The Chris Moeller Archives

Public service, and other old-timey ideas

Former President Obama accepting $400,000 for a speech from a Wall Street brokerage house is a terrible decision on his part, one that, in addition to being potentially quite damaging to his legacy, and to his political party at this particular moment in history, reveals that a possible ulterior motive has been running through his career in public service.

The criticisms he’s facing over his cash grab have nothing to do with the fact that he’s the first black former president cashing in, as some are suggesting. All the other former presidents, we’re told, have supposedly done the same thing. And this action cannot simply be dismissed as harmless because he has left his public office. Liberal apologists still don’t understand the nature of the corruption that engulfs their government so it’s little wonder that they’re so often and easily lied to. You see, it’s very inexact to suggest that the man can no longer be bribed because he has returned to private life. No, this $400,000 check is, in fact, the payoff for services already rendered. President Obama, and not Private Citizen Obama, kept the commercial banks tied to the investment banks. He saw to it that nobody went to prison for causing the U.S. economy to collapse into a dumpster fire of fraudulent promissory notes in 2008. He made sure that the Tim Geithners, the Larry Summerses, and the Ben Bernankes kept their tentacles upon the wheel of the American financial state. In contrast to his sharp campaign promises to the contrary, he made sure that the “too big to fail” banks were not broken up at all, and in fact, by the time he had left office, were bigger than they had ever been.

It’s reminiscent of Clinton, to be sure, to make such a naked grab for the root of all evil. That conditioning is presumably why so many Democrats don’t have a problem with Obama doing it. Bill Clinton and his wife rode their repeal of Glass-Steagall and their neo-liberal trade deals to more than a hundred fat, post-Oval paydays. They became an industry unto themselves-- and for themselves. A full five years after the Occupy Movement began marching on Wall Street and sitting in for change at Zuccotti Park and points all across the country, Hillary chose to ignore that breeze of political revolution and build her national presidential campaign instead upon a series of speeches delivered to the nation’s financial elite, the transcripts of which we’ve never been permitted to see. She hadn’t noticed that the Occupy forces were protesting a Democratic White House, and that their future support couldn't be taken for granted. Her team, and almost the whole of the Beltway media, dismissed the protestors as a fringe element, even impugning them as something that was physically dirty.

For his part, Obama has never been perceptive enough-- or hasn’t care enough, to attempt reform upon the system. Considering recent events, it’s clear he was never going to attempt before he had his own chance to cash in. He permitted the Clintons, the architects of the demolition of Liberal America, back into the inner circle of Washington power, elevating the candidate voters had soundly rejected during the 2008 primaries, first, to the head of his State Department, and then to the top of the party’s presidential ticket for 2016, even over the executive aspirations of his own vice president. The irony is that Obama’s own political rise to the top owed directly to the fact that he was a ballot alternative to the Clintons.

It’s also incorrect to be claiming that “everybody does it.” NO… They don’t. Harry Truman didn’t do it. Post-presidency, he turned down $100,000-a-year corporate positions in the early 1950’s, returning home to Independence, Missouri instead. Then Jimmy Carter did the same in the early ‘80s, choosing a continued public advocacy as his alternative. But it is true that “most everybody does it,” and at all levels of American government too, and that’s almost the precise, overarching reason why this country is turning into a shithole.

And it leads me to a final, uncomfortable truth on this topic: Once you have eliminated those two-party, us-versus-them hypocrites who can almost always be found at opposite ends of the same argument both pronouncing that a certain thing is good for their team while being bad for the other, we seem to be left with a distinctive line between those that are bothered by Obama’s “cashing in” and those that aren’t. I tend to believe that the question affirms an individual’s own truth-- would he or she… that is, would you do the same thing? Or would you decline? Where do you stand? And don’t just blurt out that first answer. Give it some thought. That’s your soul to which you’re affixing a price.

posted by CM @ 10:03 PM