BY MICHELLE MALKIN
Obama
campaign adviser David Axelrod and his hatchet people are still yammering about
GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney’s overseas investments. It’s time for the
Romney campaign to educate voters about all the shady financial institutions
embraced by Democrats right here on American soil.
Republicans can’t make the fatcat-narrative attacks go away by making nice
with the White House — or by relying on Beltway journalists to drop their double
standards and vet the president’s own bad-bank entanglements. Indeed, the
New York Times admitted this week that their staff and other political
journalists from every major media outlet submit their work to the White House
for unprecedented review, editing, and “veto power.”
Fortunately, the truth manipulators and message massagers haven’t gotten to
this column yet. So, let’s talk sleazy Democratic party–backed banks, shall
we?
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Forget Switzerland. The mother and father
of all financial-industry outrages are rooted in Washington, D.C. And Obama
Democrats are among the biggest winners of lavish, out-of-control compensation
packages from fraud-plagued Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama confidant James
Johnson raked in $21 million.
Former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel “earned”
at least $320,000 for a brief 14-month gig at Freddie Mac. And Clinton Fannie
Mae head and Obama economic confidant Franklin Raines bagged some $90 million in
pay and stock options earned during the government-sponsored institution’s
Enron-style accounting scandal on the public dime.
Self-appointed banking policewoman and DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman
Schultz has, uncharacteristically, kept her mouth shut about these wealthy
barons.
Superior Bank. One of the Obamas’ oldest Chicago friends and
wealthiest billionaire bundlers, former Obama national finance chairwoman Penny
Pritzker, headed up this subprime lender. Even after it went under in 2001 and
left 1,400 customers destitute, Pritzker was pushing to expand its toxic
subprime-loan business. Pritzker and her family escaped accountability by
forking over $460 million over 15 years. Obama happily accepted the nearly $800
million in campaign and inaugural funding Pritzker drummed up for him. To
protect her family’s multibillion-dollar fortune, Pritzker’s enterprises park
their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts her candidate is attacking
Romney over.
Broadway Bank. In 2010, President and Mrs. Obama personally raised
money for their Chicago friend and fundraiser Alexi Giannoulias. As I reported
then, Giannoulias’ Greek-immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a
now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to
convicted Mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky,
high-flying behavior. It’s the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S.
Senate–campaign funds. And it’s the same place that a mutual friend of Obama and
Giannoulias — convicted Obama fundraiser and slumlord Tony Rezko — used to
bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos.
Chicago’s former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for
tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real-estate crash
loomed.
Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. The
cost to taxpayers after the bank was shut down two years ago: an estimated $390
million.
ShoreBank. The “progressive” Chicago-based community development
bank, a “green” financial institution whose mission was to “create economic
equity and a healthy environment,” folded in August 2010. Obama personally had
endorsed the politically connected bank and appeared in a video promoting its
Kenyan microlending project. But it was a doomed social-justice experiment.
After regulators shut it down, Obama crony companies including Bank of America
and Goldman Sachs took over the mess courtesy of taxpayer subsidies.
Countrywide/Bank of America. Earlier this month, the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on
corruption-plagued Countrywide Financial Corp., which was bailed out by
taxpayer-bailed-out Bank of America. The House investigation confirmed the
notorious favor-trading scheme, which involved sweetheart home-loan deals for
members of Congress and their staff, top government officials, and executives of
doomed mortgage giant Fannie Mae.
“These relationships helped [Countrywide CEO and Democratic subprime-loan
king Angelo] Mozilo increase his own company’s profits while dumping the risk of
bad loans on taxpayers,” according to the new report. Mozilo copped a $67.5
million plea to avert a high-stakes public trial in the heat of the 2010
midterm-election season. Since then, Obama’s Justice Department has taken no
action to prosecute Countrywide officials on federal bribery charges.
Among the influence-peddling operation’s most prominent beneficiaries: the
aforementioned Obama top adviser Jim Johnson, who accepted more than $7 million
in below-market-rate Countrywide loans, and former Senate Banking Committee
chairman Chris Dodd, whose ill-fated 2010 reelection bid was personally endorsed
by Obama. Obama stood by Dodd even as sordid details of his two discounted
Countrywide loans and record Countrywide PAC donations mounted.
Bank of America, which raked in $45 billion in Obama-supported TARP bailout
funds and billions more in secret emergency federal loans, footed the $50
million restitution payment bill for Mozilo and another Countrywide official. In
2008, BofA’s political-action committee gave its biggest contributions to Obama,
totaling $421,000. And as I noted in January, Bank of America supplied the
Democrats with a $15 million revolving line of credit, along with an additional
$17 million loan during the 2010 midterms.
Embarrassed by the party’s ties to shady Bank of America, progressives are
now trying to rebrand the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., where
Obama will give his nomination-acceptance address. They’re referring to it as
“Panthers Stadium” instead.
Obama’s copious crooked friends and funders are going to need a lot more
whitewash than that to cover up their ill-gotten gains.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of
Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks &
Cronies. Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com. ©
2012 Creators.com
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