Who is Valerie Jarrett?

According to Fox News Transition Tracker

...longtime Obama friend and supporter Valerie Jarrett will be a senior adviser and assistant to Obama for intergovernmental relations.

Here is what you may not know. She was:

Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s deputy chief of staff

And

Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter...

And what is Parc Plaza? From the Boston Globe's Binyamin Appelbaum Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

But it's not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

Some of the residents of Grove Parc say they are angry that Obama did not notice their plight. The development straddles the boundary of Obama's state Senate district. Many of the tenants have been his constituents for more than a decade.

"No one should have to live like this, and no one did anything about it," said Cynthia Ashley, who has lived at Grove Parc since 1994.

Is this an aberration? Why no!

Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer, was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several apartments.

Antoin "Tony" Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy a home in 2005. Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.

Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his lawyer did not respond to inquiries.

Thanks to Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club (quoting Vogue. Is Vogue a better source of news than the major dailies and the alphabet networks?) we learn that

"Jarrett gets up between 4:30 and 5:00 A.M. and works out every morning before she heads to Habitat and starts her workday with a scheduled campaign phone call with Obama’s other top advisers, including David Alexrod and David Plouffe. ‘I trust her completely,’ Barack Obama has said. ‘She participates in every conversation we have in the campaign.’”

He ends with

May she have better luck in the White House than in low-cost housing.

Several of the comments following the Belmont Club post are worth reading. This one addresses the MSM's taking a dive for Obama.

All of which serves to amaze me once again for the upteenth time that Obama has managed to get to the presidency without someone blowing the whistle on him in such a way as to be taken seriously. Everything we know about this guy makes him out to be precisly the hustler “CJM” talks about (#1), though Obama was hardly “small time”: nothing is small time in Chicago corrupt politics. If it were there wouldn’t be so much money sucking people like Obama into it.

Slowly but surely, the public dossier on Obama is growing and accumulating. It is only a matter of time before the tipping point rounds the bend, and Obama and his apologists will no longer be able to hide the elephant in the living room.

The question remains: who will bring this information to a wide enough spectrum of the American people so that there will be widespread concern? These low cost housing projects are not simply mismanaged, they are the ways that people who are "connected" to the Chicago machine get paid off. Do the Liberals who make up the MSM and claim to be on the side of the poor and dispossessed really not care?