{"id":187175,"date":"2013-05-26T19:45:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/26\/all-you-need-to-know-about-barack-obama-is-that-his-crucial-mentor-is-penny-pritzker\/"},"modified":"2013-05-26T19:45:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T00:45:00","slug":"all-you-need-to-know-about-barack-obama-is-that-his-crucial-mentor-is-penny-pritzker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/26\/all-you-need-to-know-about-barack-obama-is-that-his-crucial-mentor-is-penny-pritzker\/","title":{"rendered":"All You Need to Know About Barack Obama is that His Crucial Mentor is Penny Pritzker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Without Penny Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel chain, Barack Obama would have never achieved anything in politics.  She was the first, and arguably the most enthusiastic, big money donor to fund the political career of that guy with the funny name.<\/p>\n<p>The most recent news is that she had to modify the financial disclosure forms that she filed when she was submitted as commerce secretary, because <a href=\"http:\/\/news.firedoglake.com\/2013\/05\/23\/penny-pritzkers-financial-disclosures-off-80-million\/\">she understated her pay from her consulting by at least $80 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What makes this even worse is that these wages were pay to offshore funds to avoid taxes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\"><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">And also like many of the plutocrats in America Pritzker has a lot of tax abnormalities involving <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2013\/may\/22\/pritzkers-offshore-holdings-cloud-commerce-bid\/\">offshore accounts<\/a>. But now Prtizker is under fire for providing a false financial disclosure statement which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2013-05-22\/pritzker-understated-income-files-amended-disclosure.html\">she has since amended.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker inadvertently <b>understated a portion of her income by<\/b> <b>at least $80 million<\/b> in a disclosure form required for her nomination to be U.S. Commerce secretary and has amended the document.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\">Forms released online last night by the Office of Government Ethics  show that Pritzker earned additional income for consulting work on  hundreds of trusts, including family trusts, beyond what she disclosed  last week. The omission, discovered by Pritzker\u2019s financial advisers,  was due to a clerical error, said Susan Anderson, the nominee\u2019s  spokeswoman<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Not surprisingly Pritzker makes a nice chunk of change \u201cconsulting\u201d with other 1%ers.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Documents released last week show  Pritzker received $32.2 million for a decade\u2019s worth of consulting on  the restructuring of domestic trusts. The filings released yesterday  show she earned at least $80 million for that work, according to  Bloomberg\u2019s compilation of the data. The revised total is in addition to  the amount reported last week, according to Anderson.<\/span> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Pritzker, whose family founded Hyatt Hotels Corp, is scheduled to  testify on her nomination before the Senate Commerce Committee tomorrow.  She disclosed last week that she earned $54 million in consulting fees  last year for a similar restructuring of trusts based in the<b> Bahamas<\/b>, also over 10 years. The Bahamas\u2019 income wasn\u2019t changed in the amended disclosure document.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Just what we need in a Commerce Secretary, someone who knows how to  help companies offshore their profits to avoid tax liabilities.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Also, she has a long history of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/blog\/174183\/penny-pritzkers-commerce-part-one#\">avoiding taxes through arcane instruments and offshoring for her own benefit<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>We also have the the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.truthdig.com\/report\/item\/obama_did_it_for_the_money_20130507\/\">she profited at taxpayer expense when she ran Superior Bank into the ground by aggressively pursuing subprime loans<\/a>.&nbsp; (Also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2013\/05\/03\/the-privilege-of-the-pritzkers\/\">here<\/a>)<\/p>\n<p>Also, as head of Hyatt, she has a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-505123_162-57582630\/commerce-nominees-subprime-mess-may-haunt-her\/\">long history of being virulently anti labor union<\/a>, (also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/Business\/new-economy\/2013\/0502\/Penny-Pritzker-steps-into-limelight-as-Commerce-nominee\">here<\/a>.) as well as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.substancenews.net\/articles.php?page=3409\">being a big supporter of Rahm Emanuel&#8217;s plans to privatize public education<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And finally there are the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/blog\/174197\/penny-pritzkers-commerce-part-two\">longstanding family ties between the family fortune and organized crime<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The reason that this is important is not  because of her nomination.&nbsp; The Commerce Secretary&#8217;s job has traditionally been the aggressive support of what is now called &#8220;the 1%&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Her relationship to Barack Obama is important because it defines his entire political career.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s why we are <b>not<\/b> seeing a pursuit of the banksters, and we <b>are<\/b> seeing a pursuit of a &#8220;grand bargain&#8221; on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which will have grandma eating cat food.<sup>*<\/sup><\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">In the interest of health,  I  would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food.  Cats  because  they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex   carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do.  As such, dog food is   better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential   fatty acids.  A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat   lives just fine on dog food.  The phenomenon is known as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rabbit_starvation\">rabbit starvation<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Without Penny Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel chain, Barack Obama would have never achieved anything in politics. She was the first, and arguably the most enthusiastic, big money donor to fund the political career of that guy with the funny name. The most recent news is that she had to modify the financial &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,970,1004,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-corruption","category-finance","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187175"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}