Cronyism in the Obama 'White' house

[muman613]

Obama must be the MOST corrupt, most inept, and most evil president this country has ever witnessed. Coming from the most crime-infested and corrupt political cities Chicago, IL he is well versed in the ways of paying off his supporters. The most recent example of this cronyism is the fact that the contractor who MUCKED up the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) website is a close personal friend of Obama's ugly wife Michelle who has visited the couple in the white house multiple times. This gal made off with millions of tax-payer dollars and delivered a mess which the obama admin is still scrambling to get right.

This is corruption, this is condemnable, and the American people must not be complacent and let these criminals continue running our country. They have more than amply demonstrated their ineptitude by bungling the Benghazi attack, the NSA wiretap scandal (which was first denied, then acknowledged, then claimed Obama didn't know about it...), the IRS scandal (which again the president claims he did not know about), the tapping of reporters and confiscation of their journalism notes, and the list goes on.


http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/michelle-obama-obamacare-website-cgi/2013/10/29/id/533586

White House Logs Show Visits by CGI Official, Classmate of Michelle Obama

Toni Townes-Whitley, a college classmate of Michelle Obama and a senior executive at besieged Obamacare website contractor CGI Federal, has visited the White House several times for both personal and professional reasons.

Townes-Whitley visited the White House complex on four occasions earlier this year to meet with administration officials in her role as vice president for at CGI Federal, which secured a $678 million no-bid contract to build the Obamacare exchange web portal.

Townes-Whitley, a Princeton University classmate of first lady Michelle Obama, and her husband, John Whitley, who works as an engineer for CBS News, also attended a White House Christmas gathering together in 2010, posing for photos with the president and first lady.

Urgent: ObamaCare Is About to Strike — Are You Prepared?

The records from the White House visitors log show the CGI Federal vice president, who graduated from Princeton in 1985, the same year as Michelle Obama, had a deeper connection with federal business than simply a college connection to the first lady.

Three of the afternoon meetings, held in the Old Executive Office Building, were scheduled in advance, and one, on Friday, April 26, was not. Three of the meetings were held on Friday and one on Saturday.

The records show Townes-Whitley was alone in her visits.

The first meeting was held on Jan. 18. Townes-Whitley met with Danny Werfel, a principal deputy commissioner on the Affordable Care Act, who was named acting director of the IRS in May. Records for that day show Townes-Whitley arrived at the White House at 1:31 p.m. and left at 3:23 p.m.

Townes-Whitley visited again April 26, arriving at 3:43 p.m. and leaving at 4:27 p.m. She met with Jonathan McBride, who was at the time special assistant to the president and deputy director of the presidential personnel office. McBride was promoted in July to director of the presidential personnel office.

Townes-Whitley met again with McBride on June 1, a Saturday, for about five hours, leaving the White House at around 7 p.m.

On Friday, June 28, Townes-Whitley met with John McNaught, an economics staff assistant.

The White House logs do not indicate the reason for the visits.

Townes-Whitley joined CGI in May 2010, less than two months after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. She serves as the lead of the company's Civilian Agency Programs Business Unit for the Federal Group, according to a bio published on the CGI website. The unit serves 22 federal civilian agencies in the United States and 34 other countries.

A CGI executive testified before an angry congressional committee last week about the website's significant technical problems, which have caused a registration delay for consumers seeking health insurance from federal exchanges. The White House has promised that the site will be fully functional by the end of November, although members of Congress are seeking a pause in the registration deadline until repairs are complete.

Prior to her work at CGI, Townes-Whitley worked at Unisys Corp. as a vice president for the global public sector, system integration, and consulting. She also is a former Peace Corps volunteer in central Africa, serving for three years from 1986 to 1989.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Toni Townes-Whitley gave $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama's re-election campaign, and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund.

A story published by the Daily Caller on Monday said that while at Princeton, Michelle Obama and Townes-Whitley were both active in two Princeton University groups — the Organization of Black Unity and the Third World Center. They both now belong to the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Michelle Obama served on the governing board of the Third World Center and was active in the Organization of Black Unity, according to a 2008 Boston Globe article.

"Although [Michelle] Obama had friends who were both black and white, her social world revolved around several of the black organizations on campus, as it did for many other black students," the Globe reported. "Obama was a member of the Organization of Black Unity, a primary resource for black students on campus which arranged speakers and programs."

[muman613]

http://nlpc.org/stories/2013/10/04/new-book-identifies-cronyism-outcome-big-government-source-corruption

New Book Identifies Cronyism as Outcome of Big Government, Source of Corruption
Submitted by Carl Horowitz on Fri, 10/04/2013 - 11:22

All too often, maintaining an enterprise, especially a new one, depends on knowing the right people in government from whom to acquire favors. Such an arrangement has come to be known as "cronyism." And it justifiably has its critics. Among them are Randall Holcombe and Andrea Castillo, authors of a brief, but potent and timely new book, "Liberalism and Cronyism: Two Rival Political and Economic Systems," published by the Mercatus Center, a think tank affiliated with George Mason University. Holcombe, a Florida State University economics professor, and Castillo, a Mercatus associate, view cronyism as the antithesis of liberalism. Rather than establish clearly- defined and evenly-enforced rules of behavior (as liberalism does), cronyism subordinates business decisions to political ambition and connections. It's a science that the Obama administration in particular has taken to a new level.

To understand cronyism requires an understanding of its putative antidote: liberalism. The authors use "liberalism" in its classic Lockean sense: an affirmation of individual self-ownership grounded in moral self-regulation. While not denying the significance of families, communities and nations, the classical liberal views the State's primary role as protecting each person from acts of violence and theft, favoring no class of citizens over another. Friedrich Hayek restated this principle in his defense of classical liberalism nearly 70 years ago in "The Road to Serfdom": "(I)n the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion." The old liberalism - or what we now commonly call "libertarianism" - promotes equality as a set of procedural rules ("rule of law"), applicable to one and all. By the same token it rejects equality when expressed as a set of idealized goals forcibly imposed upon society, most of all upon people who might object.

Individualist liberalism, more than any other body of thought, lay at the foundation of our nation. And it implicitly defines much of our business culture. This on the whole has been advantageous, something to which even advocates of large-scale government intervention admit. Nearly three years ago President Barack Obama, speaking before a group of CEOs representing Google, General Electric, American Express and other companies, stated: "I want to dispel any notion that we want to inhibit your success. I believe that the primary engine of America's economic success is not government. It's the ingenuity of America's entrepreneurs; it's the dynamism of our markets." Such words seem well out of character for him. Yet the context of the meeting was cronyism. The business community over the years has gotten comfortable with the idea of government as a backstop - that's how Obama managed to organize the gathering in the first place. While businessmen have been requesting favors from government since the early years of our Republic, they have done so with much greater frequency in the decades since the Depression. This, the authors argue, is contrary to liberalism.

But liberals are the ones in power, right? That depends on one's definition of terms. Liberalism in America today is actually a hybrid of capitalism, corporatism and income redistribution, with a heavy dose of racial intimidation and guilt applied for shakedowns. We have constructed a large welfare state for the benefit of those who are hardly working, as opposed to working hard; rewritten law to favor certain classes of persons over others, especially nonwhites over whites; and established government-business partnerships to achieve ostensibly socially desirable outcomes (i.e., corporatism). This isn't really socialism. But taken as a whole, these traits have eroded our contractual liberties. And they've made the American public more than a little cynical about what it takes to acquire wealth and power. A more appropriate term is "cronyism."

Cronyism always has been around. And to a certain extent, this is inevitable. All major undertakings, public or private, require some measure of discretionary decision-making that goes beyond objective criteria and reflects the input of family, friends and allies. It's a fact of human nature: Those persons closest to decision-makers stand the best chance of wielding influence and getting what they want. But not all cronyism is created equal in either type or pervasiveness. And today's brand of cronyism in very much ingrained in our economic and political life, going well beyond trade association lobbying and "old boy" networks pulling strings on behalf of family and friends. It is becoming a dominant business model. And directly or indirectly, government coercion stands behind it. The potential for corruption has risen accordingly.

[rafeli18]

Given that he's so evidently inept, and incapable of holding such a powerful position, this begs the question how on earth did he  to become president?

[Israel Chai]

Given that he's so evidently inept, and incapable of holding such a powerful position, this begs the question how on earth did he  to become president?

Americans wanted to prove that they weren't racist for the billionth time.

[rafeli18]

To what end?
America and the rest of the civilised world have become so fixated on "political correctness", even if it means suicide.

[Israel Chai]

To what end?
America and the rest of the civilised world have become so fixated on "political correctness", even if it means suicide.

It doesn't end.

[rafeli18]

It's a horrible state of affairs, and I'm beginning to think there's no hope. In London, parts are being controlled by "Sharia enforcement squads", and yet the police do nothing