Billionaire Bankster Breaks into Obama’s Cabinet By Greg Palast May 2, 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.
“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…
The disease infecting Chicago, Philly, Detroit and the rest of the Democratically run shitholes across the land is spreading to the suburbs and will eventually kill the patient.
The Chicagoization of America
By: Daniel Greenfield
The first urban political machine was named after a fictional Indian saint unrecognized by any church and whose name, when pronounced with a Y at the end, began to strike many as Irish which only further confused the issue.
The godfather of that machine was another fictional saint who became Thomas Jefferson’s vice president after successfully rigging an election using a phony water company that eventually became Chase Bank, was tried for murder after killing the first Secretary of the Treasury, was tried for treason after a conspiracy to make himself King of Mexico and plotted to convince New England to secede from the Union.
The urban political machine was born in New York but died in Chicago. It’s no longer a separate entity. One of the inconveniences of urban life along with smog, muggings and excessive regulation. The urban political machine has gone national. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.
You may disapprove of New York’s soda ban or Chicago’s love affair with gun control or Los Angeles’ pandering to illegal aliens; but what happens in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the rest of the country’s blighted metropolises no longer stays there. You can live surrounded by ten thousand acres of wilderness on one side and the deep blue sea on the other and it will still find you because the urban political machine has gone national.
The last election was the triumph of the urban political machine. In 2008, Obama ran as a national candidate. In 2012, he ran as the figurehead for the urban political machines and let their voter turnout and voter fraud efforts carry the day. In 2008, he tried inspiring people. In 2012, he ran the same tired campaign run by a hundred corrupt mayors in a hundred cities who know that they can’t lose because the game is rigged and the voters have no choice.
The urban political machine was born in New York but died in Chicago. It’s no longer a separate entity from the rest of the country; one of the inconveniences of urban life along with smog, muggings and excessive regulation. The urban political machine has gone national. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.
The machine doesn’t care about individuals. It only counts bloc votes. It doesn’t care about making life better for people. Its genius is for finding ways to make life worse because it knows that it has more leverage over people looking for the next meal than over people looking to buy a house in the suburbs. The political machine doesn’t budget; it loots. It breaks the bank, raises taxes, drives out industries and rules over a feudal war zone sharply divided between the rich and the poor.
Reborn in fragmented cities that were multicultural before it was even a word, let alone a buzzword, the machine feeds off misery and conflict. During the 1860s, the machine sent German and Irish immigrants to riot and kill African-Americans to protest the Civil War. During the 1960s, it sent African-American mobs to riot and kill to protest the Vietnam War. The machine does not care about black or white. It only cares about power.
Power, the machine understands, is division. The machine is Machiavellian. It plots out segregated neighborhoods the way that generals deploy battalions. It promotes violence and suspicion and then meets with both sides to offer them a truce. It got big again as the frontier got small and a thousand peoples crowded into overcrowded cities speaking a babble of different languages and knowing nothing except the transplanted micro-communities that they had brought with them.The machine built on that. It took as their leaders anyone who could deliver a bloc vote. And it traded entitlements for votes. The community leaders became barons, the machine operators became kings and everyone else living in narrow streets, meeting in bursts of gang violence at the boundaries, and voting in blocs to keep the other side from getting better access to the goodies offered by the machine, got to be the peasants.
In 2012, tribal politics became national politics. The country was divided and conquered. A campaign run on convincing a dozen separate groups to be afraid of each other and of the majority made all the difference, not in some urban slum, but from sea to shining sea. The country had at last become the city. And considering the state of the city… the state of the union does not look good.
Amnesty for illegal aliens is the natural next step for the machine. The urban machines always wanted their cities to be big. They never cared if the people could feed themselves or if they could feed them. More people meant more votes. More votes meant more money.
The bigger the big cities get, the more micro-districts can be carved out, gerrymandered by race, divided by language, and capable of carrying more and more of the treasury back home to the machine. And if the cities can get big enough, fast enough, then they can outrace their own inevitable bankruptcies to seize control of the wealth of a nation. It’s the only hope of municipalities bulging with unfunded pensions, unfundable social welfare and a next generation of workers that doesn’t exist.
Money is not the issue. Urban political machines have always spent money like water counting on their cities being too big to fail. Right off City Hall in New York City sits the Tweed Courthouse, named after one of the most infamous bosses of the Tammany Hall political machine. Despite being a modest building, it cost more four times more to build than London’s Houses of Parliament. Today it houses the headquarters of the Department of Education which is spending the city deep into debt. That just goes to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Obama’s crazed spending spree is nothing new in big cities where the debt is sky high and there is no way to cover it. Detroit is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Chicago is facing a frightening pile of debt. California’s municipalities are taking the entire state down with them and Bloomberg doubled New York’s debt during his time as mayor.
The urban political machines don’t fear bankruptcy. They embrace it. Crises create more opportunities. When people are hungry, it’s childishly easy to get them to march round demanding this and that and then using this and that as cover for even bigger thefts. Bailouts and recovery programs are rich wells full of money that can be plundered.
The score was never as big and rich as it was during the first heady days of Hope and Change. The machine operators are no longer playing around with a few billion here or there for urban recovery programs. Instead they’re juggling trillions. The amount of money at their disposal is mind boggling and so is their thievery.
Paying it back is not their problem. America, like Chicago, is too big to fail.
The machine operators live in a world where the people and the cities are collateral to be borrowed against. As long as they control governments, they imagine that there will always be greedy suckers ponying up a few trillion which the next generation will pay off and the one after that.
It never occurs to them that the rest of the world is filled with starving human collateral and the ruins of old cities. It never occurs to them that Chicago, Detroit and New York are just places where people made things and earned a living. And that a city without an economy is just Somalia or El Salvador with a lot of tall buildings.
America is now being run by the logic of the urban machine. The rules on which the cities run are being applied to the rest of the country when it comes to gun control, health care and race. The rules broke the cities and they are breaking the country. And there is no escaping the rules without breaking the power of the urban political machine that now controls the country.
Chicagoland is slated to see the warmest temperatures of the year this weekend.
And you know what that means!
It means mobs of unruly black teens – as acknowledged by even the mainstream media – will be out prowling and growling on the Magnificent Mile, Gold Coast and elsewhere in the gun-free, gun control paradise of Chicagoland, engaging in wilding attacks on non-black tourists and shoppers, vandalism and general disorderly conduct – quite possible coordinated in advance on social media.
It’s just another day on the gun control plantation of Chicago, where only the bad guys carry guns, leaving the good guy easy pickings for violence inclined bad people.
That may be changing soon though, for a couple of reasons.
World Net Daily picked up the story, noting that it’s just a matter of time until some Chicago visitor will come armed and dispatch a violent attacker or two…:
Cops warn Chicago tourists soon will be armed
Second City Cop, a widely read blog run by current and former Chicago police officers, now has shared an ominous prediction with WND:
[I]t is almost a certainty that if these “wildings” continue, the casual tourist will become a rarity in short order, and a tourist intent on enjoying Chicago will come to town armed, as many already do. You don’t hear about it because they aren’t usually confronted by criminals.
Given the “current lawless climate” in the city, “it is likely, almost a certainty that someone will have to defend themselves or a loved one from the out-of-control individuals currently prowling through Chicago.”
…New details are emerging into mob violence that took place in an upscale, ordinarily safe part of Chicago over the weekend. Witnesses report that up to 500 “teens” assaulted pedestrians and shoppers with no provocation, hospitalizing at least one.
One victim claimed that her attackers had “knives or box cutters, and padlocks possibly placed inside socks.”
…One target of the attacks was a 27-year-old woman returning from dinner with her mother on Chicago public transportation. According to a Chicago Tribune report, the woman saw a “group of girls” boarding the train who “appeared to want to pick a fight.”
“This girl started blowing smoke in my face, and she flicked her cigarette ashes at me,” the woman said. “I said: ‘You need to put that out,’ and the next thing I know there’s all these girls that jumped on top of us.”
At that point, the group started to punch her face and grab at her hair to attack her. The woman reportedly claimed that the group “had knives or box cutters, and padlocks possibly placed inside socks.”
The woman described her attempts to protect herself: “I put my head down between my legs so they would stop beating me in the face, but they were trying to pull my face up and hit me more,” she said. “They ripped out chunks of my hair, and I’ve got a black eye and bruises on my face, and all over my back and shoulder.”
“I’ve never been scared like this before,” the woman said. “We were just minding our own business. … It was really, really violent.”
The second reason tourists and shopper will be armed on or before June 9th, 2013 is the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals strike-down of Illinois’ prohibition on the carrying of firearms outside the home. The stay suspending that decision expires June 9th, allowing everyone in Illinois with a FOID card, or non-residents with a carry permit, to carry concealed firearms in Illinois if politicians don’t implement — that’s not “plan”, not “talk about”, not “discuss” or “negotiate”, but to implement - a carry law prior to the pending expiration of the stay.
DON’T GO TO CHICAGO: CHICAGO ISN’T SAFE!
In short, do not travel to Chicago for tourist reasons. Avoid Chicago for business reasons unless your life depends on it – and quite frankly, you’re risking your life and well-being visiting Chicago. While you probably will be okay, prudent people do what’s necessary to avoid potential conflict or criminal attack, and that would mean avoiding Chicago.
Illustrations of how and why Chicago is screwed up, aside from the criminal violence?
How about the Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney and her boyfriend who were arrested for attacking a man and fighting with cops while drunk.
Somehow, they were acquitted by a judge that was a former Assistant State’s Attorney.
Remember the drunken nutjob ASA on video repeatedly calling a CPD Officer a “f***ing whore” after being arrested after biting a shop owner on the north side?; The video went viral, three witnesses backed the store owner and the cops on the scene displayed amazing restraint with this entitled and clouted asshole.
Cleared of all charges late on a Friday (in hope of burying the story):
Chicago (Sun-Times) - A judge acquitted a Cook County prosecutor and her boyfriend of all counts against them Friday involving a scuffle in which she was accused of sinking her teeth into a man’s leg.
Associate Judge Anthony John Calabrese made the ruling after testimony that painted a less-than-pretty picture of Sarah Naughton and Bradley Gould’s Sept. 22 night out.
Defense attorneys Jeffrey Aprati and Rick Bueke said Naughton and Gould, both 31 at the time, were battered in an overly zealous eviction from a lingerie store.
At least three witnesses Friday suggested Naughton and her boyfriend, Gould, appeared drunk and out-of-control outside Taboo Tabou, 854 W. Belmont. David Boone said Naughton bit his leg during the scuffle, requiring him to get a tetanus shot.
And Naughton kept telling people she was an assistant state’s attorney, according to testimony presented by prosecutor Daniel Nikolic, a member of the Illinois attorney general’s office.
The city of Chicago has agreed to pay $55,000 to a South Side mom who was Tasered by a cop when she was eight months pregnant.Tiffany Rent, 31, sued the city after [the officer] used his stun gun to subdue her in front of her two young children during a dispute about a parking ticket outside a Walgreens store on June 5 last year.She claimed two other officers, [...], mocked and laughed at her as she writhed in pain.
And what exactly provoked this outrageous response from officers?
But the city denied that allegation and also said the officers didn’t know Rent was pregnant. Rent was Tasered after she parked in a disabled spot, then tore up a parking ticket and refused to show an ID to Pippen, police said at the time.The settlement city attorneys agreed with Rent last week “is not, in any way, an admission of wrongdoing by the City or any officers involved,” Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew said.
And the loud obnoxious behavior mentioned in the case reports? The wild swinging of the arms and kicking? The announcement of being placed under arrest and then fighting being handcuffed? That would fit the ILCS definition of an Active Resister and an Assailant, both covered under the Use of Force model as actions where a Taser can be deployed.And here comes McOpenMouth-InsertFoot with his two cents worth:
In the aftermath of the incident, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said stun guns should be used “when you’re overcoming an assault or preventing escape.”
The good news in Chicago, though:
Mayor Rahm, the tiny ballerina dancer, will be out and about in the city, making sure the dead weren’t Democrat constituents of his. Here he is, checking voter rolls at recent homicide scenes, as recorded in photos sent to Second City Cop.
Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House. One is from Chicago, another is from Tennessee, and the third is from Minnesota.
All three go with a White House official to examine the fence.
The Minnesota contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. “Well,” he says, “I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me.”
The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, and then says, “I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and
$100 profit for me.”
The Chicago contractor doesn’t measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, “$2,700.”
The official, incredulous, says, “You didn’t even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?”
The Chicago contractor whispers back, “$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence.”
“Done!” replies the government official.
And that, my friends, is how the stimulus plan works…
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Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works. — John Stuart Mill
