This is a placeholder text
Group text
by SitasMom on 21 September 2012 - 02:09
http://washingtonexaminer.com/chapter-i-a-childhood-of-privilege-not-hardship/article/2508416
Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."
That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.
In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said they would repeat Obama's racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators recommended his classes.
His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted 14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than Obama.
Some former faculty colleagues today describe Obama as disengaged, doing only what was minimally required and almost never participating in faculty activities.
And, unlike others on the Chicago Law School faculty who published numerous articles in legal journals, Obama's byline did not appear in a single legal journal while he taught there.
By comparison, more prominent legal scholars on the Chicago faculty wrote frequently. Federal Judge Richard Posner published 132 legal articles from 1993 to 2004, and federal Judge Frank Easterbrook published 32 legal articles from 1992 to 2004.
Obama has often cited his days at the law school as an important part of his preparation for the presidency. At a March 30, 2007, fundraiser, for example, he said, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution."
From 1992 until 2004, Obama taught three courses: "Current Issues in Racism and the Law," "Voting Rights and the Democratic Process," and "Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process."
Obama wasn't a professor; he was a lecturer, a position that the Chicago Law School said in 2008 "signifies adjunct status." He was elevated to a "senior lecturer" in 1996, the year he was first elected to the Illinois Senate in Springfield.
The new faculty status put him on par with Posner, Easterbrook and a third federal judge, Diane Wood. As the Chicago Law School explained, senior lecturers "have high-demand careers in politics or public service which prevent full time teaching."
Senior lecturers were, however, still expected to participate in university activities. University of Chicago Law School Senior Lecturer Richard Epstein told The Washington Examiner that Obama did not do so.
Obama, Epstein said, "did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone."
Robert Alt, a former Obama student, echoes Epstein, telling the Examiner that "I think it's fair to say he wasn't engaged in the intellectual life of Chicago outside of the classroom."
Alt is director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Rule of Law Programs and a senior legal fellow.
Alt said, "When you have faculty giving faculty lectures, you'd literally have packed rooms in which it's not unusual to have just all the big names of the university. It wasn't unusual to see Easterbrook and Posner, and it wasn't unusual to see the Nobel laureates attending as well."
Even so, Alt said, "I never remember ever seeing Obama in the audience."
Obama was also a no-show for the faculty workshops, nonclassroom lectures and moot court cases judged by sitting members of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals of the U.S. Current Chicago Law School professor Lisa Bernstein said faculty lecturers are still encouraged to participate in as many such events as possible.
The pattern of minimal performance at the Chicago campus was not an exception to the rule for Obama. In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing, Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the chamber.
When then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made Obama's state Senate voting record an issue in their Democratic presidential primary contest in 2007, the New York Times said it found at least 36 instances when Obama was the lone "present" vote or was one of six or fewer lawmakers casting that vote.
And during his lone term as a U.S. senator, according to Gov Track.us: "From Jan 2005 to Oct 2008, Obama missed 314 of 1300 recorded or roll call votes, which is 24.0%. This is worse than the median of 2.4%."
Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."
That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.
In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said they would repeat Obama's racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators recommended his classes.
His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted 14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than Obama.
Some former faculty colleagues today describe Obama as disengaged, doing only what was minimally required and almost never participating in faculty activities.
And, unlike others on the Chicago Law School faculty who published numerous articles in legal journals, Obama's byline did not appear in a single legal journal while he taught there.
By comparison, more prominent legal scholars on the Chicago faculty wrote frequently. Federal Judge Richard Posner published 132 legal articles from 1993 to 2004, and federal Judge Frank Easterbrook published 32 legal articles from 1992 to 2004.
Obama has often cited his days at the law school as an important part of his preparation for the presidency. At a March 30, 2007, fundraiser, for example, he said, "I was a constitutional law professor, which means, unlike the current president, I actually respect the Constitution."
From 1992 until 2004, Obama taught three courses: "Current Issues in Racism and the Law," "Voting Rights and the Democratic Process," and "Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process."
Obama wasn't a professor; he was a lecturer, a position that the Chicago Law School said in 2008 "signifies adjunct status." He was elevated to a "senior lecturer" in 1996, the year he was first elected to the Illinois Senate in Springfield.
The new faculty status put him on par with Posner, Easterbrook and a third federal judge, Diane Wood. As the Chicago Law School explained, senior lecturers "have high-demand careers in politics or public service which prevent full time teaching."
Senior lecturers were, however, still expected to participate in university activities. University of Chicago Law School Senior Lecturer Richard Epstein told The Washington Examiner that Obama did not do so.
Obama, Epstein said, "did the minimal amount of work to get through. No one remembers him. He was not a participant in luncheons or workshops. He was here and gone."
Robert Alt, a former Obama student, echoes Epstein, telling the Examiner that "I think it's fair to say he wasn't engaged in the intellectual life of Chicago outside of the classroom."
Alt is director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Rule of Law Programs and a senior legal fellow.
Alt said, "When you have faculty giving faculty lectures, you'd literally have packed rooms in which it's not unusual to have just all the big names of the university. It wasn't unusual to see Easterbrook and Posner, and it wasn't unusual to see the Nobel laureates attending as well."
Even so, Alt said, "I never remember ever seeing Obama in the audience."
Obama was also a no-show for the faculty workshops, nonclassroom lectures and moot court cases judged by sitting members of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals of the U.S. Current Chicago Law School professor Lisa Bernstein said faculty lecturers are still encouraged to participate in as many such events as possible.
The pattern of minimal performance at the Chicago campus was not an exception to the rule for Obama. In the state Senate during the same years he was lecturing, Obama voted "present" nearly 130 times, the most of any legislator in the chamber.
When then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made Obama's state Senate voting record an issue in their Democratic presidential primary contest in 2007, the New York Times said it found at least 36 instances when Obama was the lone "present" vote or was one of six or fewer lawmakers casting that vote.
And during his lone term as a U.S. senator, according to Gov Track.us: "From Jan 2005 to Oct 2008, Obama missed 314 of 1300 recorded or roll call votes, which is 24.0%. This is worse than the median of 2.4%."
by SitasMom on 21 September 2012 - 02:09
http://washingtonexaminer.com/chapter-iii-the-1997-speech-that-launched-obama/article/2508419
Few doubt that Barack Obama's stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.
But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.
Obama was a newly elected Illinois state senator in 1997 when he addressed an audience that included many of Chicago's most powerful political insiders and activists, nonprofit executives, business movers and shakers, and philanthropic funders.
The occasion was a meeting of the Futures Committee, an elite Chicago civic leadership group created by the Local Initiatives Support Corp., or LISC, a liberal, nonprofit, low-income-housing activist group.
No authenticated text of Obama's speech -- which was billed beforehand by LISC in a promotional flier obtained by The Washington Examiner as "a local perspective on effective communities" -- is now known to exist.
But people interviewed by the Examiner who heard him speak say Obama laid out a powerful vision for a political strategy that ultimately reshaped housing activism on the Left, first in Chicago and then nationwide, even as it paved the way for an accommodation between the corrupt political machine of Mayor Richard M. Daley and its long-standing nemesis, the city's coalition of white liberal reformers and black community organizers.
Obama described a practical strategy for building on the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, contained in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, plus federal, state and local funds and programs, to create new public-private development partnerships.
The LIHTC encouraged the partnerships needed to unite government officials and progressive nonprofit activists behind the cause of building thousands of new affordable-housing units, first on Chicago's poor South Side and then, as the movement spread, to similar neighborhoods across the nation.
Obama spoke at a time of great ferment on the Left in which federal housing policies became a central focus for political activism.
He was drawing from the same well that had produced the Community Reinvestment Act, relaxed federal standards for mortgage qualifications, and creative financial packaging of subprime loans, but doing so in a manner uniquely matched to conditions on the political ground of Chicago.
Public-private partnerships for affordable-housing projects were not a new idea to some of Obama's listeners, since philanthropic groups like the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation had been promoting the concept for several years.
Not coincidentally, it was a MacArthur vice president, Rebecca Riley, who arranged for Obama to speak at the Valentine's Day gathering.
Obama's innovation was to expand the concept beyond simply building affordable apartments and high-rises. It encompassed a cradle-to-grave vision of providing for the material needs of the low-income families residing in the new housing, including their schools, child care, job training, medical coverage, clothing and food.
In turn, the residents would campaign and vote for the officials advocating the partnerships, adding significantly to their political power.
Left unstated was the underlying reality that politically connected developers who built the housing would profit handsomely and could be expected to gratefully give millions of dollars in campaign contributions to politicians like Obama who made it all possible.
Chicago thus became the proving ground for Obama's vision, which, according to LISC spokesman Joel Bookman, "really changed the direction of community development in Chicago and ultimately nationally."
It was an irresistible combination of money, politics and idealism that also offered endless opportunities for greed and tragic abuse of the poor.
That made it an ideal tool for uniting the Daley machine with the reform coalition that had elected Harold Washington as the city's first African-American mayor in 1983. (Richard M. Daley, who reinvigorated the machine and became mayor in 1989, was the son of the machine's founder, Richard J. Daley, who died in 1976.)
The key to Obama's vision in Chicago, according to Marilyn Katz, was the city's most famous radical: "Remember, this is the community of Saul Alinsky. And most of the first housing groups were the Alinsky groups who were still banging at the door."
Katz, an influential Chicago public relations executive and longtime Obama friend and political operative, has visited the White House more than two dozen times since 2009.
Like so many in the liberal power base that served as a springboard for Obama, Katz had activist roots stretching back to her days as a Students for a Democratic Society operative in Chicago.
A Futures Committee handout for the Valentine's Day meeting titled, "Barack Obama's principles of community development," said the proposed program had "to organize around production, not just consumption."
Such words were a clarion call to activists raised on a thousand variations of the Marxist labor theory of value and capitalist alienation.
"He really questioned the kind of surrogate capitalist strategy that most of the nonprofit community-based organizations had been pursuing," Katz told theExaminer.
"And he suggested that a real estate strategy for redevelopment of communities was not enough and that you had to really go into the quality-of-life issues, education, wealth building, amenities that were the hallmarks of any community needs," she said.
Obama's vision "changed the direction and the nature of the 123 groups that were working in the various communities in the city. It was a very influential speech," she said.
The LISC vision speech was a critical turning point for Obama because his position with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland put him at ground zero with what Katz called "the tangential and interlocking circles between the Left-liberal political community, the urban redevelopment community, the legal community and politicos" who controlled Chicago, then and to this day.
It was from that point that Obama cultivated the personal, professional and political relationships that would serve him well all the way to the White House.
Few doubt that Barack Obama's stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.
But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.
Obama was a newly elected Illinois state senator in 1997 when he addressed an audience that included many of Chicago's most powerful political insiders and activists, nonprofit executives, business movers and shakers, and philanthropic funders.
The occasion was a meeting of the Futures Committee, an elite Chicago civic leadership group created by the Local Initiatives Support Corp., or LISC, a liberal, nonprofit, low-income-housing activist group.
No authenticated text of Obama's speech -- which was billed beforehand by LISC in a promotional flier obtained by The Washington Examiner as "a local perspective on effective communities" -- is now known to exist.
But people interviewed by the Examiner who heard him speak say Obama laid out a powerful vision for a political strategy that ultimately reshaped housing activism on the Left, first in Chicago and then nationwide, even as it paved the way for an accommodation between the corrupt political machine of Mayor Richard M. Daley and its long-standing nemesis, the city's coalition of white liberal reformers and black community organizers.
Obama described a practical strategy for building on the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, contained in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, plus federal, state and local funds and programs, to create new public-private development partnerships.
The LIHTC encouraged the partnerships needed to unite government officials and progressive nonprofit activists behind the cause of building thousands of new affordable-housing units, first on Chicago's poor South Side and then, as the movement spread, to similar neighborhoods across the nation.
Obama spoke at a time of great ferment on the Left in which federal housing policies became a central focus for political activism.
He was drawing from the same well that had produced the Community Reinvestment Act, relaxed federal standards for mortgage qualifications, and creative financial packaging of subprime loans, but doing so in a manner uniquely matched to conditions on the political ground of Chicago.
Public-private partnerships for affordable-housing projects were not a new idea to some of Obama's listeners, since philanthropic groups like the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation had been promoting the concept for several years.
Not coincidentally, it was a MacArthur vice president, Rebecca Riley, who arranged for Obama to speak at the Valentine's Day gathering.
Obama's innovation was to expand the concept beyond simply building affordable apartments and high-rises. It encompassed a cradle-to-grave vision of providing for the material needs of the low-income families residing in the new housing, including their schools, child care, job training, medical coverage, clothing and food.
In turn, the residents would campaign and vote for the officials advocating the partnerships, adding significantly to their political power.
Left unstated was the underlying reality that politically connected developers who built the housing would profit handsomely and could be expected to gratefully give millions of dollars in campaign contributions to politicians like Obama who made it all possible.
Chicago thus became the proving ground for Obama's vision, which, according to LISC spokesman Joel Bookman, "really changed the direction of community development in Chicago and ultimately nationally."
It was an irresistible combination of money, politics and idealism that also offered endless opportunities for greed and tragic abuse of the poor.
That made it an ideal tool for uniting the Daley machine with the reform coalition that had elected Harold Washington as the city's first African-American mayor in 1983. (Richard M. Daley, who reinvigorated the machine and became mayor in 1989, was the son of the machine's founder, Richard J. Daley, who died in 1976.)
The key to Obama's vision in Chicago, according to Marilyn Katz, was the city's most famous radical: "Remember, this is the community of Saul Alinsky. And most of the first housing groups were the Alinsky groups who were still banging at the door."
Katz, an influential Chicago public relations executive and longtime Obama friend and political operative, has visited the White House more than two dozen times since 2009.
Like so many in the liberal power base that served as a springboard for Obama, Katz had activist roots stretching back to her days as a Students for a Democratic Society operative in Chicago.
A Futures Committee handout for the Valentine's Day meeting titled, "Barack Obama's principles of community development," said the proposed program had "to organize around production, not just consumption."
Such words were a clarion call to activists raised on a thousand variations of the Marxist labor theory of value and capitalist alienation.
"He really questioned the kind of surrogate capitalist strategy that most of the nonprofit community-based organizations had been pursuing," Katz told theExaminer.
"And he suggested that a real estate strategy for redevelopment of communities was not enough and that you had to really go into the quality-of-life issues, education, wealth building, amenities that were the hallmarks of any community needs," she said.
Obama's vision "changed the direction and the nature of the 123 groups that were working in the various communities in the city. It was a very influential speech," she said.
The LISC vision speech was a critical turning point for Obama because his position with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland put him at ground zero with what Katz called "the tangential and interlocking circles between the Left-liberal political community, the urban redevelopment community, the legal community and politicos" who controlled Chicago, then and to this day.
It was from that point that Obama cultivated the personal, professional and political relationships that would serve him well all the way to the White House.
by SitasMom on 21 September 2012 - 02:09
http://washingtonexaminer.com/chapter-iv-for-the-slumlords-defense-barack-obama-esq./article/2508420
Writing in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama said he became "a civil rights lawyer" because "to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more."
There was indeed "something more" to Obama's legal career, but it wasn't civil rights litigation at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he was employed for a decade.
"He spent about half his time working with Bill Miceli and my former partner, Allison Davis, and that team," senior partner Judson Miner told The Washington Examiner. Most of the entries on Obama's client list for the firm from that period were in real estate, construction and finance.
Miceli and Davis were the partners in charge of the firm's housing and real estate practices. Davis would later leave the firm to join Obama mentor Tony Rezko in the real estate development business.
In March 1994, a year before "Dreams" was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court that has heretofore escaped examination by the national media.
In this case, Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents. The defendant was the Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., controlled by Bishop Arthur Brazier, a South Side Chicago preacher and political operator.
Brazier's burgeoning real estate empire included a low-income housing project at 6223 South University. Today, MapQuest describes the Woodlawn neighborhood as "quaint and sedate." But in the winter of 1994, it was a frigid hell.
Brazier was closely allied with Obama and his firm, not least because Davis was on WPIC's Board of Directors. Davis was also the corporation's registered agent, and he received the court summons when the city filed suit on the South University apartments.
Brazier's WPIC had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex's 15 crumbling apartments. On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago's official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below.
Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.
In court documents reviewed by The Washington Examiner, Daniel W. Weil, commissioner of Chicago's Buildings Department, slammed WPIC for multiple municipal code violations, including "failure to maintain adequate heat," failure "to provide every family unit with approved heating facilities," and "failure to provide adequate" supplies of either hot or cold running water.
Things were so bad that the city's outraged corporation counsel declared that "the levying of a fine is not an adequate remedy" and asked the court for a permanent injunction against WPIC, appointment of a receiver and imposition of a lien on WPIC to pay for repairs, attorneys' fees and court costs.
But Obama did his work so well that in the end, on March 3, 1994, the court simply fined WPIC $50. Only then did Obama tell the court of the forcible removal of tenants in the bitter cold.
An experienced Chicago housing attorney who reviewed the case at theExaminer's request said $50 fines against politically powerful slumlords were not uncommon at that time. The lawyer, who currently works for the city, asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.
The attorney termed the forcible removal of the residents in the frigid Chicago winter "outrageous," and said it looked like "a way to avoid a lengthy eviction process by law. And if the tenants had leases, they should have been bought out with a cash payment in return for leaving the premises early."
The South University apartments eventually became part of a real estate syndication deal that Obama helped negotiate. Brazier remained as the controlling general partner, while the syndicated investors became limited partners.
The merging of Brazier's insider contacts and influence with the limited partners' financial resources enabled them to benefit collectively from bigger, more profitable deals than they would have each been able to do individually.
A Chicago housing expert with direct knowledge of WPIC's real estate dealings told the Examiner that the syndication deal involving the apartments likely was being negotiated when the building lost heat.
"The property was one of five or six that was bundled together into a partnership and syndicated with tax credits," he said. It was a "prelude to being put into the partnership, which it ultimately was for purposes of the refinancing and syndication."
The WPIC case illustrates how Obama functioned at the center of a historic accommodation then developing between the Daley machine and its traditional opponents among the city's liberal reformers.
Lubricating the deal was a flood of public and nonprofit federal and state tax credits and funding for low-income-housing projects that would enrich developers and empower ambitious politicians like Obama, at the expense of taxpayers and, especially, the poor.
Brazier was not merely an Obama legal client. A disciple of Chicago's famous radical activist Saul Alinsky, Brazier was also a close political ally of Daley's and one of the key movers and shakers among the city's progressive political elite who in the years ahead would advance Obama at every turn.
Obama also did legal work involved in the establishment of four Brazier-Rezko limited partnerships: Woodlawn Partners Ltd., Central Woodlawn Partnership, KRMB Limited Partnership and Woodlawn Drexel Ltd. Partnership. Rezko is now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for fraud and attempted bribery on state government contracts.
The former Obama firm still represents WPIC, as well as Brazier's church, the Apostolic Church of God, and his Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization. Brazier's son now oversees the properties.
As Brazier clung to life in 2010 in a Chicago hospital, Obama called him from the White House for what relatives described as an extremely tearful farewell.
Shortly after Brazier died, Obama issued a statement saying of the man he had once helped put 15 poor families on the street in the dead of winter:
"There is no way that we can replace the gentle heart and boundless determination that Bishop Brazier brought to some of the most pressing challenges facing Chicago and our nation."
Writing in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama said he became "a civil rights lawyer" because "to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more."
There was indeed "something more" to Obama's legal career, but it wasn't civil rights litigation at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he was employed for a decade.
"He spent about half his time working with Bill Miceli and my former partner, Allison Davis, and that team," senior partner Judson Miner told The Washington Examiner. Most of the entries on Obama's client list for the firm from that period were in real estate, construction and finance.
Miceli and Davis were the partners in charge of the firm's housing and real estate practices. Davis would later leave the firm to join Obama mentor Tony Rezko in the real estate development business.
In March 1994, a year before "Dreams" was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court that has heretofore escaped examination by the national media.
In this case, Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents. The defendant was the Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., controlled by Bishop Arthur Brazier, a South Side Chicago preacher and political operator.
Brazier's burgeoning real estate empire included a low-income housing project at 6223 South University. Today, MapQuest describes the Woodlawn neighborhood as "quaint and sedate." But in the winter of 1994, it was a frigid hell.
Brazier was closely allied with Obama and his firm, not least because Davis was on WPIC's Board of Directors. Davis was also the corporation's registered agent, and he received the court summons when the city filed suit on the South University apartments.
Brazier's WPIC had failed for nearly a month to supply heat and running water for the complex's 15 crumbling apartments. On Jan. 18, 1994, the day the heat went off, Chicago's official high temperature was 11 below zero, the day after it was 19 below.
Even worse, the residents were then ordered to leave the WPIC complex in the winter chill without the due process they would have been afforded by an eviction procedure.
In court documents reviewed by The Washington Examiner, Daniel W. Weil, commissioner of Chicago's Buildings Department, slammed WPIC for multiple municipal code violations, including "failure to maintain adequate heat," failure "to provide every family unit with approved heating facilities," and "failure to provide adequate" supplies of either hot or cold running water.
Things were so bad that the city's outraged corporation counsel declared that "the levying of a fine is not an adequate remedy" and asked the court for a permanent injunction against WPIC, appointment of a receiver and imposition of a lien on WPIC to pay for repairs, attorneys' fees and court costs.
But Obama did his work so well that in the end, on March 3, 1994, the court simply fined WPIC $50. Only then did Obama tell the court of the forcible removal of tenants in the bitter cold.
An experienced Chicago housing attorney who reviewed the case at theExaminer's request said $50 fines against politically powerful slumlords were not uncommon at that time. The lawyer, who currently works for the city, asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.
The attorney termed the forcible removal of the residents in the frigid Chicago winter "outrageous," and said it looked like "a way to avoid a lengthy eviction process by law. And if the tenants had leases, they should have been bought out with a cash payment in return for leaving the premises early."
The South University apartments eventually became part of a real estate syndication deal that Obama helped negotiate. Brazier remained as the controlling general partner, while the syndicated investors became limited partners.
The merging of Brazier's insider contacts and influence with the limited partners' financial resources enabled them to benefit collectively from bigger, more profitable deals than they would have each been able to do individually.
A Chicago housing expert with direct knowledge of WPIC's real estate dealings told the Examiner that the syndication deal involving the apartments likely was being negotiated when the building lost heat.
"The property was one of five or six that was bundled together into a partnership and syndicated with tax credits," he said. It was a "prelude to being put into the partnership, which it ultimately was for purposes of the refinancing and syndication."
The WPIC case illustrates how Obama functioned at the center of a historic accommodation then developing between the Daley machine and its traditional opponents among the city's liberal reformers.
Lubricating the deal was a flood of public and nonprofit federal and state tax credits and funding for low-income-housing projects that would enrich developers and empower ambitious politicians like Obama, at the expense of taxpayers and, especially, the poor.
Brazier was not merely an Obama legal client. A disciple of Chicago's famous radical activist Saul Alinsky, Brazier was also a close political ally of Daley's and one of the key movers and shakers among the city's progressive political elite who in the years ahead would advance Obama at every turn.
Obama also did legal work involved in the establishment of four Brazier-Rezko limited partnerships: Woodlawn Partners Ltd., Central Woodlawn Partnership, KRMB Limited Partnership and Woodlawn Drexel Ltd. Partnership. Rezko is now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence for fraud and attempted bribery on state government contracts.
The former Obama firm still represents WPIC, as well as Brazier's church, the Apostolic Church of God, and his Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization. Brazier's son now oversees the properties.
As Brazier clung to life in 2010 in a Chicago hospital, Obama called him from the White House for what relatives described as an extremely tearful farewell.
Shortly after Brazier died, Obama issued a statement saying of the man he had once helped put 15 poor families on the street in the dead of winter:
"There is no way that we can replace the gentle heart and boundless determination that Bishop Brazier brought to some of the most pressing challenges facing Chicago and our nation."
by SitasMom on 21 September 2012 - 02:09
by SitasMom on 21 September 2012 - 02:09
Keith Grossman
I cannot go from Houston to el paso with a CNG truck..........
I cannot go from Houston to el paso with a CNG truck..........
by Keith Grossman on 21 September 2012 - 12:09
"I hope I am wrong about you, but do not presume to ever know me."
And yet, you give yourself license to do exactly that with me.
And yet, you give yourself license to do exactly that with me.
by Blitzen on 21 September 2012 - 13:09
The Washington Examiner is hardly an independent source for "click and discover" political facts:
The Washington Examiner is a free daily newspaper published in Springfield, Virginia, and distributed in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The newspaper was formerly distributed only in the suburbs of Washington, under the titles of Montgomery Journal, Prince George's Journal, and Northern Virginia Journal. Anschutz purchased their parent company, Journal Newspapers Inc., in October 2004. On February 1, 2005, the paper's name changed to the Washington Examiner, and it adopted a logo and format similar to that of another newspaper owned by Anschutz, the San Francisco Examiner
The Examiner's parent company, Clarity Media Group, also owns the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard
The Examiner is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. Politico described the paper as "a megaphone for [Anschutz's] right-wing views on taxes, national security and President Barack Obama." The Examiner co-sponsored the Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa on August 11, 2011.
The Washington Examiner is a free daily newspaper published in Springfield, Virginia, and distributed in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. The newspaper was formerly distributed only in the suburbs of Washington, under the titles of Montgomery Journal, Prince George's Journal, and Northern Virginia Journal. Anschutz purchased their parent company, Journal Newspapers Inc., in October 2004. On February 1, 2005, the paper's name changed to the Washington Examiner, and it adopted a logo and format similar to that of another newspaper owned by Anschutz, the San Francisco Examiner
The Examiner's parent company, Clarity Media Group, also owns the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard
The Examiner is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. Politico described the paper as "a megaphone for [Anschutz's] right-wing views on taxes, national security and President Barack Obama." The Examiner co-sponsored the Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa on August 11, 2011.
by Blitzen on 21 September 2012 - 14:09
In 1970, Anschutz bought the 250,000-acre (1,000 km²) Baughman Farms, one of the country's largest farming corporations, in Liberal, Kansas for $10 million. The following year, he acquired 9 million acres (36,000 km²) along the Utah-Wyoming border. This produced his first fortune in the oil business.[8 In the early 1980s, the Anschutz Ranch, with its 1 billion barrel (160,000,000 m³) oil pocket, became the largest oil field discovery in the United States since Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 1968. He sold a half-interest in it to Mobil Oil for $500 million in 1982.
by Blitzen on 21 September 2012 - 14:09
by beetree on 21 September 2012 - 14:09
I finally read this. What an IDIOT. So good to find out, now, because I never thought he would win before, but now I'm sure of it.
And on a local note, we now have Linda McMahon of WWE fame and fortune, suddenly willing to pay her debts that were absolved in her decades old bankruptcy, since yesterday, when the people she left holding the bag told about it in the newspaper. We already denied her once, we will not be bought in CT in seems, contrary to what people say about money being able to buy everything or anyone. I hope we do it again.
And on a local note, we now have Linda McMahon of WWE fame and fortune, suddenly willing to pay her debts that were absolved in her decades old bankruptcy, since yesterday, when the people she left holding the bag told about it in the newspaper. We already denied her once, we will not be bought in CT in seems, contrary to what people say about money being able to buy everything or anyone. I hope we do it again.
Contact information Disclaimer Privacy Statement Copyright Information Terms of Service Cookie policy ↑ Back to top