Monday, August 30, 2010

Chicago’s ShoreBank morphs into Urban Partnership Bank
  Progressivism piece by Ann "Babe" Huggett

Chicago’s ShoreBank, known as the “Clintons’ favorite bank” and with close ties to the Obama Administration, which allegedly pushed Goldman Sachs and Citibank to underwrite it using $135 million of their TARP funds even as it reported losses, failed on August 20th but immediately reorganized itself as Urban Partnership Bank.  Upon the reorganization, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) quickly handed over $367.7 million to keep the newly renamed bank’s doors open.

Earlier in the year, the Illinois Financial Authority’s chairman, Bill Brandt, ignoring pressure from Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky to bail out ShoreBank and its toxic assets, literally passed the buck to the Feds when he hinted at potential political fallout and/or actual physical street violence if ShoreBank, whose executives were neighbors of the Obamas in Chicago, was not bailed out by the US Treasury.

Brandt said, “Mark my words:  After this Herculean effort by so many people, should Treasury allow this bank to fail because of the utter lack of leadership coming from Washington, there will be a firestorm in Chicago.”

On top of the political arm-twisting, ShoreBank’s president, Mary Houghton, actually played the race card in order to keep ShoreBank going when she hinted that “white bankers”, who kept insisting on not blindly approving shaky sub-prime housing loans, “deserved to be pressured” in order to overcome their reluctance to lend to inner city residents.

Huffington Post blogger, Karen Harris further muddied the ethical waters by lauding ShoreBank as some sort of people’s international banking savior when she wrote, “Since its inception in 1973, ShoreBank has been a model bank committed to social justice. ShoreBank’s mission has been to develop a triple bottom line of social responsibility, environmental responsibility and profitability, or “people, planet, profit.“ ShoreBank’s website describes it as, “America’s first community development bank.“

Taking a closer look at the “people, planet, profit” mantra of ShoreBank, “people” and “profit” come and go especially within socialist engineering and redistribution schemes chasing after the chimera of social justice.  However, the “planet” aspect as part of the Green Agenda is a latent goldmine for socialists in terms of control of the population through resource allocation and allowances from carbon credits, which are reminiscent of the sale of indulgences by the Medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, to surreptitious population culling through abortion mills and rationing of medicine through national health care to experimentation on food supplies by diverting grains to unprofitable alternate fuel manufacturing schemes which consume more energy in production that is actually produced.

A quick look at the Green Agenda finds its brutal beginnings in Nazi Germany, where it was developed in the ‘30s and ‘40s as a means of controlling the “blood and soil” of lands occupied by German conquest.  Based originally on the anti-Jewish ruminations of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), it was part of the justification for the Holocaust in order to rid Nature of the Jewish concepts of land and animal husbandry to benefit the people.  Instead Nature was to be the beneficiary and people, especially the Jews, were to be controlled, contained and eventually eradicated.

A further historical examination of Nazism shows that it is a combination of the words National Socialism and its major rival is international socialism, i.e., communism. International socialism has itself gone through major rebranding efforts through the decades as its anti-human agenda became known.  From communism it went to socialism then to communitarianism and liberalism.  As liberalism took on its inevitable anti-human taint, it was renamed to progressivism.  Currently, whenever an institution is referred to as “progressive” it is code for socialism of which the Green Agenda is a prime tool of control for the population.

In other words, the survival of ShoreBank is vital to the socialist agenda of population command and control through the Green Agenda hence the national hysteria over what is essentially a local Chicago issue.

As Paul Chesser of the Heartland Institute wrote, “…meet Urban Partnership Bank; same as the old ShoreBank.  That ShoreBank will continue its mission as Urban Partnership Bank shows that its progressive agenda is worthy of an unlimited supply of FDIC funds and arm-twisting, which is what saved it.

“Meanwhile ShoreBank’s heavily subsidized green agenda survives as its subsidiary, ShoreBank Pacific, is absorbed by another progressive community development institution: Oakland-based OneCalifornia Bank. Alternative energy schemers dependent on taxpayers to back their manure-to-energy and food-burning ideas can breathe a sigh of relief.

“If ShoreBank was to be saved, then its fellow progressives in the multibillion-dollar Ford Foundation and James and Catherine MacArthur Foundation should have stepped up. Shareholders in firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America should hold their executives accountable for their companies’ roles in reviving this Frankenstein bank.”

Ann “Babe” Huggett

Posted by Ann "Babe" Huggett on 8/30/10

Email Author  [Email Article To Someone.]  (Permalink) Print This Page

UPSSA United Progressive Socialist States of America