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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (415237)	9/8/2008 2:10:37 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 1576642

Obamas Record As A Community Organizer: Not Good Ever since Sarah Palin gave Barack Obama’s experience as a “community organizer” a thorough mocking during her speech at the RNC convention the left has been up-in-arms over it. “Community organizers were important,” they’ve told us. “Don’t you know that Jesus and Gandhi were community organizers too!” So, ok then. Let’s look at Obama’s track record as a community organizer. Has he done great things? Accomplished great feats? Um, not so much Back in June I posted on a Boston Globe story detailing Obama’s something less-than-stellar record on low-income housing in the Chicago area which included shelling a lot of money for housing development out to people like convicted fraudster Tony Rezko and not a lot of lasting, affordable housing for the people of Chicago. sayanythingblog.com Antoin Tony Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for Obamas early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy a home in 2005. Rezkos company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obamas 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 Obamas 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. Granted, the housing failure came while Obama was a legislator and not a community organizer. But The One’s track record as an organizer wasn’t great either: The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; Kellman took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries,? Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That's all he did. And he made big bucks doing it. That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn't be coming back So Obama looked for new opportunities. It must have been shocking for an idealistic young Barack Obama to learn that complex economic problems couldn’t and can’t be fixed with a little old-fashioned, role-up-your-sleeves community organizin’. So he did what any idealistic liberal does when confronted with reality. He go into bed with people like William Ayers and Tony Rezko and launched a political career to pursue his idealism that way kxmc.com