Thursday, June 26, 2008
Friends of Obama: “Double-Duty” Allison Davis
http://rezkowatch.blogspot.com/2008/06/friends-of-obama-double-duty-allison.html
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“In July 2004, state pension board member Allison S. Davis voted to turn over as much as $100 million in state workers’ retirement cash to an investment management firm,” Chris Fusco, Dave McKinney and Tim Novak wrote June 26, 2008, in the Chicago Sun-Times.
“Months after it won the lucrative deal at Davis’ urging,” the investment firm, RREEF America REIT II Inc., “agreed to pay the Chicago developer $30,000 a year to take a part-time post on its board of directors, even as Davis continued to serve on the Illinois State Board of Investment.”
“There were questions about the legality of the dual roles. According to Illinois law, ‘No member of the board shall have any interest in any brokerage fee, commission or other profit or gain arising out of any investment made by the board,’ [but] the state board got a legal opinion that Davis could hold both posts as long as he didn’t vote on any future state deals for RREEF, a real estate investment trust.”
*snip*
Obama, Rezko and Davis
On February 20, 2008, RezkoWatch reported that in 1993 Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) started working at Davis’s “small Chicago law firm”. In 1998, Davis left the firm to invest in convicted political fixer Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko’s “final government-subsidized, low-income housing project” and the deal was “handled by Davis’ former law firm.”
[Allison S. Davis is named as “Individual BB” in Tony Rezko’s court documents.]
Early Rezko political contributions made to Sen. Obama predate October 1998 letters Obama wrote on Rezko’s behalf to housing officials “in support of a proposed apartment building for senior citizens four blocks outside of his district,” a project overseen by Obama’s former boss, Allison S. Davis, who ran the project’s development company, New Kenwood LLC.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported in June 2007 that together Rezko and Davis ran the project’s development company, New Kenwood LLC, with the “development open[ing] in 2002 and end[ing] up costing $14.6 million in taxpayer money, including $855,000 in development fees for New Kenwood.”
Obama helped Davis (and Rezko) get $1 million from charity in 2000
While the Kenwood project was on-going, Obama was serving as an Illinois State Senator, on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago charity, and still working for the law firm that represented Davis, his former boss and “a small contributor to Obama’s political campaign funds,” Tim Novak reported November 29, 2007, in the Chicago Sun-Times.
In 2000, Davis came to Obama “looking for money ... to help fund his plans to build housing for low-income Chicagoans,” Tim Novak wrote. Obama, who left the Woods Fund in 2002, agreed.
[Obama] voted with other directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago to invest $1 million with Neighborhood Rejuvenation Partners L.P., a $17 million partnership that Davis still operates.
It’s not clear whether Obama told other board members of his ties to Davis, whose family would go on to donate more than $25,000 to Obama’s political campaigns, including his bid to be president of the United States.
“Let me get back to you on that,” Obama presidential campaign spokesman Bill Burton said when asked about that ... He never did.”
Novak wrote that the Woods Fund “has no records to show whether the board knew about Obama’s ties to Davis, said Woods Fund president Deborah Harrington. ... Under its agreement with Davis, Harrington said, the fund cannot disclose how Davis has spent the money. ... Davis declined to comment.”
Was this a direct political favor for Rezko?
Yes.
Although Novak reported that it was Obama’s former boss, Davis, who asked for Obama’s help, Davis was not asking on his own behalf. He was asking for Obama’s assistance in obtaining the money for the development company which he owned and operated jointly with Rezko. It was the company that benefitted from the funding, not just Davis.
See other RW articles on Allison S. Davis.
http://rezkowatch.blogspot.com/search/label/Allison%20S.%20Davis
THE HUMAN STAIN
An Interview with Consultant Allison Davis
When you think of films that deal with race, you have to wonder whom the filmmakers go to get advice from as far as authenticity or experience. In “The Human Stain”, Allison S. Davis served as a consultant to the production and makes his feature film debut in a minor role as a bigoted passenger on a dining car.
As a person of color, Allison is proud of his heritage, but with extremely light skin, he often appeared to others as a white man. He was able to see and hear what others thought of blacks as they were unaware of his race.
For the last 30 years, Mr. Davis has practiced law in Chicago specializing in real estate and community development. In an interview with blackfilm.com, Mr. Davis speaks about his position as a consultant to “The Human Stain”.
How did you get brought into this film as a consultant?
AD: I have known Tom Rosenberg for about 30 years and we saw each other on the golf course about two years ago and he had asked if I had read “The Human Stain”. It didn’t trigger anything, so asked, “What’s it about?” He then started to tell me about this professor in a New England college. I then said, “Oh, yes, I read the review in the New York Times, but I was told it was loosely based on his life.” “I had intended to read it, but it slipped away when it came out during the summer” is what I said next.
He asked if I could now read it and I told him, I would be happy to do so. The next day the book showed up on my desk and I read it in like 2 days and was fascinated by the story. It really grabbed me. I called Tom and told him the book was unbelievable. We had a discussion and asked if I wouldn’t mind reading the screenplay.
I got the document and the scenes which interested me was the scene with the family where Coleman’s father brought up the issue of boxing and the one where he rejects his family and the one with the sister after the funeral.
There’s a scene where the family is having dinner and the family is leaving to catch a train. I thought that was unbelievable. I called him back and told him I thought it was better than the book.
*snip*
. My father (William Allison Davis) was a professor, a distinguished one, and was the first African American tenured professor at a major white university (University of Chicago) in this country so he went through the same debate.
He wanted to teach English at Williams but they wouldn’t hire him. His first teaching job was at Hampton and then at Dillard. He made different choices and he had a different appearance then. No one would mistake him for being white if the option weren’t open but both of his siblings were very faired and both were academics and achievers on their own.
http://www.blackfilm.com/20031031/features/allison_davis.shtml
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His father
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The University of
Chicago Faculty
A Centennial View
Written with Robert Havighurst, this paper was one of a series arguing that “the American social class system actually prevents the vast majority of children of the working classes, or of the slums, from learning any culture but that of their own groups.”
Allison Davis
An important figure in psychology and social anthropology for more than forty years, Davis was the first Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected in the field of education.
Allison Davis | Education
1902-1983
Allison Davis first confronted the effects of social class on education while teaching English to black children in rural Virginia in 1925. A graduate of Williams and Harvard, Davis was discouraged to realize that “teaching in the standard manner made no sense to these poor and poorly schooled rural blacks. I decided that I didn’t know anything to teach them since our backgrounds were so different, yet I wanted to do something to affect such students.”
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/centcats/fac/facch25_01.html