Obama's Houseboy Billy-boy Daley singing some blackface BS for "His Massa"!

I lived in Chicago for a decade
and got to know a lot of influential people in the Windy City through my contacts connected to my job at Amoco as Political Risk and Economics Advisor to the Chairman and CEO Larry Fuller. At the time, we at Amoco were trying to set up a series of gas stations in Mexico, which was difficult to do because the ruling PRI Party was a socialist/populist regime so nationalist in its petroleum policy that there were ZERO US-owned & operated facilities in the gigantic corruption-ridden political warehouse for PRI family and friends that was [and still is] PEMEX.

I was in charge of trying somehow to get the NAFTA negotiations out of the doldrums that they had fallen into and in 1993 came up with the idea of Amoco's co-sponsoring a conference on NAFTA in DC with CSIS, where I had previously worked for about a year as a fellow. CSIS agreed, but said that Amoco had to provide the money to put on the conference. I personally worked up a proposal and since Larry and his Vice=Chairman Pat Early liked the idea, wrangled a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund CSIS's conference-facilitation scheme.

I asked personal friend Bill Richardson, for whom I had sponsored a fund-raiser in my home in the late '80s, and head Democrat on the Energy Committee, if he would be a headliner and he said not only that, he'd try to get his friend Senator Bill Bradley, a pro-NAFTA advocate, to be the co-star along with a number of oilmen and economists.

The conference, due to timing and luck, not only went forward, but was a rousing success which was noticed in Mexico City by the Presidente, and downstream negotiations began to move forward rapidly, just as the NAFTA negotiations, stuck because of the opposition of left-wing Democrats driven by big union money, were tossed out in the 1994 elections and suddenly, NAFTA sailed through soon afterward with Republicans in favor of Free Trade now a majority in both houses.

Soon afterward, Bill Daley, who was Sec'y of Commerce under Bill Clinton during the NAFTA negotiations, left his job and returned to Chicago to a seven-figure job with a very influential law firm. A senior partner in the firm and I were friends and he kindly asked if I ever wanted a one-on-one meeting with Daley, he would see if he could set it up. Amazingly, Bill Daley, after checking me out, agreed and he, myself, and my friend had a friendly one-hour conversation in their plush facilities in the Loop. Over coffee and tea and crumpets, we covered the landscape of oil and politics and US trade policy, etc.

I proudly narrated my role in initiating the CSIS conference on NAFTA, and how coincidentally or not, it had seemingly been so successful that it'd seemed to help get the Congress and the Mexican government both out of their respective stuck-in-the-mud positions on NAFTA and moved the process on the Hill forward, even though it was a small event in the larger picture.

To my surprise, suddenly Daley became irritated and brusquely told me that he'd always thought NAFTA and other free trade agreements were "a bad idea" and, though following the Democrat Party line laid down by Billy Jeff Clinton, had been opposed to it from the start and was still skeptical that it would ever work. Now that he was free to speak about his real opinion on the issue, he didn't mince words on how NAFTA and free trade agreements in general were not good for the American economy.

Let's flash forward more than a decade and a half later, and listen to the first question the NYT's highly-respected Bill Harwood asked in a one-on-one interview published in the NYT:
Q. This is a sour time in Washington, but you got the trade deals done. Tell the average struggling business owner, or person looking for a job, how’s this going to affect their life?

A. Well, in addition to the three trade deals for Korea, Panama and Colombia we got trade adjustment assistance, which really is going to people who are negatively affected by trade deals. And there are negatives to them. But over all, you’re creating jobs in the U.S. because of lowering barriers in foreign countries, especially in Korea. The other thing it does, John, is it sends the message to the rest of the world that in these economic times the U.S. will continue to be aggressive about doing trade deals. Our economy is very open to the world.
The rest of the interview is equally interesting, but this gives one a great optic on how a second-rate POTUS like Obama tends to surround himself with third-rate yes-men like Axelrod, Plouffe, and yes, Bill Daley, who is now his White House Chief of Staff.

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows, but it has a tendency to create total hypocrites. In Chicago, of course, this goes back to Machine Politics which have strangled the city's political development for the last century and a half [to be fair, even the GOP participated with Big Bill Hayward's machine in the teens and the twenties].

To a native of Wisconsin and born in Milwaukee, which was run for decades by Mayor Zeidler, a socialist, and who re-elected Victor Berger, a socialist, even though he was in jail in 1918 during his re-election, there is no comparison. Wisconsin's politics may be skewed and occasionally zany, but they are not the sink of corruption and moral sewage which prevails in "The City of Big Shoulders." The big shoulders are necessary to carry the weight of all the political money siphoned off to the Democrat machine and its crony capitalists.

In south Florida, the politics aren't pretty, but nowhere matches Chicago, New York, Boston and LA for pure putrid politics.*

*Yes, I left out New Orleans, but NO doesn't qualify in the size of the peculations and brazen thievery that prevails in the four capitals of crony capitalism named above. In Milwaukee, socialism wasn't pretty, but it was clean and didn't rob honest taxpayers.