Obama Got “Discount” on Home Loan
by Jeff Davis
Slowly, hesitantly, tentatively, a few of the mainstream news media outlets are beginning to do their job and investigate Barack Obama. Initial indications are he’s just another corrupt, self-promoting politician. Unfortunately the media are still wearing their “kid gloves” whenever his name comes up.
Obama worked for a law firm that did civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development. I guess that means using our taxpayer dollars to build more ghetto high rises and suing any employer, that an uppity Negro had a complaint about.
One source notes “The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations.[19] In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book.[19] He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published as Dreams from My Father in mid-1995.”
So, just because a bunch of liberals at Harvard voted Obama to be the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review (essentially winning a popularity contest), Obama apparently got a lucrative contract to write a book. The book was supposed to be on race-relations, but Obama instead wrote a self-promoting book called “Dreams from my Father.” It’s not clear from the title if he means his Kenyan father who disappeared after two years or his Indonesian father, whom his mother hooked up with after the African daddy disappeared.
Obama spent a considerable amount of time in various universities including Occidental, Columbia and Harvard. He put in a few years with a couple law firms, wrote his self-promoting book and taught briefly at the University of Chicago Law School. Then he went into politics in 1997 winning a seat in the Illinois state senate which he occupied until 2004. Then he won an election to become the junior Senator from Illinois in 2005. Curiously many Americans are under the illusion that Obama voted against the Iraq War. Obama was NOT a Senator when the vote on the Iraq War was taken on October 11, 2002. The war started in March 2003.
The Washington Post reports “Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois. The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a ’super duper jumbo.’ Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates… Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama’s rate could have saved him more than $300 per month. Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said the rate was adjusted to account for a competing offer from another lender and other factors. ‘The Obamas have since had as much as $3 million invested through Northern Trust,’ he said in a statement.”
Isn’t it curious how politicians with virtually no marketable skills are always rolling in dough? A Senator is paid $169,300 per year. If Joe Sixpack asked a mortgage lender for a $1.65 million dollar home loan at a discount rate with no points (and he had the same salary as Mr. Obama), he would get the bum’s rush, possibly with a swift kick in the rear as he exits the door. Obama’s only extraordinary activity aside from becoming Senator was writing a book. Did anyone buy that book BEFORE he became a presidential candidate? Exactly how interesting was Obama to ordinary Americans before 2007?
The Post article continues “Driving the recent debate is concern that public officials, knowingly or unknowingly, may receive special treatment from lenders and that the discounts could constitute gifts that are prohibited by law. ‘The real question is: Were congressmen getting unique treatment that others weren’t getting?’ associate law professor Adam J. Levitin, a credit specialist at Georgetown University Law Center, said about the Countrywide loans. ‘Do they do business like that for people who are not congressmen? If they don’t, that’s a problem.’ ”
Actually, no. The question is not “Do Congressmen get unique treatment others don’t get?” Of course they do. The question in this case is “Did Barack Obama get special corrupt treatment he wasn’t entitled to?” Notice how, when pinned down, the liberal media deflects and diverts our short attention span from the actual issue by broadening it and turning the story into some kind of generalized discussion that wanders all over the board and away from the person to be shielded, in this case Obama himself.
Can you imagine the screams and shrieks from the news media if any other politician (say a conservative White Republican of any kind) had gotten this kind of preferential treatment?
Considering the kind of immunity Obama usually receives from the media regarding any critical scrutiny of his affairs, the Washington Post deserves credit for mentioning this incident. But even so, I notice that they barely whispered it, and the story of Barack’s sweetheart loan deal has obstinately refused to “grow legs.” In the Washington Post it was reported, and in the Washington Post it has remained. This is a sure indication whenever the media as a whole wants to suppress a story, and one of the ways they kill it. They report it once, in one outlet, and then all the other media outlets just ignore it and refuse to pick it up. Sort of like the coverage they’ve given Obama’s earlier marijuana and cocaine use. Can you say “different rules for the quota-hire”?