The shady ShoreBank bailout
The shady ShoreBank bailout
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
“No more bailouts, no more greed, how many profits do you need?”
That’s been a signature chant of community organizers and Big Labor thugs who have stormed bank offices and financial executives’ private homes decrying corporate welfare over the past several months. But now that the federal government and a coalition of big banking interests are poised to bail out a crony Chicago bank with longtime ties to the Obama administration, Saul Alinsky’s avenging angels are nowhere to be found.
ShoreBank is a Windy City investment bank with all the right (or, rather, left) ties. Its stated progressive mission isn’t merely to make good lending decisions, but to engage in Barack Obama-esque social engineering to “create economic equity and a healthy environment.” The ShoreBank corporate slogan: “Let’s change the world.”
The company website features a video of Obama in Kenya championing ShoreBank microlending projects overseas. ShoreBank has also touted itself as a “green” bank from its founding days — promoting dubious carbon credit programs, subjecting new borrowers to eco-litmus tests (“we look at how you use water, how you recover water and clean it, how you use energy, if you produce clean energy, how you manage CO2, whether you are offsetting CO2 that your product produces, if you are using sustainably produced materials”) and encouraging customers to participate in “EcoDeposits” to “directly support the green agenda.”
Social and environmental justice may make for good Volvo bumper stickers. They do not, however, make for a good bottom line. While the bank was on do-gooder missions around the world, business at home was in trouble. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “Losses racked up during the recession have left the bank facing a demand to raise new capital or face likely closure by regulators.”
Enter the Chicago political friends and family of ShoreBank. The ties are long and deep, as the Central Illinois 9/12 Project has been chronicling for months:
– ShoreBank co-founder Jan Piercy was a Wellesley College roommate of Hillary Clinton’s, who has long supported the bank along with former president Bill Clinton.
– Former ShoreBank Vice Chairman Bob Nash worked for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential bid as deputy campaign manager. Board of Directors member Howard Stanback is a Hyde Park neighborhood pal of President Obama, who served with Stanback on the board of the radical Woods Fund (where Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers also sat).
– White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett served on the board of Chicago Metropolis 2020 with ShoreBank Director Adele Simmons, former president of the liberal MacArthur Foundation, where she focused on “climate change” and “global governance” issues.
– The bank and its employees donated some $12,000 to the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, and co-founder Mary Houghton reportedly gave advice to Obama’s late mother about small business lending issues.
In other words: ShoreBank is too politically connected to fail. And now you, the taxpayer, may be on the hook for helping its cronies engineer a special rescue. Fox Business News reported this week that a consortium of large lenders — including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and GE Capital — have partnered with the feds to pitch in a combined $200 million public-private bailout. (In addition, Illinois Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky has been crusading for a state-level bailout of the beleaguered bank.) The buzz on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill is that Goldman and perhaps others in the public-private partnership were pressured to lend a hand.
It wouldn’t be the first time that businesses have felt the Obama squeeze. And it wouldn’t be the first time that Democrats exploited the financial crisis to milk public money for their banking cronies.
The laggardly House Ethics Committee is still investigating Democrat California Rep. Maxine Waters, who had a personal and financial stake in Boston-based OneUnited, a minority bank that received $12 million in TARP bailout money under smelly circumstances. The bank’s executives donated $12,500 to her congressional campaigns. Her husband, Sidney Williams, was an investor in one of the banks that merged into OneUnited. Waters secured meetings between OneUnited execs and Treasury Department officials.
That probe has dragged on for nearly a year, which doesn’t bode well for fresh GOP demands for an investigation into the shady ShoreBank bailout. House Financial Services Committee ranking minority member Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., has demanded that the White House cough up documentation about any possible overt contact with Goldman about the deal.
Team Obama is smarter than that, of course. To quote Obama’s environmental czar Carol Browner, who pressured auto industry execs last year to cooperate on a fuel standards increase, they know “to put nothing in writing, ever.”
The fingerprints may be missing, but the stench of the Chicago Way is impossible to cover up.
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Surely you see a difference between me voluntarily commenting on something I find interesting, troubling, noteworthy, etc… and you asking me directly to comment on a specific post that had no question directed to me.
I mean what do you want me to comment on specifically? That post had several broad assertions.
And you were calling somebody else disingenuous…???
Again, I am not looking to represent green industry. I am looking to social enterprises. Big difference.
Oh for goodness sakes, can’t you simply formulate a question? How hard is that, really? At least then I can pinpoint whether or not I agree with your underlying premise.
I wasn’t posting to you, alone.
But there isn’t much difference between the two categories; one is a sub-set of the other.
FIFY
Seriously, do you want my opinion on whether or not green businesses should get subsidies? Whether any businesses should get subsidies? Whether green businesses should have regulatory advantages? Whether any business should have regulatory advantages? Whether I agree that such subsidies would be “collectivist”? Whether we agree on a definition of “collectivist” or “capitalist”? Whether I agree with this bank bail out? Whether I agree with ANY bank bailout?
Chap – My best friend in college went into business with his dad designing and building passive/active solar homes and retrofits for industrial application. The oil “shortage” and subsequent price spikes coupled with Peanut Boy’s subsidies and tax credits for solar made it look like a goldmine. When the oil stablized and the economy rebounded they couldn’t sell a solar system to Al Gore.
Are you that certain this “trend” is long term? As someone else suggested, I hope you have a plan B.
#110
That’d be good…
Yes, yes, yes, yes, no, no, I don’t know, yes.
There you go.
‘k.
We’ve established that you think it is moral…or even smart policy…to take money from people who earn it, and give it to “social” value…or some other value…business that some bureaucrat decides should have it.
Welcome to the fascist economics wing of the collective
Welcome to our economy for the past 230 years. We have ALWAYS provided incentives or advantages to certain industries or businesses over others for reasons decided upon by our government.
That is utter BULL-SPIT. We have NEVER had a system where caprice and cronyism ruled the day.
For you to paint with such a broad brush that you take in patent law with patently corrupt pay-offs for FOBs (friends of Barak) is intellectually bankrupt.
Moreover, you seem to think if a thing is practiced historically, it’s OK. Genocide is very common in history, I remind you.
That is utter BULL-SPIT. We have NEVER had a system where caprice and cronyism ruled the day as it DOES NOW.
George Orwell knew damn well that the future would go this way. And there is nothing to stop it. All of the levers of society are controlled by left-thinking people. They control the public schools, the universities, the press, the TV networks, the billion-dollar corporate boardrooms, Hollywood, the major bookstores, and the two giant tech companies, Microsoft and Apple, that everybody uses to interact with each other. They also control Google and Facebook.
There is no way of stopping what is coming.
100 million from unions going to dems. even though they owe 900 million
manpower of ACORN (different names), black panthers LaRaza
Money coming to dems. from every dictator and america hater in the world.
Fat cats on wall street want to keep the bailouts coming will spend millions.
those heroes, mcconnel, mclame, kyl, snowe, collins, scott brown , graham, grassley, cornyn, hutchison, etc.
have taken their george soros checks and are happily spitting in america’s face.
I didn’t say a damn thing about patent law. But maybe you should take a blood pressure pill, crack open a history book and look back at the long history of our government favoring or disfavoring one industry over another. Ever heard of the Whiskey Rebellion? Land Act of 1820? Ever wonder how all those rail lines were built back in the wild west? Ever heard of farm subsidies?
I disagree with your underlying premise.
Ever heard of the Whiskey Rebellion? Land Act of 1820? Ever wonder how all those rail lines were built back in the wild west? Ever heard of farm subsidies?
Why, yes. WAY before you were born, I bet.
And if you cannot find it in Dr. Zinn’s history, that does not mean it ain’t there.
If you think the land acts and rail road BOUNTIES (which were earned, BTW) are equivalent to “green subsidies” and crony give-aways, I haven’t anything like the time to set you right.
But I do get the underlying approval of compulsion as an economic organizing principle. Mussolini would approve.
In other words, extortion is fine as long as you get a cut.
Well, then I am sure you see that your original premise, that tax dollars have been used to favor or disfavor industries for social reasons since our countries founding, is accurate.
I won’t waste yours, or mine, time having you come up with your litany of trivial reasons why green subsidies are different from railroad subsidies. Because we all know that, in the end, they are really only different in that you consider one of the industries “liberal”.
I disagree with your underlying premise.
Oh…exactly, txvet! You are super good at this whole “distillation” thing!
Glad you agree.
Good grief! Are you seriously that dense, or are you being disingenuous again?
Funny. The rest of us don’t see it as a “premise”, but your declaration/admission.
“that tax dollars have been used to favor or disfavor industries for social reasons since our countries founding, is accurate.”
Please explain that and name some industries?
So you disagree with the statement?
The liquor/wine/beer industry has always been disadvantaged at the hands of the federal government in the form of excise taxes.
The railroad industry has benefited from subsidies.
The agriculture industry has too.
There has never been a time in our history where all industries have been treated equally.
Lets just say 1913 is the date of the beginning of the Federal Income tax – before that dat what tax dollars are you talking about
Guess this is what happens when you’re not politically connected.
I hear ya Carole and unfortunately I agree.
They needed to make it look like a jelly donut.
Actually, a jelly donut would provide more energy and have a better cost recovery curve.
More precisely, the primary turn-out numbers you presented merely reflect KY’s voter registration, Dems outnumber Reps in this state something like two/three to one, and show that not only was the Dem vote fairly evenly split between Jim Conrad (not sure of the name) and Dr. Daniel Mongiardo, but that Dems here rejected their party’s lieutenant governor!
The numbers also portend a rough time ahead for Rand Paul’s challenger, James Convoy, in trying to solidify his Dem base and win over all those Mongiardo supporters. A number of Dem pundits here complain that their party definitely chose the weaker candidate in the primary, because of Connor’s apparent alignment with the national Dem party and the administration’s more controversial legislation.
Does that rhyme with Social Disease?
===
Let your sidearm be like Master Card:
Don’t Leave home without it.
Green subsidies are a rip off from word one-phony solar projects using 1950s technology, wind turbines doing nothing, alternative fuel cars with special license plates and sing along drug fests. But leave it to the Liberal to see smoke and declare it a vision.
They teach that at law schools and witch doctor seminars.
I met a guy in the Philippines who was supposedly an Abalaryo (witch doctor). He would show you how to place curses on your enemies for a sizable fee. The bigger the fee, the more powerful the curse.
I may go look him up and see if we can do something about Barry.