Penny Pritzker was one of President Obama’s biggest fundraisers in 2008 and 2012. She’s also his nominee for Commerce Secretary. I guess he felt letting her billionaire family off the hook for the failure of Superior Bank wasn’t payback enough.
The billionaire Pritzker family owned Superior Bank which went belly-up in 2001 because of bad bets they made on subprime mortgages. Penny Pritzker, one of President Obama’s top fundraisers and a member of the President’s Economic Advisory Board, encouraged the bank to make even more bad bets only a month or so before the bank went bust. According to The Washington Times, the Pritzkers cut a deal with the federal government and agreed to a $460 million settlement. They have only paid off $316 million of that settlement (which was interest-free) yet the government has agreed to let them off the hook for the remaining funds.
Naturally, depositors who have yet to be made whole are not happy.
The White House forgot to mention that little tidbit of information when they made their announcement.
“Penny Pritzker is one of the most accomplished and highly respected women in business today,” said White House official, praising the selection. “With more than 25 years of experience in the real estate, hospitality, senior living, financial services and other industries, Penny knows what it takes to build, grow, and invest in a business, and will be a strong advocate for policies that help grow the economy and create jobs.”
I’ll bet those depositors who got screwed would disagree.
To protect her family’s multibillion-dollar fortune, Pritzker’s enterprises park their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts Obama attacked GOP rival Mitt Romney over. But Obama lapped up nearly $800 million in campaign and inaugural funding raised by Pritzker. A former Pritzker tax lawyer pioneered tax-avoidance strategies for the family, which allowed them to pay $9 million in taxes instead of $150 million in estate taxes after patriarch A.N. Pritzker died. As Forbes notes: “There are now 11 Pritzkers on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.” Nice lawyering if you can get it.
Exempted from Obama’s poisonous class-warfare demagoguery, Pritzker also chaired Chicago’s failed Olympic Village Subcommittee while serving as president of Pritzker Realty Group, a top Illinois mega-developer that would have reaped untold millions in project work if then Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the White House had secured the 2016 Olympic bid.
Former Pritzker executive and Obama campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt also served on the Olympic committee, while holding the chairmanship of the Chicago Housing Authority under Daley — brother of former Obama Chief of Staff William Daley. Cronies of a feather.
Read the whole thing, Penny Pritzker is really good at enriching herself at the expense of the people. Do we really want her as Commerce Secretary? Good grief.
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