It took Bill and Hillary years to get to 100 million. The Obamas, well…
Barack and Michelle Obama have sold the rights to their next books to Penguin Random House for a sum that has reportedly passed $60 million, according to a report by the Financial Times. (They will be writing separate books, but the rights were sold jointly.) As far as past and present presidential book deals go, this one’s a biggie: It surpasses previous records set by George W. Bush’s reported $7 million deal and Bill Clinton’s reported $15 million dollar advance.
I’m waiting for the speeches, those should be wonderful.
I think this is only fair, though. Clinton may have carried water for the rich, but Obama played a huge part in making sure that they didn’t lose all their money after the financial crisis (yes, Bush and Bernanke started the bailouts, but Obama had them all by the short and curlies and could easily have put almost every senior executive in the financial industry in prison for fraud, and could have spiked large parts of the bailouts had he chosen to do so.)
This is why I don’t get very worked up about Trump’s conflicts of interest. They are real, but the only difference is that he’s getting paid now as opposed to later. Politicians exist to do what rich people want, Trump is only cutting out the middle man and the partial delay.
This is an important point, and I want to encourage you to read this longer article on how politicians are paid by rich people to fuck over ordinary people. It’s not about donations for elections.
Obama continued the trend, which has gotten worse for decades, of the rich getting more and more of all the gains of the economy. He did not try, in any way, to reverse it. And that’s because he knew he was being paid to funnel money to the rich. That was his job, he did it, and now he is getting his reward.
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