Almost all American bankers stink, but among the certifiable "Butt-Hole Surfers of American Banking," Penny Pritzker is a big stinking kahuna, and Barack Obama is the gidget she created.
It isn't just the failure of Superior Bank that endows Penny Pritzker with her particular stench. Others bankers have thrown away all their depositors money on worthless paper while paying themselves $200 million in dividends.
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.
It's the terms of this miserable settlement 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 almost nobody, an Illinois state senator who had been crushed in a primary challenge to the Democratic incumbent in Illinois 1st Congressional District, Bobby Rush. His only notable foray into financial regulation was supporting a minor initiative by Republican Governor George Ryan, who now languishes in federal prison after being convicted on 18 charges of racketeering.
Following the lead of a racketeer doesn't exactly make you a star in the field of financial regulation, but Barack Obama's follow-the-Republican-leader approach to controlling out-of-control banks turned out to be a very good thing for Barack Obama.
It made him a product that David Axelrod could sell to Penny Pritzker, and Pritzker's money infused the formerly anemic state senator with so many Presidential qualities that only two years later he was... Barack Obama, Man of Destiny!
But except for access to Penny Pritzker's money, what else changed about Barack Obama between 2002 and 2004?
He didn't publish any books: The Audacity of Hope came out in 2006.
Did Obama's brilliant or useless career (opinions vary) in the Illinois State Senate suddenly become astoundingly more brilliant between 2002 and 2004 than it was from 1997 to 2002?
Not so anybody noticed.
Did Obama suddenly acquire charisma in 2002? Was a sudden, mysterious onset of charisma that nobody noticed in 2000 the difference between getting crushed in a Democratic Congressional primary and winning a seat in the US Senate?
Or was it the money?
In 2004, unlike 2000, Barack Obama had access to Penny Pritzker's virtually infinite mountain of money, enough money for David Axelrod to overwhelm all other Democratic candidates with a humongous onslaught of slick TV advertising, and Brand Obama was born. The rest is about to be history.
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