Obama's Skank

When Penny Pritzker withdrew her name from consideration for Secretary of Commerce, a typical corporate news report in the New York Times was neutral, to say the least. "Penny Pritzker, a Chicago hotel magnate whose business transactions could have provoked scrutiny, last week said she did not want to be Commerce Secretary." One of Penny Pritzker's transactions that "could have provoked scrutiny" was paying herself and her co-conspirators $200 million in dividends on phony profits while they diddled away all the depositors' money deposited in Superior Bank. This enormous scam never provoked much scrutiny while Penny Pritzker was bankrolling Barack Obama's Senate campaign, and it never provoked much scrutiny while she was the financial chair-person of Barack Obama's Presidential campaign, and it isn't provoking much scrutiny now that President Obama has appointed Penny Pritzker to the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, but nominations for Mr. Obama's Cabinet must be especially provocative, because apparently nothing else was ever going to provoke much scrutiny of Penny Pritzker except being nominated as Secretary of Commerce. The only significant "accomplishments" in Penny Pritzker's hugely over-privileged life are bankrolling Obama and cheating hundreds of elderly retirees out everything in their bank accounts that wasn't covered by the FDIC, so... Which one of these "accomplishments" qualified Penny Pritzker to be Secretary of Commerce, or a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board? Was it cheating depositors, or bankrolling Obama? And Penny Pritzker isn't just an ordinary skank among the skanky multitude of bankers who bankrupted the American economy! It isn't just her shameless shilling for sub-prime mortgages in May 2001: We will "once again restore Superior's leadership position in subprime lending." Two months later Superior Bank ceased to exist, and all the money anyone had deposited in it was gone. The Pritzkers squeezed hundreds of millions of dollars out of Superior, and then bought their way out of criminal charges with a partial repayment to the FDIC (this option isn't available to the average hold-up man), and even that isn't what reeks about Penny Pritzker. Penny Pritzker is a big stinking kahuna even among all the other certifiable "Butt-Hole Surfers of American Banking," because Penny Pritzker's version of sub-prime scamming was exceptionally nasty, and targeted an especially vulnerable clientele.

It's the terms of Penny Pritzker's miserable settlement with the FDIC that make it especially scummy even for a typical American banker, because the Pritzkers got 15 years to make their partial repayment of $460 million. This is just plain ugly, because a lot of the people who are waiting for that partial repayment are working-class retirees who had trusted Superior Bank with their life savings, and whatever wasn't covered by the FDIC was gone. Penny Pritzker alone is worth $2.8 billion, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of the Pritzker family's $15 billion fortune.   So if you were a seventy-year-old retired plumber, and your retirement savings amounted to $210 thousand, you have to wait 15 years to get most of it back from the gang that threw it away, because... Why? Because paying out 3% of their fortune would break the Pritzkers? Not exactly. And that's what stinks about Penny Pritzker, outstandingly even among American bankers: It's making those poor old chumps who trusted your bank wait 15 years to recover their money, so they almost go broke again and again and again, like a detainee almost drowning on a waterboard, and then a little money finally leaks in from the almighty Pritzkers. It actually gets worse, because repaying all the money lost from retirement accounts would only cost $10 million, not even 1/10th of 1% of the Pritzker fortune. The Pritzkers agreed in 2001 to pay the F.D.I.C. $460 million over 15 years to cover claims by depositors. Still, more than 1,400 depositors who had more than $100,000 in their savings accounts - the maximum the government then insured - were left short about $10 million, said Clint Krislov, a lawyer for several of them. "Why the Pritzkers wouldn't do the right thing and just make these people whole for the small amount of money that it would take, I still cannot understand," he said. So Penny Pritzker wasn't in jail in 2002, and she was just as rich as ever, and what's a girl to do with so much money that not even a Pritzker can spend it? In 2002 Barack Obama was a nobody of a state senator who had just been crushed in a primary challenge to the Democratic incumbent in Illinois' 1st Congressional District, Bobby Rush...   But then Penny Pritzker used a small chunk of the money she had stolen from working-class retirees to turn that woebegone nobody into Barack Obama, Man of Destiny. [Re-posted from the now extinct OpenLeft, February 9, 2009]