Obama Camp Has Many Ties to Wife's Employer
By Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008; A01
A few years ago, executives at the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center were concerned that an increasing number of patients were arriving at their emergency room with what the executives considered to be non-urgent complaints. The visits were costly to the hospital, and many of the patients, coming from the surrounding South Side neighborhood, were poor and uninsured.
Michelle Obama, an executive at the medical center, launched an innovative program to steer the patients to existing neighborhood clinics to deal with their health needs.
That effort, in time, inspired a broader program the hospital now calls its Urban Health Initiative. To ensure community support, Michelle Obama and others in late 2006 recommended that the hospital hire the firm of David Axelrod, who a few months later became the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
(snip)
Links to University
Both Barack and Michelle Obama have worked at the University of Chicago, a financial and intellectual powerhouse with 9,500 employees and a legacy of nurturing Nobel laureates.
Barack was a part-time lecturer at the law school for more than a decade, earning as much as $69,000 a year. Michelle was the founding director of the university's community service center, working there for five years before moving to the medical center in 2001.
Shortly after Barack Obama joined the U.S. Senate in 2005, the medical center promoted Michelle Obama to vice president of community and external relations, and more than doubled her salary. She is now on leave from the $317,000-a-year post, in which she sought to bridge the gap between the wealthy institution and its poorer neighbors. The hospital declined to discuss the budget for her program or her input into budgetary decisions.
The vast majority of political contributions from university employees have gone to Democrats, and over the past nine years they have donated at least $373,000 to Barack Obama’s campaigns, records show. The university's executive suites are home to a number of the couple's closest friends and financial backers.
The medical center's chairwoman, Valerie Jarrett, is a close friend and top adviser who travels frequently with Barack Obama. One of Barack’s best friends, Eric Whitaker, is executive vice president at the center and is now in charge of the Urban Health Initiative. Hospital board member Kelly R. Welsh is executive vice president at Northern Trust Co., which extended the couple a $1.3 million home mortgage shortly after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. Dan Shomon, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager, is a university lobbyist. Jarrett, Whitaker, Welsh and Shomon all declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests.
(snip)
Pretty closely held corporation, isn’t it? And more importantly, accountable to nobody outside their own circle.
To run an organization of this size requires some considerable funding, much of which came from the Chicago Annenberg Initiative, grant money from a private fund that was taken over and looted, very little of it actually being used to fund the original purpose, which was to “improve” Chicago schoolroom environments in the public schools.
Enter the George Soros funding capabilities. Through a number of front organizations, the cash just kept on coming when the Annenberg funds were finally drained, and was used to build the launch apparatus for the nascent obama perpetual campaign.
Now, understand, “campaign” has a much different meaning in this context than is normally understood to be in a political contest. This is smashmouth, lead-pipe, take-no-prisoners, all out mortal combat, not so much to win on the strength of your arguments, but to discredit, slander, and if possible, get the opponent to APPEAR to have some criminal background, making them unfit for office, before the same can be proven or even alleged about yourself.
By any objective standard, obama has NEVER openly WON any elective race prior to becoming a candidate for the US Presidency, it was always by default because the rival was outgunned and outmaneuvered, by getting cut off at the knees by some accusation or innuendo that turned out to have little basis in fact, but looked bad on paper and spread by a whispering campaign. Protective coloration by open and covert restating of reality by the various agencies who were safeguarding information that may not have proved beneficial was also a factor.
There is reason to believe that the campaign funding, once the spigot was turned on, was channelled in such ways to avoid being accountable by applicable campaign finance rules. This was supposed to be an election for Americans, by Americans. It shall never be pursued, but an objective investigation of the source of this funding in the long journey to the Oval Office for obama would show the presence of “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth” have contributed far more disproportionately to the launch and ascension of this pretender, than has ever been the case in all of Untied States history.
Even Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., was never this cynical about the nature of America.