Valerie Jarrett, Iranian-American Adviser to Obama: Do You Know Who she Is?

Are you really asking us to accept an Article written by the GLOBE staff?

talk72000 wrote:

It appears both her parents are Americans. Only Iranian about her is that she was born in Shiraz, Iran.

Her father was American, but where was her mother born?

Read about Val's former husband and see where "true love" gets you!

no,no that is a lie. She is African American. Get you facts straight and stop spreading lies.

...her link to Habitat could cause complications. The company, the court-appointed overseer of vast tracts of Chicago's public housing, has been accused of mismanaging some of those projects, allowing them to deteriorate even more than they had under government supervision.

Valerie Jarrett

Obama's closest aide is Shirazi

knowledgeplex.org: Jarrett is a member of African-American and Chicago royalty. But her story and her life begin in the Middle East, not the Midwest. She was born in 1956 in Shiraz, Iran, about 570 miles south of Tehran. Her parents moved to Shiraz, known for its poets, wine and flowers, as part of a program that sent American doctors and agricultural experts to developing countries to help jump-start their health and farming efforts. Her father was on the staff of the brand new Nemazee Hospital, where Jarrett was born. "Every memory from Iran is a very happy memory," Jarrett told me in an e-mail

Every memory from Iran is a very happy memory

Ms. Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1956, and educated at a New England prep school. But while Mr. Obama was once an outsider in Chicago’s black community, Ms. Jarrett was a member of its royalty. Her great-grandfather was the first African-American to graduate from M.I.T., her grandfather was the first black man to head the Chicago Housing Authority, and her father was the first black resident at St. Luke’s Hospital. Though Ms. Jarrett has never worked in Washington, her great-uncle is Vernon Jordan, the well-known Democratic power broker.

There's talk of making her secretary of Housing and Urban development, but trouble at some Habitat-managed housing projects could make her confirmation hearing messy. Obama is more likely to want her floating around the White House.

Habitat, which manages subsidized housing throughout the city, has been criticized for mismanaging some of its properties. One of the public-private projects, Grove Parc Plaza, deteriorated so badly that federal inspectors rated conditions there an 11 on a 100-point scale and moved to seize the property.

Jarrett has supported a transformation of public housing that has demolished whole public housing projects and replaced them with mixed housing that includes both affordable and market-rate units, said Ethan Michaeli, publisher of Residents’ Journal, a non-profit publication that covers Chicago’s low-income communities, who has written about Jarrett since the early 90s.

The approach “hasn’t done much for public housing tenants or poor people in general,” he said, largely because the mixed-use developments have less affordable housing.

The policy has poured billions of taxpayer dollars into private development and management companies and reduced the number of public housing units, Michaeli said. And when he talks to former residents of the demolished Robert Taylor Homes, more than 4,400 apartments in 28 high-rise buildings named after Jarrett’s grandfather, Michaeli said he has never met a resident who benefited from the mixed-use approach.

“If their lives were better, it was despite the best efforts of the housing agency, not because of them,” he said.

“You’re not hearing she’ll be HUD secretary, I hope?” Michaeli asked early in an interview. “She wouldn’t be the first person I would choose for progress on public housing.”