RE: Obama wants votes delivered to him instead of earning them himself
What else would you expect from a pay to play politician trained in Chicago by Daley and Emil Jones, Jr.?
Here's an Obama Tale for you, sad but true. In a campaign influenced by Walmart, instead of backing the pro-labor candidate, Obama backed a "Walmart tool."
There was little surprising about Obama's endorsement given his self-interested allegiances to the politically powerful City Hall regime of Chicago's Mayor Daley, with whom Obama shares the same big money campaign super-consultant (David Axlerod) and numerous big money sponsors.
For the first time Mayor Daley had vetoed an ordinance by his normally obedient City Council, and he did not want the council to bring the measure up again. It was originally passed by the council under pressure from a remarkable grassroots campaign, and would have required giant retail corporations like Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, and Home Depot to pay workers a modest minimum wage of ten dollars an hour by 2010.
Wal-Mart and Target announced that they were putting a number of "big box" retail developments on hold in Chicago, and launched a preemptive public relations strike, threatening to disinvest in the city unless a "favorable business climate" was restored. Daley made a special point of wrapping his veto in the flag of racial justice, claiming it was required to permit the flowering of economic development in the city's abandoned ghetto neighborhoods.
Pat Dowell, the recipient of significant support from the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU), was running against Tillman, and Dowell had strongly criticized Tillman for siding with Daley and Wal-Mart.
Obama needed the support of the powerful campaign finance magnet Daley, and endorsed Tillman, over labor-backed Dowell.
Obama's wife Michelle then received $51,200 in 2006 for attending a few board meetings of TreeHouse Foods, a giant firm that relied heavily on its close business relationship with Wal-Mart. The granting of high-pay/do-little board posts to the spouses of politicians is a longstanding tool of the "old," corporate-dominated politics that Senator Obama claims to reject.
Mrs. Obama resigned from her position with TreeHouse in the summer of 2007, citing "increased demands on her time" in connection with her husband's presidential campaign.









Discuss