Penny Pritzker: Obama's Payoff to His Masters

I have written in the past about Class Traitors, especially those in the Bush Administration. Luminaries like Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonazalez, Colin Powell and John Yoo accepted positions in an infamous administration and, because of their origins among the “people,” provided cover for the mandarin class Bush represented. I also pointed out that this is a common practice, bearing many similarities to what slave masters did in the ante-bellum South when they promoted some of their slaves to work in the massa’s house. Having a slave impose order and punishment on the field slaves made the necessary control go down better. The same operates in government. Having Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice justify the invasion of Iraq made the operation less susceptible to the accusation that it was a ‘white man’s war of exploitation.’

Now, in light of his payoff nomination of Penny Pritzker to be Secretary of Commerce, we are beginning to see that Barack Obama has been another example of this practice. Far from being a representative of the exploited classes—a champion of workers and the poor and the millions who lost their homes and much else in the economic collapse caused by Wall Street banksters—Obama has revealed that he has really been representing the wealthy, exploitative classes all along. This is why not a single banker has been slapped with a penalty for the fraud committed in the financial collapse. This is why virtually every initiative of Obama’s, including his heralded health care reform, has been designed to enrich corporations and the wealthy, rather than help the poor or middle classes as advertised.

In order to understand this, we have to know who Penny Pritzker is, and how she got to be one of the wealthiest women, or men, in America (worth $1.8 billion). According to muckraking journalist Greg Palast, Pritzker met Obama when Barack was a state legislator from Chicago’s South Side, with little or no power. But she saw a fitting candidate for higher office, and promoted him to her Lake Shore friends. They apparently liked him too, and before long, Obama was a U.S. Senator, and then a presidential candidate, with Penny Pritzker as his finance chair. She raised nearly a billion dollars for the “candidate of the people,” along the way introducing him to Robert Rubin, CEO of Citibank and former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, who in turn “opened the doors of Wall Street” to the candidate. In return, of course, Obama was persuaded to nominate Rubin’s protégés, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to the top economic posts in his administration. (See Greg Palast, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits, Seven Stories Press: 2012.)

Obama also had plans to nominate his friend Penny as Commerce Secretary in 2008, unfazed by her role in the original sub-prime scandal at her Superior Bank of Chicago. But the firestorm of opposition this raised—with the sub-prime fiasco of 2007 still fresh in everyone’s minds—persuaded him to settle on another Commerce Secretary. That Superior Bank scandal, though, was a doozy. According to Dennis Bernstein, host of KPFA’s Flashpoints (in a May 3 piece on Consortiumnews.org, originally written Feb. 28, 2008), it was Penny Pritzker, along with associates at Merrill Lynch (to sell securitized bonds based on subprime loans) who virtually invented the sub-prime scams. First, she and her family—billionaire heirs of the Hyatt chain of hotels and nursing homes—in 1988 bought the failed Lyons Savings Bank for the bargain-basement price of $42.5 million. Aided by $645 million in tax credits from the government, these richest of the rich only had to come up with $1 million in cash, even getting their deposits insured by FSLIC. Then, under Penny’s leadership, Superior Bank concentrated its dealings on sub-prime lending, mainly on home mortgages, acquiring Alliance Funding as a wholesale mortgage business as well. According to Bert Ely, the bank then engaged in all kinds of shady practices, paying “its owners huge dividends and providing them favorable loans and other financial deals deemed illegal by federal investigators.” Their borrowers, by contrast, mostly low-income and minority buyers, were lured in and exploited through “predatory lending techniques, including exorbitant fees, inadequate disclosure and high interest rates.” By 2001, Superior Bank had collapsed, one of the largest failures of its kind ever, and a failure “directly attributable to the Bank’s Board of Directors and executives ignoring sound management principles,” according to FDIC Inspector General Gaston Gianni Jr. in his 2002 report. Penny Pritzker, as owner and board chair, was actually named in a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) class action suit brought for 1,400 depositors who had lost over $50 million in savings. She was also fined $460 million for the predatory, racist practices of her bank.

This is the woman Barack Obama has just named to be Commerce Secretary.

Nor does her lurid past end there. While she was on the board of the Hyatt Corporation, she was regularly attacked by the AFL-CIO for violations in the areas of worker safety, discouraging union membership, and laying off regular workers to replace them with cheaper employees. This would seem to make her an inveterate enemy of unions—including the unions that were assiduously courted to help elect Barack Obama. The teachers’ unions have also taken her to task for favoring the closing of Chicago public schools and promoting charter schools instead, as well as for using the influence to get taxes on her family mansion in the Lincoln Park Area slashed, tax money that funds public schools. When she resigned from the Chicago Board of Education after hearing of her Commerce announcement, the head of the Chicago’s Teachers Union said, “good riddance.”  

President Obama and his team have apparently concluded that Americans have forgotten about the sub-prime disaster of 2007 and that it is now safe to pay off his moneyed master, Penny Pritzker. No doubt the sub-prime queen has let him know, in no uncertain terms, that she expects this as part of the bargain they made to put him in the White House. It is always thus. The Massa doesn’t promote the slave to a position of power without getting his/her due, with interest. All the signs point to a quick confirmation, since the Republicans appear to be delighted with the prospect that one of their own will be running Commerce. If retired banking consultant and researcher Tim Anderson has his way, though, the confirmation may not be a slam dunk. As he noted in a recent CBS interview,

“What has not been focused on until now is what was Penny's role in the subprime mortgage meltdown. It was the Pritzkers who got investment-grade ratings on subprime debt. It was the Pritzkers who were into subprime lending long before Wells Fargo, Countrywide and Washington Mutual. They were in the forefront of the subprime fiasco, but they have never been held accountable.”

Wouldn’t it be something if someone—someone prominent and probably gloating over her apparent escape from justice and imminent rise to unprecedented power and renown—were finally held accountable?

Whether or not such an unlikely turnabout comes to pass, one thing is certain: Barack Obama has lost all the credibility he might still, in some circles, retain. His attempt at a payoff has made perfectly obvious who his real masters have always been. He has also made absolutely clear that there no longer exists a political party or a politician in these United States who hasn’t long been bought and paid for, and placed on a very short, and very unforgiving leash. 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Bailout

Niel Barofsky’s recent book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (Free Press: 2012), is a sobering, even infuriating account by an insider who was chosen as the special Inspector General charged with overseeing the TARP program. His office was called SIGTARP, and he got an indication of how important the Treasury Department considered his oversight when he was shown his new office—a tiny hole in a basement of the Treasury building with no windows and a musty odor (in Washington, a big office with a view of iconic buildings is a sign of status). Still, Barofsky, who had trained as a prosecutor with the FBI’s renowned New York Office, brought some of his comrades with him and set out to oversee TARP. What he found shocked him, eventually forcing him to resign in frustration. It should shock every American; for what he learned, indicated by his subtitle, was that the Treasury Department, headed first by Hank Paulson, and then, under Obama, by the narcissistic former head of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, so favored banks over homeowners that every program was shaped to help big banks, while letting homeowners, waiting for the promised modifications of their loans, basically “twist in the wind.”

            Barofsky begins his tale by showing us how the banks encouraged those subprime loans we’ve all heard about. They used the euphemistically termed “yield spread premium” as a way of offering a bonus for brokers who could “convince a borrower who qualified for a prime loan to take a more expensive, higher-interest-rate subprime loan.” That is, they paid brokers more money to steer borrowers into more expensive loans, even though they knew the borrowers had less chance of paying them. That’s because banks earned double on the subprimes: they’d get higher interest rates to begin with, and then be able to resell the mortgages for higher profits in those infamous loan packages that brought down the system. This was predatory lending in spades. But the rating agencies routinely gave these risky loans AAA ratings, and the Federal Reserve just looked the other way. When the loans and the derivatives based on them went bad, panic ensued. 

            Then came TARP. As most of us remember, Hank Paulson went to Congress and rang the alarm about the imminent collapse of the entire financial system if the people’s representatives didn’t approve the massive bailout. Even so, many in Congress were reluctant, but went along because the Treasury Department sweetened the bank bailout with the assurance that, since it would control the troubled mortgage loans that were toxic, Treasury could give relief to homeowners by modifying the terms of those loans. And this would allegedly stabilize the housing market.

            Trouble was, it didn’t work that way. Paulson instituted the CPP (Capital Purchase Program), and what it did was to use TARP funds to “inject capital directly into the banks by buying preferred shares of stock from them,” allegedly to help stimulate lending. It immediately put $125 billion of taxpayer money into nine of the largest banks, but without removing the toxic assets, or purchasing or modifying mortgages at all. The focus of CPP, and of all other government programs, would be the banks; there would be no lending, no credit flowing, no help to homeowners being foreclosed on. Some in Congress, like Georgia Democrat David Scott, cried foul:

            “We have been lied to…bamboozled; they came to us to ask for money for one thing, then used it for another. They said we would have oversight, and no oversight is in place. We have given these banks $290 billion for the sole purpose of so-called buying these toxics. They change it, and all of a sudden now they [the banks] are not lending it but using it for acquisitions, using it for salaries. These are lies.” (p. 27)

            There were other programs with other acronyms (TALF, HAMP), and they were all, according to Barofsky, dedicated to the same thing: easing the pain for banks, bailing them out, and letting defrauded homeowners fend for themselves. The amounts of money either given or lent or guaranteed by the government (U.S. taxpayers) was staggering. TALF, for instance, the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility, was created by the Federal Reserve to spur consumer credit lending. The NY Fed lent up to $1 trillion to the banks, with “asset-backed securities” as collateral, in effect, betting a trillion dollars of taxpayer money with the only requirement being that “all eligible bonds [the collateral] earn a AAA rating by two credit-rating agencies.” Barofsky, outraged, called William Dudley, head of the NY Fed; the exchange is worth quoting in full:

            “That’s fucking crazy, right?” I asked

            “You are correct. That is fucking crazy.”

            “Bill” I said, “Let me get this straight. We’re going to put $200 billion of taxpayer money on the line to buy asset-backed securities that are similar to those that got us into this whole mess in the first place, and we’re going to rely only on the credit-rating agencies and investor due diligence, nothing else?” I asked.

            Dudley replied, “Right.”

            I exploded. “Really? Really?” My voice rose. “Isn’t that exactly the same formula that caused this financial crisis? Exactly? What makes you possibly think that now, after all of this, the rating agencies are suddenly going to get it right?”

            Dudley paused, understandably annoyed at my tone. “Well, the rating agencies performed pretty well in these asset classes,” he continued, “and we’re confident they won’t risk being embarrassed again.”

            It was my turn to pause. “You don’t think that the credit-rating agencies will embarrass themselves again?” I challenged.

            “Correct,” Dudley confirmed.

Barofsky comments: “These guys were going to risk hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money on the integrity of the exact same rating agencies that had sold their souls for a few basis points of profit.”

            When he gets to the new Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, Barofsky has even more trouble controlling his contempt. Geithner apparently did everything he could to stymie and sabotage the oversight function that Barofsky had sworn to implement. The Treasury Secretary’s concern was always to protect and bail out the banks, period. If this hurt homeowners losing all of their wealth, in many cases because of fraudulent loan practices by the very banks Geithner was protecting, so be it. So it was with HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification  Program, created in 2009 under Obama. Its four purposes were to 1) protect home values, college funds, retirement accounts, and life savings; 2) preserve home ownership; 3) promote jobs and growth; 4) protect taxpayer interest. But as Barofsky describes Geithner’s comments about it in a key meeting, the Treasury Secretary saw it as a way to help banks rather than homeowners: “This program will help foam the runway for them (i.e. the banks).” In other words, HAMP’s main purpose, for Geithner, was to keep an imminent tide of foreclosures from hitting the banks all at the same time. By stringing homeowners along with the illusion of relief, foreclosures would be spread out over more time, thus giving banks a chance to absorb the losses “while other parts of the bailouts juiced the bank profits.” In short, “HAMP was not separate from the bank bailouts; it was an essential part of them.” And if those who received, or never received home modifications eventually went under, as many would, that was fine; the banks would survive and thrive, as their huge bonuses shortly after the bailouts proved.

            Barofsky’s team eventually estimated what the real cost of the government bailout was, or could have been if all the pledges of all the government programs had been actually committed. The number is shocking, even to a public inured to the shenanigans and sleight of hand engaged in by government officials. Though the dollar amount outstanding at the time Barofsky’s team did their audit was “only” $3 trillion, the total amount that the government had to commit, if money markets and banks had failed, was—$23.7 trillion. That’s Trillion, with a T—more money than most nations can even conceive—and its purpose was to bail out the banks. The amount that Treasury spent to help homeowners, on the other hand, was $3 billion—paltry, even compared to the $50 billion originally allocated to HAMP.

            Now, of course, the banksters and Wall Street are riding high again, with more profits than ever, while millions of Americans still struggle without jobs and 3.5 million have lost their homes for a total loss of $7 trillion in housing wealth. As to the poor, the poverty rate has also increased from 12.5% to 15.1%  since 2007. Nor have mortgage servicers—the ones who encouraged all those subprime loans in the first place, as well as the ones who pretended to be helping homeowners under the HAMP program—been held responsible.

            Barofsky’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how banks thrive and bought-out governments facilitate their financial theft. An added benefit is that it’s written with clarity and verve, making it quite comprehensible for the average reader. Though he is precisely the type of government official the nation needs, Barofsky’s investigations and positions and refusal to play the DC game, pretty much short-circuited his government career. Rather than cash in on his government job, he’s now teaching law in New York, and writing books like this one. For that, we all owe him. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Greed Be Good

In 1965, Alan Greenspan wrote:

“It is precisely the greed of the businessman, or more precisely, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer” (Madrick, 228).

This should really be the epitaph inscribed on the tombstone of the American economy. Far from ‘protecting’ consumers, the greed that has defined American business and especially Wall Street these last 40 years has decimated the economy, loaded businesses with debt, put millions of Americans out of work, and transferred huge chunks of American industry to foreign countries such as China. Therein lies the theme of Jeff Madrick’s crucial book, The Age of Greed, (Knopf: 2011). To read it, with its portraits of banksters and junk bond traders and acquisition specialists and CEOs of America’s largest corporations, is to learn of chicanery, conniving and contempt for average Americans on such a scale as to sometimes deceive the reader into thinking he is reading Dante’s Inferno. Such characters—some of the mightiest names in corporate and political America in the latter years of the 20th Century, names like Rubin and Weill and Reagan and Greenspan and Friedman and Milken and Boesky and Welch—do deserve a poet like Dante to fix them in an appropriate level of pain and torment. While Madrick is not that poet, he does a creditable enough job of this to sicken even the most cynical reader, for his is the tale of the outright looting and crippling of the American industrial might (along with its workers) that was once the envy of the world.

The book begins with the general proposition that while industry and transportation and communications and retailing were once the foundations of American wealth and prosperity, “by the 1990s and 2000s, financial companies provided the fastest path to fabulous wealth for individuals” (24). And where government was once seen as a needed supporter and regulator of such enterprises, Milton Friedman’s economic doctrines, put into saleable form by Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan, turned government into the enemy. As Friedman wrote, “The fact is that the Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government (mis)management rather than by the inherent instability of the private economy.” The answer to all problems, in this tortured view, lay not in government actions to help those who need it, but in reducing government and lowering taxes so as to (allegedly) make the poor better off, eliminate inequality and discrimination, and lead us all to the promised free-market land. As noted above, Alan Greenspan believed wholeheartedly in these and other theories (especially those espoused by his friend Ayn Rand), and Ronald Reagan became the shill for selling such pie-in-the-sky nonsense to the American public. As with his sales work for General Electric, Reagan marketed the kool-aid more successfully than anyone could have anticipated. In office in California as governor, he blamed welfare recipients for the state government’s financial problems: “Welfare is the greatest domestic problem facing the nation today and the reason for the high cost of government.” When he got to the national stage with inflation rampant, he hit government profligacy even harder. “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well,” he said. “We have inflation because government is living too well” (169). All this was coupled with his mantra that getting back to the kind of “rugged individualism” that had made America (and himself) great required reducing taxes. And reduce he did. From a tax rate that was at 70% on the highest earners when he took office, he first signed the 1981 Kemp-Roth bill to reduce it to 50%, and then, in 1986, with the Tax Reform Act, reduced it even further to 28%. Meantime, the bottom rate for the poorest Americans was raised from 11% to 15%, while earlier, Reagan had also raised the payroll tax (for Social Security) from 12.3% to 15.3%. This latter raise, it should be noted, coupled with the provision that only wages up to $107,000 would be taxed for SS, meant that “earners in the middle one-fifth of Americans would now pay nearly 10% of their income in payroll taxes, while those in the top 1% now paid about 1-1/2%” (170). And what Reagan never mentioned about his “rugged individualism” is that he was made wealthy by those rich men who cajoled him to run for office: his agent arranged for 20th Century Fox to buy Reagan’s ranch for $2 million (he had paid only $65,000 for it), giving him a tidy profit with which to buy another ranch that also doubled in price when he sold it.

But such tales treat only the enablers. It is when we get to the actual hucksters of this story that things get interesting (or nauseating, depending on your point of view.) The basic scheme went like this: find a company that is undervalued—often because it had managed its assets so well it had cash on hand—and acquire it, using debt to finance the takeover. Then make money—and I mean millions and billions—on all the steps involved in the takeover, including the debt service, the legal fees, and the rise (or fall) in the stock price. For in the age of greed that Madrick documents, the stock price was all. Anything that pushed the stock price of a company up was good. Anything that pushed it down was bad (unless you were one of those smart guys like hedge-fund ace George Soros who worked the “shorts”). And of course, the best way to get a company’s stock price to go up was to increase profits. And the best way to do that was not to innovate or develop better products, but to slash costs, i.e. fire workers. Here is how Madrick puts it:

American business was adopting a business strategy based on maximizing profits, large size, bargaining power, high levels of debt, and corporate acquisitions…Cutting costs boldly, especially labor costs, was a central part of the strategy. (187)

What began to happen in the 1980s and into the 1990s was that all companies, no matter how successful, became targets of the ruthless merger mania that replaced normal business improvements. Lawyers like Joe Flom and takeover artists like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens could spot an undervalued, or low-stock-price company (the process reminds one of wolves spotting a young, or lame deer in a herd) to take over, using borrowed money to finance it (90% of the purchase price). The borrowing then demanded that the new merged company cut costs in order to service the huge debt required for the merger—which in turn required firing workers. If a company did not want to be taken over, the only way to do so was to get its stock price to rise, and this, too, required the firing of workers. In either case, the workers took the hit. But the CEOs running the merged ventures, often sweethearted into selling by generous gifts of stock, “usually made a fortune.” As Madrick notes, in 1986, Macy CEO Ed Finkelstein arranged for a private buyout of his firm, for $4.5 billion, and became the “envy of fellow CEOs” (174). Like many other mergers, however, this one drained what was one of America’s most successful retail operations, and Macy’s went bankrupt in 1992. Madrick concludes:

The allegiance of business management thus shifted from the long-term health of the corporations, their workers, and the communities they served, to Wall St. bankers who could make them personally rich... (173)

In the process, of course, the Wall Street bankers and leveraged buyout firms (LBOs) like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts who arranged the buys and the financing took in obscene amounts of money. So did risk abitrageurs (who invest in prospective mergers and acquisitions, angling to buy before the stock price rises on the rumor of a merger) like Ivan Boesky. Earning $100 million in one year alone (1986 when he was Wall Street’s highest earner), Boesky needed inside information to buy early, and got into the little habit of paying investment bankers for that information, i.e. on upcoming deals. Unfortunately for him, he got caught in his banner year because one of his informants (Dennis Levine of Drexel Burnham) was arrested and agreed to name those he had tipped off. Boesky was one (the deal was to pay Levine 5% of his profits for early information on a takeover), and he too was subpoenaed in the fall of 1986. Boesky immediately agreed to finger others (agreeing to wear a wire at meetings), and nailed Martin Siegel, also with Drexel, who, in turn, kept the daisy chain of ratting out associates going by naming Robert Freeman, an arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs. Nice fellows. Boesky ended up serving three years in prison, but he fingered an even bigger fish, Michael Milken. Then the wealthiest and most ruthless Wall Streeter of all, Milken, who made his money in junk bonds (risky high-interest bonds to ‘rescue’ companies in trouble) was sentenced to 10 years in jail (reduced to 2 years for good behavior) for securities violations, plus $1.3 billion in fines and restitution. He’d made so much money, though, that he and his family still had billions, including enough to start a nice foundation for economic research, to commemorate his good name in perpetuity.

There are, of course, lots of other admirable characters in this tale, but one in particular deserves mention, Jack Welch, the revered CEO of General Electric. This is because Welch’s reign at GE typifies what greed did to a once-great American institution, the very one that Ronald Reagan shilled for in a more innocent age, the one that brought the Gipper to the attention of the big money boys. Welch made enormous profits for GE (in 2000, the year he left, GE earnings had grown by 80 times to more than $5 billion), and himself, but he didn’t do it the “old fashioned way,” i.e. by developing new and better products. He did it by shifting the emphasis at GE from production to finance. Welch saw the value of this early:

“My gut told me that compared to the industrial operations I did know, the business (i.e. GE Capital) seemed an easy way to make money. You didn’t have to invest heavily in R&D, build factories, or bend metal…” (191)

To give an idea of how this works, Madrick points out that “in 1977, GE Capital…generated $67 million in revenue with only 7,000 employees, while appliances that year generated $100 million and required 47,000 workers” (191). Welch did the math. It didn’t take him long to sell GE’s traditional appliance business to Black & Decker, outraging most employees, though not many of them were left to protest: in his first two years, Welch laid off more than 70,000 workers, nearly 20% of his work force, and within five years, about 130,000 of GE’s 400,000 workers were gone. Fortune Magazine admiringly labeled him the “toughest boss in America.” And by the time he left the company in 2001, GE Capital Services had spread from North America to forty-eight countries, with assets of $370 billion, making GE the most highly valued company in America. The only problem was, with the lure of money and profits so great, GE Capital acquired a mortgage brokerage (Welch was no mean takeover artist himself) and got into subprime lending. In 2008, GE’s profits, mostly based on its financial dealings, sank like a stone, with its stock price dropping by 60%. Welch, the great prophet of American competition, now had to witness his company being bailed out by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company: since it owned a small federal bank, the FDIC guaranteed nearly $149 billion of GE’s debt. So after turning a U.S. industrial giant into a giant bank, the man Fortune Magazine named “manager of the century” also succeeded in turning it into a giant welfare case. Perhaps there’s a lesson here somewhere.

There’s more in this disturbing book—such as the fact that Wall Streeters not only attacked corporations in takeovers, they also attacked governments (George Soros’ hedge fund attacked the British pound, as well as Asian currency in 1999, causing crises in both places, and ultimately, cutbacks in government programs for the poor)—but the story is the same. During several decades of Wall Street financial predation, insider trading, and more financial chicanery than most of us can even dream of, the high-rolling banksters made off with trillions of dollars, and most others (including union pension funds) lost their shirts. Madrick quotes John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds, concerning the bust of the high-tech IPO bubble: “If the winners raked in some $2.275 Trillion, who lost all the money?...The losers, of course, were those who bought the stocks and who paid the intermediation fees…the great American public” (332). The same scenario was played out again and again, in derivatives trading, in the housing boom, in the mortgage-backed securities boom, in the false evaluations of stock analysts like Jack Grubman, in the predatory mergers and subprime shenanigans of Citibank CEO Sandy Weill, and on and on, all with an ethic perfectly expressed in an email, made public by the SEC, commenting on how ‘the biz’ was now run:

“Lure the people into the calm and then totally fuck ‘em” (334).

That’s essentially the story here. And the sad ending, which most of us haven’t really digested yet, is that the very vipers who cleverly and maliciously calculated each new heist and made off with all the money while destroying the economy, then got federal guarantees and loans that came to more than $12 trillion, that’s trillion, to “save the country.” And now lobby for “austerity” and “leaner government” and fewer “wasteful social programs” like social security and Medicare, and fewer regulations so that their delicate business minds can feel safe enough to invest again. And save us all again with their unfettered greed.

In which case, I’ll sure feel protected. Won’t you?

Lawrence DiStasi