Sunday, May 05, 2013

277 It's a Wall Street Government. Indeed, it is...

In de film van Charles Ferguson slaakt een van de deelnemers deze zucht: "It's a Wall Street government."

Een tot vandaag voor mij onbekende journalist, Greg Palast ( BBC o.a.) heeft daarvoor alweer extra bewijsmateriaal aangedragen. 

In onderstaand artikel, dat deels overeenkomt met enkele hoofdstukken uit zijn recente boek, zegt hij dat Robert Rubin er voor gezorgd heeft , meet erg veel Wall Street geld, dat Obama de nieuwe president zou worden. 

In mijn visie hebben Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan en Larry Summers met hun drieën de sub-prime crisis veroorzaakt.  En niet bij vergissing, maar met opzet ! 
          Uit talloze voorbeelden één:  Toen Brooksley Born , verantwoordelijk voor derivaten, haar best deed om meer toezicht en regulering van de derivaten-handel te verkrijgen, werd ze op zeer brute wijze buitengewerkt door deze drie financieel-terroristen. ( Greenwald) ( Frontline
We begrijpen nu waar het geld voor Obama ècht vandaan kwam: niet van kleine bijdragen die door de nieuwe 'social media' waren gestimuleerd, maar van Wall Street. 
We wisten al uit de officiele publicaties dat de banken de grootste campagne-bijdragen hadden geleverd, maar hier lezen we het nog eens.

De veroorzakers van de crisis waren de eersten die door Obama werden aangenomen: Larry Summers en de Rubin-protegé Geithner. 
Zij hebben de crisis op zo'n manier gebruikt dat de grote banken nu machtiger en rijker zijn dan ooit, en de gewone man met de schuldenlast is opgezadeld. 

In het artikel legt Greg Palast uit hoe Obama zo in het centrum van de macht is geraakt: met behulp van mevrouw Penny Pritzker, een miljardaire die over lijken gaat als haar dat zo uitkomt. 
Ze bedroog zwarte bewoners van de arme wijken in Chicago, en kreeg daarvoor een boete van 460 miljoen $. Blijkbaar geen bezwaar voor de zwarte mijnheer Obama. 

Natuurlijk was Obama haar iets schuldig, maar haar bloeddorstige beleid maakte het onhaalbaar om haar een mooie politieke functie te bezorgen. 
Tot vorige week, dan toch.....

Here you see the original article.
I made some lines bold. J V. 




Thursday, May 2, 2013
By Greg Palast 
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.

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

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.

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More interesting news from Greg Palast: 
1. How the USA tried to 'kill' Chavez. ( Chavez
Note: Venezuela has more oil-reserves than Saudi Arabia, Palast says.
2.  An oil pipe-line from Venezuela to Canada: terrible for the environment ( CO2) and competes stroongly with Venezuelan oil  ( Koch
3. Millions of US votes are not counted ! ( Votes


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