GOLFING ON MARTHA’S VINEYARD

By Jerry D. Rose

President Barack Obama and his family are vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod, but it seems that a President never stops doing his “job” even when on his vacation. The golf course is a perennial venue (along with hunting parties in some cultures) in which “leisure” pursuits provide a relaxed atmosphere in which power figures can do their consulting (conspiring) or, at the least, give the public a rare glimpse of exactly which people have the ear of a political leader. So it was that observers have taken particular note on Obama’s golf games at Martha’s Vineyard this week.

On Monday Obama played in a foursome including his trip director, Marvin Nicolson ,as well as Robert Wolf and Eric Whitaker, two public figures of major significance. Wolf is CEO of UBS Investments, and Amy Goodman has described the peculiarity of Obama “playing ball” (in many more ways than one) with Mr. Wolf. Robert Wolf was one of Obama’s most prolific “bundlers” for campaign contributions, raising over a half million dollars from UBS employees for the 08 campaign. He was “rewarded,” as fund-raising super-stars typically are, by being appointed by Obama to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. UBS (formerly United Bank of Switzerland), had some recoveries of its own to make, having plea bargained a settlement at about the time of Obama’s appointment of Wolf for $780 million for the bank’s encouragement of off-shore banking to avoid U.S. income taxes; an amount presumably paid by application of billions of dollars in federal “bailout” dollars through the U.S. government’s rescue of A.I.G. The star witness in that case was Bradley Birkenfeld, former UBS banker who testified against his former colleagues and, just last month, was sentenced to an unexpectedly harsh prison sentence of 40 months. Shortly after this, Birkenfeld’s old boss Robert Wolf bobbed to the surface of the UBS cesspool of corruption and became one of Obama’s golfing buddies.

I have attempted to focus additional attention on the other prominent member of that first-day golfing foursome, Dr. Eric Whitaker of Chicago. So far my two comments on Whitaker appended to Goodman’s article are the only comments on Whitaker-the-golfer that I have seen. His presence in that game and his past and continuing association with Obama are matters that should perhaps be of as much interest as those of Robert Wolf. Whitaker was a Chicago doctor who became a “rising star” on the Chicago medical scene by a Project Brotherhood of going to black barber shops to cajole them to change their behaviors as a way of combating preventable diseases. Perhaps as a result of this notoriety, he was appointed director of the Illinois Department of Public Health upon the recommendation of Obama, then a state senator, making his pitch to Tony Rezko, the now-convicted briber who was “vetting” political appointments on behalf of now-impeached Governor Rod Blagojevich. The IDPH was subsequently involved, according to Evelyn Pringle, in a series of highly questionable if not illegal award contracts brought to light by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in his investigations of Rezko. He later joined Michelle Obama in an executive position with the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) whose chairman of the board was Valerie Jarrett, another long-time Obama associate and now his principle domestic policy adviser. (Tuesday on Martha’s Vineyard, it was “Chicago night” with Jarrett and Whitaker joining Barack and Michelle Obama for dinner.)

In the context of the current battle for a “reformed” health care system to make medical services available to people of all economic means, Eric Whitaker does not provide a very encouraging model of the administration’s attitude. As it turns out, two of Obama’s Chicago basket-ball playing buddies have parallel questionable records. Whitaker as an executive with UCMC is notorious for his record in recent years of trying to deprive poor Chicagoans of public services, as Secretary of Education has done for education as head of the Chicago public school systen It was Whitaker who publicly defended the decision of UCMC to reduce drastically its emergency room operations in a Chicago ghetto, reasoning in a “let them eat cake” attitude that they should spend the $100 for a doctor’s appointment to save UCMC the $1500 he says it costs the hospital to process an emergency room patient, the move designed to improve the capacity of the hospital to deal with “real” medical needs, meaning presumably the needs of those able to pay sticker prices for hospital services.

Obama’s continuing very close association with those like Wolf and Whitaker with questionable backgrounds and elitist attitudes can do very little to inspire trust in the President’s commitment to the economic well-being of ordinary American people–not to mention his promises of a change in “the way business is done in Washington.” Business appears to continue to be conducted on golf courses and back rooms and other venues not accessible to the public in seeing how that business is accomplished. With the firestorm of populist anger at the Bush administration at having arrived at energy policy through a secretive energy task force conducted by Vice President Cheney, where is the corresponding outrage that health care and other policies are being conducted in the same non-transparent atmosphere in the Obama administration?

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist