[Rhodes22-list] Community Organization and Lowe's response

[Lowe, Rob]

Brad and Bill,
Thanks for the information.  Certainly some dismaying information.  I
appreciate it.  No, I really do.  While you guys have been saying some
of this stuff for some time, I prefer to get info from more mainstream
sources, like the press.  I know Brad, you rail against the MSM all the
time.  But as Bill just finished saying, "Better to check me out --
sometimes I just make stuff up."

The public housing debacle certainly seems real.  In the City of Roanoke
(just up the road from us), the public housing authority is facing most
of the same challenges that Chicago is.  They have done a pretty good
job of improving the housing situation, but the issues of corruption and
kickbacks have surfaced as the process has unfolded.  It seems that
anytime the government is spending money that corruption is involved.
Not much difference if it's housing or military spending, someone's
getting a big slice of the pie for doing nothing.  Ah well, the American
way.  McCain says he will clean up the system but you know he won't, the
system is stronger than he is.

It's going to be real interesting in the voting booth.  Going to have to
hold my nose which ever button I push! - rob


-----Original Message-----
From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
[mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org] On Behalf Of Brad Haslett
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 10:31 AM
To: The Rhodes 22 Email List
Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Community Organization and Lowe's response

Bill,

Yup!  You got it about right.  Attached is an article on the plight of
Obama's projects. Obama has closer ties to Iraq and Iraqi's with money
than the press has been willing to investigate. One would think that
they would at least be looking into this weeks claim from an Iraqi
government official that he requested they "chill" US troop movements
until after the election (a clear violation of the Logan Act).  But
no, the MSM is in the tank so deep with "The One" that they'll have to
just jump in the sewer before it's over with to hold everyone.

I wasted yesterday watching the market and doing research.  Keep an
eye on the world for me today, I'm going to try and be a productive
citizen.

Brad

--------------------------

Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy
The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build
low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many
projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.

By Binyamin Appelbaum, Globe Staff  |  June 27, 2008

CHICAGO - The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense
neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state
senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for
people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by
unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice
scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs
up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the
condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad
the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader
failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and
manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as
the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee
coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for
developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal
subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a
promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give
developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago
that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies -
including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so
completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and
managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those
people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's
constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding
neighborhoods were blighted.

Some of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did
not notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of
Obama's state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his
constituents for more than a decade.

"No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about
it," said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.

Obama's campaign, in a written response to Globe questions, affirmed
the candidate's support of public-private partnerships as an
alternative to public housing, saying that Obama has "consistently
fought to make livable, affordable housing in mixed-income
neighborhoods available to all."

The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Obama was
aware of the problems with buildings in his district during his time
as a state senator, nor did it comment on the roles played by people
connected to the senator.

Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally
are:

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and
a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of
Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this
winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago
that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city
inspectors found widespread problems.

Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and
a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer,
was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government
subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including
a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic
plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several
apartments.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for
Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas
buy a home in 2005. Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate
more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district,
then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to
the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers -
including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more
than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised
hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at
least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale
Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was
seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than
1,800 code violations.

Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his
lawyer did not respond to inquiries.

Jarrett, a powerful figure in the Chicago development community,
agreed to be interviewed but declined to answer questions about Grove
Parc, citing what she called a continuing duty to Habitat's former
business partners. She did, however, defend Obama's position that
public-private partnerships are superior to public housing.

"Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private
sector because the incentives are not there," said Jarrett, whose
company manages more than 23,000 apartments. "I would argue that
someone living in a poor neighborhood that isn't 100 percent public
housing is by definition better off."

In the middle of the 20th century, Chicago built some of the nation's
largest public housing developments, culminating in Robert Taylor
Homes: 4,415 apartments in 28 high-rise buildings stretching for 2
miles along an interstate highway.

By the late 1980s, however, Robert Taylor Homes and the rest of the
Chicago developments had become American bywords for urban misery. The
roughly 30 developments operated for poor families by the Chicago
Housing Authority were plagued by crime and mired in poverty.

In Stateway Gardens, a large complex just north of Robert Taylor, a
study of 1990 census data found the per-capita annual income was
$1,650. And the projects were falling apart after decades of epic,
sometimes criminal, mismanagement.

Similar problems plagued public housing in other cities, leading the
federal government to greatly increase funding to address the
problems. Many cities, including Boston, mostly used that money to
rehabilitate their projects, maintaining public control.

Chicago chose a more dramatic approach. Under Mayor Richard M. Daley,
who was elected in 1989, the city launched a massive plan to let
private companies tear down the projects and build mixed-income
communities on the same land.

The city also hired private companies to manage the remaining public
housing. And it subsidized private companies to create and manage new
affordable housing, some of which was used to accommodate tenants
displaced from public housing.

Chicago's plans drew critics from the start. They asked why the
government should pay developers to perform a basic public service -
one successfully performed by governments in other cities. And they
noted that privately managed projects had a history of deteriorating
because guaranteed government rent subsidies left companies with
little incentive to spend money on maintenance.

Most of all, they alleged that Chicago was interested primarily in
redeveloping projects close to the Loop, the downtown area that was
seeing a surge of private development activity, shunting poor families
to neighborhoods farther from the city center. Only about one in three
residents was able to return to the redeveloped projects.

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

"The same exact people who ran these places into the ground," the
private companies paid to build and manage the city's affordable
housing, "now are profiting by redeveloping them."

Barack Obama was among the many Chicago residents who shared Daley's
conviction that private companies would make better landlords than the
Chicago Housing Authority.

He had seen the failure of the public projects in the mid-1980s as a
community organizer at Altgeld Gardens, a large public housing complex
on the far South Side.

He once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered
becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from
Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko's
development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil
rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison
Davis.

The firm represented a number of nonprofit companies that were
partnering with private developers to build affordable housing with
government subsidies.

Obama sometimes worked on their cases. In at least one instance, he
represented the nonprofit company that owned Grove Parc, Woodlawn
Preservation and Investment Corp., when it was sued by the city for
failing to adequately heat one of its apartment complexes.

Shortly after becoming a state senator in 1997, Obama told the Chicago
Daily Law Bulletin that his experience working with the development
industry had reinforced his belief in subsidizing private developers
of affordable housing.

"That's an example of a smart policy," the paper quoted Obama as
saying. "The developers were thinking in market terms and operating
under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had
government supporting and subsidizing those efforts."

Obama translated that belief into legislative action as a state
senator. In 2001, Obama and a Republican colleague, William Peterson,
sponsored a successful bill that increased state subsidies for private
developers. The law let developers designated by the state raise up to
$26 million a year by selling tax credits to Illinois residents. For
each $1 in credits purchased, the buyer was allowed to decrease his
taxable income by 50 cents.

Obama also cosponsored the original version of a bill creating an
annual fund to subsidize rents for extremely low-income tenants,
although it did not pass until 2005, after he had left the state
Senate.

"He was very passionate about the issues," said Julie Dworkin of the
Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who worked with Obama on
affordable housing issues. "He was someone we could go to and count on
him to be there."

The developers gave Obama their financial support. Jarrett, Davis, and
Rezko all served on Obama's campaign finance committee when he won a
seat in the US Senate in 2004.

Obama has continued to support increased subsidies as a presidential
candidate, calling for the creation of an Affordable Housing Trust
Fund, which could distribute an estimated $500 million a year to
developers. The money would be siphoned from the profits of two
mortgage companies created and supervised by the federal government,
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

"I will restore the federal government's commitment to low-income
housing," Obama wrote last September in a letter to the Granite State
Organizing Project, an umbrella group for several dozen New Hampshire
religious, community, and political organizations. He added, "Our
nation's low-income families are facing an affordable housing crisis,
and it is our responsibility to ensure this crisis does not get worse
by ineffective replacement of existing public-housing units."

One of the earliest public-private partnerships of the type supported
by Daley and Obama took place in the Woodlawn neighborhood, a
checkerboard of battered apartment buildings and vacant lots just
south of the University of Chicago.

Grove Parc Plaza opened there in 1990 as a redevelopment of an older
housing complex. The buildings had a new owner and a major renovation
funded by the federal government. Even the name Grove Parc Plaza was
new.

The owner, a local nonprofit company called Woodlawn Preservation and
Investment Corp., was led by two of the neighborhood's most powerful
ministers, Arthur Brazier and Leon Finney. Obama had relationships
with both men. In 1999, he donated $500 of his campaign funds to
another of their community groups, The Woodlawn Organization.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a private management firm, William
Moorehead and Associates, to oversee the complex. In 2001, the company
lost that contract and a contract to manage several public housing
projects for allegedly failing to do its job. The company's head,
William Moorehead, was subsequently convicted of embezzling almost $1
million in management fees.

Woodlawn Preservation hired a new property manager, Habitat Co. At the
time, the company was headed by its founder, Daniel Levin, also a
major contributor to Obama's campaigns. Valerie Jarrett was executive
vice president.

Residents say the complex deteriorated under Moorehead's management
and continued to decline after Habitat took over. A maintenance worker
at the complex says money often wasn't even available for steel wool
to plug rat holes. But as late as 2003, a routine federal inspection
still gave conditions at Grove Parc a score of 82 on a 100-point
scale.

When inspectors returned in 2005, they found conditions were
significantly worse. Inspectors gave the complex a score of 56 and
warned that improvements were necessary. They returned the following
year and found things had reached a new low. Grove Parc got a score of
11 and a final warning. Three months later, inspectors found there had
been insufficient improvements and moved to seize the complex from
Woodlawn Preservation.

After negotiations with tenants, the government agreed to allow a new
company, Preservation of Affordable Housing, a Boston-based firm, to
replace Habitat as the manager of Grove Parc. The company is
negotiating to buy the development, which would then be demolished and
replaced with new housing.

Officials at Woodlawn Preservation say the government didn't give them
enough money to properly maintain Grove Parc. Habitat's Jarrett
declined to comment on Grove Parc in particular but said it is hard to
manage something you don't own.

But other Chicago developers and housing activists say federal
subsidies can be adequate if managed properly. They say Grove Parc
stands apart for how badly it fell into disrepair.

Preservation of Affordable Housing has assumed responsibility for
numerous subsidized complexes across the country.

"Grove Parc is quite an exception to what we've normally done because
it's in such bad shape," said the nonprofit's chief executive, Amy
Anthony. "These complexes are often tired, they're always denser than
today's philosophy, but they're not usually anywhere near as
deteriorated."

Similar problems also plagued the next generation of affordable
housing de velopment in Obama's district, created as part of the Daley
administration's efforts to subsidize smaller apartment buildings
scattered throughout neighborhoods.

One of the largest recipients of the subsidies was Rezmar Corp.,
founded in 1989 by Tony Rezko, who ran a company that sold snacks at
city beaches, and Daniel Mahru, who ran a company that sold ice to
Rezko. Neither man had development experience.

Over the next nine years, Rezmar used more than $87 million in
government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000
apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also
managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.

Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on
mortgage payments almost immediately. On its first project, the city
government agreed to reduce the company's monthly payments from almost
$3,000 to less than $500.

By the time Obama entered the state Senate in 1997, the buildings were
beginning to deteriorate. In January 1997, the city sued Rezmar for
failing to provide adequate heat in a South Side building in the
middle of an unusually cold winter. It was one of more than two dozen
housing-complaint suits filed by the city against Rezmar for
violations at its properties.

People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not
picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows
whistled, insects moved in.

"In the winter I can feel the cold air coming through the walls and
the sockets," said Anthony Frizzell, 57, who has lived for almost two
decades in a Rezmar building on South Greenwood Avenue. "They didn't
insulate it or nothing."

Sharee Jones, who lives in another former Rezko building one block
away, said her apartment was rat-infested for years.

"You could hear them under the floor and in the walls, and they didn't
do nothing about it," Jones said.

By the time Rezmar asked Chicago's city government for a loan on its
final subsidized development, in 1998, the city's housing commissioner
was describing the company in a memo as being in "bad shape." The
Daley administration still made the $3.1 million loan.

Shortly thereafter, Rezmar switched from subsidized housing to
high-end development, fueled by the money it had made in subsidized
work. Rezko's companies also stopped managing the subsidized
complexes.

"Affordable housing run by private companies just doesn't work,"
Mahru, who no longer works with Rezko, said in an interview with the
Globe. "It's difficult, if not impossible, for a private company to
maintain affordable housing for low-income tenants."

Responsibility for several buildings fell to the Chicago Equity Fund,
which had purchased government tax credits from Rezmar to help finance
the projects. After Rezko walked away, the fund was obliged to
maintain the buildings as affordable housing. If it did not, it would
have to repay the government for the tax credits.

The fund found the buildings in terrible condition. In a 2001 plea to
the state to temporarily suspend payments on its mortgages, a fund
executive wrote that heating problems, lapsed maintenance, and
uncollected rent made the buildings almost impossible to manage.

Most of the buildings have since been foreclosed upon, forcing the
tenants to find new housing.

All the while, Tony Rezko was forging a close friendship with Barack
Obama. When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995,
Rezko's companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising.
Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn't raise
another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of
Obama's political career.

As Obama ascended, Rezko became one of his largest fund-raisers. And
in 2005, Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas purchase the house where
they now live.

Eleven of Rezmar's buildings were located in the district represented
by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in
January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his
district. So was Jones's building with rats in the walls and
Frizzell's building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after
the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area
represented by Obama.

But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in
Rezmar's buildings.

After Rezko's assistance in Obama's home purchase became a campaign
issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated
bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration
of Rezmar's buildings never came to his attention. He said he would
have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

"I started getting complaints from police officers about particular
properties that turned out to be Rezko properties," said Toni
Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman.

She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and
said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city's best
affordable housing developers.

But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for
the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was "getting out of the
business," she said - walking away from its responsibility for
managing the developments.

"I didn't see him nor have anything to do with him after that," she
said.

Preckwinkle, who will be an Obama delegate at the Democratic National
Convention, said she would not answer any questions about Obama's role
in her district, nor his relationship with Rezko.

Allison Davis, Obama's former law firm boss, dabbled in development
for years while he worked primarily as a lawyer. He participated in
the development of Grove Parc Plaza. And in 1996, Davis left his law
firm to pursue a full-time career as an affordable housing developer,
fueled by the subsidies from the Daley administration and aided, on
occasion, by Obama himself.

Over roughly the past decade, Davis's companies have received more
than $100 million in subsidies to renovate and build more than 1,500
apartments in Chicago, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally. In
several cases, Davis partnered with Tony Rezko. In 1998 the two men
created a limited partnership to build an apartment building for
seniors on Chicago's South Side. Obama wrote letters on state Senate
stationery supporting city and state loans for the project.

In 2000 Davis asked the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago for a $1
million investment in a new development partnership, Neighborhood
Rejuvenation Partners. Obama, a member of the board, voted in favor,
helping Davis secure the investment.

The following year, Davis assembled another partnership to create New
Evergreen/Sedgwick, a $10.7 million renovation of five walk-up
buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood. The project, a model of
small-scale, mixed-income development, was subsidized by almost $6
million in state loans and federal tax credits.

Conditions deteriorated quickly. Chronic plumbing failures consumed
the project's financial reserves while leaving undrained sewage in
some of the apartments. In October, after repeated complaints from
building residents, the city government sued the owners, and a judge
imposed a $5,500 fine.

New Evergreen/Sedgwick is managed by a company run by Cullen Davis,
Allison Davis's son and also a contributor to Obama's campaigns.
Cullen Davis said the problems were rooted in the way New
Evergreen/Sedgwick was financed. Like most new projects, it is owned
by a company created to own one building. That company determined how
much to spend on renovations, how much to set aside for maintenance -
and how much to keep as profit. When the maintenance funds ran out,
there was no other source of money.

"All these deals are set up as islands," Cullen Davis acknowledged. In
this case, "The margin of error at Sedgwick was a little too close to
begin with."

Chicago's struggles with the deterioration of its subsidized private
developments seemed to reach a new height in 2006, when the federal
government foreclosed on Lawndale Restoration, the city's largest
subsidized-housing complex. City inspectors found more than 1,800 code
violations, including roof leaks, exposed wiring, and pools of sewage.

Lawndale Restoration was a collection of more than 1,200 apartments in
97 buildings spread across 300 blocks of west Chicago. It was owned by
a company controlled by Cecil Butler, a former civil rights activist
who came to be reviled as a slumlord by a younger generation of
activists.

Lawndale Restoration was created in the early 1980s, when the federal
government helped Butler take control of a group of old buildings,
including lending $22 million to his company to redevelop the
buildings and agreeing to subsidize tenant rents. In 1995, Butler's
company got a $51 million loan from the state to fund additional
renovations at Lawndale Restoration. In 2000 Butler's company brought
in Habitat Co. to help manage the complex.

Nonetheless, the buildings deteriorated badly. The problems came to
public attention in a dramatic way in 2004, after a sport utility
vehicle driven by a suburban woman trying to buy drugs struck one of
the buildings, causing it to collapse. City inspectors arrived in the
ensuing glare, finding a long list of code violations, leading city
officials to urge the federal government to seize the complex.

In the midst of the uproar, a small group of Lawndale residents
gathered to rally against the Democratic candidate for the US Senate,
Barack Obama.

Obama's Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, trailed badly in the polls
and was not seen as a serious challenger. But the organizers had a
simple message: Cecil Butler had donated $3,000 to Obama's campaign.
Habitat had close ties to Obama. And Obama had remained silent about
Lawndale's plight.

Paul Johnson, who helped to organize the protest, said Obama must have
known about the problems.

"How didn't he know?" said Johnson. "Of course he knew. He just didn't
care."

Butler did not return messages but in the past has said the government
did not give him enough money to maintain the project. Habitat
emphasized in a statement that its role at Lawndale was restricted to
tasks that included financial oversight and management.

In 2006, following the foreclosure, the federal government sold the
buildings to the city for $10. The city has since parceled out the
buildings among two dozen developers, who are rebuilding Lawndale for
the fourth time with yet another round of government loans and
subsidies.

Even as Lawndale Restoration and Rezmar's buildings were foreclosed
upon, and Grove Parc and other subsidized developments fell deeper
into disrepair, Obama has remained a steadfast supporter of
subsidizing private development.

And although he has distanced himself from Rezko, Obama has remained
close to others in the development community. Jarrett participates in
the campaign's senior staff meetings. And Obama chose another close
friend, Martin Nesbitt, as his campaign treasurer. Nesbitt is chairman
of the Chicago Housing Authority, one of the key overseers of the
shift toward private management and development.

"Throughout his career in public service, Barack Obama has advocated
for the development of mixed-income housing and public-private
partnerships to create affordable housing as an alternative to
publicly subsidized, concentrated, low-income housing," the Obama
campaign said in a statement provided to the Globe.

As a result, some people in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods are torn
between a natural inclination to support Obama and a concern about his
relationships with the developers they hold responsible for Chicago's
affordable housing failures. Some housing advocates worry that Obama
has not learned from those failures.

"I'm not against Barack Obama," said Willie J.R. Fleming, an organizer
with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and a former public
housing resident. "What I am against is some of the people around
him."

Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way: "I
hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his
involvement with that community."


On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:17 AM, Bill Effros <bill at effros.com> wrote:
> Ed,
>
> It's so hard to explain when no one is paying attention.
>
> I'm glad you are.
>
> I look forward to seeing what Obama had to say in the O'Reilly
interview
> -- thanks for bringing it up.
>
> Obama was hired from Harvard by a politically connected "public
> interest" law firm headed by the whitest black guy you ever saw, and
> funded by the Chicago Arab-American community which recruited him.
>
> The law firm, working with the Daley machine, took over a "black"
> district of Chicago by running Obama against black candidates with
roots
> in the community.  They lost the first time they tried, but then
knocked
> all the community leaders off the ballot, leaving only Obama in the
race
> for State Senator -- the method by which Obama was elected has since
> been declared unconstitutional.
>
> The law firm made most of its money securing government projects for
> members of the Arab-American community.
>
> Obama's boss, the white faced black guy, then left the law firm to go
> into partnership with the Arabs as the "minority ownership" component.
> (Brad -- Please note -- this is how it is done!)
>
> Somewhere around $40 million changed hands for projects in Obama's
> district.  No one can now say where that money went.  It did not go
back
> into the community.  The map I sent shows the location of the projects
> funded--all went into bankruptcy, along with many other projects not
in
> Obama's district.  All are now 100% owned by an off-shore Arab holding
> company financed by Oil-For-Food receipts stolen from the government
of
> Iraq.
>
> Obama got a house out of the deal -- financed by the same Arab holding
> company.
>
> All of the participants in the deal are currently under Federal
> Investigation, including Barack Obama.  80 or 90 of them have already
> been found guilty, or have pled guilty, and have agreed to testify
> against the Kingpins.  One of the major players, a Syrian-born
> naturalized American Citizen named "Rezko" is reported to be
negotiating
> a deal implicating Obama and Illinois Governor Blagojevich.  Rezko was
> found guilty of 16 charges in a largely unrelated case in which Obama
> and Blagojevich were implicated, but not central.  Rezko has been
> indicted in another case to which it is widely assumed Obama and
> Blagojevich will soon be added.
>
> Rezko is due to be sentenced 6 days before the Presidential Election.
>
> I am anxious to see Obama's comments minimizing his involvement in
this
> scheme.  There were only 12 lawyers in his law firm, and all are under
> investigation.
>
> The crimes for which I believe Obama will be charged, automatically
call
> for impeachment, according to the constitution.
>
> Catholic Joe Biden, if elected VP, would be just an indictment away
from
> the Presidency.  To get the Catholic vote, without which the Democrats
> can't win, Biden will have to oppose abortion much more strongly than
he
> has opposed it in the past.
>
> Way to Go NARAL!
>
> Bill Effros
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Tootle wrote:
>> Bill:
>>
>> You will have to take time and explain what you are trying to
demonstrate
>> in:
>>
>>
http://www.rhodes22.org/pipermail/rhodes22-list/attachments/20080916/ecf
58f28/attachment.jpg
>>
>> Keep in mind that the illustrations will have be specific and not
guilt by
>> association.
>>
>> I understand where you are going, but obviously Obama acolytes do not
>> comprehend what this is all about.
>>
>> I would add that I have seen many parts of Bill O'Reily's interview
with
>> Obama.  Not intentionally, but because I watch TV while eating
dinner.
>>
>> Obama came across good.  And for those who believe in revivals and
>> evangelists, Obama was persuasive.
>>
>> One aspect of the interview was about those associations you
question.
>> Obama answered those questions so as minimalize their relevance.
However,
>> for some of us, what he had said speaking publically as recently as
one year
>> ago was consistent with the problems you derive from those
associations.
>>
>> Bill, since you are a member of the northeast media, see if you can
explain
>> the meaning of those associations and their relevance to Obama.
>>
>> Maybe our liberal attorney from New Jersey can address the question?
>>
>> Ed K
>> Greenville, SC, USA
>> addendum: Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing
the same
>> thing over and over again and always expecting different results."
>>
>>
>> Rob Lowe wrote:
>>
>>> I really have no idea what this is showing.  Without some supporting
>>> explanation, it's just a made up map. - rob
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
>>> [mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org] On Behalf Of Bill Effros
>>> Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2008 12:33 PM
>>> To: R22 List
>>> Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Community Organization
>>>
>>> Brad,
>>>
>>> I think you underestimate Obama's community organizing
accomplishments.
>>>
>>> The attached map shows projects sponsored by Barack Obama in his
>>> district.
>>>
>>> Bill Effros
>>>
>>>
>>> -------------- next part --------------
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>>> Desc: not available
>>> Url :
>>>
http://www.rhodes22.org/pipermail/rhodes22-list/attachments/20080916/ecf
>>> 58f28/attachment.jpg
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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