Billionaire Bankster
Breaks into Obama's Cabinet
By Greg Palast 
Thursday, 2. May 2013

You 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.

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This article is based on the chapter Penny's from Heaven? From Palast's New York Times Bestseller Billionaires & Ballot Bandits with comics by Ted Rall.
Donate and get a signed copy.

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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.


Note:  This article is used with permission.  For more information and investigative reports, please go to GregPalast.com

Forgetting the Holocaust?

A friend of mine sent me this just today.  It portrays perfectly the perpetual mind-numbing insensitivity of so many people toward the Jews.

Mrs. Clare Booth-Luce, the wife of Henry Luce, the founder of TIME magazine, was a well-respected and highly informed writer and journalist.

It must have been in the late ‘60’s that she said, at a gathering of academics and politicians, to a prominent Jewish leader, it may have been Nachum Goldman:

"I really feel that the Jews should stop commemorating the Holocaust. Why don’t you get on with life, put all those experiences, however painful they may be, behind you and concentrate on the future.”

Nachum Goldman stood silent for a moment, then, with brightly shining eyes and warm smile on his face he said:  “Mrs. Luce, these are exactly my sentiments when I hear people talk about the Crucifixion!


[Thank you, Bob Poris!]

Wealth Inequality in the U.S.

If you missed this video, it's worth a few minutes of your time.  Remember that the Republican Party serves as the sponsors and enablers of the richest Americans.  Remember that the so-called Sequester is kicking in because the Republicans in Congress believe that the burden of erasing our nation's debt should fall on those who are the least among us.  God forbid that the wealthy should have to give up a little scrap of their largesse!

What is amazing is that many of our wealthiest citizens and a goodly number of Republicans in Congress claim to be Christians yet fail to see the dichotomy between their religious confession and their actions.  I know many of them proudly confess "Jesus as their Lord," completely oblivious to the fact that Jesus did not give a whit about money and said quite clearly that the rich will never, ever, make it into the Kingdom of Heaven! 




Video produced by Politizane.

Hunger in America

Something's Always Wrong

By Toad the Wet Sprocket

Welcome to our Self-Made Crisis Period, number the fifth in the last six months. I'm well past outrage fatigue. I'm just done with these buffoons in DC. I'm done with David Brooks and John McCain being interviewed about the sequester but not one economist.

I'm tired of privileged white men like Scalia denigrating voters' rights as a racial entitlement. I'm tired of climate change being the single most pressing issue in the entire world, and yet the New York Times declares its Green Blog defunct. I'm tired of good liberal bloggers like Steve Gilliard losing his life because he couldn't afford health insurance and Josh Trevino got paid $400,000 to pimp Malaysian politics AND got published in HuffPo (maybe it's time to start looking at newsman Bob Woodward's extra income).

I'm tired of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner lying about the spending cuts that have already happened and demanding that those who can afford it the least largely bear the burden of their terrible administration. I'm sick of living in a post-fact America where no media outlet assumes the responsibility of informing their audience and keeps playing the "both sides do it" card.

I'll say this until I'm blue in the face: WE HAVE THE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEMS FACING US. But our elected representatives are operating with a completely different agenda, and that's to carry us to the next Self-Made Crisis Period. I'm not being overly morose, really I'm not. I'm just done with this stupidity. I think it's time for us to get rid of the petulant brats and get some adults at the table.

(The above from Crooks & Liars, here.)

President Obama on the Sequester

The people voted into office those morons who currently hold the majority power in the House of Representatives.  They are responsible for this horrible mess, not the president.  Only they can fix it, not the president.  The Republican majority in our Congress said loudly and clearly, "We care only about our rich friends and to hell with the rest of you!  Our main objective for the past four years has been to bring down the president even if we have to destroy out country to do it!"

Ronald Reagan on Social Security and the Budget

This is what Reagan said: “Social Security, let’s lay it to rest once and for all…Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. Social Security is totally funded by the payroll tax levied on employer and employee. If you reduce the outgo of Social Security, that money would not go into the general fund or reduce the deficit. It would go into the Social Security Trust Fund. So Social Security has nothing to do with balancing a budget or raising or lowering the deficit.”

h/t to The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare

"I want my fair share--and that's ALL OF IT." - The Kochs & the XL Pipeline

"I want my fair share–and that's ALL OF IT."

The Kochs & the XL Pipeline

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine 
Thursday, February 14, 2013

Activists alert:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his son Connor Kennedy were arrested Wednesday in Washington while protesting against approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline. 
 

A rally in Washington, DC, protesting the Pipeline, has been called by Forward on Climate for Sunday, February 17. 

Bobby Kennedy, my partner in these investigations, is a contributor to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: Greg Palast investigates Karl Rove, the Koch Gang & their Buck Buddies, the book on which this report is based.  

According to the transcript of the secretly recorded tape, Charles Koch was chuckling like a six-year old.  Koch was having a hell of a laugh over pilfering a few hundred dollars’ worth of oil from a couple of dirt-poor Indians on the Osage Reservation.

Why did Koch, worth about $3 billion at the time (now $20 billion) need to boost a few bucks from some Indian in a trailer home?  Koch answered:

“I want my fair share – and that’s all of it.”

Now “all of it” includes a pipeline, the Keystone XL, which would run the world’s filthiest oil, crude made from tar sands, down from Canada to his family’s refinery on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

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This is Part 2 of “The Koch Brothers, Hugo Chavez and the XL Pipeline.”  Part 1 explains that the Koch Oil refinery can only “crack” heavy crude from Venezuela—which costs $33 a barrel more than tar sands heavy oil.  But Canada’s cheap crude cannot get to Texas without a new, giant pipe.  XL would save the Kochs nearly $3 billion a year.

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Problem:  the Keystone XL tar-oil tube would endanger the largest US water sources, vastly increase pollution in the USA and measurably heat the planet.

Solution:  Congressman Tim Griffin.

Congressman Griffin is sponsoring the bill to force the Obama Administration to approve the XL Pipeline without the environmental review now required by law.

What’s odd is that Griffin represents Arkansas, a state with no stake in the Pipeline.

But the Kochs have a stake in Griffin.  In his maiden run for Congress, Griffin was elected with an eye-popping $167,000 donation from the Kochs.  For $167,000, any congressman will wash your car – with their tongue.

For the Kochs, $167K is peanuts.  Their political action operation, Americans for Prosperity, built a quarter billion dollar fund this past year, a sum never seen even in the US politics cash swamp.

Global Warming Denial as a Profit Center
To answer the concerns about global warming raised by the XL and the Kochs’ oil business, the billionaire brothers have bankrolled a gold-plated campaign of global warming denial.

For example, Americans for Prosperity funded “Hot Air Tour” rallies across the US with the slogan, “Global Warming Alarmism:  Lost Jobs, Higher Taxes and Less Freedom.”  More rallies were held by the Koch-funded FreedomWorks, a foundation which has seized control of the Tea Party movement—and redirected populist rage against plutocrats. FreedomWorks transformed the Tea Party into a used tea bag, dangling from the Kochs' string.

Break the Law then Re-make the Law
States on the pipeline’s route could block the Keystone XL, but the crucial extension will originate in Oklahoma where the Kochs have cowed all resistance to their needs.

The Kochs’ power to terrorize politicians in Oklahoma and the West originates in that case of Osage tribe’s missing oil.

FBI agents filmed Koch Oil men pilfering the crude, had witnesses to Koch’s directives to siphon the oil, and more. The US Justice Department drafted a criminal indictment of Koch Industries and Defendant “67C” (reportedly Charles Koch himself) for “Crime on an Indian Reservation” and racketeering, big-time jail-time offenses.

That’s when Koch Oil drilled down and struck Bob Dole, the nation’s most powerful Senator, the Republican Majority Leader.

Dole (representing Kansas), joined by a Koch-funded Senator from Oklahoma, Don Nickles, had the federal prosecutor who brought the case fired.  Case closed except for a few million paid to the Osage for some of their stolen oil.

Dole ran for President using Koch money given to Dole’s not-for-profit foundation.  It was a cheap buy for the Kochs because it was illegal – so Dole, when caught, had to give it back.

But one Senator wouldn’t let the oil theft go: Dennis DeConcini, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Investigations whose report concluded, “Koch Oil is the most dramatic example of an oil company stealing by deliberate mismeasurement and fraudulent reporting.”

The Kochs didn’t like that.  And when the Kochs don’t like something, or someone, it’s notably more serious than a ‘thumbs down’ on your Facebook page. In 1996 (yes, I’ve been investigating the Kochs for that long), DeConcini told me the Kochs warned him that if he published and stood by the Senate’s and the FBI’s findings, the Kochs would destroy the Senator’s political career.  They did.

Then there was the matter of the 97-count criminal indictment of Koch Oil for dumping poisonous crude sludge into rivers in six states.  The Kochs didn’t merely want to beat the rap—they wanted to continue dumping.

That would require buying a whole new Congress.  No problemo, Pardner.  In 1996, Koch Industries, through a fake front called Coalition for our Children’s Future, secretly funded millions of dollars in vicious attack ads against vulnerable Democrats just days before the election.

As a result, Republican Newt Gingrich kept his post as Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Gingrich pushed an agenda he called "The Contract with America", which would eliminate criminal sanctions for pollution and slash rules against polluting.  The Center for Public Integrity said it “seems to have been drafted and designed for Koch interests.”

Wrong.  The Contract was drafted by the Kochs and crafted at the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank the Kochs founded.

Bill Clinton’s Administration, though nominally Democratic, went easy on Koch interests. Vice-President Al Gore especially, head of the Reinventing Government Commission, attacked regulations with more verve than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher.  Gore’s anti-regulation guidebook was the “Mandate for Change” drafted by the Democratic Leadership Council.  It was the DLC that had launched the career of the previously unknown Bill Clinton, its first chair, and Al Gore’s career as well. The DLC was created with $100,000 of Koch money.

The Kochs use of fronts for corporate donations to politicians was plain illegal—until, in 2010, the US Supreme Court decriminalized this game in the Citizens United case.  The lawyer for Citizens United is Ted Olson, whose day job is representing Koch Industries.

Note:  The Kochs are bi-partisan employers.  They also retain lawyer Bob Strauss, former Chairman of the Democratic Party.

The Themis Machine
As if their billions, their think tanks, lawyers, fronts and political action fund were not enough to scare the bejeezus out of politicians, there is Themis.  Themis, created by the Kochs, is the nation’s most sophisticated, detailed database on every American living, surpassing the most demonic dreams of the FBI.

Themis, for example, knows the last time you, Jack, downloaded porn.

Given their power and their Themis, is it really possible for a few greenies and some fact-afflicted scientists to stop the Kochs from jamming their pipeline right up our aquifers?

Absolutely.  Indeed, that’s the only way it will be stopped, because the Kochs have already put the politicians in their pipe and smoked them.

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Note:  This article by Greg Palast was originally written for Vice Magazine, and is used with permission.

The Colbert Report/Jesus is a liberal Democrat

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

h/t to Art Woodstone

Handguns - An American Institution

h/t to Bob Poris

A Shooting in Connecticut

The latest news reports indicate that a person or persons entered the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, this morning - armed to the teeth - and started shooting.  

There are, at last count, 27 people dead, 18 of which are children.

Who needs foreign terrorists? We've got homegrown, organic ones! We've got them in the cities, towns and rural communities across our land.

Newtown, Connecticut was considered by some to be a very safe place. It isn't. No place is safe.

And tomorrow, some sick puppy carrying enough firepower to take on the Taliban, may show up in your hometown - in a school, a movie theater, a church, a mall!

That person is just as much a terrorist - and perhaps more so - than a radical Islamist - for he or she can easily obtain access to our most vulnerable citizens - our kids.

It is difficult to pin the blame for these random acts of incredible violence, but part of it must be aimed directly at the National Rifle Association. I am a gun owner, but the NRA's actions down through the years has been unconscionable, for it has, without evidence or reason, conducted a campaign to ensure that every kook in the country has access to every kind of death-dealing weapon made today.

The NRA spent millions of dollars over the last two election cycles trying to defeat President Obama, claiming he would "take your guns away," even though the President never said he would do that and made no effort to do so. But the cumulative effect of their blatant lies and unending propaganda created lines at local guns stores as people "stocked" their armories in case Obama's "Armageddon" took place.

A second finger should be pointed at the television and movie industries. Violence is endemic to many movies and television shows today; gun violence. Life is cheap at the movies. Shoot to kill is the way to go. If someone is your enemy, blow him or her away! The new James Bond is a good example. Violence always played a part in the old Bond movies, but it was within a broader context and usually tongue-in-cheek. Not so, anymore. The new Bond movie is two hours of unremitting high-tech violence and bloodshed.

See for yourself. Consider the top ten movies and the highest-rated television dramas over the past year. I'll bet that a majority are violence-ridden and involve a variety of pistols and automatic weaponry.

This is small consolation for those who mourn their dead in Colorado, Oregon, Virginia, Michigan, Connecticut and all the other places where innocent children and adults have been murdered by some insane fool with a gun.

Perhaps it would help if we called the NRA to account, if we took another look at the Second Amendment and either amended it or deleted it. The Second Amendment was never conceived as license to kill, as the Bible for the individual shooter, or to suggest that everyone has the right to walk around armed with deadly weapons. It was to ensure, in those troubled times, that states had the ability to create a militia quickly in time of need. That time has passed. We have a militia - it's called the National Guard on a state level and the U.S. Military Machine on the national level.


Something must be done.  But we've got one more finger to point - and that's at those Congresspersons, whether they be Republican or Democrat, who have taken money from the NRA, who are fearful of being targeted by the NRA, who refuse to create sane and sensible gun-control laws because they'd rather have children die than lose the good graces of the NRA and thus lose their seats of power in the government.

As it is said, this issue is not rocket science.  At the present time just about anyone in this country can easily legally obtain just about any kind of weapon made.  In some states one no longer even needs a license to carry a concealed weapon.

And thus, Jimmy Dipstick, fuming and festering because of some real or imagined slight, gets his hands on an AK-47 and decides to shoot up a school, to kill as many people as possible.  He may be insane.  Actually, by any reasonable definition of insanity, he is insane.  But if that's the case, then that's all the more reason, at the very least, why we should strive to keep weapons out of his hands.

And until we do that, as sensibilities crumble and the world gets more complicated and frustrating for the troubled and the stupid, we will continue to see our friends and our children, our leaders and ourselves, shot to death for no reason at all.