforts to build a partnership
with Chicago’s "Friends of the Parks, so that parents in a blighted
neighborhood could have an inviting spot for their kids to play.
However, as the L. A. Times puts it, "Obama’s task was to help far South
Side residents press for improvement" in their communities. Part
of Obama’s work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much
in the mold of radical groups like ACORN. |
|
Altgeld
Gardens |
|
Next, Obama worked at a Chicago housing project, Altgeld Gardens, where he refined
his skills.
Here, Obama worked as an
ethnic activist, helping the
impoverished black community wring more money and services from the
government. That government money was wrecking the morals of the
housing-project residents seems obvious from his book, but Obama never
comes out and says it. Numerous white moderates assume that a man
of Obama’s superlative intelligence must be kidding when he espouses his
cast-iron liberalism on race-related policies, but they don’t understand
the emotional imperative of racial loyalty to him.
His mentor during this period was the veteran local agitator, Hazel
Johnson, who
disputes the version of events at
Altgeld Gardens that Obama wrote of in his book and tells audiences at
his political gatherings. |
|
Madeleine
Talbot |
| An L. A. Times piece
says some claim that Obama’s book, "Dreams from My Father,"
exaggerates his accomplishments in spearheading an asbestos cleanup at
the low-income housing project. Obama, these critics say, denies
due credit to Johnson, who claims she was the one who actually
discovered the asbestos problem and led the efforts to resolve it.
Read carefully, the L. A. Times story leans toward confirming this
complaint against Obama, yet the story’s emphasis is to affirm Obama’s
important role in the battle. Speaking up in defense of Obama on
the asbestos issue is Madeleine Talbot, who at the time was a leader at
Chicago ACORN. Talbot, we learn, was so impressed by Obama’s
organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff. |
|
Obama Gets Religion |
In 1988, while working as a community organizer, Obama was repeatedly asked to
join Christian congregations but
begged off.
"I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives ..." he
wrote.
When Obama first undertook his agitating
work in Chicago's South Side poor neighborhoods, he was un-churched.
Yet his office was in a Church and most of the folks he needed to
agitate and organize were Church people -- pastors and congregants --
who took their churches and their church-going very seriously.
Again and again, he was asked by pastors and church ladies, "Where do
you go to Church, young man?" It was a question he dodged for a
while, but finally he relented and
joined a church, to get some "street cred," according to his second
book, "Audacity."
Obama didn't join just any church, but a huge black nationalist church,
the
Trinity United Church of Christ
(UCC). Its pastor, Rev.
Jeremiah A. Wright,
unabashedly preaches a "black" gospel.
The crosscurrents
appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could
not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but
could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to
solve. "It was a powerful program, this cultural community," he
wrote, "one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my
own brand of organizing."
So it is very clear. Obama joined Trinity UCC for political
reasons. |
|
Harvard
Law School |
|
Obama interrupts his
activist career to attend Harvard Law
School. |
|
Summer In The
City |
| Obama is a summer intern at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP in
Chicago where
he meets Michelle Robinson, his summer
adviser -- and Michelle's friend and fellow staffer, the left-wing
terrorist Bernadine Dohrn. |
|
Harvard
Law
Review |
|
Obama’s story first
surfaced publicly in February 1990, when he was elected as the first
black president of The Harvard Law Review. An initial wire service
report described him simply as a 28-year-old, second-year student from
Hawaii who had "not ruled out a future in politics"; but in the days
that followed, newspaper reporters grew interested and produced long,
detailed profiles of Obama.
The coverage prompted a call to him from Jane Dystel, a gravelly-voiced
literary agent, who suggested Obama write a book proposal. Then
she got him a contract with Poseidon Press, a now-defunct imprint of
Simon & Schuster. When he missed his deadline, she got him another
contract and a $40,000 advance from Times Books.
Obama
graduated from Harvard Law School in
1991 and received his Juris Doctor law degree,
magna cum laude. |
|
Judson
Miner |
|
Obama moves back to Chicago where he
takes a job with the civil rights law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland.
Judson Miner had been counsel to Chicago's late black mayor, Harold
Washington. Miner was also classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the
University of Chicago law school in 1967 where they were both were
involved in anti-war activity.
Obama is a member of the Illinois Bar. He was
admitted on December
17, 1991. He is voluntarily inactive, with no record of discipline
or pending proceedings. You can check the status of Illinois
lawyers at www.iardc.org.
Obama lied twice on his application to the Illinois Bar by omission.
He neglected to provide his "also know as" name of Barry Soetoro and
information regarding his six years of abusing drugs.
People who knew Obama in the early 1990s said he made it clear that he
aspired to run for public office. For that, the firm, now called
Miner, Barnhill & Gallard, was a good place to start.
The firm has been a force in Chicago politics. Carol Moseley
Braun, one of Obama's predecessors in the U.S. Senate from Illinois,
briefly worked there.
Miner was counsel to the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington.
Allison Davis, a co-founder of the firm who since has left, is a major
Chicago developer.
Miner, Davis and other partners and clients have been a regular source
of campaign money for Obama, giving him $100,000 over the years.
Miner said he organized fundraisers for Obama's first state Senate run,
his 2000 congressional campaign and his 2004 U.S. Senate race.
Davis, who could not be reached for comment, has been a partner with
other Chicago developers who also are clients of the firm and are Obama
backers. One Davis partner was Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a major Obama
patron who has now been convicted in a federal public corruption case.
Over the next several years, Obama represents victims of housing and
employment discrimination.
The law firm says Obama logged 3,723 billable hours during his tenure
from 1993 to 2004, most of it during the first four years.
In 1995, the year his first book came out, Obama started his successful
run for the Illinois state Senate, and stopped working full-time once he
took office in 1997. He remained associated with the firm until he
was elected to the U.S. Senate nearly eight years later. |
|
Project Vote! |
By 1991, when Obama, law degree in hand,
returned to Chicago...black voter registration and turnout in the
city were at their lowest points since record keeping began.
Six
months after he took the helm of Chicago's Project Vote!, those
conditions had been reversed. Within a few months, Obama, a tall,
affable workaholic, had recruited staff and volunteers from black
churches, community groups, and politicians.
He helped train 700
deputy registrars, out of a total of 11,000 citywide. And he began
a saturation media campaign with the help of black-owned Brainstorm
Communications. The group's slogan -- "It's a Power Thing" -- was
ubiquitous in African-American neighborhoods. "It was
overwhelming," says Joseph Gardner, a commissioner of the Metropolitan
Water Reclamation District and the director of the steering committee
for Project Vote! "The black community in this city had not been
so energized and so single-minded since Harold died."
"I think
it's fair to say we reinvigorated a slumbering constituency," says
Obama. "We got people to take notice."
As for Project Vote!
itself, its operations in Chicago have officially closed down.
Barack Obama has returned to work on his book, which he plans to
complete this month. "We won't let the momentum die," he says.
"I'll take personal responsibility for that. We plan to hold
politicians' feet to the flames in 1993, to remind them that we can
produce a bloc of voters large enough that it cannot be ignored."
Nor can Obama himself be ignored. The success of the
voter-registration drive has marked him as the political star the Mayor
should perhaps be watching for. "The sky's the limit for Barack,"
says Burrell.
Some of Daley's closest advisers are similarly
impressed. "In its technical demands, a voter-registration drive
is not unlike a mini-political campaign," says John Schmidt, chairman of
the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority and a fundraiser for
Project Vote! "Barack ran this superbly. I have no doubt he
could run an equally good political campaign if that's what he decided
to do next."
Obama shrugs off the possibility of running for
office. "Who knows?" he says. "But probably not
immediately." He smiles.
Project Vote of course was an
affiliate of the radical community group ACORN,
to which Obama was long connected.
When Obama successfully ran
for an Illinois State Senate seat in 1995/96 he was endorsed by DSA.
He also joined and was endorsed by the New Party, a front for ACORN, DSA
and the Committees of Correspondence. |
|
Woods
Fund |
Barack Obama
served on the board of directors of Woods Fund of Chicago from 1993
to 2001. During that time, the tax exempt foundation made some
interesting grants, including one to Obama's church, Trinity United
Church of Christ, headed by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Grants were also
made to ACORN, a left wing voter registration group and to a partnership
for constructing low income housing. The fund also used Northern
Trust for financial services, which is the same company that provided
Obama his 2005 mortgage.
In 2001 the board of directors included Obama, William Ayers, the former
Weather Underground radical terrorist, and serving as chairman was
Howard J. Stanback who headed New Kenwood LLC, a limited liability
company founded by now-convicted felon Tony Rezko and Allison Davis,
Obama's former boss at the law firm of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland. |
|
Chicago
Law
School |
|
He also began
teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, although he declined to pursue
a tenure-track post, hoping to save time for politics.
Here is Obama's Constitutional Law III, 1996 Final Examination.
His examination review is
here. All of the exam questions appear to deal with an issue
connected with minority activism (race, gender preference), which I
suppose one would expect to be the extent of Obama’s interest in
"constitutional" law.
During the presidential campaign, Obama would consistently and falsely
claims that he was a law professor. The Sun-Times reported that,
'Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's primary [Senate] campaign
said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is
not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school.
In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles.
Details matter.' In academia, there's a significant difference:
professors have tenure while lecturers do not.
The University of Chicago Law School has now posted
a statement
declaring his claims semantically sound: "The Law School has received
many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as
'Senior Lecturer.'
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama
served as a instructor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from
1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during
which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are
considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as
professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of
Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies
adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior
Lecturers have high-demand careers in politics or public service, which
prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as an
instructor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a
full-time tenure-track position, but he declined." |
| Law School Faculty Hated Obama |
According to TheBlogProf
blog, the University of Chicago Law School faculty hated Obama,
"because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty
meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a
political stepping stool."
Is the Obama's resume accurate when it
comes to his career and qualifications? I can corroborate that
Obama's "teaching career" at Chicago was, to put it kindly, a sham.
I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago
Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about
"Barry." Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn't
even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call
from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him
on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him
he didn't have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give
him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly
an adjunct.
According to my professor friend, he had the lowest
intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he
was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was,
he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to
never be published while in school (publication is or was a
requirement).
Consider this: Barack Obama, former editor of the
Harvard Law Review, is no longer a "lawyer." He
surrendered his
license back in 2008 possibly to escape charges that he "fibbed" on his
bar application.
A senior lecturer is one thing. A fully
ranked law professor is another. According to the Chicago
Sun-Times, "Obama did NOT 'hold the title' of a University of Chicago
law school professor." Barack Obama was NOT a Constitutional Law
professor at the University of Chicago.
The University of
Chicago released a statement in March, 2008 saying Sen. Barack Obama
(D-Ill.) "served as a professor" in the law school, but that is a title
Obama, who taught courses there part-time, never held, a spokesman for
the school later confirmed.
"He did not hold the title of
professor of law," said Marsha Ferziger Nagorsky, an Assistant Dean for
Communications and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago School
of Law.
The former Constitutional senior lecturer cited the U.S.
Constitution recently during his State of the Union Address.
Unfortunately, the quote he cited was from the Declaration of
Independence, not the Constitution.
By the way, the promises Obama mentions, are not a notion, our founders named
them unalienable rights. The document is our Declaration of Independence
and it reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness."
And this is the same guy who lectured the Supreme
Court moments later in the same speech?
When you are a phony it's
hard to keep facts straight. |
|
The
Book |
If one had to name Barack Obama's chief accomplishments in public
life, his two books would outweigh anything he has done in politics.
The New York Times had a fascinating article,
The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, on the front page of Sunday's
paper. The piece points out that Obama's attraction to the masses
is driven not by what he has accomplished in the real world (especially
in the Senate), but by his ability to tell a tale -- his own.
Unspoken by the NYT is that this phenomena does have its place in
history -- it is the very definition of "cult of personality."
After he was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law
Review. He was approached by an agent, Jane Dystel, who got him a
contract for a book.
Obama’s
original plan was to write a book about race relations
(what else?), but, sitting down to
write, he found his mind "pulled toward rockier shores." So the
book became more personal -- the record of an interior journey, as he
put it in the introduction, "a boy’s search for his father, and through
that a search for a workable meaning for his life as a black American."
Obama had been given free use of an office at the University of Chicago,
along with a law school fellowship and the aforementioned advance, to
finish his first manuscript. Obama missed his deadline, and Dystel promptly got
him another contract and a $40,000 advance for the same book.
The New York Times
reported that Obama's first agent (the one he dumped) got him a a
second book deal with Random House after the first one with Poseidon
Press fell through.
The Times article neglects to mention that Obama received then Random
House publisher Peter Osnos describes as a six figure advance "(about
$125,000, I am told)" from Poseidon. According to Osnos, Obama
would have had to return all or part of the first advance. Did he?
And when?
Obama and Dystel worked mostly by telephone and by manuscripts sent by
Federal Express between New York and Chicago. Obama, an inveterate
journal writer who had published poems in a college literary magazine
but had never attempted a book, struggled to finish. His half-sister,
Maya Soetoro-Ng, said he eventually retreated to Bali for several months
with his wife, Michelle, "to find a peaceful sanctuary where there were
no phones."
Ah, retreating to Bali after getting a second $40,000 advance and while
receiving income from a law school fellowship -- a tough life indeed. We
can all empathize. Oh, and about the "truthfulness of the book"?
In the introduction, Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms,
composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of
chronological order. He was writing at a time well before a recent
series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs. "He was
trying to be careful of people's feelings," said Deborah Baker, the
editor on the first paperback edition of the book. "The fact is, it all
had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."
That's how we judge "truth" now? Ignore the lies used to build the
foundation for the benefit of the quest for the nebulous "larger truth"?
This article is looking more and more like an apologia for upcoming
disclosures that Obama's story as told by himself has more than a few
holes in it. |
|
Anna Helps With "Dreams..." |
Anna
helped Barack write his book, "Dreams from My Father," while she was
battling cancer. Obama wrote:
During the writing of this book,
she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood,
careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to
explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character.
Obama noted in the book that it was Ann rather than his natural
father who taught him about his African American heritage.
She
would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings
of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me
stories of schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read books
handed down from wealthier white schools but who went on to become
doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to
wake up and study in the mornings…
Every black man was Thurgood
Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena
Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great
inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were
strong enough to bear.
Obama noted in the book that he might have
written a different book if he had known she was dying when he wrote it:
I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her
illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on
the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single
constant in my life.
In my daughters I see her every day, her
joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I
mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most
generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to
her.
His mother was his first class and
race propagandist and mentor. |
|
Who Wrote Dreams And Why It Matters |
Jack Cashill said his
involvement in this occasionally harrowing literary adventure began in
July 2008, entirely innocently. A friend sent him some short excerpts
from Dreams and asked if they were as radical as they sounded. Cashill
bought the book, located the excerpts, and reported back that, in
context, the excerpts were not particularly troubling.
But he did
notice something else. The book was much too well written. Cashill had
seen enough of Obama's interviews to know that he did not speak with
anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.
About six weeks later, for entirely unrelated reasons, Cashill picked up
a copy of Bill Ayers 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. Ayers, he discovered,
writes very well and very much like "Obama."
In mid-September,
after considerable digging, Cashill wrote a few speculative articles for
American Thinker and other online journals and discovered that he was
not alone in his suspicions.
Looking for some scientific
verification, Cashill consulted Patrick Juola of Duquesne, a leading
authority in the field of literary forensics. Juola, however, advised
him
against relying on computer analysis on a subject this sensitive. "The
accuracy just isn't there," he told him. He encouraged
Cashill instead "to
do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective
work." Cashill took his advice.
The first question Cashill had to
resolve was whether the 33 year-old Barack Obama was capable of writing
what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by
an American politician."
The answer is almost assuredly "no."
Very interesting piece -- worth reading
-- go
here . . . |
|
Mortgage
Meltdown |
Sources point to Obama as a possible starting point
to the domino affect that lead to the housing crises we are now
facing. Check the provided links and judge for yourself.
Obama had a part in the lawsuit that started the
government on a course of forcing lenders to give more loans to
those who had poor credit. Lending companies were forced to
come up with imaginative ways of fulfilling the quota that was
required. Sub-prime lending was born as a result. The
mortgage crises was forecast by many who were able to look beyond
the quota.
This New York Times
article (.pdf)
clearly forecast the mortgage meltdown.
In a move that could help
increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income
consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit
requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other
lenders, ... under increasing pressure from the Clinton
Administration.
"Fannie Mae has expanded home ownership for
millions of families in the 19902 by reducing ddown payment
requirements," said Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman and chief
executive officer. "Yet there remain too many borrowers whose
credit is just a notch below what our underwriting has required who
have been relegated to paying significantly higher mortgage rates in
the so-called subprime market."
Demographic information on
these borrowers is sketchy. But at least one study indicates
that 18 percent of the loans in the subprime market went to black
borrowers, compared to 5 percent of loans in the conventional loan
market.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of
lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may
not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the
government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an
economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of
the savings and loan industry of the 1980s.
"From the
perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift
industry growing up around us," said Peter Wallison, a resident
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "If they fail,
the government will have to step up and bail them out, the way it
stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry."
|
|
More Mortgage
Meltdown |
What exactly does a "community organizer" do?
Barack Obama's rise has left many Americans asking themselves that
question. Here's a big part of the answer: Community organizers
intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to customers with poor
credit.
In the name of fairness to minorities, community organizers occupy
private offices, chant inside bank lobbies, and confront executives at
their homes -- and thereby force financial institutions to direct
hundreds of millions of dollars in mortgages to low-credit customers.
In other words, community organizers help to undermine the US economy by
pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama
has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.
The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community
Reinvestment Act -- a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise
amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.
CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers,
often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has
provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing
banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to
often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.
Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has
complied with CRA -- and approval can be held up by complaints filed by
groups like ACORN.
In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to
use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract
hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from
America's financial institutions.
Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further
in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world
markets.
Fannie and Freddie acted in response to Clinton administration pressure
to boost homeownership rates among minorities and the poor.
However compassionate the motive, the result of this systematic
disregard for normal credit standards has been financial disaster.
One key pioneer of ACORN's subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline
Talbott -- an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She
was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae's
mortgage policies.
Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in "direct
action" -- organizers' term for their militant tactics of intimidation
and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of
ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to
push for a "living wage" law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested
for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her
drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.
Important! --
Read the details from Stanley Kurtz |
|
Mortgage Meltdown -- Full Circle |
The NAACP is
accusing Wells Fargo and HSBC of forcing blacks into subprime
mortgages while whites with identical qualifications got lower rates.
Class-action lawsuits were to be filed against the banks Friday in
federal court in Los Angeles, Austin Tighe, co-lead counsel for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told The
Associated Press.
Black homebuyers have been 3 1/2 times more
likely to receive a subprime loan than white borrowers, and six times
more likely to get a subprime rate when refinancing, Tighe said.
Blacks still were disproportionately steered into subprime loans when
their credit scores, income and down payment were equal to those of
white homebuyers, he said.
Similar NAACP lawsuits are pending
against a dozen other subprime lenders.
"This is systematic,
institutionalized racism," Tighe said. "Once you take out factors
relative to income and credit risk, the only difference between the
borrowers is the color of their skin."
Tighe estimated that "tens
of thousands" of blacks had been forced into bad loans, but said it was
difficult to gauge the scope of the problem because banks keep much of
their internal data private. The lawsuits could force banks to
divulge closely guarded information, such as how banks can determine the
race of a loan applicant and how federal bailout funds are being spent.
The NAACP is seeking reforms from the banks such as increased
transparency in the loan process, educational outreach and internal
training.
File under damned if you do --
damned if you don't. |
|
Politics |
In 1995, when
Obama gets the chance to run for the
state senate in a district that includes Hyde Park, the home of the
university and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side,
he jumps at it.
A longtime, widely-revered matron of the civil rights movement named
Alice Palmer had held the seat for a number of years, but she announced
that she wanted to run for Congress. So, Obama seized the
opportunity and proclaimed his intention to run for Alice's open seat.
And, we're off! |
| |
©
Copyright Beckwith 2010
All right reserved
|
