Obama kiss of death? Ex-president set to campaign for Joe Biden
In another sign of Democrats acting as if maybe they aren't cruising to victory as polls claim, they're wheeling out former president Obama in a bid to put Biden over the top.
According to the New York Post:
Former President Barack Obama reportedly is poised to hit the campaign trail for Joe Biden, his former vice president, as the 2020 presidential race enters its crucial final stretch.
"President Obama plans to hit the trail soon, in addition to all the other activities he's undertaken all year in support of electing VP Biden — as he's said, we all have to do everything we can to win on November 3," an aide to Obama told ABC News.
That would be the same Obama who thus far has been absent from the campaign trail all these months, including even the past couple of weeks when Joe Biden has ventured out from his basement hideaway to zero crowds. Unlike Biden, Obama can draw a crowd, even if it's done with scrupulous social distancing, which is likely to be what they present for the fawning press cameras.
The guilt here is pretty obvious, too — note how that aide in the quote above made sure he slipped in that clause about "in addition to all the other activities he's undertaken all year in support of electing VP Joe Biden" as if Obama had done anything more than an occasional Zoom meeting. The Post continues:
"He's doing enough for our campaign," Biden told reporters on Tuesday, according to Fox News. "He'll be out on the trail and he's doing well."
This rather sounds as though Biden's been getting a few questions about this as he turns up for zero-crowd rallies at this late date within the campaign.
Recall also that Obama took a long time to endorse Biden for president, despite working with him at close quarters for eight long years. He endorsed Biden only when all the other candidates had bailed out and then he had to.
It calls to mind that Obama's contempt for Biden is very well known.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f--- things up," Obama reportedly told another Democrat, as per Politico.
"You don't have to do this, Joe, you really don't," the New York Times reported Obama telling Biden ahead of his campaign announcement. The Daily Beast, writing in August 2019, put it this way:
According to the Times, "Mr. Biden — who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago — responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump."
The Times also reported that Obama met with top Biden advisers in March and, according to the sources, requested that the ex-veep's team do what they can so that Biden does not "embarrass himself" or "damage his legacy."
There are countless other examples.
Besides that contempt, Joe Biden should be careful what he wishes for — Obama in fact has endorsed very few candidates who came up winners.
When Obama endorses some poor schmoe, the other guy tends to win.
According to Patriot Post, Obama campaigned for the following losing candidates:
Obama has a miserable record when it comes to electing anyone but himself. Whether he was trying to help some Democrat win a governorship or a Senate seat, Obama's record has been abominable. By now, he must be something like 0-40.
Heck, even campaigning with Michelle in Georgia, a state that is 31% black, the two of them couldn't get Stacey Abrams into the governor's mansion. Democrats would insist, as the Obamas and Ms. Abrams have been doing for the past two years, that she lost because of voter suppression. It's a tough argument to make because in a state with a population of 10,500,000 — 3,150,000 of whom are black — she received nearly two million votes. Her problem was that Brian Kemp received 55,000 more than her. It hardly seems like voter suppression when 74% of all registered voters, including blacks, cast votes in that election.
Charlie Spiering tweeted that actually, the list was pretty extended:
Obama campaigned for the following losing candidates:
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) November 7, 2018
Joe Donnelly
Richard Cordray
Andrew Gillum
Stacy Abrams
And it's far from all of them. Think of the various special elections where Obama's endorsed lost, too.
It's so bad that there are many Democratic candidates who don't want his endorsement at all.
And even Obama knows this, according to this 2018 piece in the Washington Examiner, holding off his endorsements of Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana for this very reason.
Biden should be careful what he wishes for. Not only will Obama's capacity to draw a crowd stand in stark contrast to his own miserable efforts, but Obama's presence will remind many of how little regard he had for Biden, too. But worst of all, Biden's gotten himself the great anti-Midas of the Democrats' campaign trail, given that everything he touches turns to something that isn't gold.
As the Obamatons say, let's hope.
Image credit: Eric Drost, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
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.
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