For more than five weeks during the brutally cold winter of 1997, tenants suffered without any heat in a government-subsidized apartment building. The 31-unit building in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood had been "rehabbed" just four years prior at taxpayer expense, no less.
How cold was it? Temperatures routinely dipped around ten below zero. With wind-chills factored in, the effective temperatures approached 30 below.
And the residents of the building had no heat for more than a month.
The building's owner -- Rezmar Corporation -- didn't bother to turn on the heat for weeks. In fact, it didn't do so until it was sued.
And the Englewood building wasn't the only one of Rezmar's properties that had scores of code violations. At least a dozen times, Rezmar had to be sued in order to simply turn on the heat in its properties.
17 buildings ended up in foreclosure, 6 are boarded up, hundreds of apartments are vacant and require repair... and taxpayers were stuck with millions in unpaid loans.
All of these buildings were in -- or just blocks away -- from a single state senator's district. A district belonging to a young, up-and-coming politician named Barack Obama.
In fact, during the brutal winter of 1997, even while Rezmar refused to heat its Englewood apartments, it was donating $1,000 to state senator Obama's campaign fund.
During the winter or the scores of subsequent code violations, did state senator Obama ever lift a finger to protect his constituents from "predatory slumlords" like Rezmar?
The answer appears to be a resounding "No". In 2007, Obama's own campaign staff stated, "Senator Obama does not remember having conversations... about properties that [Rezmar] owned.."
The shivering tenants in in and around the district were left defenseless. Assailed on one side by predatory slumlords like Rezko, they were -- for all intents and purposes -- left out in the cold by their state senator, Barack Obama.
There's a simple reason Obama didn't lift a finger to protest these horrific violations. His political patron, Tony Rezko, was a driving force behind the Rezmar schemes. And Rezko helped raise a quarter of a million dollars for Obama's various campaigns.
And after stating he'd "never done any favors for" Rezko, the Chicago Sun-Times discovered letters Obama wrote to city and state officials supporting Rezko's bid for $14 million in taxpayers' money for an elder-care facility.
While Obama didn't expend an ounce of energy to protest Rezko's outrageous violations, he did take time to write letters on behalf of Rezko in his efforts to secure an additional $14 million in taxpayer funds.
State senator Obama couldn't effectively represent his abused constituents... perhaps because he was otherwise occupied helping his slumlord patrons with their various flim-flam operations.
And as a so-called "community organizer" and then a state senator, Obama couldn't even keep federally subsidized housing complexes like Grove Parc habitable.
Barack Obama couldn't effectively represent a tiny district in Chicago's south side.
Now extend that kind of failure to the entire United States.
• The Illustrated Results of Obama's "Community Organizing"
Linked by: American Thinker, National Conversation and SondraK. Thanks!
Big surprise: The fix is in at the chicago sun times - The Obama-Rezko property map link is dead.