ShoreBank Gets Help But Is Still Begging

MAY 18, 2010: GE joins effort to save Chicago community bank‎ (Reuters) Privately owned ShoreBank, a community development lender on Chicago's South Side near the home base of President Barack Obama and some of his top aides, is getting assistance from a consortium of Wall Street banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), Citigroup (C.N), JPMorgan (JPM.N) and Bank of America (BAC.N), sources have said. Spokesmen for Citigroup and General Electric Co (GE.N) each confirmed $20 million investments on Tuesday, and JP Morgan previously said it was ready to inject $15 million. Another source said Goldman injected $20 million. However... The Financial Times reported (on May 19, GMT) that "Two people familiar with the deal said the next test for the bank was whether or not it could raise an additional $70m from the federal government." That would be in addition to the money from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and GE Capital. The American Spectator is almost as suspicious about the bailout of ShoreBank as we are here at Chicago News Bench. On May 17, they wrote that "Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee want to find out if anyone in the Obama White House attempted to influence the financial bailout of a well-known Chicago-based 'community bank,' which faced FDIC closure last week, and which, going back to the Clinton Administration, has had close ties to ACORN and the leftist community-organizing world of Chicago. The story about the bailout attempt of ShoreBank first began breaking last Thursday night. The FDIC was demanding that the bank have $125 million in investments by Friday, but discussions to bail out the bank, which has close ties to both senior members of the Obama Administration, as well as the Clinton family, went deep into the weekend as Chicago politicians scrambled to save the bank." What? Last Thursday? Where the hell has American Spectator been? It was two weeks ago, on May 5, that we posted "Failing ShoreBank, Cap-And-Trade and Jan Schakowsky." In that post, I wrote that "This story is about much, much more than just ShoreBank. It's about corruption, the $10 Trillion cap-and-trade scam, the continuing attempt by Schakowsky and the Democrats to seize control of America's energy policies, and more. It's about the Joyce Foundation, which is a major shareholder of ShoreBank and also a major player in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX trades in 'greenhouse gases.' Franklin Raines, George Soros, Al Gore, Goldman Sachs, Barack Obama and others are big players in this story. (At this point, I strongly suggest that you watch Glenn Beck explain the twisted story of the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Joyce Foundation.)Over the past decade, 'green' ShoreBank has become a shill and a front for the cap-and-trade crowd and those with a radical environmentalist agenda." Fourteen days ago, we called out the corruption of the ShoreBank situation. We were certainly not the first ones to do so, by any means, but American Spectator makes it sound as though the connection was only realized when the FDIC was trying to rush through a bailout for ShoreBank. The stench surrounding ShoreBank, Schakowsky, the Clintons, the Obamas and many others wafts back years. The odiferous mess is only now getting the attention that it should have gotten long ago.