Thought that this might be helpful...

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CHICAGO — Last month, when hundreds of people showed up at a downtown convention center to hear plans for the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), a campus dedicated to the legacy of Barack Obama, the former president himself arrived unannounced and in full campaign mode to do some hard selling.

“This could anchor a transformation of the South Side to create more jobs, more business opportunities, more educational opportunities, more hope. This is our gift. This is us wanting to give back,” he said.

But while Obama is embraced in his home town, the OPC has become a flash point for many of the issues that the former South Side community organizer once railed against: gentrification, affordable housing, government accountability and transparency.

Since it was announced, the OPC has received strong pushback from people who say the Jackson Park location, which borders different neighborhoods, will destroy valuable green space while driving up property values that will displace people who are already living paycheck to paycheck.


The Obama Presidential Center is set to occupy nearly 20 acres of Jackson Park near Lake Michigan in Chicago. (Courtesy of the Obama Foundation)
Set to occupy nearly 20 acres of Jackson Park, one of Chicago’s oldest green spaces adjacent to Lake Michigan, the OPC is intended not as a traditional presidential library but as a gathering place designed to galvanize young people and to show them how to put their ideas for change into action.

“What [the Obamas] wanted was essentially a center that would serve as a campus, a place for civic engagement and training and inspiring citizen leaders,” said Obama Foundation chief executive David Simas.

The idea to plant roots on the South Side is an easy one for the former first couple, who represent this area’s greatest success story. They still own a home here, and pictures of the Obamas still line the walls of restaurants and barbershops nearby. Tourists can even take a tour that tracks their fabled first date, culminating at a corner of 53rd Street where they shared a first kiss.

[Barack Obama is building a library — and grappling again with Chicago politics]

The OPC will consist of four buildings: a two-story “forum” for public programming, a museum tower, a library and an athletic center. The foundation is not yet clear about the partnerships or programming that will take place inside the campus, although some features have been tossed around, like a podcast recording studio and a test kitchen. The library will not house the physical archives of the Obama administration but instead will serve as a component of the Chicago Public Library system, although the nature of that partnership is not yet clear.

Future scholars might not even need to travel to Chicago for their research. That’s because the presidential documents and artifacts, owned by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), will not be here. Instead, the OPC plans to digitize all nonclassified documents. “This new model could be the standard going forward,” Simas said. “Our goal is to make the records available in a frictionless way for as many people as possible.”

Some of the displacement fear is rooted against the University of Chicago after it pursued one of the largest urban renewal projects in the United States in the late 1950s, a period of demolitions and acquisitions that ended up displacing 30,000 people from their homes and led the neighborhood’s black population to fall 40 percent by 1970.

“That’s not history for us,” said Jawanza Malone, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, which operates after-school programs and food pantries for about 6,500 low-income people in the area. He is concerned that gentrification is behind the continued exodus of black people from Chicago. Between 2000 and 2015, U.S. Census data shows, more than 200,000 black people left the city. Its white population fell at a much slower rate through 2000 but has surged upward in recent years. Analysts say the reasons for the loss in black residents are mixed and include rapid gentrification, lack of jobs and stability, the dismantling of public housing and violence.

“For us, the population loss is because of bad public policy. It becomes a never-ending cycle. It raises the questions: Why is this happening, and is it unintentional or intentional?” Malone asks.

Those living near the Obama site are particularly vulnerable. According to a study last year by the DePaul University Institute for Housing Studies, more than 14,000 households living in the vicinity of Jackson Park need affordable housing. About two dozen community, preservation and fair housing groups are pressing the Obama Foundation, the city of Chicago and the University of Chicago to sign a Community Benefits Agreement they say will force them to commit to measures that will prevent the most vulnerable from leaving their homes. The agreement would include measures such as a property tax freeze for nearby building owners, money set aside for low-income housing assistance and weekly monitoring to ensure that local hiring promised during the construction period remains local.

Obama said he won’t sign. “We will not displace residents,” he said, adding that the project will create $3 billion in economic activity and 5,000 permanent jobs. “If rents go up, [residents] can afford to pay it because they will have jobs.”

Michael Strautmanis, the foundation’s vice president for civic engagement, explained that “it’s not appropriate for the OPC to have a housing strategy for the neighborhood.” “Our expectation is that this very robust community will come together to bring all the parties in place to deal with housing,” he said. He suggested the issue could be tackled by Emerald South, a newly formed “economic development collaborative” with former Obama Cabinet member Arne Duncan and other heavyweights like Susan Sher, former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, on its board. In March the nonprofit group announced that one of its goals is “supporting an inclusive housing strategy.”

People like activist Anton Seals Jr. say that by not signing the agreement, the foundation is asking for the blind trust of low-income people. “Their mind is, ‘We’ll let the market handle it’. That usually means disaster for black people.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... 9cb1465e22

How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

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The Obama presidency was a disaster for middle-class wealth in the United States. Between 2007 and 2016, the average wealth of the bottom 99 percent dropped by $4,500. Over the same period, the average wealth of the top 1 percent rose by $4.9 million.

This drop hit the housing wealth of African Americans particularly hard. Outside of home equity, black wealth recovered its 2007 level by 2016. But average black home equity was still $16,700 lower.

Much of this decline, we will argue, can be laid at the feet of President Obama. His housing policies led directly to millions of families losing their homes. What’s more, Obama had the power — money, legislative tools, and legal leverage — to sharply ameliorate the foreclosure crisis.

He chose not to use it.


A Program Designed to Fail

After the 2008 collapse, the Wall Street banks that caused the crisis got spectacular sums in the form of the Trouble Asset Relief Package (TARP) and discount loans from the Federal Reserve. According to one estimate, they received a staggering $29 trillion in cash and loans.

For homeowners, the largest source of potential relief was, ironically, that same bank bailout, which contained an unspecified appropriation to “prevent avoidable foreclosures.” The Obama administration designed and implemented the foreclosure relief effort, calling it the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), and set aside $75 billion for the effort.

But HAMP proved to be an abject failure. The basic problem was that the government paid mortgage servicers (who process the payments and paperwork for the mortgage owner) to conduct mortgage modifications. Servicers have an incentive to keep people paying on a high principal, since they receive a percentage of the outstanding debt. They even have an incentive to foreclose, because they are paid from the proceeds of a foreclosure sale before the actual owners.

Lax oversight from both the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice made things worse. Some servicers tricked people into foreclosure, according to several investigations and sworn testimony from Bank of America whistleblowers. And by repeatedly “losing” people’s paperwork or engaging in other tricks, the servicer squeezed out a final few payments and fees before foreclosing.

This kind of chicanery was illegal, and also violated the administration’s rules. But they didn’t bother to seriously investigate servicer abuses. The Treasury Department didn’t even permanently claw back a single one of its payments to abusive servicers.

Why not? Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.

As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.

Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.


Letting off the Crooks

An epic crime spree after the crisis offered another opportunity to assist beleaguered homeowners.

During the bubble years, originators and banks had routinely mangled the paperwork while issuing loans and packaging them into securities. When they went to foreclose, they often found they did not have the correct documentation. But rather than acknowledging their indiscretions, financial institutions paid large teams of entry-level employees to commit document fraud on an industrial scale — forging signatures, falsely notarizing documents, or falsely attesting to “personal knowledge” of large mortgage files, hundreds of times per day. This was the so-called “robosigning” scandal.

These document problems eventually came to the attention of law enforcement. Forty-nine state attorneys general, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Justice banded together in a lawsuit, which resulted in a $26 billion joint settlement between them and the five largest servicers.

However, largely due to foot-dragging at the Department of Justice, the settlement ended up being toothless. Much of the cash went to “short sales” (simply selling an underwater home) instead of principal reductions, or to other weak relief. Servicers even received roughly $12 billion in credit for waiving outstanding debts from short sales in states where such a waiver is already legally mandatory. JPMorgan Chase allegedly claimed credit for forgiving loans that it had already sold.

Unsurprisingly, bending over backwards for the banks failed to stop the wave of foreclosures sweeping the nation. All told, some 9.3 million homeowners lost their homes. It was the greatest destruction of middle-class wealth since the Great Depression at least.


Black Wealth Destroyed

Even before the crash, decades of discriminatory policies had depressed African-Americans’ housing wealth. New Deal federal housing subsidies — the bedrock of the postwar middle class — largely locked out African Americans. Racist housing covenants forbade neighborhoods from selling or renting to black families, back up by the threat of riot. Black families that could buy were often brutally exploited by contract sellers.

The mortgage bubble fostered similar abuses. Originators, looking for anyone to take subprime mortgages, handed them out to disproportionately black lower-class people, and steered black middle-class families who would have qualified for ordinary mortgages into subprime loans as well.

Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.

The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).

Broken down by race, the overall story for homeownership is similar for all groups, but black homeowners started lower and stayed lower than white ones, with no rebound at all from 2013 to 2016.

However, the total homeownership rate can be misleading in that it includes people with negative equity, which is worse than owning no home at all — it is merely “a rental with debt.” After the crisis, the percentage of black homeowners with negative equity exploded by twenty-fold, from 0.7 percent to 14.2 percent — and unlike white families, did not reach its peak until 2013.

Next we examined home equity by race. Here is average white, black, and Latino home equity by year:

The sharp decline from 2007 to 2013 is readily seen, as well as partial recovery through 2016, and the large racial wealth gap. Average white home equity in 2016 is 3.5 times greater than the same black figure, and it has regained 84 percent of its 2007 value, compared to a black figure of 73 percent.

Then there are the distributional effects. Home ownership makes up a much larger percentage of black and Latino wealth than it does white wealth, and a much larger percentage of middle-class wealth than top wealth in all racial groups. On the eve of the recession, middle-class families tended to hold 50 percent to 70 percent of their wealth in home equity, while the wealthiest 10 percent of families held 15 percent to 30 percent of their wealth in home equity.

Given these differences in wealth portfolios, bailing out financial assets after 2008 while allowing homeowners to drown directly concentrated the national wealth into the hands of the richest white families.

Between 2007 and 2016, the wealthiest 10 percent of white families saw their wealth expand by an average of $1.2 million (21.6 percent), the next wealthiest 10 percent of white families increased their net worth by an average of $141,000 (15.5 percent), and the top 10 percent of black families grew their wealth by $78,000 (8 percent). Everyone else experienced wealth declines as high as 40 percent.

Mass foreclosures have severe ripple effects. People who lose their homes are at greater risk of job loss and falling into poverty, and are more likely to commit suicide. Nearby homes lose value, as foreclosed properties are often blighted. A 2013 Center for Responsible Lending study estimated that properties in proximity to a foreclosure shed $2.2 trillion in value — and that half that loss was in communities of color.

The decision to hang homeowners — especially black homeowners — out to dry was a catastrophe.

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https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/obama-fo ... inequality

Barack Obama – ‘Yes, We Can’ champion of the rich

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OPINION: By John Minto

Former US President Barack Obama won office decisively on the basis of a fervent campaign driven by his supporters believing he would bring real change.

Obama’s two terms did nothing of the sort.

He was elected US President in 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis. It was a deeper capitalist crisis than most and widespread disenchantment, frustration and anger threatened to force politicians to regulate capitalism and end neoliberalism.

The reign of the rich was under intense pressure. Billionaire wealth and power rich were endangered.

Around the globe ordinary people were demanding governments not use state funds to bailout the banks at the heart of the crisis. Anger at obscene wealth alongside poverty and growing inequality was finding public expression through the likes of the Occupy movement.

What was to be done?

It was Barack Obama who rode to the rescue – a fresh-faced political orator talking of the imperative for change and promising a transformation in US politics.

“Yes, We Can” said Obama.

Hope and vision

Ordinary people flocked to his message of hope and a vision for a better world.

But behind it all his campaign was heavily backed by big business donations – more than even for the Republicans. Their donations were given on the basis of assurances Obama would calm things down, bail out capitalism and continue the exploitation of low and middle-income families for the benefit of the rich.

Obama bailed out the banks, increased weapons production and delivered 10 times more drone strikes than his predecessor George Bush.

I’m not a student of American political history, but I haven’t come across another US President where there has been a greater gulf between promise and delivery. Obama was a huge disappointment to ordinary people but a champion of the rich.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that his visit to New Zealand this week is in the company of the rich and the very rich. They owe him.

It’s disappointing all the same to see the childlike fawning of politicians and media representatives to this visit.

In New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s case it’s not so surprising.

“Yes we can” and “Let’s do this” have a similar ring.

John Minto is an independent Christchurch media commentator and activist.

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https://asiapacificreport.nz/2018/03/24 ... -the-rich/