VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 229Mexican plant. From [the] story, “Machinists’ Union TELLS It Like It Is,” quoting a must-read
article at TradingMarkets.com, “Obama’s fundraising, rhetoric collide: Union says senator did
little to save jobs.” Obama had a special connection to Maytag: Lester Crown, one of the
company’s directors and biggest investors whose family, records show, has raised tens of
thousands of dollars for Obama’s campaigns since 2003. But Crown says Obama never raised
the fate of the Galesburg plant with him. These are the ties that bind: The billionaire
industrialist Crown family’s board memberships with Exelon Corporation, Maytag Corporation,
and Northern Trust [and their close ties to] Barack Obama. Barack Obama plays the “populist”
routine in his campaign speeches, but he delivers to his billionaire benefactors, not the common
working stiffs who are losing their jobs and their homes. (susanunpc, noquarterusa.net, July 2,
2008)^89OBAMA’S LIMITLESS HYPOCRISY
Back in February 2008, susanunpc had called attention to Obama’s scandalous hypocrisy, which
had become an issue on the campaign trail, writing:
Machinists Union President Tom Buffenbarger, introducing Clinton, talks about Maytag. He
talks about the betrayal by Barack Obama, who only gave those Maytag workers a speech.
WORDS. Baloney. But then Obama collected huge sums from the Crown family of Chicago,
owners of Maytag who shipped those workers’ jobs out of the country.^90 The Chicago Tribune
commented:
It is a ready applause line for the Illinois presidential hopeful, one that he has been reciting
almost verbatim since he was a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2004, when appliance giant Maytag
was in the process of shutting a refrigerator plant here, putting 1,600 people out of work. But
the union that represented most of those Galesburg workers isn’t impressed with Obama’s
advocacy and has endorsed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Its leaders say they wish he
had done more about their members’ plight. What rankles some is what Obama did not do even
as he expressed solidarity four years ago with workers mounting a desperate fight to save their
jobs. Obama had a special connection to Maytag: Lester Crown, one of the company’s directors
and biggest investors whose family, records show, has raised tens of thousands of dollars for
Obama’s campaigns since 2003. But Crown says Obama never raised the fate of the Galesburg
plant with him, and the billionaire industrialist insists any jawboning would have been futile.’^91OBAMA’S LEFT FLANK: ABUNIMAH, KHALIDI, AND RABBI WOLF
But at the same time that he was courting high finance and the military-industrial complex,
Obama was also at tentative to his left flank, and particularly to the interface between the US
intelligence community (to which Obama belongs under Executive Order 12333 thanks to his
foundation connections) and certain factions of the PLO:
For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi,
a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation
to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he
talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000,
the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr.
Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-
raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the