Showing posts with label Cullen Davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cullen Davis. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Berkeley Balcony Tragedy Will Show Political Dry-Rot At Its Core


The remnants of the Library Gardens apartment building balcony that collapsed. Inset: The six students who lost their lives in the tragic accident, top left to bottom right: Lorcan Miller, Eoghan Culligan, Nick Schuster, Ashley Donohoe, Eimear Walsh and Olivia Burke



Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever. Bishop George Berkely


Six Irish students on summer Visas died when a balcony collapsed and the New York Times saw fit to make a mockery of their deaths. The kids were accused of rowdy behavior and drunkenness and program for which they had applied was called into question.  The New York Times was worried about Berkeley - the college named for the 18th Century Irish Bishop and empiricist philosopher, but George Berkeley has not yet been accused of being 'loaded.'

The New York Times went far beyond the report of the deaths and Ireland demanded an apology and got one from Grey Lady that is similar to Rachel Dolezal's non-apology.

I think the New York Times took a very agitated and worrisome phone call from a political wheel just before print time.

You see political grifters, lawyers, activists and bundlers are deep in real estate.

Chicago readers might remember the death of a little black boy when a rusted gate of slum property fell on him. That property was managed by Cullen Davis, son of Allison Davis - the man who gave Barack Obama his shove into the White House.  Valerie Jarrett controls slum properties.

A tall, rusted steel gate that fell and crushed a 3-year-old boy to death at the Cabrini-Green public housing complex failed a building code inspection Monday, said Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Buildings.
The gate at the Cabrini-Green rowhouses in the 900 block of North Cambridge Avenue fell on Curtis Cooper at about 5:30 p.m. Friday; he was pronounced dead less than an hour later in Children's Memorial Hospital. . . .
The CHA property has been managed for about two years by Urban Property Advisors. The firm is run by Cullen Davis, who is the son of influential city developer Allison Davis.
"If Chicago Housing Authority had been monitoring their properties, public housing wouldn't be in the shape it is in now," Steele said. "If they had been monitoring UPA, that gate wouldn't have fell."
UPA manages properties all over Chicago. The Davis family stands to make millions as part of CHA's Plan for Transformation, the city's ambitious effort to demolish high-rise public housing and replace it with mixed-income communities.
UPA Property Manager Ronald O'Neal and CHA spokesman Derek Hill declined to comment on Monday's failed building inspection.

Property is political capital and slum property is pure gold.  Note the rotted wooden support beams on the Berkley Building

I hope that Irish journalists crawl into the facts behind the rotten owners of the apartments and the amounts of cash they paid out to politicians -City, State and Federal -and bring the truth to light.

The wood rot begins on the pages of the newspapers providing cover for politicians.

At the end of day, I believe that a politician, political bundlers and the New York Times will have much to explain.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Sun Times TIF Tip - Location, Location, Location! Affordable Housing



Allison Davis* is an old timey radical and lawyer who makes millions of dollars from government funded real estate opportunities, by dint of his earnest GOO-Goo associations. Several years ago, a little boy was crushed to death by a rusted gate in a property that the hand-wringers made available to his son Cullen. That was an affordable housing moment. It has been pretty quiet on that rusted gate story of late - news embargo, the Progressive Memory Hole.

Allison Davis, of the Judson Miner connection to the halcyon days of good government when Clarence McClain shooed folks in to the Mayor Harold Washington's beefy presence and Forrest Claypool was knocking the cow pies off of his Timberlands and Slim Coleman was ducking Eddie Vrdolyak, has been larding his jeans with bucks in high-minded but essentially filthy real estate deals. Another Faulknerian sentence!

Progressives seem to steal with jolly impugnity and have a compliant news media ready to parse their coin scoopings followed by news embargoes. Editorial Boards are composed of people who believe that the Easter Bunny, Ralph Martire and Spending Dollars I Don't Have are Economic First Principles - Here is Your Sun Times Editorial Board not asking Candidate Obama anything back in 2007-2008.




Section 8 Housing is made available for poor folks in neighborhoods where tax-payers ( black, white, Latino) attempt to eke out a living and send their children to Catholic, Lutheran, Dutch or Charter Schools. Wrightwood, a black working class neighborhood, formerly known as St. Thomas More Parish, was until very recently indistinguishable from white Beverly, Mount Greenwood and Morgan Park in terms of quality of life - good schools and no crime. The empirical fact known to all, but the people who occupy editorial boards and who could care less about the realities facing the shrinking Middle Class, is that Section 8 Housing brings a spike in crime (violent and property).

There is also a Federal Agency dedicated to Housing America's poor - Housing and Urban Development - that makes foreclosures available and hosts sites that make affordable housing a warm and welcoming experience! Click my post title.

TIFs has been a political strawdog for Progressives. TIFs are meant to spur economic development in areas where the poor are underserved.

Save the hand-wringing.

Until Section 8 Housing is featured in areas where diversity is embraced and never realized - areas where people actually watch WTTW.


July 6, 2010

For years, just a fraction of Chicago's fat TIF funds has gone toward affordable housing -- despite widespread demand and need.

And when you drill deeper into that nebulous term "affordable," only a fraction of that fraction has been spent on housing for the city's poorest, according to an analysis of TIF spending from 1995 to 2007 by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

An ordinance to help chip away at that imbalance will go before a City Council committee Wednesday for a possible vote.

It deserves the City Council's full support, though some adjustments are needed to make it more workable.

We heartily endorse the broad goals of this ordinance, which would dedicate 20 percent of annual TIF funds toward affordable housing, because it targets scarce public dollars where they are needed most. Less than 10 percent of TIF dollars now go to affordable housing, according to the coalition's analysis.

The ordinance also could help boost confidence in the city's maligned Tax Increment Financing program, one of Mayor Daley's main economic development tools. In the city's 159 TIF districts, the amount of property tax dollars that goes to schools, parks and other services is frozen. Then, as property values rise, the extra tax revenue collected is set aside in a separate account to finance other public and private ventures in the name of economic development.

TIFs frequently are criticized for siphoning money from schools and the like to subsidize questionable investments that get little oversight. With this ordinance, the public would at least know how a portion of TIF funds each year would be spent.

Still, some reporting requirements in the ordinance are too weak. Verifying family income for affordable housing eligibility -- crucial to the program's integrity -- shouldn't be left solely up to developers.

Under the proposed ordinance, 20 percent of TIF dollars would be dedicated to building or preserving affordable housing, including converting foreclosed properties into affordable housing. The annual requirement would be citywide, not 20 percent per TIF district.

For rental housing, half the apartments in each development would be for families earning 50 percent or less of the area median income, which is $38,000 a year for a family of four. Citywide, 40 percent of all affordable apartments would go for families earning even less, $23,000 a year.

While well intended, we fear requiring half the rental units to be affordable might discourage development. In the end, because of market forces, most of these projects will end up 100 percent affordable, rather than including a mix of incomes. This makes the projects more expensive, harder to finance and could produce projects that don't enhance property values in a TIF district, affordable housing developers tell us.

Targeting 30 percent of units for families making $38,000 makes more business sense. We'd also lower slightly the 40 percent target for the poorest families.

We strongly recommend changing the homeownership rules. Under the proposed ordinance, 50 percent of for-sale units in a development would be for families making less than $60,000 a year. Developers tell us few families in that income range can afford to buy and maintain a home. Plus, the restriction could make the entire development prohibitively expensive.

To improve the ordinance, we'd like to see the city commit not to overly concentrate affordable developments in challenged neighborhoods. Many TIF districts are no longer blighted and are in need of affordable housing to shelter families that would otherwise be priced out.

The ordinance, pushed by a coalition of housing advocates, community groups and labor, and backed by at least 19 aldermen, is on the right track. As swaths of the city have been devastated by foreclosure and other housing subsidies are stretched thin, Chicago needs a firm commitment to produce more affordable housing.

But it must be done carefully, so it enhances development rather than hampers it.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/2467316,CST-EDT-edit06.article
Save the hand-wringing, this sounds like prelude to a public screwing, by Allison Davis and other Cadillac Commies. Just saying.

*
Nota Bene! Sun Times Investigative Reporter - Tim Novak covered Allison Davis and Cullen Davis like quality wallpaper. In fact, this helot lamented the long absence of Tim Novak's powerful work over the last summer and fall. Here is a link to my references to Mr. Novak's great work ( amended 8:53 AM 6/17/2009). I apologize for this inadvertent slight of Chicago's most tenacious news pitbull.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Oh, Carol, You're The Bottom of the Barrel; The Dirty Rotten Apple of My Eye!





Today, Carol Marin does the buzzard on Fran Spielman's labors.

Fran Spielman is going after Mayor Daley's nephew - the Vanecko kid. Fair enough. The kid went into business with Progressive Clout Meister Allison Davis - Judson Miner's partner and Obama's Law Boss. It seems that the Sun Times wants no light on Allison Davis, whose own little boy had a real estate venture that got a three year old child killed when Cullen Davis' Venture* included a rusty gate that crushed the toddler.

Yep, The Progressive Independent Voice of Chicago shed no light on Progressive Impunity Immunity Workhorses. You see, if and when Allison Davis starts chirping to Fitzy - bad stuff about the Progressive Machine gets out.

Nota Bene! Sun Times Investigative Reporter - Tim Novak covered Allison Davis and Cullen Davis like quality wallpaper. In fact, this helot lamented the long absence of Tim Novak's powerful work over the last summer and fall. Here is a link to my references to Mr. Novak's great work ( amended 8:53 AM 6/17/2009). I apologize for this inadvertent slight of Chicago's most tenacious news pitbull.

http://hickeysite.blogspot.com/search?q=Tim+Novak
So, the pile on continues on Regular Democrats and GOP politicians only - oh, and any and all members of their families - It's A Progressive Thing.

Well, Old Carol Marin, for whom I have little, or no regard as a journalist, but fully understand and appreciate her status as a manufactured icon, does the buzzard on the body of work performed by a real reporter - Fran Spielman.

Carol can't eat all the carrion on her own self and powers, so she pours on the Royko Remoulade - Mike Royoko is the be all and end all of Progressive Coverage. The Sauce is Boss!

Voila,

Decades before the White House columns, he was writing about another generation of Vaneckos and Daleys and a disease he called "payrolliaitis."

"It isn't anything that would show up through scientific testing," wrote Royko in 1965, "but Mayor Richard J. Daley is a carrier of a fast-spreading germ . . . called payrolliaitis. The symptoms are easy to spot. A person gets close to the mayor. Crunch -- the payrolliaitis bug nips him. He wanders off in the direction of a city, state or county agency, sits down at a desk, and his name breaks out on a payroll."

Royko was talking about the hiring of Robert Vanecko's grandfather, Dr. Michael Vanecko, whose son married the late mayor's daughter. Shortly before the wedding, that Vanecko went to work for the Chicago Board of Health. And later, his son, Dr. Robert Vanecko, was hired as the physician for the city's municipal pension fund. And now today we have the third generation, as his son, another Robert Vanecko, lands a $68 million deal with -- what else -- city pension funds. He severed all business ties with the deal only after the feds began subpoenaing records.

I dialed Fran on Tuesday at City Hall to ask if she had ever been to dinner with the mayor.

"No," was all she said.

That's good. There's work to do.
Yeah, but Carol Marin will do bugger all of it!

Yep, Carol decided, or her Editorial Chinaman decided, that going after the Family Davis is au contraire! However, "Everyone Hates the Daley Family! The Knit Hat-Soul-Patch & Shave-No-Legs Crowd will find it Fabulous to rip Daley's Family Even Though There is No Tangible Connection Whatsoever to the Story! Just Splash on the Royko!"

So, Carol Marin impugns one of the City's best, most skilled and respected Thoracic Surgeons Dr. Robert Vanecko of Northwestern Medical Center and his surgeon Father as political hacks! Bottom of the Barrel Carol!

Carol, there was a great old song by the Fabulous Farquahr** a folkish musician ( No Pete Seeger, He!) of note with a cult following who penned a lyric about an odious woman named Carol. It is almost eerie.

Carol, you're the bottom of the barrel/You're the Dirty Rotten Apple of my eye/
And when I see you/ I hold my nose and go PU/ And When I See You, Carol

You're Face, You're, Hair, and Your Complexion/ Sure Could Use a Resurrection! - Carol . . .& etc.


* The Family Davis Saga has everything that No Progressive Wants Talked about - Billy Ayers, Comb-Over Dave Axelrod, Rahmbo, Bernardine Dohrn, Judson Miner, all the 1960's Radicals insulated from Inquiry!

**http://johnnykmusic.blogspot.com/search/label/Fabulous%20Farquahr

Friday, October 10, 2008

Obama's Clout Trail Weaves Ayers/Dohrn & Sidley & Austin


Professor Steve Diamond has made the case for Obama's disembling concerning his biggest distraction Ayers/Dorhn/ACORN Progressive Chicago Clout.

The Chicago newspapers and the Daley Administration are busy trying to find dirt on garbage truck crews, but could care less about the millions of dangerous dollars tossed into the hands of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and buttoned out to ACORN and other real estate scam artists from Chicago Foundations. It's all good.

Read this in Full:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Who "sent" Obama?
See June 19, 2008 post: That "guy who lives in my neighborhood" for more detail on Ayers-Obama relationship.Updated May 24, 2008: former Sidley managing partner tells Chicago Tribune he hired Bernardine Dohrn as favor to Bill Ayers' father Thomas Ayers.Updated May 18, 2008 with information from Nell Minow, daughter of Obama mentor Newton Minow and sister of Obama's Harvard professor, Martha Minow.Updated May 3, 2008: Ken Rolling, first Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, had been a program officer of the Woods Fund; Republican activist claims Ayers is "advisor" to Barack Obama. In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" - from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in the early 70s.) As a young student, Mikva wanted to help out the his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeeman's office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and was immediately asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody that nobody sent."


So it is reasonable to ask, who "sent" Barack Obama? In other words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained? And, of course, in an answer to that question might lie a better understanding of his essential world view. When I started looking at this question a few weeks ago I quickly grew more concerned about the kinds of people that seem to have been very important in Obama's ascendancy in Chicago area politics. It is the connection of some of these people to authoritarian politics that has me particularly concerned. And a key concern of this blog has been the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the global labor movement.


The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization. In fact, at the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that government or right wing elements helped create them. There is some evidence, in fact, that that was true (for example, the Cointelpro effort of the federal government.)


Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular the pro-China maoists elements of that era and are now playing a role in the labor movement and elsewhere. And yet this question of Obama's links to people from this milieu has not been thoroughly explored by any of the many thousands of journalists, bloggers and political operatives looking so closely at Obama.


The most recent effort was by Jonathan Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal who argued that a critical connection for Obama was his links to some in the wealthy and prominent Jewish community in Chicago. This article contains some important insights and is well worth reading. But, I think Kaufman gets it wrong.


So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School. During that time a critical issue in Chicago politics was the ongoing crisis in the public schools. A movement was underway from two angles: below in black, latino and other communities for more local control of schools and from above by business interests who wanted to cut costs. (For a fascinating account and analysis see Dorothy Shipps, The Invisible Hand: Big Business and Chicago School Reform, Teachers College Record, Vol. 99, #1, Fall 1997, pp. 73-116 or her later excellent book on the subject: School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-2000 (Kansas 2006.))


A 1987 teachers’ strike brought those two sides together to push for a reform act passed by the Illinois legislature in 1988 that created "Local School Councils" (LSC) to be elected by residents in a particular school area. According to Shipps, the strike "enrag[ed] parents and provid[ed] the catalyst for a coalition between community groups and Chicago United [the business lobby] that was forged in the ensuing year." (The full story of this complicated process is provided by Shipps in her book.)


The LSC’s were to be made up by a majority of parents and have the power to hire and fire principals thus creating a new power center in the school system against what both reform groups viewed as the bureaucratic and expensive school board, on the one hand, and, on the other, the teachers union. In my view these types of councils are reminiscent of the manipulative "community" bodies set up in regimes like those of Hugo Chavez and the Sandinistas - used to control genuine democratic movements such as trade unions. Dorothy Shipps argues, as I will suggest below, that there is an alternative approach that is genuinely democratic and possibly more effective in improving outcomes for students.

Active in the local control from below, on the "community" side of this effort, was Bill Ayers who had returned to Chicago in 1987 as an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus, after surfacing from the underground and earning his Ph.D. at Columbia. Another ally in this battle at the same time was Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP), as Obama notes briefly in his Dreams From My Father. (See also, "Meeting on School Reform Halted," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1988 at 3; and "Black Parents" A letter to the Chi. Trib. on Aug. 23, 1988 from a DCP member defending the 1988 local control reform bill) The DCP had its origins in the "radical" movement started by Saul Alinsky. (It should be remembered Alinsky's world view was one that is and was often in tension with many in the trade union movement - for example, Alinksy was an almost uncritical admirer and biographer of trade union bureaucrat par excellence John L. Lewis. For one independent approach that urges re-examination of the Alinsky view of unions today in light of rise to power of SEIU's Andy Stern, see Staughton Lynd, Commentary: Another World is Possible, Working America, March 2008).


Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew, broadly, as “maoist” politics – a view of the world that was opposed to Russian style bureaucratic communism from above, instead advocates of this approach supported sending revolutionary cadre to “swim among the masses like fish in the sea” or attempting to establish guerilla foco as romantically theorized by Regis Debray and carried out with disastrous results by Che Guevara.


Today one of the approaches used by these types is the "long march" through the (presumably "bourgeois") institutions. (See this discussion of it by "Progressives for Obama" supporter, Fidelista and former SDS leader Carl Davidson.) Of course, the "long march" referred to is that taken by Mao and the Red Army in 1934. Now, Davidson et. al apply the concept to the tactics of the "left" inside various "reform movements" such as the anti-war movement. Davidson was one of the organizers of the 2002 anti war rally at which Obama first spoke out against the war.


Here is how Ayers in 2006 described his approach to "electoral politics" in an interview with the left wing Chicago magazine, In These Times:



"ITT: [A]ren’t progressives putting high hopes in November? Even leading Republicans admit that the Dems are likely to recapture at least one house of Congress.



"So what? That’s not the point, Ayers says. Electoral politics is a tool to connect causes, like gay rights, disability rights, voting rights, human rights. 'That’s how you use electoral politics. Not as an end in itself, but as an organizing mechanism. Our deepest belief, I think, is that we need to connect all these good projects and build the movement. …we should always be positioning ourselves, thinking, okay, if I’m involved in this next election, how am I positioned to help contribute to building a movement, raising consciousness, making the connections, and that’s a real tricky business.'"


Bill Ayers appears to be attempting to lead a similar "long march" in the education world. Ayers is a vigorous advocate of local control along with a related concept called “small schools,” most likely because he believes it gives him the potential to build a political base from which to operate. He has discussed these ideas in speeches and writings on his blog. As he said in a speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in late 2006: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!"


Bill raised money to start the Small Schools Workshop in the early 90s and eventually hired another former maoist from the 60s (and actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS disintegrated) named Mike Klonsky to head it up. [Bill's brother John later got in on the small schools approach also, raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program started by Bill and chaired by Obama (see School Leadership in Times of Urban Reform edited by Bizar and Barr).]

A leading figure in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting and "efficiency" in the Chicago schools in the 1980's was Bill Ayers' father, Thomas Ayers. Tom Ayers, of course, was a very prominent Chicago business man, a retired head of Commonwealth Edison, a lifelong liberal, and a supporter of open housing campaigns (in which my parents participated when I grew up in Chicago in the 60s) as well as Martin Luther King. According to Dorothy Shipps, Tom Ayers co-authored a report of a joint public-private task force on school reform and was later nominated to head up Chicago United, a business backed school reform group that Ayers helped found, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was opposed successfully by black community activists.


When the 1988 Reform Act was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE) was formed, according to Shipps, by the elite business lobby that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly elected local school council members. Some 6000 LSC members were elected. And they became a huge thorn in the side of school administration in Chicago.


Interestingly, one LSC member was John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993, John was made head of the LQE - which, by then, according to Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to re-centralize control of the schools in the hands of the mayor.

In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I believe that in a minute. Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you.


So, why or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley?


Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed's key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-in-law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar.


Dohrn was not admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the "Revolutionary Armed Task Force") "comrades," including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after serving 22 years of a plea bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. The father of Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert, was sentenced to 75-to-life, with no chance of parole, after a trial in which he refused to participate. Chesa is the co-author of a recent apologia for the regime of Venezuelan "left" strong man, Hugo Chavez.


Trienens recently explained his unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practice law and had graduated from law school (before going on her bombing spree) 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago Tribune saying, "[W]e sometimes hire friends."



I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior to attending law school when Obama's DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988. Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn's CV indicates that she left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to starting a position at Northwestern (again, hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been at the firm at the same time, although if Obama and Dohrn met before Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have discussed the firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there.


My best guess, though, is that it would have been Tom Ayers who introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get the attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in very handy later in Obama's career as Kaufman suggests.


(Recently I heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton Minow, who tells me her sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell contends on the basis of this anecdote that her family met and supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to provide me any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.)

In any case the summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a lawyer and working as a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama's first supervisor or mentor there. Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law review in the spring of 1990. After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter registration campaign (which would turn out to be an important step in his career).


Then Obama joined a tiny, little known (outside Chicago, at least) public interest law firm called Davis Miner Barnhill. The partner who hired him was Judson Miner. Miner was a well known left wing lawyer in Chicago who had been counsel to the progressive black mayor in the 80s, Harold Washington. But Miner possibly also had ties to the Ayers family. He was law school classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago (both Class of 1967). He formed a lawyers group against the war after graduation and organized a left wing alternative to the local Chicago bar association.

Then, in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the grant proposal and sheparded it to success. The purpose of the program was to defend the controversial and troubled local schools council effort that had been put in place back in 1988. The first Executive Director of the Challenge was Ken Rolling, who came there from the much discussed Woods Fund (where he had been a program officer). The Woods Fund had provided grants to Obama's DCP in the late 80's and Rolling was a part of the school reform effort in which both Bill Ayers and Obama participated. Obama joined the board of the Woods Fund in 1993 in 1999 he would be joined on the board by Bill Ayers.


A report authored by Dorothy Shipps on the first three years of the Annenberg Challenge program, when Obama was its Board chair, concluded: "The Challenge sought to build on the momentum of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act which had radically decentralized governance of the Chicago Public Schools."


While apparently several hundred school principals had been fired by the LSC’s, kids were still doing poorly in schools and there was chaos of a sorts in the system. (See Shipps, Invisible Hand, for a summary of the problems.) Interestingly, Shipps concludes that the local control movement in Chicago, though backed by radicals like Ayers, gave "business the clearest voice in systemwide reform." She argues that a district level democracy effort such as an "Education Assembly" is required rather than the parochial local control approach:


"A large districtwide elected group intended to serve as a legislative body, such an assembly would have both the staff and structure of one. This alternative vision of democracy rests on citizenship and stewardship even as it builds on the private interests and knowledge of concerned parents and neighbors. As an example of a different form of democratic governance, it serves to remind ordinary Chicagoans that they now have no systemwide forum through which to debate broad issues of equity, standards, and accountability."


This represents a very different vision than that of Ayers & co. (not to mention of the charter school business group approach now in vogue). In fact, in retrospect the Ayers/Ayers (business from above, local activism from below) joint campaign against both the Chicago School District bureaucracy and the Teachers Union is reminiscent of the kinds of alliances one finds in neo-stalinist regimes like that of Cuba, China or Sandinista-run Nicaragua. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, for example, Mao appealed to local activists to attack the party bureaucracy. These authoritarian movements often try to build their power against democratic institutions like unions. Well-intentioned liberals even from the business community are often willing to support such efforts because they view the traditional labor movement as even more of a threat than the neo-stalinist authoritarians like Castro, Chavez or Ortega. While many on the left try to portray such movements as a new form of democracy, they are anything but.


One educational policy analyst called the early 90s Chicago school system "dysfunctional." The former business allies of Bill Ayers and the local control advocates broke away from their support of the LSC's in favor of recentralization of power in the hands of Chicago's new Mayor Daley. According to Shipps,


"for six years, LQE [led by John Ayers until he later joined up with the charter school movement] remained a strong advocate of the 1988 reform. But in 1993 Club [ Commercial Club of Chicago ] members decided the LQE's support for community organizing and voter turnout campaigns was not producing better schools, resurfacing their initial skepticism about political decentralization as a reform strategy. Moreover, they determined that the role of outside agitator might suit community groups, but was ill suited to corporate leadership. It was creating a rift between Club leaders and the central administrators whom they hoped to influence. Club leaders were increasingly convinced that central office accountability was a necessary component of results. As the fundamental divisions between the business view of administrative decentralization and the political version held by community activists reemerged, activists felt betrayed. They protested the 'pull-back' loudly, but succeeded only in becoming less central actors in future reform efforts."


Now the business groups backed re-centralization through a 1995 bill that gutted the power of the LSC’s.


But the Annenberg Challenge money came through anyway due to the efforts of Bill Ayers, among others. It had to be matched 2 to 1 by corporate and foundation money (in fact, they raised an additional $60 mn by 1999), so the Board Chairmanship would have allowed Obama to be in touch with the powerful money interests in Chicago, including possibly the Pritzker Family and others that Kaufman mentions in his story. Penny Pritzker would join the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund which received its startup funding from the Annenberg Challenge as the Challenge wound down in 2001 - the Challenge, in effect, handed the baton of support for school reform to the CPEF. Penny Pritzker is now a key Obama campaign insider in charge of fund raising.

Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who "sent" Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn.


It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to the Ayers's in the battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the 80s.


One guess as to why Obama does not play up his educational experience more thoroughly now – it certainly could be of use to him one would think in beefing up his “I have the experience to be President” argument – is that it would lead to a renewed discussion of the Ayers connection, which is clearly toxic for Obama. And it turns out the impact of the Annenberg Challenge on actual students in Chicago schools is considered mixed at best, although Bill Ayers deemed it a success on political grounds. Indeed the 1995 and 1999 legislative attempts to recentralize power over the schools in the hands of the mayor did not quite succeed in wresting control completely away from the LSC's, instead it helped, in the words of Alexander Russo, "keep the flame alive for decentralized, community-based school reform - even as the system was moving in a very different direction."


This likely explains why Obama tried a kind of head fake when asked about Ayers by George Stephanopoulos in the TV debate with Clinton prior to the Pennsylvania primary. Obama said Ayers was a "professor of english." Yet, Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and served on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on grants to Chicago schools. And he did not know that Ayers was a professor of education? That strains credulity.


Perhaps this would be of just historical interest if it could be firmly established that Bill Ayers no longer has any role in the Obama campaign. But that is not something we know for sure yet. In a recent television interview with Greta Van Susteren (granted, it was on Fox), John Murtagh, a Republican town council member from Yonkers, New York, said that Ayers is currently an "advisor" to Obama. Murtagh has a particular and understandable sensitivity to the Ayers-Obama connection besides his Republican politics: his father was a New York Supreme Court (in NY the Supreme Court is a trial court) judge who presided over a trial of the "Black Panther 21" in 1970-71.


Murtagh was 9 years old at the time. During the trial Murtagh's home was fire bombed and Murtagh claims the Weather Underground was responsible for that bombing along with several others in "solidarity" with the Panthers. He charges, specifically, that Bill Ayers' wife Bernardine Dohrn later took credit (apparently on behalf of the entire WU group) for the bombing. Accounts sympathetic to the Panthers confirm the role of the Weather Underground. (See David Barber, "Leading the Vanguard: White New Leftists School the Panthers on Black Revolution" in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Duke 2006).) The Panther 21 were acquitted of the bombing-related charges made against them, after a lengthy trial.


Certainly Ayers' politics remain unapologetically authoritarian. He recently traveled to Venezuela - only the most recent of several such trips - and delivered a speech in front of Hugo Chavez in which he spoke of education as the "motor force of revolution" and his interest in "overcom[ing] the failings of capitalist education" and said he thought Chavez was creating "something truly new and deeply humane." He closed his speech by mouthing typical slogans of the authoritarian left: "Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!"


As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and the maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign. Davidson apparently moved into the maoist movements of the 70s after the disintegration of SDS.


Now that we have some idea of who "sent" Obama, the left and labor movement deserve to know more about how the exhausted ideas of the authoritarian side of 60's politics may still be influencing the thinking of a potential U.S. president. Maybe Andy Stern's endorsement of Obama makes more sense, now.


In any case, imho, if either Hillary or Obama wins they will keep our troops in Iraq for at least three years and possibly longer....makes you want to run into the arms of Ralph!
Posted by Steve Diamond at 8:59 PM

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Ayers/Obama: Past is Prologue -Except When it Makes Obama Uncomfortable



The New York Times offers a flabby push-up, as opposed to rigorous work-out on Obama's long, close, dangerous and uncomfortable association with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Chicago's complex and cowardly web of convenience that weaves radicals, Private Foundations ( Woods Fund, Joyce Foundation, MacArthur and others), law firms ( Sidley & Austin,,Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, Bluhm Center, Peoples Law Office) real estate opportunists ( Tony Rezko, Allison Davis, Cullen Davis), universities ( UICC, Northwestern, and University of Chicago), and the media ( WGN, Chicago Tribune, Medill School of Journalism) and gutless and cynical politicians ( Daley and Blagojevich) provides the cover for this long, close and dangerous association.

This corporate weave is the 'dumb-down comforter' that wraps Ayers and his odious wife in such warmth that they can stare down from their stoops at America with contempt and allow Billy the Bomber, who polka-ed all over Old Glory in the Tribune's glossy and chi-chi Chicago Magazine, to give AMERICA THE FINGER. Even a Huffington Post Obamabot Michael Shaw noticed that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-shaw/reading-the-pictures-emny_b_131855.html

Obama is rooted to William Ayers and his political ascendancy owes more to Ayers than it does to the urban myth - Obama as Chicago Machine Politician. Obama is no more a Democratic Machine Politician than Tony Rezko is a philanthropist, or the Chicago Sun Times is a newspaper.

For all the protestations from Obama's journalists - worldwide - there has never been a serious inquiry, much less valuable study of William Ayers and his dangerous influence upon Obama by any Mainstream Media -including the cut-and-paste work of Sean Hannity.

Professor Steve Diamond and National Review's Stanley Kurtz have conducted the only real examinations of Ayers and the many other radical mentors of Barack Obama.

The Annenberg Challenge which was funded by Ambassador Walter Annenberg, himself a publisher of sorts -TV Guide and such - and the off-spring of real Chicago Gangsters - Moe Anneberg and the nephew of Max Annenberg. The lazy media dismiss the Annenberg Challenge as a Republican cover -'not just Ayers but Republicans too.'

Nuance!

Ayers and Dohrn were helped to toss their crimes against Americans into the Orwellian Memory Hole, through political convenience. Dorhn has been helping radical lawyers bring suit against Illinois taxpayers through her studies of children being assaulted by a racist Justice system that promotes police torture of blacks, inadequate legal representation for minorities at Northwestern Law School. Dorhn can not practice law. However she can yield power and influence over our courts through radical agitation methods and heavy, heavy lawsuits - Sue the City, Sue the County, Sue the racist People of America. I wish she would have stuck to C-4 as she would have done much less damage to lives and property.

Ayers bombs minds at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They got these jobs and cover of academic propriety through Law Firms - notably Sidley and Austin, where Michele Obama worked.

Obama took the path to White House holding the hands of Ayers and Dorhn.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

McCain/Palin: Want more Obama/Rezko/Jones? Get Sun Times to take the chains off of Tim Novak!



Obama has two little girls at home dying for a puppy, when he has this kennel of news poodles at the Sun Times! Not Fair!

Speaking of not fair! Toss Carol a dog Yummy! Sneed!! Sit up!

The only pit bull on the Chicago Sun Times is Tim Novak. Click my post title for a litany of Novak stories dug up out of the dirt and the dust shovelled on the truth by Obama's shills, Daley's stooges, Medill's meatheads, Ayers acolytes, and Rezko's raiders.

When little Curtis Cooper was crushed by rusty iron gate on mismanaged former CHA property, Young Cullen Davis ( Son of Allison Davis Obama's Law Boss), all fat and sassy, came to the light of day only because of Tim Novak.

Tim Novak is the real deal. When Obama had the the editorial board of the Sun Times - Sit Up! Beg! Roll-Over!!! Fetch! for him, Tim Novak was doing a newsman's job.

Free Tim Novak! Get Some News!

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Obama/Rezko/Davis/Cullen Davis Gate: It Cost Taxpayers Millions of Dollars, Swings One Way,Falls Off and Killed Curtis Cooper






Neither the Chicago Tribune nor the Sun Times ( because Tim Novak is not on the story) made the connection to Barack 'One House'Obama to Tony Rezko and Allison Davis, a white guy termed 'Mayor Daley's link to the African American Community.'


Allison Davis is 'Mayor Daley's link to the African American Community.' No other links, associations, reachers-out, heads-up guys, liasons, or friends in the African American Community - Allison Davis. Allsion Davis is the go-to-guy whenever Mayor Daley needs a link to the African American Community.Not Senator Barck Obama.
Not Ike Carothers. Not Jackie Heard.Not Elzie Higginbottom.Not Dempsey Travis.

Nope Allison Davis. Allsion Davis who was Barack Obama's Law Boss. Back in April of 2007, Tim Novak was on the story and should continue to be on the story for STNG, but they want this tale to fade. Here is what Tim Novak, the only real newsman on the Sun Times, had to say about insulated Progressive lawyer Allison S. Davis.

When Barack Obama took a job at a small Chicago law firm in 1993, the first name on the door of the firm was Allison S. Davis.

Five years later, having left his Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland firm, Davis invested in Antoin "Tony'' Rezko's final government-subsidized, low-income housing project, state records show, in a deal handled by Davis' former law firm.

Davis and Rezko also went into business together, building upscale homes in the booming Kenwood neighborhood where Davis lives. The legal work on those deals was also done by Davis' former law firm, where Obama was working.

Davis, 67, and Rezko are still business partners "in a technical sense,'' Davis said in an interview, though he added, "There's nothing going on in the last couple years.''

He said he didn't recall how or when he met Rezko, a businessman and political fund-raiser under indictment on federal charges that include demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state pension investments under Gov. Blagojevich.

While Davis was running the law firm, he was also a board member of the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., a not-for-profit company that hooked up with Rezko's Rezmar Corp. on tax-supported projects to rehabilitate apartments for low-income tenants. Davis' firm handled the legal work on those housing deals.

Davis has long been an influential member of the Woodlawn community just south of the University of Chicago. His father was the university's first African-American professor. Since 1991, Davis has been a member of the Chicago Plan Commission, appointed by Mayor Daley, a friend.

Four years ago, Blagojevich appointed Davis to the Illinois State Board of Investment, which controls state pension funds -- one of a series of appointments the governor made at Rezko's request.

Tim Novak


Novak says that Davis's Pa was African American? Guess I was mistaken! Must be true - Davis ain't a white guy then. Pictures never really tell the story. Surface value journalism is also misleading. Get Novak back on the case.

Yep, Tim Novak on a story is like Sterling on Silver. He is such a pitbull that he could dig up my dreams ( don't go there, Tim).

Instead, to make any sense of the non-investigation into the death of Curtis Cooper by our propaganda journalists we need to flip to the New York Post.

Here is a piece that considers the Davis/Rezko/Obama connection important.


In October 1998, Obama wrote city and state officials, urging them to give Rezko $14 million to build an apartment complex outside of Obama's state Senate district. The Chicago Sun-Times noted last year that Obama's request included 855,000 in "development fees" for Rezko and for another developer, Allison Davis, who happened to be Obama's old law-firm boss. Obama's spokesman said it was just a coincidence that the state senator wrote letters to obtain millions of dollars for his two longtime friends. ( emphasis my own -because . . .gee, isn't that kind of a red-flag?)

In fact, Obama was a dependable ally of subsidized developers in the Legislature, giving Rezko and others broader help as well. In "The Case Against Barack Obama," I identify and parse six housing bills with which Obama was closely involved. A few examples:

* In 2001, Obama cosponsored a bill allowing developers to sell state tax credits to others and pocket half of the proceeds.
* In 2002 and 2004, he was chief cosponsor of a bill to authorize a rent-subsidy fund giving "grants . . . directly to developers" of low-income housing. Seventy percent of the money was earmarked for the Chicago area.

* Obama cosponsored the Illinois Housing Initiative Act of 2003, which required the governor to develop a plan for more low-income housing and "provide[d] for funding for housing construction and rehabilitation and supportive services."

* In 2003, Obama voted for the Affordable Housing Planning and Appeal Act, which required Illinois municipalities to make 10 percent of their housing units "affordable" (by definition, this included subsidized housing). This forced 46 communities just outside of Chicago to create more than 7,000 new "affordable" units - a huge boost in demand for area developers. The bill also provided loopholes for developers to circumvent local ordinances and regulations.

After voting for this measure (it passed narrowly), Obama then cosponsored a new bill that moved up its implementation by more than a year.

These and the other Obama-backed bills helped make millionaires of Rezko and other slum developers at taxpayers' expense. The developers - including his former law boss and an adviser to his current campaign - reciprocated, together giving and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama's campaigns.

To sum up: Obama got them subsidies to build. He secured them a steady income of government rent subsidies. He arranged special tax credits and abatements for them. He backed measures that increased demand for their services, and helped them legally circumvent local laws.

Perhaps Obama acted with only the poor in mind. Yet some of his developer friends weren't so conscientious - especially Rezko.

Notably, Rezko's company claimed that it lacked the funds to heat one of its 11 buildings in Obama's state Senate district from December 1996 to February 1997. But Rezko still managed to write a $1,000 check to Obama's campaign fund on Jan. 14. That month, his tenants shivered as 19 inches of snow fell on northern Illinois.

With his early and large investments in Obama, Rezko helped the Democratic nominee get to where he is today. Obama, meanwhile, helped Rezko with his legislative work and his letter-writing. Given this close working relationship, the Obama-Rezko land deal is far less surprising.

David Freddoso, a political reporter for National Review, is the author of "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate."


All this stuff is out there for us paper readers at Kean Gas Station each morning. The people who Medill snobs think are too stupid to matter. Well, listen up! We have jobs, families, lives, interests and activities that bring people together. We share thoughts and opinions. Millions of us! We read and we remember what we read. We also control the impulse to buy a paper - we just might glance at it without buying it while we have coffee and crullers. That's revenue denied to you dopes. Guerilla Theatre as the Hyde Park Mafia might opine.

And Obama worries about John McCain's Houses. McCain is a Tightwad! I have raised ranch and a thirty year mortgage and the number of homes in possession really upsets me!

Hell, the cheap bastard! If I shared Cindy McCain's money, with her say so of course, I'd have houses in Peotone, Martinton, Braidwood, Coal City, Custer Park and Papineau, Illinois as well as Sidona,AZ - but I guess that it is a dry heat there.

Obama can stand some heat - Dry, or Wet, Obama will not get any heat form the Cupcake Mules slinging ink for Chicago papers. Tim Novak is a pitbull and he can bring the heat!

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Tribune Updates the Cullen Davis ( Dad was Obama's Law Boss) Complicity in Boy's Death


The Tribune updated its story on the death this summer of Curtis Cooper and the complicity of the property managers United Property Advisors (UPA)that is raking in millions of dollars from the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA).

Yesterday's article deftly stepped around the 'alleged' crumb in the unhappy accident that caused Curtis Cooper's death - Cullen Davis.

Cullen Davis, like William Ayers, is the wee lad of a well-connected Lefty Dad, who has his own bundle of problems with the Feds.

Yesterday, I posted a rather piquant prose philippic that noted the obvious and glaring side-step around Cullen Davis and his well-juiced Dad.

The Tribune locked Mayor Daley into the tale, which makes sense, but seemed to give a complete pass to Allison Davis. Allison Davis, who is very white, was made to appear to be Mayor Daley's African American link to the community. Rather, Allison Davis, who is very white, was Barack Obama's Law boss.

Allison Davis is a member of the Progressive Apparatus of lefty lawyers, journalists, activists, and opportunists who get a pass from the Medill School of Journalism for peccadilloes, wallet-liftings, fund-miss appropriations and other Lefty high-jinks. Let's see if the Trib gets hot-under the bra on this story, though it may lead to the conviction of 'a licensed attorney and real estate broker bringing visionary and strategic leadership to Urban Property Advisors (UPA) plus a number of companies and ventures impacting change in urban environments:'Cullen Davis. Shucks, if the Tribune wants you to suffer - you suffer! Ask George Ryan. If a piece falling off a truck and killing six children can be made to prosecute and destroy the Governor of Illinois, how high the moon? Unless, of course the Medill Industry demands a pass for Progressives.

Today the Tribune added a bit more to the horrific tale of little Curtis Cooper's Death. They included Cullen Davis, who is very white but served as an aid to Rep. Danny K. Davis - no relation I presume - which is only fitting and should have been in the first paragraph of yesterday's feature.

Here is the thing. The Tribune had no problem linking this little boy's death to Mayor Daley - a very wholesome villain to MSM -but blanched at pointing out the very powerful connection between Allison Davis/Tony Rezko and Senator Obama. Why is that?
Tim Novak the only real newsman of the bumptious Chicago Sun Times has been a pitbull with his buckers sunk deeply in cheeks of the Progressive paragons - Obama/Rezko/Davis.

Credit where due - the Trib threw us a bone this morning:


UPA is run by Cullen Davis. His father, Allison, also has been an official with the firm, according to state records. Cullen Davis also declined to comment because of the pending lawsuit.

HUD inspectors reported that the conditions of the gates worsened over the last two years, records show. In 2006, the problem was judged to be of midlevel severity, with a rating of 2 on a scale of 1 to 3. The level was raised to 3 in two subsequent inspections, in April and December of last year.

Under HUD's inspection system, housing authorities are required to immediately fix problems regarded as pressing health and safety concerns, such as exposed wiring and blocked fire exits. Inspectors found many such violations on their last visit to the Cabrini-Green Rowhouses and gave the project a score of 30 points out of a possible total of 100—a "very bad score," Hanson said.

The condition of the gates, however, was not marked as life-threatening and thus did not require immediate repair. Hanson said HUD's computer software, in use for about 10 years, does not allow problems with gates or fences to be designated as life-threatening.

Even though it was not required to fix the gates immediately, the CHA should have made sure they were repaired, said Eleny Ladias, director of technical services for HUD in Chicago. "It's up to the housing authority. They're required to follow up with those type of repairs."

CHA officials said non-emergency items needing repair usually are "addressed by the property manager." They declined to comment on whether the broken gates were ever fixed.

UPA got the contract to manage the rowhouses where Curtis Cooper lived at the end of 2005, taking over from a resident-run management group. Residents have been critical of the firm's work, and some said the gates have long been in bad shape. "The gates were raggedy as hell," said Sherri Montgomery, a lifelong resident of the rowhouses.

After the accident, UPA posted signs warning children not to play on or near the gates. "It's too damn late," said Clayton Wade, Curtis Cooper's father. "The baby's dead."

lcohen@tribune.com

solkon@tribune.com

jgrotto@tribune.com


Like the Ayers/Obama papers held hostage at Cement City, better late than never.

Whenever I am near a Progressive Do-Gooder, I throw both hands over the Left check of my ass to protect my wallet.

Whenever a Progressive Do-Gooder gets near poor people, they rake in millions, properties get boarded up, and people die.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Gate Crushes Boy Chicago Tribune Hides Obama Connection but Links Daley



That's Cullen Davis Folks - he's doing just fine. The little boy killed by the gate on the properties that are making Cullen richer never met Cullen. Cullen Davis has long resume for a young man - loaded with all kinds of do-gooder stuff. Cullen Davis never got mentioned in the Tribune story about responsibility for the death of little Curtis Cooper.


Click my Post Title for series of real articles by a real newsman, Tim Novak of the Chicago Sun Times that link Rezko client Obama and Allison Davis - Obama's Law Boss.

The Tribune just flashed a story about CHA complicity in the Death of a little boy this summer, when a rusted wrought iron gate crushed him to death. Little Curtis Cooper died at a property manged by Cullen Davis, son of Allison Davis, a lefty lawyer with thick ties to Obama.

The Tribune is in the tank for Obama. I am in the tank for McCain, but this piece don't cost you nothing.

The Tribune white-washes Obama's sordid support for Rezko/Davis/Ayers/ . . . any more do-gooder crooks that you can name? and saves the kick in the two things that Jesse Jackson wanted to cut off of Obama for Mayor Daley - not a guy that I would like to ever hear the words 'Pat Hickey is a great friend of mine' (which I won't) -because he MAY be treated as the bad guy du jour by the Progressives. He is after all a Daley - not a great one like his brother John, who happens to be one of the most genuine and authentically nice people I have ever had the honor to meet.

Here's the Tribune at its Candy Assed Best:

Inspectors for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported at least as long ago as 2006 that gates at the Cabrini-Green complex were damaged, falling or leaning. In their last report, in December 2007, they also said that "multiple" gates were "missing hardware" and that the defects were severe.

Six months later, 3-year-old Curtis Cooper died when one of the massive metal gates fell on him. A lawyer for the boy's family has alleged that the gate was dangling by one hinge because its two other hinges had rusted through.

After being alerted to the problem, it's not clear what steps—if any—the CHA took to get the politically connected firm managing the Cabrini-Green Rowhouses to fix the gates. Urban Property Advisors, or UPA, is run by the son of developer Allison Davis, one of Mayor Richard Daley's top allies in the African-American community.

In response to questions from the Tribune on Thursday, the CHA issued a news release Friday morning saying that the agency passed on the last report to UPA and that repairing the gates was not a priority because HUD inspectors did not designate the gates' condition as a life-threatening emergency.


Read the array of Tim Novak pieces for real story. Novak is the only real newsman at the tanking Sun Times

The Tribune just laid off forty plus people, but they put three reporters on this whitewash crap?

They do not even name the punk responsible - they let Daddy get the tune-up because Daddy is already singing an aria to the Feds. That's Cullen Davis Folks*! Cullen Davis!

Mr. & Mrs. Cooper, God Bless you in your grief and give guidance to your days without your little boy, Curtis.

Cullen Davis! Anything to add? Didn't think so. Tribune? How about a Harrumph?

Come off of it! You clowns calling the shots at the Trib have taken way too many pulls on whatever it is that you have in that Hookah.

*Cullen J. Davis, CEO, is a licensed attorney and real estate broker bringing visionary and strategic leadership to Urban Property Advisors (UPA) plus a number of companies and ventures impacting change in urban environments:
• CJD Investments, which identifies opportunities for acquisition of
undervalued properties in transitional neighborhoods.
• CJD Projects, which develops multifamily housing using complex
financial transactions, especially those involving a high degree of government interaction.
• CNS Projects, a company focused on the holistic development of
urban areas and currently has more than $35 million dollars in
value under development.
• Principal of Hallmark and Johnson Real Estate Management,
LLC, which manages condominiums and market-rate housing
across the Chicagoland area.
• Daveri Development Group, a partnership which develops
multifamily housing throughout the state of Illinois.

Mr. Davis is formerly an associate in the real estate department at the law firm of Winston & Strawn, where he represented developers, financial institutions, investment bankers and investor groups in connection with residential, industrial, office and retail properties. He also served as an aid for Congressman Danny K. Davis, a position which further grounded him in the intricacies of public and private partnership. Mr. Davis received a Juris Doctorate from Northwestern University’s School of Law and a Bachelor’s Degree from Grinnell College. He is a certified tax-credit compliance specialist, a member of the Illinois Bar Association, and holds a variety of other professional memberships and certifications.

Mr. Davis, a native of Chicago, lives in the North Kenwood-Oakland community with his wife and has been a pioneer in that community’s redevelopment.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

John McCain: Obama wrong on Colombia, FARC, Ayers, Dohrn, and American Interests in General





John McCain returned from Colombia and three Americans and a Colombian Presidential candidate held by Marxist FARC terrorists fro six years were freed by Columbia's military with American assistance.

Senator Obama is wrong on America's Free Trade Agreement with Colombia, which is fighting Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez for the liberty of South American democracies - Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil are all in danger from Chavez's ambitions for a Marxist Continent.

William Ayers has been and continues to be an influence on Obama. Ayers has a long history with Chavez.

From American Thinker:

Obama may already be working with Hugo Chavez and the narco-war against Colombia. Colombian troops March 1 nailed narco-guerilla leader Raul Reyes just across the border in Ecuador. In response, Chavez threatened to invade Columbia. Information on a laptop computer found with Reyes' corpse detailed the FARC guerillas'relations with both Venezuela and Ecuador and included a February 28 letter from Reyes to the FARC Secretariat. The letter details extensive FARC relations with the governments of Colombia and Ecuador and includes this item:


"The gringos called for a meeting with the minister to ask him to tell us they are interested in talking about several topics. They claim they new president in their country will be Obama and that these people are interested in their fellow citizens. Obama will support neither Plan Colombia nor the signature of the Free Trade Agreement. In this regard, we replied we are interested in relations with the governments that are on equal grounds and that in the case of the United States, a public statement voicing their interest in talking to the FARC is needed, given their eternal war against us."


As Reyes predicted, on April 10 Democrats in Congress blocked enactment of a free trade treaty with Colombia -- in spite of the fact that Colombian exports are already allowed into the US without tariffs. Obama opposed the treaty, winning denunciation by Colombian president Uribe.



Obama is wrong - he is a Progressive Windsock. Obama is wrong on the Surge; he is wrong on Colombian Free Trade; Obama is dead wrong on Chavez and Senator Obama is wrong for the Office of President of the United States.

Barack Obama has had the wrong tutors ( Tony Rezko, Allison Davis, whose son Cullen is being sued for the wrongful death of three year old Curtis Cooper, Fr. Mike Pfleger, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the dious couple of unrepentant terrorists Bernadine Dorhn and William Ayers) and he listened to them with rapt attention.

Pay attention to Senator Obama.

Pay attention to John McCain. In the days to come the man who roughed up a Sandinista jefe back in the 1980's* will prove to be more than right on Colombia - just as he has been on the Surge.


*
The two senators have made peace since the remarks. Cochran said McCain included him on a recent campaign visit to Meridian. He told the Sun Herald on Monday that McCain, whose ancestors lived in north Mississippi, is the best man for the job.

But Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987. Cochran, McCain - who had won election to the Senate that year - and other members of a bipartisan committee of lawmakers called the Central American Negotiations Observer Group - met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, head of the left-wing political party known as Sandinistas, about tensions in the region.

The atmosphere was tense, as the U.S. was pressing "pretty hard." Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.

"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

No punches were thrown and the two sat back down, Cochran said. The man, who appeared ruffled after the confrontation with McCain, was an Ortega associate, but Cochran said he was unsure of his identity.

Flash-forward 21 years. Tuesday, McCain was traveling in Central America and he stopped in Colombia. In 2006 Ortega won his office back after losing a 1990 election.



http://www.bnd.com/news/politics/story/386304.html