Today's must-read: Obama and the financial crisis

The Democratic party should have been able benefit politically from the current financial crisis. Alas, Obama cannot invoke Clinton's legacy of prosperity, since Obama's legion of zombies spent so much time trashing that legacy during the primaries.

Worse, Obama was funded by many of the ailing and failing financial institutions which got us into this mess:

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages. These latest frauds have left thousands of children in some of our largest minority communities coming home from school to see eviction notices and foreclosure signs nailed to their front doors. Those scars will last a lifetime.

These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. There is also a large hedge fund, Citadel Investment Group, which is a major source of fee income to Wall Street.

All of which brings us to today's must-read story. Obama's finance chair is Penny Pritzker, the former chair of the failed Superior Bank of Chicago.

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,” Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds.”

In other words, if you traced today’s sub-prime crisis back to its origins, you would come upon the role of the Pritzkers and Superior Bank of Chicago.

(And before you say it -- yes, I know that other members of the Pritzker family have ties to the Clintons. So, at this point, what?)

If you're looking for a fun, easy-to-follow explanation (illustrated with cute stick figures) of how the subprime crisis destroyed the world economy, go here.