Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (27 page)

In addition to the DVD deal, federal and state investigators are looking at a $1.1 million “finder’s fee” paid by Quadrangle to an agent named Henry Morris even though, according to the SEC complaint, Loglisci was already negotiating the investment directly with Quadrangle by the time the firm “retained” Morris.
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Naturally, New York wasn’t the only state in which Rattner worked his magic. In 2005, Quadrangle won a $20 million contract from the New Mexico State Investment Council, headed by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, later to be a disgraced Obama Commerce Secretary nominee. Rattner donated a total of $20,000 to Richardson’s 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial campaigns.
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From 2004 to 2009, Quadrangle employed New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman’s son.
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At some point during that period, Rattner had lunch with Senator Bingaman at Quadrangle’s offices in New York.
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No word on whether they discussed
Chooch
.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department said Rattner disclosed the SEC-Quadrangle investigation before his appointment.
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A White House spokesman in April 2009 said President Obama remained fully supportive of Rattner. In July 2009, Rattner resigned.

TECHNOLOGY CZAR VIVEK KUNDRA: PETTY THIEF, CLUELESS CHIEF

Whoever thinks putting a shoplifter in charge of the entire federal government’s information security infrastructure is a good idea? Raise your hands. Anybody? Well, the Obama White House has complete confidence in Vivek Kundra, the 34-year-old “whiz kid” named Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) in March 2009 despite his criminal history. As first reported by blogger Ed Morrissey at
HotAir.com
, Kundra was convicted of misdemeanor theft.
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He stole a handful of men’s shirts from a J.C. Penney’s department store and ran from police in a failed attempt to evade arrest.
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Morrissey, a former call center manager for the burglary and alarm business, points out that his employees in the private workforce had to be licensed; in some of those states, “any adult theft conviction at all would be disqualifying.”
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But such high standards for technology security czars in the government workforce apparently do not exist. Only after Morrissey pestered the White House—and only after mainstream media outlets picked up on Morrissey’s reporting—did the White House finally acknowledge Kundra’s criminal past.
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Kundra was a 21-year-old adult at the time of his attempted thievery and attempted escape from the police. From the White House’s pooh-poohing of the incident as a “youthful indiscretion,” you might have thought the digits in his age were reversed.

You will find no acknowledgment of Kundra’s troubles on the official White House website. Instead, President Obama effuses about his technology czar’s “depth of experience in the technology arena” and “commitment to lowering the cost of government operations.” As the nation’s CIO, Kundra “will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.”
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But the aura of security and openness was further thrown into doubt in March when an FBI search warrant was issued at Kundra’s office. He was serving as the Chief Technology Officer of the District of Columbia before moving over to the White House. During the transition, two of Kundra’s underlings, Yusuf Acar and Sushil Bansal, were charged in an alleged scheme of bribery, kickbacks, ghost employees, and forged timesheets. Kundra was put on leave for five days and then reinstated after the Feds informed him that he was neither a subject nor a target of the investigation.
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Team Obama emphasized that Kundra had no idea what was going on in his workplace, which employed about 300 workers. But if his claimed ignorance is supposed to exonerate Kundra, what does it suggest about his ability to police government technology operations across the entire federal government? And what responsibility and oversight exactly did Kundra have over the indicted employees in his office? The buck stops where? Veteran D.C. newspaper columnist Jonetta Rose Barras reported that Acar “was consistently promoted by his boss, Vivek Kundra, receiving with each move increasing authority over sensitive information and operating with little supervision, according to government sources familiar with activities inside the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, or OCTO.” The raid was no surprise to city and federal watchdogs, who identified a systemic lack of controls in the office, Barras reported.
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Eric Krangel at technology trade publication
Silicon Alley Insider
called on Kundra to resign:

No one has accused Vivek of direct wrongdoing. But Vivek’s apparent obliviousness to the alleged criminal behavior in his office hardly testifies to his managerial skills. Especially not given Vivek’s self-promotion as a crusader against corruption. If Vivek couldn’t keep tiny DC clean, can he handle the responsibility of an exponentially larger federal budget?

Even if Vivek is clean as a whistle, his effectiveness as a reformer has already been crippled. Who won’t question Vivek’s motives should the new CIO call for a radical reform of our government’s IT infrastructure? Is there any chance Vivek can implement real reform while we wait—over the course of months and years—for more information about what he knew to dribble out of an ongoing criminal investigation?

Reforming the federal government’s bloated web presence is a huge job, one we once thought Vivek Kundra was an inspired choice to tackle. But surely Vivek isn’t the only person capable of taking on the dot-gov mess.
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No, but he may be one of the few convicted petty thieves in the country who has gone on to testify, as Kundra did in 2007, on how to create “a culture of accountability and innovation” in order to prevent “theft and fraud.”
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The anti-crime prevention strategy of Obama’s technology security chief: takes one to know one.

Unchecked, these shadow despots with spotty records could wreak major havoc on the economy. But proving that sunlight can indeed be the best disinfectant, conservative bloggers, talk radio, and FOX News spotlighted the radical extremism of one Obama czar who was forced to resign after original publication of this book. Van Jones, the “green jobs czar” who was personally recruited by White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, had a long history of making inflammatory statements and joining fringe movements (such as the 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy theorists). Jones, an Oakland “community activist,” lobbied for the release of notorious Death Row cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, likened his opponents to the Ku Klux Klan, and frequently ranted about Marxist “revolution” away from “gray capitalism.”

Van Jones did not just accidentally slip through the cracks of the Obama vetters. They knew what he espoused before they installed him. Jarrett took full credit at the far Left dKos blogger conference in August 2009:

JARRETT:.You guys know Van Jones? [Applause. Moderator injects: “This is his house apparently.”]

JARRETT:Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House.
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On September 6, 2009, amid spreading outrage over his “creative ideas” about destroying the free market and engaging in racial demagoguery, Jones tendered his resignation. He blamed an orchestrated “campaign” of “lies and distortions to distract and divide.” His defenders falsely accused FOX News Channel host and radio talker Glenn Beck, who had been targeted by Jones’s former rabble-rousing outfit, Color of Change, of clamoring for his head in retaliation against the boycott action. But Beck had started exposing Jones’s views well before Color of Change launched its vendetta. It was the work the “mainstream” media didn’t want to do.
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A few weeks after Jones threw himself under the Obama bus, moderate GOP Senator Susan Collins of Maine proposed an amendment to an Interior Appropriations bill that would have restricted federal funds of at least eighteen appointed Obama czars, required every czar to “respond to reasonable requests to testify before, or provide information to, any congressional committee with jurisdiction over matters the President has assigned to that individual,” and required every czar to “issue a public, written report twice a year to these same congressional committees. This report would include a description of the activities of the official and the office, any rule, regulation, or policy that the official or the office participated in the development of, or any rule, regulation, or policy that the official or the office directed be developed by the department or agency with statutory responsibility for the matter.”
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Senator Collins said on the Senate floor:

The effective functioning of our democracy is predicated on open government, on providing a transparent process for the people we serve. It cannot instill trust and confidence in its citizenry unless it fosters accountability.

It is against that backdrop that I raise my strong concerns regarding the Administration’s appointment of at least 18 new “czars” to manage some of the most complex issues facing our country.

. . . I am deeply troubled because these czars fail to provide the accountability, transparency, and oversight necessary for our constitutional democracy.

... Senators Lamar Alexander, Christopher Bond, Mike Crapo, Pat Roberts, and Robert Bennett joined me in writing to the President about these important issues. We identified at least 18 “czars” whose reported responsibilities may be undermining the constitutional oversight responsibilities of Congress or express statutory assignments of responsibility to other Executive branch officials.

To be clear, I do not consider every position identified in various reports as a “czar” to be problematic. Positions established by law or subject to Senate confirmation, such as the Director of National Intelligence, the Homeland Security Advisor, and the Chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, do not raise the same concerns about accountability, transparency, and oversight. Furthermore, we all recognize that Presidents are entitled to rely on experts who serve as senior advisers.

As I noted earlier, however, “czar” positions within the Executive Office of the President are largely insulated from effective Congressional oversight. And many “czars” appointed by this Administration seem either to duplicate or dilute the statutory authority and responsibilities that Congress already has conferred upon Cabinet-level officers and other senior Executive branch officials.

Indeed, many of these new “czars” appear to occupy positions of greater responsibility and authority than officials who already have been confirmed by the Senate.

Whether in the White House or elsewhere, these “czar” appointments are not subject to the Senate’s constitutional “advice and consent” role. Little information is available concerning their responsibilities and authorities. There is no careful Senate examination of their character and qualifications. And we are speaking here of some of the most senior positions within our government.

The appointments of so many czars have muddied the waters, causing confusion and risking miscommunication going forward. We need to know, with clarity: Who is responsible for what? Who is in charge—the czar or the Cabinet official? Who can Congress and the American people hold accountable for government policies that affect daily life?

Under pressure from the White House, the Democrat majority in the Senate used a procedural maneuver to kill Senator Collins’s bill. Senate Democratic Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois sneered at “czar watchers” on the Right. The White House continued to show its contempt for openness by appointing ever more commissars, including a union hatchet man-turned-auto-czar-turned-manufacturing czar, Ron Bloom. He’s a double-dipping appointee now in charge of revitalizing two industries that he and his Big Labor bosses helped run into the ground.

Like so many of the czars of the Obama Underworld, Bloom serves in a completely superfluous position. Why does America need a “manufacturing” czar? Doesn’t the Department of Labor cover that jurisdiction already? As a former Steelworkers Union representative, Bloom has no practical experience running a business—let alone a successful one.

President Obama trotted out a new euphemism in an attempt to avoid criticism about the Big Labor pay-off: “Point person.”
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But the “czar watchers” see through the smokescreen and comprehend the power grab, even if the self-proclaimed watchdogs in the mainstream media have clung stubbornly to their blinders.

Nature, thankfully, abhors a vacuum. And so does the information-hungry public.

CHAPTER 6

MONEY MEN

LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND LIBERAL

M
an of the People Barack Obama was on fire. Playing to a crowd in Chester, Virginia, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, the Democratic presidential candidate took his rhetorical piñata-stick to GOP rival John McCain and whacked him repeatedly for his personal wealth. Obama told the crowd that reporters had asked McCain how many houses he owned. Obama pretended to be aghast at McCain’s answer:

“He said, ‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to check with my staff.’ True quote!”