MEGABUCKS: Obama Becomes Paid Evangelist For Fat Cat Oil Companies And Wall Street Robber Barons
Obama is coming to Wall Street less than a year after leaving the White
House, following a path that’s well trod and well paid. While he can’t
run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party
torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power. His new work
with banks might suggest which side of the debate he’ll be on and
disappoint anyone expecting him to avoid a trap that snared Clinton.
by Geoffrey Grider September 21, 2017 Hillary
Clinton says she made a mistake when she gave speeches on Wall Street
after leaving government. Taking money from banks, she writes in her new
memoir, created the impression she was in their pocket. Her old boss
doesn’t seem to share her concern.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Remember President Obama, and how he used to rail against things like
“crony capitalism” and “wall street influence”? Less than a year after
leaving office, Obama is now firmly in the paid pockets of any and all
Wall Street companies that will have him. His fee to speak is now
$400,000 per, and there is no shortage of Wall Street fat cats wanting
his services, dubious as they are. Isn’t it amazing how many Democrats
are super-rich, and pass laws favoring the super rich? Yet they want me
and you to live under a Socialist system while they roll in piles of
capitalist cash like Scrooge McDuck.
Last month, just before her book “
What Happened” was published, Barack Obama spoke in New York to clients of
Northern Trust Corp. for
about $400,000, a person familiar with his appearance said. Last week,
he reminisced about the White House for Carlyle Group LP, one of the
world’s biggest private equity firms, according to two people who were
there. Next week, he’ll give a keynote speech at investment bank Cantor
Fitzgerald LP’s health-care conference.
Obama is coming to Wall Street
less than a year after leaving the White House, following a path that’s
well trod and well paid. While he can’t run for president, he continues
to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and
vilifying corporate power. His new work with banks might suggest which
side of the debate he’ll be on and disappoint anyone expecting him to
avoid a trap that snared Clinton. Or, as some of his executive friends
see it, he’s just a private citizen giving a few paid speeches to other
successful people while writing his next book.
Tucker: Obama taking $400K from Wall Street is indefensible
“He
was the president of the entire United States — financial services are
under that umbrella,” said former UBS Group AG executive Robert Wolf, an
early supporter who joined the Obama Foundation board this year. “He
doesn’t look at Wall Street like, ‘Oh, these are individuals who don’t
want the best for the country.’ He doesn’t stereotype.”
Since
leaving office, Obama has delivered public and private speeches that are
“true to his values,” Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former
president, said in an email. “His paid speeches in part have allowed
President Obama to contribute $2 million to Chicago programs offering
job training and employment opportunities to low-income youth.”
Obama’s
relationship with Wall Street hasn’t always been good. Bankers still
boil over with rage about him, wincing over his 2009 line about fat cats
as if the wounds were fresh. But his Justice Department prosecuted no
major bankers for their roles in the financial crisis, and he resisted
calls to break up the biggest banks, signing a regulatory overhaul that
annoyed them with new rules but didn’t stop them from pulling in record
profits.
The brokerage and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald isn’t
one of those giants. S&P Global Ratings announced this year that
the New York-based firm’s debt grades could be cut to junk. Cantor’s
investment banking division is run by health-care specialist Sage Kelly,
who left Jefferies Group after divorce-case accusations became
salacious tabloid fodder in 2014. His ex-wife later apologized for the
storm caused by the claims, which he had denied.
Obama’s Wall Street speeches generate big pay day:
When
Obama was president he railed against Wall Street, but now that he’s a
private citizen he grabbing all the ill-gotten loot from Wall Street
that he can stuff in his pockets.
Cantor
Chief Executive Officer Howard Lutnick, whose firm lost more than 600
people in the Sept. 11 attacks, said the former president will make
remarks and take questions. The three-day conference for current and
prospective clients begins Sept. 25. Obama will be paid about $400,000,
according to a person familiar with the arrangement.
“Everybody
would like to come,” Lutnick said. “Hopefully, we will really talk about
the Affordable Care Act in interesting and nuanced ways, which I think
is really cool.”
Obama’s appearance at the Carlyle conference in Washington was previously unreported.
The private equity giant
has enjoyed some of the best political connections in the world, with
executives and advisers who have included former presidents, prime
ministers and cabinet secretaries. Obama discussed his life and the
decisions he made in the White House, the people who heard him said. A
spokesman for the firm wouldn’t comment.
The ex-president has been
busy. His foundation is raising money for a library in Chicago, and he
and his wife signed a book deal with Penguin Random House after an
auction that went above $60 million, according to the Financial Times.
He spoke about food in Milan, democracy in Jakarta and himself at an
A&E Television Networks event in New York. He vacationed in
California and Hawaii and on Richard Branson’s Necker Island with its
billionaire owner.
Obama has picked private equity, hedge fund,
venture capital and banking veterans to oversee his foundation, and an
alumnus of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to advise him on investments.
President Obama Announces The Obama Foundation Summit:
Remember the Clinton Foundation, and how it was going to “change the world“.
As it turned out, the only thing the Clinton Foundation did was make
the Clintons richer. Now Obama is starting his own foundation to “change
the world”. Hmm…looks like we won’t be running low on Democrat
financial scandals any time soon.
Northern Trust is a bank that specializes
in wealth management for rich families and services for big funds. The
event had gone unreported, but a program accessible on the firm’s
website lists Obama alongside executives from Microsoft Corp., IBM and
Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of Bloomberg LP.
Northern Trust,
based in Chicago, gave Obama a discount on a $1.32 million loan for a
mansion in that city in 2005, after he was elected to the Senate, the
Washington Post reported. The rate was changed to account for an offer
from another lender, a spokesman for Obama said three years later. Doug
Holt, a spokesman for Northern Trust, wouldn’t comment for this story.
Obama
is getting advice on investments from Robbie Robinson, who’s on leave
from BDT & Co., according to a person familiar with the arrangement.
That Chicago-based firm works with wealthy families and is run by Byron
Trott. Both bankers worked for Goldman Sachs.
Obama has known executives there for more than a decade.
He spoke at the 2006 Goldman Sachs partners’ meeting in Chicago. Then a
senator, he appeared between Hank Paulson and Warren Buffett in the
Fairmont hotel’s Imperial Ballroom, an event program shows.
Both
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump blasted Clinton for her lucrative
Goldman Sachs speeches, and the issue is still raw. Sanders and fellow
Senator Elizabeth Warren have tried to pry the Democratic Party away
from its coziness with Wall Street. If Obama is hoping the party will be
a big tent with room for corporate giants, they may stand in his way.
Obama’s
donor friends tend to mention the same reason when they defend his Wall
Street speeches, saying he’s no longer president and not running for
office. Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides is one of them.
“I
love Barack Obama, and if someone is willing to pay him to give a
speech, God bless America,” said Nides, a deputy secretary of state
under Clinton in Obama’s administration.
But Jeff Hauser,
who studies political corruption as head of the Revolving Door Project
in Washington, said Obama should play by the same rules as other
politicians because of his ongoing work with the Democratic Party.
“He’s
continuing to exercise the authority,” Hauser said, citing Obama’s
support for the party’s redistricting committee and the push he gave Tom
Perez in the race to head the Democratic National Committee. If he
wants to play a role, “he ought to forgo a few hundred thousand here and
maybe a half-million there.”
Few leaders have left the top of the
U.S. government recently and resisted the lure of corporate money.
Former Vice President Al Gore is a director at Apple Inc. and a senior
partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital
firm whose chairman, John Doerr, is on the Obama Foundation’s board. Dan
Quayle, another ex-vice president, has spent almost two decades with
private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP. Trump’s White House
has lost officials so quickly that Sean Spicer has already made
arrangements to speak to a financial firm this year.
“Not
everyone’s going to be a Jimmy Carter, who does purely good works after
he gets out,” said Sean Coffey, a Democratic donor who chairs the
complex litigation group at corporate law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis
& Frankel LLP. Obama is used to being criticized, the attorney
added. “I don’t think getting any grief for doing this is going to
bother him at all.”
source
MEGABUCKS: Obama Becomes Paid Evangelist For Fat Cat Oil Companies And Wall Street Robber Barons • Now The End Begins – Re-Shared and administered by Aaron Halim
