Of the ironies which occur often there is something about Ms. Pritzker being appointed commerce secretary which is disturbing.
Her family compounded their wealth through a series of trusts that are not available to anyone of this generation; she pays less tax as percentage of income than Buffett. Unlike Buffett, she was handed her wealth through the birth canal lottery . She did not earn it.
I am sure she is a nice and inteligent person but President Obama has gone on about fairness time and time again. Appointing a Pritzker just does not seem fair.
Please share widely!
jconway says
That’s the lesson tcook. Obama needed Pritzker, he was going up against Blair and Hull, two millionaires who could self fund, and Hynes, someone with the nearly same Irish political pedigree as the Daley’s. He needed the money, and she was refusing to give him any in 2012 because he was talking about fairness. Now his debt has been repaid as the editors put it.
The worst part? Penny gets a free, non unionized Hyatt hotel in Hyde Park, and thanks to TIF districts won’t be paying a penny of property taxes for 25 years. We needed the hotel, the community needed the jobs, but did she really need to pad her wallet that much more? Can we afford to give her, and soon the Ricketts, free tax dollars while we are closing 52 schools and forcing poor black kids to cross gang lines to go to school? It’s called the city that works, but it works for the few and the connected. Thats the hard truth.
stomv says
Can somebody like Pritzker really cause him enough heartache from the sidelines that he has to throw her a bone? Surely for every Pritzker there’s a dozen who “deserve” a bone slightly less but don’t know/believe that and could very well be snipping at Obama’s heels, no?
Why does Obama owe anybody anything? He’s POTUS — it can’t be taken away from him (easily).
HeartlandDem says
I have a deeply ingrained prejudice when I see inherited wealth pave opportunity more than talent, work ethic and character. That said, I took a quick glance at Pritzker’s credentials and see that she is an accomplished woman and business person. Her privileged status as a member of America’s “haves” class undoubtedly opened gilded doors not accessible to middle class and “have-nots” in our society. She seems however to possess the skills to position herself in the POTUS inner circle and has a professionally manicured web presence. Money can buy a lot of things including access, which translates into power. I would be hard pressed to believe that she comprehends the life of a truck driver, self employed carpenter, single mother who can’t afford child care or transportation, or the daily terror working and unemployed Americans feel today. Let’s hope her ambitions include a sincere quest for social and economic justice. She could begin by modeling corporate responsibility with her own assets and going after financial institutions that are still making enormous profits at the expense of working Americans.
dhammer says
That doesn’t mean she’s not smart, accomplished, and has the qualifications to be commerce secretary. It does mean, however, that the President of the United States chooses anti union scumbags to help manage the economy – just like he did when he chose Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and countless others in the administration. This says more about Obama and the Democratic Party than Pritzker. Don’t trust them, they don’t care about you and your future, they only care about your vote and their short term accumulation of power and money.
fenway49 says
This
almost would seem to preclude appointment by Barack Obama to any high-level economic post.
hlpeary says
Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Winthrop Rockefeller…inherited, not earned wealth… should they have been disqualified for having wealth handed to them? Were they out-of-touch with average Americans’ needs?
I am not as concerned about electing or appointing a rich person as I am about the rich people (and corporations) who have essentially bought our elected officials with their contributions.
jconway says
And they were all “traitors to their class”, as the beneficiaries of the Gilded Age called FDR for having the gall to level the playing field. And I would contend that the Kennedy’s and to a lesser extent the Rockefeller’s (particularly Winthrop and Nelson) have had to endure that epithet as well. Pritzker is not. She has never done anything in her public or private life to indicate that she is not a self-serving plutocrat. She has backed the radical right wing social experience of ‘school reform’ that continues to devastate Chicago’s schools, she has ignored strikers who have picketed in front of her hotels in downtown Chicago since 2005, she fired them for forming a union in violation of the NLRB and has avoided prosecution for it, and she has abused the TIF district process so she doesn’t have to pay property taxes and so the public can fund her private development schemes. Not to mention she is nearly in the Adelson wing of AIPAC. She personifies all that is wrong with the current Democratic party.
The brilliance of Obama was offering progressive what seemed like a win-win bargain, a vote for the Democratic wing over the Clinton-DLC-corporate wing and a more electable general election candidate to boot. We got the latter (which was always debatable), but the former has been utterly elusive and will continue to be for the remainder of the term. He has no incentive to listen to liberals anymore. The memory of Nader is the real world equivalent of Kodos saying “go ahead throw your vote away”.
Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkeley, Tammy Baldwin, and Russ Feingold on the bench. Thats our team.
merrimackguy says
that the Pritzker’s for a variety of reasons, some self-inflicted, held up the development of Fan Pier for many years. Only once they sold did the current build out of the area begin. They were not a real positive for here.
hlpeary says
…and the Pritzker’s put up Copley Place. (how many jobs did that create in Boston?)
Obama has the right to appoint whomever he wants, it comes with the job he has won.
Someone on this thread noted that the Roosevelts, Kennedy’s and Rockefellers were “traitors to their class” for helping the working and poor classes….So what does that make Obama when he puts cutting Social Security and Medicare on the table? Is he being a traitor to his class?
SomervilleTom says
n/m
fenway49 says
a traitor to his original class. Not to his new class.
Christopher says
…to absolutely prohibit the nomination of anyone who raised money for your campaign? Ambassadorships gets handed out to fundraisers all the time too. Maybe such a prohibition could be part of the same constitutional amendment which would overturn Citizens United.
stomv says
It does not make any sense.
Christopher says
I think nominations should go to people who are qualified for the position rather than who raised money.
stomv says
There’s no reason why the most qualified person should be excluded merely because he or she happened to legally raise money for a candidate.
Free speech is free speech. So long as funding political campaigns is restricted free speech, it ought be restricted for all lawful US adult citizens the same.
Christopher says
RFK may have been highly qualified to be AG too, but after his brother nominating him it was prohibited to nominate family members. If you’d like to be in the running for an appointment you should be able to go ahead and donate the maximum personal contribution if you wish, but leave it at that.
Mark L. Bail says
What does the Secretary of Commerce do? How does it affect me?
jconway says
Former NH Senator Judd Gregg that the entire department should be eliminated and it’s regulatory arms spread to other cabinet officials. The business class can take care of itself, it doesn’t need my tax dollars funding a multi billion dollar department to ‘boost’ it. As the President stated, businesses are doing pretty well, it’s the worker that is getting screwed. I’d eliminate Commerce and double the Labor departments budget. Also Agriculture, another arm of business that is literally intertwined with the government.
usergoogol says
The Department of Commerce is only tangentially related to “the business class.” From a budgetary perspective, most of the Department of Commerce is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The original intent for creating the Department of Commerce was to promote commerce, but a lot of the important business-promoting departments are elsewhere, so it’s really just a hodge-podge of random government organizations which have some vague connection to commerce. (Of course, for precisely that reason breaking it up would make sense: it doesn’t really have any reason for existing other than historical inertia.)
merrimackguy says
Now part of Homeland Security.
Christopher says
Coast Guard was previously part of Transportation and before that Treasury. It can be merged with Navy in a time of war. One other thing that is within Commerce is the Census Bureau.
jconway says
None of those agencies are related to the mission of the Department of Commerce which is to promote American business and economic growth. Census can go to Interior, NOAA can to EPA or DOE. I’d consider merging DOE with the EPA to create a Department of Environmental Policy, I’d have a Department of Industrial Policy so the US can actually have one (USTA, a clearinghouse for R& D, competitiveness, STEM and retraining initiatives, etc.), keep Labor seperate but take all the non-worker rights protection functions and move them DIP. I’d merge the VA back with HHS, it’s actually weaker on it’s own. The transit planning arms of DOT I’d merge with HUD to allow for smart growth, and have a Department of Consumer Protection that would take all the regulatory arms of DOA like the FDA along with ones like the SEC. That’s just me though.
Christopher says
..but as it stands here is an organizational outline of Commerce and it does seem that most of them serve a function that is related to that mission.
stomv says
Every time we had a GOP administration, the EPA would just roll over. They don’t have as many teeth during GOP administrations now, but merging them with DOE would make them neutered.
Energy and the environment aren’t the same thing. They don’t really belong in the same place at the national level. At the state level it might make sense, in a large part because so much of the heavy lifting [data collection and regulation] is handled by the Feds.
merrimackguy says
Should have double checked that one.