Fake progressive Gabriela Santiago-Romero, a nominal Democrat who nominally represents Detroit’s City Council District 6, does good things sometimes. Like, last week, for example, as detailed in her Friday newsletter.
On Monday [November 17], Team GSR [the councilwoman and her staffers] partnered with Perry Outreach Center and Bedrock to purchase turkeys for D[istrict] 6 residents. In total, 82 turkeys were distributed to families in need, ensuring they have a healthy and filling meal on the table for the holiday.
We are grateful for Bedrock's generosity and especially to the Perry Outreach Center for their commitment to our communities and residents. In these challenging times, collaboration and partnership will be essential to creating and sustaining communities of care.
Nice, right? I couldn’t possibly have anything to criticize here, right? But something is bothering me about this.
Back in March, the fake progressive made a big show of declining a campaign donation from the Gilbert Family Foundation. Back in August, Malachi Barrett reported for Bridge Detroit that
Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero turned down thousands of dollars for her re-election campaign from a political committee funded by Dan Gilbert and his employees.
State campaign finance disclosures show Santiago-Romero voided a total of $5,000 that Rocket State Political Action Committee (PAC) attempted to give her through two donations in February and March. Santiago-Romero confirmed that she declined to cash the checks offered to her.
She didn’t elaborate on why, but the first-term council member who represents Southwest Detroit previously touted her commitment to reject corporate donations during a District 6 candidate forum hosted by BridgeDetroit. The event was held a few days after the donations were declined, records show.
Gabriela Santiago-Romero. This image has been significantly modified from the original.
“I have been offered PAC money I will not accept,” Santiago-Romero said in June. “I can continue to work with Rocket Mortgage without taking their money. I meet with DTE consistently without taking their money. You don’t need to take money to have a working relationship with people.”
In her case, “working relationship” with Dan Gilbert and his companies means that they give her marching orders, she obeys, and they don’t actually give her any money. They can make the checks as large as they can, knowing she won’t cash any of them. That’s a pretty good deal for Dan Gilbert. I even wonder if that was previously coordinated.
Presumably Bedrock, one of Dan Gilbert’s many companies, paid for all 82 turkeys, Perry Outreach gave out most of the turkeys and the councilwoman gave out one or two turkeys, just enough for a photo op.
My quick and dirty estimate is that the 82 turkeys cost more than $3,000. I was hoping that number would come out closer to $5,000. That’s still a lot of money to me, but really just a drop in the bucket for someone like Dan Gilbert. Like, come on, you couldn’t even spring for an even one hundred turkeys?
Back in 2018, our own Marjani posted an article titled “Dan Gilbert: You Can Run But You Cannot Hide.”
For those who thought predatory lending was a thing of the past due to President Obama’s now-Trump-defunct Consumer Protection Bureau, behold Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans/Rocket Mortgage, and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Gilbert has, so far, managed to slip beneath the radar of the FHA’s FNMA (Fannie Mae) oversight and he did it just toward the end of the Obama presidency. Stopped the clock long enough to run from his responsibilities, yes he can and yes, he did.
[...]
When Gilbert and his crones say things like “We have a low overall foreclosure rate so it’s not our problem they can’t pay,” it’s because they are combining low-income borrowers with the richer ones — overall.
That makes the comparison an automatic lie, and it means they knew what they were doing when they did it.
The borrower no longer has that nice affordable mortgage they originally had, they now have one that is eating into a huge chunk of a tight income that was already budgeted out for other living expenses. In return, their income has not changed enough in that short a period of time to accommodate the sudden unexpected mortgage increase.
[...]
When the day comes that it’s more important for those predatory lender types to own several homes and buy basketball teams than it is for people to keep their ONE home, even when one of his LEAD PLAYERS is an advocate to end homelessness in his own home town, something has surely gone awry in America.
The year before that article I wrote about a special handout to poor Dan Gilbert.
Well, Detroit City Council just rolled over and signed off on a $250 million handout to billionaire Dan Gilbert for a project that will supposedly create 24,000 new permanent jobs. At least my councilwoman, Raquel Castañeda-López (D-District 6), voted against the handout. Too bad four others didn’t join her.
The Quicken Loans founder and Cleveland Cavaliers owner has almost $6 billion in assets. The projects downtown would take barely 5% of his assets, assuming no cost overruns. But he’s got to socialize the risk, privatize the profits.
Quick recap: after the Republicans in the state legislature paved the way for him to take state taxpayer money for “transformational brownfield” projects, Dan Gilbert asked for $250 million for a package of four projects in downtown Detroit, which he’s counting as a single project.
Republicans are supposedly big fans of local control, but in this instance did put the provision that the relevant municipality has a say, even though they knew that would probably be Detroit, which they’re not terribly fond of.
And so, a subcommittee of the Detroit City Council started deliberating a couple of weeks ago. But they dragged their feet and made Dan Gilbert wait before referring his request to the full council for a vote.
Santiago-Romero wasn’t a councilwoman at the time, she had recently left a job as the so-called “diversity coordinator” at Grand Circus (which has ties to Dan Gilbert), but she was anointed to City Council by Castañeda-López, who in turn had been anointed by Rashida Tlaib before her time in Congress.
Santiago-Romero certainly knows how to say pretty words. “Collaboration and partnership” with companies like Dan Gilbert’s “will be essential to creating and sustaining communities of care.” That means Michigan and Detroit giving millions of dollars in handouts to Dan Gilbert and hoping that’ll trickle down to the peasants. It will trickle down. Just don’t expect the trickle to be anything more than a trickle.
