Why are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton so keen to take on the Vulture and provoke the wrath of his coven of billionaires and their mighty checkbooks?
If you want me to be a partisan water boy for the Democratic Party, skip this.
Barack Obama means “The Blessed One We’ve Been Waiting For.” But who was waiting for him?
We never heard of this guy until 2004. Less than three years before taking the Oval Office, he was in the Illinois State Senate, a swamp of scammers, backhanders, and Party Machine tools, not a stellar launchpad for the presidency.
And then, one day, the Blessed One was visited by his fairy godmother. Her name is Penny Pritzker.
Penny’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 the 1990s the federal government fined her $400 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of the bank she owned on the South Side of Chicago.6
Penny did not like that. No, not one bit.
What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She Hoped someone would Change the banking laws to let her get away with this crap.
Pritzker introduced 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, former Secretary of the Treasury, former Chairman of both Goldman Sachs and Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.
Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily, Democrat Obama raised three times as much from banking and finance as his Republican opponent in 2008.
So what did Rubin get for showering the Blessed One 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.
These were the two gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, had deregulated and decriminalized the kind of banking activity that had got Penny in so much hot water.7 Despite their banking-law destruction spree having brought the planet to its financial knees, Summers and Geithner were now back in the saddle—Obama’s horse but Rubin’s saddle.
Rubin received over $100 million from Citigroup (the commercial bank–investment bank–casino created by deregulation). His payoff went unchallenged by Citi’s new owner, the US Treasury, which put up over a trillion dollars in loans and guarantees to pull Rubin’s creature out of bankruptcy.
But now the centi-millionaires like Rubin are worried. Obama, once elected, protected the banks from doom and public anger—but not from the threat of the hedge-fund billionaires like Singer the Vulture, who has sued Citibank along with the treasury of Argentina. Romney’s vultures have targeted the Congo, Greece, and the big New York banks that need to keep these nations alive.
The trillion-dollar high-stakes showdown between these finance superpowers, the billionaires versus the bankers, will be played out in 2012 and beyond, with super-PACs, supercomputers, voter-roll purges, senators, congressmen, and the White House as the pieces on the chessboard moved by the invisible hands.
But Penny is pissed off. She had taken a state senator/community organizer from the ghetto, made him a US senator, then, as the Obama campaign finance director, raised a mind-blowing three quarters of a billion dollars to make him president. In return, Obama decided to make his patron the secretary of commerce.
But then, just as he was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Penny’s victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes which her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama dumped Penny pronto.
In 2012, Obama, to his credit, snapped the door shut on Penny, reducing her to hosting an Obama reelection fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time anyone has used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.
Happy ending? Penny’s gone, yes. But her poodle, Tim Geithner, and her policies, and the power of privilege, passed to Goldman, remain.