Senate Confirms (Billionaire) Penny Pritzker to Be Commerce Secretary, 97 to 1

[LWolf]

30. Penny "Pincher" Pritzker. What a choice.

On Thursday, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said in a statement that Pritzker "has a long and storied history as being an anti-labor, anti-worker kind of boss. She has supported policies that have had an adverse impact on working-class families and their children."

We cannot imagine that someone who has a long history of bludgeoning Chicago’s working families and destroying public schools would be given a platform to continue these sorts of business practices on a national level," Lewis continued.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/14/penny-pritzker-resigns-chicago_n_2878698.html

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http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2012/12/rowdy-rauner-and-rahminator-are-steamin.html

The third reason Obama chose not to risk political capital on a Penny Pritzker nomination fight is that unions despise her. Among the reasons: the Hyatt hotel chain, which the Pritzkers built practically from nothing, is infamous for just about the worst treatment of their staff in the business. (Here’s a moving first-hand account.)

Since that near-nomination, Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, chose Penny Pritzker to join the mayor-appointed school board—a body, as I’ve been documenting here, that has fanatically devoted to breaking the Chicago Teachers Union, and turning over the system to charter school operators. Their excuse has been the school system’s alleged $500 million deficit. Which is where Penny comes in. For while the city’s budget for schools is alleged to be bare, the city’s tax increment financing (TIF) fund, a slush pile for rich developers, carries a surplus of at least $500 million. What does this have to do with Penny Pritzker? Well, as it happens, on my very street, she is building a Hyatt financed with $5.2 million in TIF funds. As the Chicago Teachers Union points out, the TIF fund is controlled personally by the mayor; members of the school board (from which Pritzker recently resigned ahead of her Commerce appointment), overwhelmingly his rich campaign backers, are personally appointed by the mayor; and nothing’s keeping them from leaning on the mayor to tap the TIF surplus to plug the school deficit—except the fact that this very deficit is the rhetorical foundation for all the things they’re doing to weaken the union. All in all, Penny Pritzker’s relationship with labor has become exponentially worse since her near-nomination in 2008.

So how has second-term Obama responded? By renominating her.

Read more: Penny Pritzker's Commerce (Part One) | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/174183/penny-pritzkers-commerce-part-one#ixzz2XH28Ja17
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