“The NFL Players Association, UNITE HERE, and the AFL-CIO were among the groups that descended upon the nation's capital Monday to demonstrate against the Chicago-based company. They called for a week of demonstrations at Hyatt Hotels in 20 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Boston. And they urged travelers not to stay at any Hyatt Hotels `to send a clear message to Hyatt that its abuse and exploitation of hotel workers will not be tolerated,’ according to a press release.
"`The global boycott marks the largest escalation to date in an ongoing campaign for basic workers rights,’ the organizers said in the release. `Hyatt has singled itself out as the worst employer in the hotel industry by abusing its housekeepers and other hotel workers, replacing long-time employees with minimum wage temporary workers, and imposing dangerous and health-threatening workloads on those who remain.’…”
--from the July 23, 2012 issue of USA Today
“Joining President Obama on his short flight from San Francisco to Portland, Ore., today was Penny Pritzker, his 2008 campaign finance chairwoman and one of his earliest supporters…Pritzker, whose family owns the Hyatt hotel chain…is a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness…”
--from the July 24, 2012 issue of USA Today
Anti-Labor Hyatt Hotels Director Penny Pritzker Raised Funds For Obama’s 2008 Campaign
The Democratic Obama Administration failed to create the radical democratic change required to restore economic prosperity for U.S. working-class people, dramatically lower the U.S. unemployment rate and reduce the political and economic power of U.S. billionaires and their corporations between 2009 and 2012. One reason might be because a member of the board of directors of the anti-labor Hyatt Hotels corporation, Billionaire Penny Pritzker, raised funds in a big way for the Democratic Party’s 2008 Obama presidential campaign. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter recalled in his 2010 book The Promise: President Obama, Year One:
“The Obama fund-raising juggernaut was often seen as a social-networking phenomenon, but it was actually more like an Internet startup. Obama and [Penny] Pritzker knew that they needed the equivalent of venture capitalists to put in seed money before their enterprise could `go public.’…In the National Finance Committee tent [on Election Night in November 2008], the big donors, the ones whose early money had made it possible for him to win, climbed up on table and chairs to get a glimpse of the president-elect as he thanked them. Penny Pritzker, the…Chicago businesswoman who spearheaded his record fund-raising, sat on the cold ground, out of view. Obama expected to see her there, and when he didn’t he emailed her at 2 a.m. asking where she’d been…”
The same book also noted that “in the presidential campaign” in 2008, Obama “pandered to younger voters by opposing a mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance,” although the health reform/obamacare plan [which is expected to create more super-profits for both pharmaceutical corporations and health insurance corporations than a Single-Payer/Medicaid for All plan would create] that Obama eventually pushed through Congress between 2009 and 2012 did contain a mandate requiring younger voters to buy costly, but sub-standard health insurance from private health insurance companies.; and that “Obama was too competitive to consign himself to being a one-termer.”
Sitting next to 2008 Obama Campaign National Finance Chairperson and President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness Member Pritzker on the Hyatt Hotels corporate board in recent years have been former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs and former International Advisor to Goldman Sachs Bernard Aronson (who also sits on the board of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs), Goldman Sachs Managing Director Richard Friedman and former Goldman Sachs Executive Byron Trott. In addition, a director of the anti-union/anti-labor Wal-Mart Stores Inc. named Gregory Penner has also been sitting next to Penny Pritzker on the Hyatt Hotels board of directors in recent years.
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