Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (3 page)

The American Spectator
’s Jeffrey Lord reminded Americans of another Democratic White House facing accusations of trading jobs for political support. In 1960, while then-Senator John F. Kennedy was running in a heated fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, an East Coast governor had claimed Kennedy offered him a cabinet post in return for his Convention report. Instead of dodging the question, shrugging his shoulders, or counseling those asking questions about the rumors to “move on,” Kennedy demonstrated what any normal public official so falsely accused would demonstrate: anger. Campaign chronicler Theodore H. White recounted his reaction:
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The conversation began in a burst of anger. A story had appeared in a New York newspaper that evening that an Eastern Governor had claimed that Kennedy had offered him a cabinet post in return for his Convention support. His anger was cold, furious. When Kennedy is angry, he is at his most precise, almost schoolmasterish.
It is a federal offense, he said, to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor.
This was an accusation of a federal offense. It was not so. [Emphasis added.]

The weasel-worded statements from the current White House about their reported involvement in such federal offenses stand in striking contrast to Kennedy’s clear condemnation of such practices.

On Memorial Day weekend 2010, White House legal counsel Bob “The Fixer” Bauer attempted to bury questions about the Sestak affair with a holiday document dump that raised more questions than it answered. Bauer’s memo acknowledged that “options for Executive Branch service were raised with him” through former President Bill Clinton, whom White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel enlisted to woo Sestak. The memo also mentions “efforts” (plural, not singular) to woo Sestak.
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But the White House refused to divulge what offers besides Clinton’s were extended to Sestak. Moreover, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs denied that Team Obama was involved in the one Clinton offer that has been publicized—an unpaid appointment on an intelligence board for which Sestak was ineligible. After months of silence, Romanoff finally stepped forward to acknowledge once and for all that the White House had dangled several positions before him, too. He released e-mails detailing not one, not two, but three different paid positions offered by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina.
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Messina’s boss, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, was subpoenaed the same week by impeached former Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich to testify in his Senate pay-for-play corruption trial.

Yes, Obama’s Blagojevich headache continued to throb. In chapter 7, I spotlighted the convergence of disgraced former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich, Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, and Team Obama in the scandalous Senate seat-for-sale scandal. Blagojevich is on trial for attempting to profit from his power to appoint Obama’s Senate successor. In April 2010, his defense team filed a motion to subpoena President Obama in the case. Thanks to an administrative bungle, portions of the motion that were intended to be redacted were left readable. NBC Chicago obtained and published the sections, which included references to a secret phone call between Obama and Blagojevich; an allegation that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel floated his own suggested replacement for Obama’s seat; an allegation that Obama told a “certain labor union official” that he would support (now-White House senior adviser) Valerie Jarrett to fill his old seat; and a bombshell allegation that Obama might have lied about conversations with convicted briber and fraudster Tony Rezko. From NBC Chicago’s Ward Room’s report and analysis of the redactions:

Blagojevich’s lawyers allege that Rezko admitted breaking the law by contributing “a large sum of cash” to a public official. Blagojevich’s attorneys say that public official is Obama. Obama said that Rezko never relayed a request from a lobbyist to hold a fundraiser in favor of favorable legislative action. But the point may be moot: regardless of Obama talking/not talking to Rezko, Blagojevich’s attorneys say that Obama refused the request regardless.

Redacted portion: However, the defense has a good faith belief that Mr. Rezko, President Obama’s former friend, fund-raiser, and neighbor told the FBI and the United States Attorneys a different story about President Obama. In a recent in camera proceeding, the government tendered a three paragraph letter indicating that Rezko “has stated in interviews with the government that he engaged in election law violations by personally contributing a large sum of cash to the campaign of a public official who is not Rod Blagojevich. . . . Further, the public official denies being aware of cash contributions to his campaign by Rezko or others and denies having conversations with Rezko related to cash contributions. . . . Rezko has also stated in interviews with the government that he believed he transmitted a quid pro quo offer from a lobbyist to the public official, whereby the lobbyist would hold a fundraiser for the official in exchange for favorable official action, but that the public official rejected the offer. The public official denies any such conversation. In addition, Rezko has stated to the government that he and the public official had certain conversations about gaming legislation and administration, which the public official denies having had.

Redacted footnote: The defense has a good faith belief that this public official is Barack Obama.
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But the most glaring example of the Obama culture of corruption, and the clearest evidence that Hope and Change is hazardous to your personal well-being and welfare, can be found in the $60 billion White House payoff to Big Labor in exchange for its support for Obama’s federal health care takeover plan. In mid-January 2010, the White House convened backdoor meetings with Democratic leaders, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern, and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger. Outside the view of C-SPAN cameras, which Obama had so ostentatiously, repeatedly, and falsely
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promised to install at every health care policy negotiation, the special interest groups cut a deal to exempt union members from a massive 40 percent excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums.

The excise tax kicks in for everyone else in 2013. While the law squeezes middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors, and drug-makers to subsidize expanded government health care, the Big Labor Cadillac tax exemption gives union members who belong to any health plan that is part of a collective-bargaining agreement immunity until 2018. State and local government employees who belong to unions will also be spared. As the
Wall Street Journal
editorial board put it succinctly: “The 87% of Americans who don’t belong to a union will now foot the bill for a $60 billion giveaway to those who do.”
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And you can bet the union lobbyists will spend the next eight years lobbying to ensure that the “temporary” exemption never ends. As I first reported in chapter 7 of the book a year ago, the Purple Army thugs of the SEIU and their Big Labor brethren use the “persuasion of power” to pursue their power grabs at all costs.

Connecting this raw deal to the parallel dirty deals hammered out on Capitol Hill to force the Obamacare package through,
National Review
editor and syndicated columnist Rich Lowry put the payoff in perfect perspective: “This Labor Loophole stands in the finest tradition of the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback. With no possible public-policy justification, it puts the awesome power to tax and spend at the service of nakedly political ends. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price of civilization. In this case, taxes are the price of not belonging to a group that pours countless millions of dollars into the Democratic coffers.”
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Vice President Joe Biden, of course, lectured wealthy people that paying taxes is our patriotic duty.
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But he was unavailable for comment on the refusal of the class warfare poseurs of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and UAW to demand that their members benefiting from generously negotiated health care plans show the same patriotism. A touchy President Obama, however, had plenty to say about those of us who objected to the wholesale Demcare bribery and sabotage of transparency at the White House. In an interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, he blamed Congress:

I think that this gets into a big mush. So, let’s just clarify: I didn’t make a bunch of deals. There is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked. So, that’s point number one. Number two is that, I think, it is important to know that the promises we made about increased transparency we’ve executed here in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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The unmitigated chutzpah here is so blinding that you don’t just need sunglasses to protect your eyes. You need blackout curtains. As if Rahm and all the senior goons in the White House weren’t twisting arms and cracking heads to ensure that the deal met their boss’s timeline. As if the Cadillac tax break for unions hadn’t been hashed out at 1600 Pennsylvania. “Big mush” indeed. Of course, if he means “executed” in the homicidal sense as opposed to the operational sense, he’s perfectly right. Obama lied, transparency died.

In Chicago, there’s an old slang word for the funny money that oiled the city’s Democratic political machine: Boodle. Historian James Merriner defined it originally as “the private use of public funds or the practice of selling one’s legislative vote; now a generic term for graft, bribery, gratuities, or just ordinary pork-barrel benefits.”
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While “progressive” reformers tried various methods of eliminating boodle from Chicago politics, their good-government measures were no barrier, and their compromises and deal-cutting with party posses often made things worse.

Windy City native Jim Tynen explains modern boodle-ism brilliantly:

Today the boodle is not graft flowing to the political machine, and then flowing out again. Today the boodle is the money supplied by government, both in terms of its own perks and welfare and programs, and in doing what it can to keep the economy primed. It is boodle because the voters want the benefits of socialism without the costs, and the benefits of capitalism without the costs, and government is responsible for seeing that that happens. The heck with the budget, the heck with the long-term effects, or even the short term ones: government’s job is to keep the good times rolling, without pain or even bother for the voters, or the government will be tossed out.

Boodle is not merely the money in the envelope handed to the alderman. It is the whole mindset: that money is the object of government; that the system can be manipulated, yet still yield a profit for the voters; that anything besides money is ridiculous. As filched watermelon is said to be sweeter, boodle is more fun than honestly earned money.
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In the Age of Da Boss Barack, the boodle has flowed from bottomless new pots of government programs to its favored beneficiaries: the auto bailouts, AIG bailouts, TARP, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, and on and on. In some cases, the boodle is being transferred between pots to reinforce political support. Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute
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reported that Democratic districts have received much more Obama stimulus money than Republican ones. Retiring Democrat Congressman Bart Stupak and ten other House Democrats who sold out their pro-life principles to provide crucial support for the president’s health care tax-and-spend bill put in their requests for more than $3.5 billion in earmarks—an average of $314 million worth of earmark requests for each lawmaker, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which is now tracking all the post-Obamacare pay-ups and payoffs.
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The cajoler-in-chief and his political strategists may be in perpetual denial about the costly, cancerous side effects of their culture of corruption. But Americans, armed with knowledge, are more disgusted than ever with government. Hope and Change came wrapped in a pair of Chicago-manufactured brass knuckles. It’s not just Tea Party activists who realize it. Voters of all political stripes are revolting. In April 2010, a Pew Research Center poll diagnosed the Obama backlash:

By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government—a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.

Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation’s top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation’s problems—including more government control over the economy—than there was when Barack Obama first took office.
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Commenting on the study, Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut said “Politics has poisoned the well.”
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That’s not quite accurate. It’s not just any politics. It’s boodle-clogged, dissent-squelching, redistributive
Chicago
politics that has poisoned the well. And the 2010 mid-term elections promise to be an anti-corruption referendum for the history books.

As I’ve traveled the country speaking about Obama’s culture of corruption over the last year, I’ve frequently invoked the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous aphorism that, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” To that, I’m adding a new corollary: