Census bigs’ crazy Chicago pizza connection

What do pizza and the Census Bureau have in common? Nothing.

Why, then, did a politically connected pizza parlor owner end up in charge of a Census office near Chicago after he got in trouble for Obama campaign finance violations?

Today, I’m going to finish the story of Stanley Moore, the 80-something-year-old who had been in charge of the Chicago Census region until he was mysteriously removed from that job in late 2013.

A few columns back, I wrote about how Moore was removed from his job just weeks after I started poking around Census.

Moore’s political friends came to his rescue after his removal and he was given what seems to be a better job at Census.

Census won’t say what happened. And only one of the four Chicago congressmen who came to Moore’s aid would talk about the intervention.

Rep. Danny Davis, a Democrat who represents downtown Chicago, said the letter he wrote on Moore’s behalf was about “Stanley Moore working ’til he died.”

In fact, Davis said he thought Moore — whom he “just saw yesterday” and is his best friend — should have been made the head of the whole Census Bureau. But Davis said he didn’t know why Moore had been removed. “It just came up that they wanted someone else to do it,” he said.

Even though politics isn’t supposed to intrude upon the duties of Census, it seemingly has. Back in 2009, when President Obama first came to office, his administration wanted to have Census report directly to Rahm Emanuel, who was then the president’s chief of staff.

Emanuel, as you might already know, is now the mayor of Chicago.

The Chicago pizza man is another Census story that has a political undertone.

Back in 2010, Moore hired a guy named Joseph Aramanda, who owned a Chicago pizza business, to run a newly opened Census office in suburban Palatine.

Aramanda, it was reported at the time by the Associated Press and others, had gotten caught up in the corruption trial of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The pizza man, who was granted immunity in exchange for his testimony, was, it seems, crucial in arranging a $250,000 payment to a guy named Tony Rezko, a central figure in the Blagojevich case.

Rezko was supposed to give $10,000 of that money to the Obama presidential campaign, it was alleged.

I attempted to get a comment from Aramanda, but he couldn’t be reached.

So, let me ask this question again: What the heck was going on in the Chicago Census office? Why was an agency that collects economic data entangling itself in politics? And why is the government being so secretive about what happened to Stanley Moore?

Since this column had already raised a lot of questions, here is one more: If the US economy is really growing as quickly as Washington alleges, why doesn’t the Federal Reserve raise interest rates immediately?

Last week, the Commerce Department said our nation’s gross domestic product grew at a 5 percent annualized rate in the third quarter. This was shockingly good news that even caught Wall Street — which is colonized by eternal optimists — by surprise.

But that news should have alarmed the Fed, which has kept interest rates near zero percent for years because the economic recovery hasn’t taken hold. And the Fed said earlier this month that it would be months, at the very least, before it starts to raise rates.

So that’s the conundrum — either the Fed doesn’t believe growth is as good as Commerce says it is or it is shirking its duty to keep the economy from growing too much and producing inflation.

Which is it?

As I’ve said a number of times, I think the Fed doesn’t trust Washington’s economic statistics. And it shouldn’t — not only because of the falsification I’ve documented over the past year but also because the economic data is misleading.

In the first place, the experts believe fourth-quarter GDP growth will only be at a 2.5 percent annual rate — half of what was reported in the third quarter. If that turns out to be true, the growth rate for the four quarters of 2014 will average out to a very moderate 2.5 percent.

And the 5 percent third-quarter growth was inflated by a nearly 21 percent increase in health care spending related to ObamaCare.

Nobody seems to know why that health care blip showed up in the third quarter and not earlier in the year, but it did.

There’s also a new category in the GDP this year called “intellectual property” that contributed nicely to the overall growth.

Take those and other anomalies out of the GDP report and the Fed was correct in not jumping to the conclusion that the economy was strong.

Come February, the Fed will have even more reason to doubt whether it can raise rates anytime soon.

I’ll explain that remark — and will do so excessively — in the New Year.