Obama has just nominated Penny Pritzker, the billionaire former chairwoman of just such a bank (until 1994) and later a director for its holding company (with an active role in its operations, according to Crain’s, from 1999 until its failure in 2001) as his new secretary of Commerce.
Commerce is a meaningless cabinet position, usually given to a party hack or a big donor. (It has actually been vacant since last June, and it’s not like anyone has noticed.) But that this bauble would go to this particular big donor and longtime Obama fundraiser — one of the first in Chicago’s smart set to embrace Obama’s 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate — seems somewhat incongruous.
Probably the most important aspect of Superior’s failure was the fact that over a thousand depositors lost up to $40 million at the time, and that the billionaire Pritzker clan settled with the FDIC to avoid government action against them.
◼ OBAMA TAPS CHICAGO INSIDER, BILLIONAIRE BUNDLER TO HEAD COMMERCE DEPARTMENT - The Blaze
Pritzker, a billionaire Hyatt hotel heiress, will fill a cabinet post that has been vacant since former Secretary John Bryson resigned in June 2012 after he said he suffered a seizure that led to a series of traffic collisions.
If confirmed, Pritzker would become the fourth woman serving as secretary in Obama’s current cabinet. She also would be the wealthiest cabinet member by far, with Forbes estimating her net worth at $1.85 billion and ranking her as the 277th richest American.
But her background comes with some questions.
“She and her secretive family have been caught up in some pretty dodgy commercial ventures including but not limited to dodging taxes and running a bank that specialized in subprime mortgages,” The Atlantic notes.
Back in 2008 when she was “widely reported to be a leading contender for commerce secretary,” The New York Times laid down some difficult truths about Pritzger. It’s true that 53-year-old woman — then just 49 — has managed a number of businesses in her career. Unfortunately, one of them was Superior Bank which, in The Times‘s words, “focused on bundling subprime mortgages into securities, the practice that later helped set off the current financial crisis.” Oops.In fact, as noted in the above, her “shady” background was the reason she removed her name from consideration when she was nominated for the gig in 2008. Or, you know, Congress can choose to ignore these issues and move forward with the nomination of one President Obama’s chief fundraisers.... She was his finance chairwoman in 2008 and served as co-chair of Obama for America 2012.
◼ Meet Obama’s Chicago fat cat Commerce nominee - Micelle Malkin
Taxpayers, beware. Pritzker is a deep-pocketed doyenne with a family history of dodging taxes — or siphoning them away from the public for her own family’s gargantuan private gain. If you want to see how she’ll oversee a $10 billion government agency, look at her own wealth redistribution record....
One of the most lucrative schemes milked by these developers and perfected in Chicago is a mechanism called tax increment financing. When I worked in Seattle covering corporate welfare and city government, I became strange bedfellows with a diverse alliance of libertarians and Ralph Naderites who rightly oppose “public-private partnership” deals between developers, statist Democrats and corporate welfare Republican politicians. These “public-private partnership” scams inevitably involve tax increment financing gimmickry to siphon off tax dollars to subsidize developers/builders/contractors, who then reward politicians with big campaign donations.
TIF schemes totaling hundreds of millions of tax dollars were at the heart of the Obama/Daley/Pritzker Chicago Olympics bid. And a huge franchise of Pritzker’s Hyatt Hotels Corp. was the beneficiary of a $5.2 million TIF subsidy approved by Chicago Dems last year. It’s part of a massive redevelopment project with the Obamas’ hometown University of Chicago that robs local schools to subsidize well-connected corporations.
Don’t take my word for it. As a radical leftwing local activist put it: “It’s not fighting economic blight; it’s a way of taking from everyone and giving to the 1 percent.” From Chicago to Chicago on the Potomac, it’s dirty statist business as usual.
