Obama’s lucrative post-White House career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.
Barack Obama: How the mighty are fallen
Once upon a time, Barack Obama had the world at his feet. Tens of thousands of adoring people would come to see him, and often women would react to him as teens once reacted to Frank Sinatra, by fainting away in his presence. Now, though, not so much. Obama is stumping for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the magic is gone. Nowadays, Obama is drawing crowds that number in only the tens and maybe the hundreds.
Before Trump and his mega (and MAGA) rallies, there was Barack Obama circa 2008. Back then, he was a rock star. In June 2008, when Obama knew that he was going to be the Democrats' presidential candidate, he famously announced that his nomination "was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal."
At a Portland rally in July, approximately 75,000 people came to see Obama speak. Obama got an even better reception that same July, when around 200,000 people turned up in Berlin to hear Obama speak. By October 18, 2008 (almost exactly 12 years ago), the St. Louis, Missouri police estimated that 100,000 people attended an Obama rally.
No wonder Obama and his team began to take him very seriously. At the Democrat National Convention in August 2008, Obama stood on a set with impressive Greek columns that were obviously intended to suggest the dawning of a New Age.
And then there was the fainting, so much fainting. In February 2008, when the Obama worship hadn't even peaked, James Taranto put together a list of fainting women at Obama rallies. Women were fainting in California, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Washington State. You'd think they were at a Sinatra or Beatles concert.
Why am I reminding everyone about Obama-mania? Because I like to compare that mania for Obama back then with the crowds Obama draws today.
As you know, Obama was called in to stump for Joe Biden, who is trapped in the basement and can't get out. And on the rare occasions when Biden escapes the basement, no one wants to see him. You can be sure that the Biden campaign assumed that having Obama on the campaign circuit would draw the crowds, offsetting the enthusiasm that Trump's supporters feel for him.
Trump's supporters, by the way, do not support him with reverence or awe. Instead, he's one of them, from his humor and conversational style to his evident desire to help improve their lives. In other words, it's not about some imaginary light he'll bring to the world.
But back to Obama. The following are videos showing his campaign stop in Philadelphia. Don't you love his little bullhorn as he "sneaks up" on these fifteen or so people?
.@BarackObama told community organizers the importance of their work and encouraged them to “work as hard as you can” in these final weeks. He also stressed the need to stay safe and wear a mask, joking that he wears it even though “it accentuates how big” his ears are. pic.twitter.com/3Pb1v7OVI5
— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaNBCNews) October 21, 2020
Obama then spoke at a car rally, which seems to have all the thrill of a drive-in movie on a Wednesday night. Allegedly, there were "hundreds" of cars honking for this (ahem) magic moment:
Wrapping up his speech, @BarackObama throws it back to his famous “fired up and ready to go” line before putting on his VOTE mask and waving at fans. pic.twitter.com/U0N0Z7XS0w
— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaNBCNews) October 21, 2020
Meanwhile, here's footage from Donald Trump's rally, not in Philadelphia, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, population 95,508:
Crowd lined up in rainy Erie, PA hours ahead of President Trump’s rally tonight
— Will Steakin (@wsteaks) October 20, 2020
2 weeks to go pic.twitter.com/PiW0weJ4Gy
Trump rally in Erie, Pennsylvania tonight pic.twitter.com/7h3Jo9dhtC
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 20, 2020
It's true that Obama draws bigger crowds than Biden. But that's not saying much when you consider that just 12 years ago, Obama was a political god. If I were a betting woman, I would bet that Obama's efforts on Biden's behalf will not change the outcome of the upcoming election.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell
the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available.
See also www.cashill.com.
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM
THE FED'S OLD BOY NETWORK
By
Attorney Jonathan Emord
Author
of "The Rise of Tyranny" and
"Global
Censorship of Health Information"
December
19, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, performed an enormous
service for the American public when it sued the Federal Reserve and the
Clearing House Association LLC, an institution created by several of the
nation’s largest banks, to force disclosure of secret loans made by the Federal
Reserve principally to the six largest U.S. banks but also to certain foreign
banks. The treasure trove of evidence ultimately obtained by Bloomberg reveals
that while the public Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailed out leading
Wall Street firms for the whopping sum of $700 billion, the Fed at the same
time doled out some $7.77 trillion (an astronomical sum equal to have the gross
domestic product). To make matters worse, the Fed expanded its emergency
discount lending program, giving tens of billions more to the same banks at an
interest rate of 1%, while the prime lending rate stood at over 3%. The
banks getting these funds often turned them into profit centers, lending out
proceeds from them at higher interest rates and pocketing the difference,
profiting on federal largesse.
The President and his top economic advisers bought the “too
big to fail” concept, the notion that regardless of how profligate,
irresponsible, even criminal, heads of the leading financial institutions in
America had been, it would be worse for the nation if those institutions were
to collapse. Consequently, while pushing a legislative agenda of public
bail-outs, the Obama Administration maintained a secret program of
multi-trillion dollar loans, including billions at below market interest rates.
The principal recipients of the funding were JPMorgan, Bank of America,
Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan
Stanley.
The General Accounting Office audit of the Federal Reserve
revealed that some $16 trillion was supplied in secret loans from the Federal
Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010. The largest single
recipients were Citigroup ($2.5 trillion); Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion);
Merrill Lynch ($2 trillion); Bank of America ($1.3 trillion); Barclays PLC
($868 billion); Bear Stearns ($853 billion); Goldman Sachs ($814 billion); the
Royal Bank of Scotland ($541 billion); JP Morgan Chase ($391 billion); and
Deutsche Bank ($354 billion).
Bloomberg discovered that while top banks were touting in
their press releases during the crisis that they had fiscal soundness, their
balance sheets were made up primarily of federal funds, most from the Federal
Reserve. Moreover, while many banks paid back the TARP funds, they most often
did so in reliance on the secret receipts of tens of billions of dollars in
Federal Reserve money (in other words, the pay back was in that sense a
charade: federal money paid back federal loans). In short, the
Administration was complicit in the orchestration of a massive fraud on the
American public, making it seem that the banks largely responsible for the
financial crisis were weathering the storm of their own accord when in fact
they were on board the good ship U.S. Taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the bad lending and financial dealing practices
that helped produce the financial crisis have been largely kept in place,
underwritten by the federal government. The top banks suddenly realized that
far from having to suffer ignominy and defeat for their abuses, they would be
kept alive by a seemingly endless flow of federal cash. Indeed, the feds
accepted as collateral for loans securities of virtually no worth and other
properties that would never support private commercial lending. By propping up
the major banks despite their irresponsible lending practices, the federal
government has given them a privileged financial status whereby private lenders
will give them terms far more favorable than their smaller competitors because
they understand the federal government will not let them fail. Economist call
this safety net a “moral hazard” (effective federal underwriting for heightened
risk taking that permits these lenders to profit at above market rates of
return in speculative investing without suffering financial liability for
loss). The amounts doled out by the federal government to the banks
could have paid off as much as one tenth of all of the delinquent mortgages,
Bloomberg determined.
Rather than be forced to take their losses on their enormous
junk portfolios and interbank lending practices, the top six banks were allowed
to keep the junk portfolios, maintain their dubious lending practices, and turn
to the Federal Reserve for money on demand whenever problems arose. Repeatedly
when the banks should have gone under due to poor lending practices and grossly
speculative profiteering, they were complimented by the Federal Reserve,
rescued, and then allowed to tout the falsehood that their success came from
sharp management rather than from secret loans. At the same time, these banks
and others have shut down commercial lending for small businesses nationwide.
The “too big to fail” justification for the massive federal
welfare dole to the top six United States banks was based on a faulty premise.
Without question the demise of the leading banks would entail hardship,
particularly for the employees of those institutions, but the long term
prognosis was good for a restructuring of the financial market through
bankruptcies and takeovers. The alternative to allowing the market to impose
its own swift and harsh corrective involves imposing a massive burden on every
American citizen for generations to come for the trillions spent to prop up a
few dozen Wall Street moguls. Rather than have the taxpayers pay an
inflated sum to keep the banks responsible for the financial crisis alive, the
nation could have spared itself an assumption of massive debt and witnessed the
demise of these banks and the rise of new competing financial institutions
based on a solid financial model.
The Bush and Obama Administration’s role as Santa Claus for
Wall Street has kept from Wall Street the needed lessons that would have
otherwise come from the collapse of the major lending institutions. Painful as
it may seem to some, it is far better to allow the market to experience a
correction for profligate lending practices than to force the American
taxpayers for generations to come to pay for the bad decisions made by a few
and to let those few go without suffering a single consequence beyond temporary
embarrassment.
In the two years since leaving the White House,
former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his
position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama
has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made
deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made during the depths
of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,”
there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much
wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South
Africa last year.
Since he left office, the former president has
given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of
thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama
was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in
the US.
Just last month, Obama
was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference
in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is
Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the
largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack
Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in
marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous for the
corruption prevalent in its public sector and military, which
costs the country $17 billion a year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its
GDP.
Colombia exports half of the world’s
cocaine and its drug cartels have been known to have a hand in
the government. Corruption and drug money are so rampant
that Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to “the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding
inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in
Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a
year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the
amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs
that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former
President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin
America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and
growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his
public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama
has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and
commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to
records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged
that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and
outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a
multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest
redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent,
spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as
the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war
on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first
president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of
the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on and the financial
oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being
concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented
opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of
despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted
in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.
In addition to monetary rewards for his service
to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been
lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama
was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were
seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also benefited after the
family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book
deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs.
Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10
million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and
Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting
diversity in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative post-White House
career hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite
epitomizes the revolving door relationship between the US government and the
private sector. Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services
rendered to the capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.
In the two years since leaving the White House,
former President Barack Obama has spent his time raising and solidifying his
position in the uppermost echelons of the top one percent of Americans. Obama
has raked in exorbitant amounts of money for public speaking events and made
deals worth millions with multiple companies.
Despite his quip, made during the depths
of the Great Recession, that “at a certain point you’ve made enough money,”
there seems to be no such limit for the Obamas. His family has amassed so much
wealth that even Obama himself said he was surprised in a speech in South
Africa last year.
Since he left office, the former president has
given an estimated 50 speeches a year to corporate audiences for hundreds of
thousands of dollars per event. In 2017, the same year he left office, Obama
was officially recognized as one of the top ten highest paid public speakers in
the US.
Just last month, Obama
was reported to have been paid nearly $600,000 to speak at the EXMA conference
in Bogotá, Colombia. According to the Bogotá Post, EXMA is
Colombia’s largest marketing and business event of the year and one of the
largest in Latin America. Simply titled, “A conversation with President Barack
Obama,” his talk purportedly addressed “influential growth strategies” in
marketing and other aspects of the marketing economy.
Colombia is infamous for the
corruption prevalent in its public sector and military,
which costs the country $17 billion a
year, equivalent to 5.3 percent of its GDP.
Colombia exports half of the world’s
cocaine and its drug cartels have been known
to have a hand in the government.
Corruption and drug money are so rampant that
Colombia’s Inspector General likened it to
“the new cartel.”
While Obama warns of the danger of “exploding
inequality” in his speeches, the massive sum granted to him for one night in
Bogotá is more than 10 times what the typical household in the US makes in a
year, and 72 times the average worker’s annual income in Colombia.
Notably, Obama’s purse was nearly triple the
amount Hillary Clinton was paid for her notorious speeches to Goldman Sachs
that revealed her and the Democratic Party as Wall Street stooges. Former
President Bill Clinton was paid just $200,000 per speech when he toured Latin
America in 2005.
A key factor in Obama’s newfound and
growing wealth are those who profited from his presidency. A number of his
public speeches have been given to big Wall Street firms and investors. Obama
has given at least nine speeches to Cantor Fitzgerald, a large investment and
commercial real estate firm, and other high-end corporations. According to
records, each speech has been at least $400,000 a clip.
During his presidency, Obama bragged
that his administration was “the only thing
between [Wall Street] and the pitchforks.”
In fact, Obama handed the robber barons and
outright criminals responsible for the 2008–09 financial crisis a
multi-trillion-dollar bailout. His administration oversaw the largest
redistribution of wealth in history from the bottom to the top one percent,
spearheading the attack on the living standards of teachers and autoworkers.
Under Obama’s watch the stock markets soared as
the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 149 percent. Meanwhile, the “war
on terror” in the Middle East was expanded with Obama becoming the first
president to spend every day of his two terms at war, much to the delight of
the military-industrial complex.
As the wars raged on and the financial
oligarchs fattened themselves off the ever-increasing mountain of wealth being
concentrated at the top of society, real wages stagnated and an unprecedented
opioid overdose crisis spun out of control. Rising numbers of “deaths of
despair” during Obama’s tenure, particularly among the working class, resulted
in a decline in life expectancy unprecedented in the modern era.
In addition to monetary rewards for his service
to the financial elite and military-intelligence apparatus, Obama has been
lavishly feted by socialites and billionaires such as Richard Branson. Obama
was Branson’s special guest in 2017 on a private island where the pair were
seen kite surfing and enjoying the amenities of Branson’s exclusive resort.
Michelle Obama has also benefited after the
family’s departure from the White House. The couple signed a $65 million book
deal with publishing company Penguin Random House for their political memoirs.
Michelle’s memoir “Becoming” was the best-selling book of 2018 with over 10
million copies sold. The pair also signed multi-year deals with Netflix and
Spotify to produce content aimed at “fostering dialogue” and promoting diversity
in entertainment.
Obama’s lucrative post-White House career
hobnobbing with the corporate, entertainment and financial elite epitomizes the
revolving door relationship between the US government and the private sector.
Obama’s rewards are simply retroactive bribery for services rendered to the
capitalist elite, who have welcomed him with open arms.
Unmasking Obama: The Fight to
Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency Hardcover – August 18, 2020
by Jack Cashill (Author)
5 ratings
Unmasking Obama: The Fight to
Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency Hardcover – August 18, 2020
by Jack Cashill (Author)
Jack Cashill’s Unmasking Obama By Thomas
Lifson
To my surprise, Jack Cashill's new book,
Unmasking Obama, couldn't be more relevant to the political struggle facing us
today. In 2020, as in 2008 (and throughout the two Obama presidential terms),
the key to political power is what must be called "information
warfare" (my term, not Jack's) between the mighty establishment media and
the feisty conservative alternative media, which Jack likens to the samizdat
underground commentary in the old Soviet Union. It is the process of the
unmasking of the phony propaganda peddled by the all-powerful establishment by
the resource- and prestige-poor "Lilliputians" (an appropriation of
Jonathan Swift's work that the satirist surely would approve of) that is the
heart of the book. The narrative history presented in Unmasking Obama is
captivating. Jack takes readers along with him as he was both a participant in the
warfare and a historian of it, digging up parts of the elusive truth about the
real Barack Obama in the face of derision and obstruction that came his way.
But Jack is far from the sole hero of the story of the warfare. Because of his
literary detective work, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Bill Ayers
wrote the autobiographical book, Dreams from My Father, that first established
Obama as a serious intellect, Jack enjoyed access to many of the most
formidable truth-tellers about Obama. The book's prologue, in fact, begins with
a phone call Jack received in 2011 from a then little-known lawyer named
Michael Cohen, acting as a lawyer for Donald Trump. Unmasking Obama takes the
reader through the major aspects of the fraudulent picture of Obama that was
painted by the media and political establishments and details how the truth was
uncovered and often partially suppressed by the retaliatory efforts launched in
response. It often resembles detective fiction in the drama of the struggle to
get at the truth and the struggle to prevent that. I hesitate to call it beach
reading, for it is not in any sense fluff, intended to while away time. But it
is vastly entertaining and thought-provoking, and the 218 pages fly by rapidly.
Today, exactly the same struggle is underway between the Lilliputians seeking
to uncover who really is running the front-man candidacy of Joe Biden and the
shadowy movement that is looting and destroying our cities and the coordinated
might of the mass media that spends 95% of its time pushing a party line that
Trump is an unprecedented threat to human civilization and Joe Biden an amiable
and pragmatic centrist. Future historians, if there are any left still
interested and able to dispassionately understand how America came to the current
point of crisis, will find the story told in Unmasking Obama a very helpful
guide. If journalism is the "first draft of history," Unmasking Obama
is a well considered second draft, adding crucial perspective and assessment of
the consequences of the real-time reports. You don't have to wait that long,
though. It went on sale last week, and is well worth your time.
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