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made fun of me when I suggested that President Barack Obama would
nominate a confessed bank scammer, a loan-sharking mortgage predator, to
his cabinet. But thar she blows!
Today, Obama has named Penny Pritzker Secretary of
Commerce. As the President says, It's a milestone: the first female
fraudster to hold that post. No longer will criminal bankers have to
lobby the administration - because now they'll have one of their own in
the Cabinet.
The following is taken from the Chapter, "Penny's from
Heaven?" you'll find in my bestseller, Billionaires & Ballot
Bandits. [Get a copy, I'll sign it, and you send it to the President.]
We never heard of this guy Barack Obama until 2004.
Less than three years before taking the presidency, he was in the
Illinois state senate, a swamp of scammers, backhanders, and party
machine tools - not a stellar launch pad for the White House. And then,
one day, state Sen. Barack Obama was visited by his fairy godmother. Her
name is Penny Pritzker.
Pritzker's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8
billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of
politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher,
except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family
$460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices
of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side
of Chicago.
Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks
to go bust - at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost
nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and
poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.
Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one
bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped
someone would change the banking regulators and the Commerce Department
so she could get away with this crap.
Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator,
to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on
Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better - an introduction
to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former
chairman of Goldman Sachs and former co-chairman of Citibank. Even
atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.
Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for
Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times
as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.
So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama
with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers
and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as
Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.
Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under
Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In
effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that
brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the
banksters loads of lucre.
So, in 2008, Summers and Geithner were put back in the saddle - Obama's horse but Rubin's saddle.
Rubin received more than $100 million from Citigroup,
the gargantuan commercial bank/investment bank/casino created by
deregulation. It is worth a mention that Rubin's centi-million-dollar
payoff went unchallenged by Citi's new owner, the US Treasury, which had
put up more than a trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to pull
Rubin's creature out of bankruptcy.
Rubin rocked, but Penny was pissed off. Pritzker had
taken this state senator/community organizer from the ghetto, made him a
US Senator, then, as Obama's campaign finance chairwoman, raised a
mind-blowing three-quarters of a billion dollars to make him president.
In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron
Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as
Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of
Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted
bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her
family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed
the door on Penny pronto.
The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from
Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of
directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE,
the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international
boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the
AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress
on the down-low.
Obama appeared to keep the door shut on Pritzker
throughout the 2012 campaign, reducing her to hosting an election
fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman
Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time and last time anyone
used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.
But today, with the unions' money and votes already
pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give
Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.
The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms.
Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the
business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business
community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags
of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.
By giving Penny, the Piggy Banker, Commerce, we have to change Obama's rating to sub-prime.
I do note that some woman's organizations are
applauding the appointment of the first female to the Commerce post.
But I prefer to honor the victims of the Chicago femme fatale. Most of
Penny's victims, busted bank borrowers and underpaid health care
workers, are women, too. But, unlike those wounded and destroyed by
Pritzker, she worked hard for her money: it was not easy inheriting her
first billion from her daddy.
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