Via CNN:
President Obama announced Thursday that Penny Pritzker, an ex-national finance chair for the Obama campaign, will lead the Commerce Department. If confirmed, she will be the richest cabinet secretary in U.S. history. The president already skipped over her for the nod once.
The New York Times said of Pritzker in 2008, “Ms. Pritzker’s family is renowned for finding ways to avoid paying taxes on its wealth. The Pritzkers were pioneers in using tax loopholes to shelter their holdings from the internal revenue service, and many of their dealings have never been made public.”
Pritzker’s trusts were set up by her grandfather, and she has not received a dime from them, said Tommy Vietor, former White House National Security spokesman.
“What we need in a Commerce Secretary is somebody who can create jobs,” said Vietor. “Those are the qualifications we should focus on, not something her grandfather did when she was a little girl.”
On Wednesday, the president named another campaign bundler, Tom Wheeler to head up the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler spent two decades as a lobbyist representing the two industry groups that represented every single cable company, and every single cellphone provider.
“This guy was a lobbyist a decade ago,” said Vietor.
President Obama signed an executive order the day he stepped into office putting tough new anti-lobbying rules into place.
“The president took this important step, and you get kind of one day of stories about how this was sort of a good idea and a good move,” said Vietor. “Then if you do anything where you mention lobbyist afterward, he’s getting dinged for it.”
“President Obama in his second term is clearly liberated enough to give really good jobs to fundraisers,” said A.B. Stoddard, associate editor with The Hill.
Stoddard said nominating Pritzker is the bigger problem.
If “Obama is looking at a larger budget deal that contains tax reform, he is really going to hear it about tax warfare, and loopholes from your fancy, fat cat friends from Republicans in her nomination,” said Stoddard.
Oh, guess where Pritzker is from? Yup, more Chicagoland:
Via The Guardian:
Pritzker is the latest in a long line of friends and supporters from the president’s hometown of Chicago that he has rewarded since taking office in 2009, among them former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago’s mayor. The appointments have led to accusations of cronyism