Union Endorses Penny Pritzker By Saying Nothing
By Jim Vail
Second City Teacher


Second City Teacher just ran a fascinating in-depth interview on how the Pritzkers made their billions, avoided paying taxes and control our political process.  

Penny Pritzker, who served on the Chicago Board of Education, was just recently nominated to become the US commerce secretary by President Barak Obama.

Think of it as payback for funding his run to be president.

But what about the unions who also helped put Obama in office?  

UNITE HERE represents the hotel workers who have been involved in one of the ugliest union battles between Pritzker's Hyatt Hotel and the workers who were abused by replacing career housekeepers with minimum wage housekeepers and imposing dangerous workloads on the remaining employees.  

Why the unions even went so far as to call Hyatt the worst hotel employer in America and called for a boycott.

But now Unite has nothing to say about Penny becoming our new commerce secretary. 

This highlights the incestuous relationship between unions letting down its members and joining forces with management.

"Unite Here is not going to fight this thing with Penny because it would embarrass the president, and since these union people are democrats and love unions and Barak says he loves unions too, they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with the president," said Chicago-based banking investigator Tim Anderson in an interview with Pacifica Radio.

"So Unite Here is selling out their own people in Chicago, and the whole Hyatt chain throughout the country, to protect the president.  It's disgraceful.  They know the story.  I've had their people interview me twice.  The union gets abused by the Pritzkers, but they take it because they like the kind of money she makes for them, and the left doesn't want to fight her because Barak is their candidate.  They know how to play both horses in a race."

They certainly do.  The unions were against Penny being commerce secretary after Obama was freshly elected the first time.  Except he kind of owed union people who went out to campaign for him by listening to the union protests and refusing to put Penny in his cabinet the first time around.

Now that the president was re-elected, and thumbed his nose at the union card check that he had also earlier promised, he proposed Penny again, and it appears she is headed for confirmation with no real opposition.

So it takes the republicans - the party that represents big business - to ask her the tough questions about the subprime mess at Superior Bank, a bank her family owned.

"Ultimately there were a number of the banks, uninsured depositors that had claimed that they had lost over one hundred thousand dollars worth of savings, including one who reportedly deposited her entire retirement account with Superior a month before it failed.  My question is, and it's two parts:  What do you have to say to those depositors who lost significant sums of money because of this venture; and what lessons did you learn from your experience at Superior Bank that will inform your role as Secretary of Commerce if you're confirmed."

This is how Pritzker responded to Rep. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, according to Democracy Now.

"Well, Senator, I regret the failure of Superior Bank.  It's was not an outcome or a situation that I am, you know, I feel very badly about that."

If confirmed, Pritzker with a net worth of over $1.5 billion, would become one of the wealthiest cabinet secretaries in US history.  Democracy Now reported that Pritzker recently inadvertently understated a portion of her income by at least $80 million in a disclosure form required for her nomination.  Pritzker  received more than $53 million in consulting fees from her family's offshore trust in the Bahamas, DN reported.

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