Not unexpected, not here at least, but it stinks:
I didn't just vote for Barack Obama twice, I volunteered for his campaigns. My family donated to those campaigns. In my house, particularly around my wife, who worships the ground the Obamas walk on, you can't say anything wrong about them — it doesn't matter if it's about drones, or the misuse of our personal data, or anything else — the Obamas are right and everybody else is wrong, as far as she's concerned.
[...]I wasn't surprised to see that Barack and Michelle will be getting $60 million for their memoir. He's actually an amazing writer and storyteller and I could imagine it being one of the best presidential memoirs ever. I'm not even surprised to see him delivering speeches for a lot of money. He has a gift for speaking and it's not quite like he's about to get another job to build wealth off of. He was a gifted speaker and writer before he became President of the United States so he has every right to earn a living and build wealth with his own skills and gifts. However, it's not so cut and dry with President Obama or other politicians who hold so much influence and sway over how things get done in this country.
The news that President Obama signed with the same speaking agency used by Bill and Hillary Clinton makes sense. That agency clearly understands how to manage the affairs of such high-profile people. That's a unique skill held by very few agencies. However, it appears that President Obama could end up speaking to pretty much the same old crowd as the Clintons after it was revealed that he'll be paid $400,000 to speak to the Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
I operate under the guise that these firms like Goldman Sachs and Cantor Fitzgerald spend that amount of money not simply because they want to hear what someone has to say, but that they want to curry favor and get in the good graces of the high-profile people they invite. If Hillary Clinton went to Goldman Sachs and put them on blast for their greed and bad practices, she damn sure would've released the transcripts.
Maybe President Obama will release his transcripts as a standard practice. I doubt it, though. When it comes to Wall Street, it's genuinely hard to tell Barack and Hillary apart. Again, I don't mean that as an insult — it's just the billionaire class are their friends. This is who they hobnob and vacation with. These are their buddies and the financiers of their campaigns. Neither of them will ever go down in history as being tough on billionaires or investment bankers.
That's also why I understand Elizabeth Warren's recent remarks expressing real reservations about Obama's paid speeches to Wall Street. It will be insincere for him to ever really talk about the problematic role of money in politics, particularly as it pertains to the billionaire class, particularly when he's being paid by them.
Earlier this year a major defense contractor asked my speaking agency if I'd be willing to speak there during Black History Month. I wasn't. I don't agree with their practices. I didn't want to be used as a prop.
[Warren link in original]. Is anybody at all really surprised? I have become very, very, very, VERY tired of voting lesser evil. That's why I refused to do it, 2016. (Not voting greater evil either, not Trump, but there were other ballot choices besides Clinton/Podesta/Goldman and Trump/Jarad/Goldman). It sucks. The author of that quoted item was gentle.
THE TIME FOR TOLERATING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY PULLING THE LESSER EVIL BULLSHIT IS OVER. THEY NEED TO SUCK IT UP.
Bravo, Lizzy. Duly circumspect, but detecting a miasma too. Also this link. Sixty million for a book.
Even Pynchon does not make that money per pop; but he's paid only for the output - in writing the book, not for anything prior to it.
Do you think for one minute Lizzy got that kind of loot for her book mentioned in that perhaps too gentle bostonglobe.com report:
“I was troubled by that,” she said.
That was the extent of her comments aimed directly at Obama. She quickly launched into a broader discussion of her views of the corrupting influence of money in Washington.
“I describe it as a snake that slithers through Washington. And that it shows up in so many different ways here in Washington,” she said, referencing her just-published book, “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class.”
“The influence of dollars on this place is what scares me,” she continued. “I think it ultimately threatens democracy.”
While Warren’s critique was a far cry from the withering criticism some on the left have leveled at Obama, it’s rougher than anything she said during the 2016 campaign about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s acceptance of hefty speaking fees from Wall Street firms.
Unlike Obama, Clinton was considering running for office when she gave her controversial speeches, while the former president’s days in elected public office are behind him.
Warren stayed neutral — and mostly silent — throughout the bitter primary contest between Clinton and Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, despite, as she writes in her book, coming under intense pressure from both sides to endorse her preferred candidate. “I didn’t want to undermine either of our candidates or to short-circuit any part of that debate,” she writes.
When Warren finally did endorse Clinton, after the New York Democrat had secured enough primary votes to clinch the nomination, the Globe asked whether Clinton should release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, an issue Sanders had hammered on the campaign trail.
“That’s for her to decide — there will be a whole lot of issues to talk about over the next several months,” Warren said.
Yeah. She waffled when she could have been more forceful. But aside from Warren feeling a need to be politically nice, the fair and honest truth is Obama's loot grabbing is obscene. But hardly unexpected. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.
_____________UPDATE______________
From the sidebar:
