Obama the Fascist

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After two years in office we can say with some certainty where Barack Obama’s instincts really lie. From the war on terror to the current unrest in Egypt, his foreign policy has owed far more to conservative realpolitik than to any left-wing vision of international affairs.

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On nearly every anti-terror front, from detainee policy to drone strikes, the Obama administration has been what The Washington Times’s Eli Lake calls a “9/14 presidency,” maintaining or even expanding the powers that George W. Bush claimed in the aftermath of 9/11.

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On Israel-Palestine and Iran, the Obama administration ... reverted to the policy status quo of Bush’s second term. Indeed, from the twilight struggle over Iran’s nuclear program — featuring sanctions, sabotage, and the threat of military force — to the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, this White House’s entire approach to international affairs looks like a continuation of the Condoleezza Rice-Robert Gates phase of the Bush administration.

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Obama’s response to the Egyptian crisis has crystallized his entire foreign policy vision.

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If the Obama White House has its way, any opening to democracy will be carefully stage-managed by an insider like Omar Suleiman, the former general and Egyptian intelligence chief who’s best known in Washington for his cooperation with the C.I.A.’s rendition program.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/opinion/07douthat.html

[Obama 2012 1,714]

I said all of this back in 07/08..... Nothing was going to change on that front.

It's really easy to say things while running for office, it's a completely different ballgame once you are there.

There's the factors of special interests to take into consideration ( I laugh at all the leftists who thought Obama was going to shut them out ) and then of course the fact that you don't have all intelligence reports until you are in office...

Either way, the 'changes' that have been taking place lean more towards special interests and I don't forsee that changing any time soon.

[luckytxn 2,265]

I said all of this back in 07/08..... Nothing was going to change on that front.

It's really easy to say things while running for office, it's a completely different ballgame once you are there.

There's the factors of special interests to take into consideration ( I laugh at all the leftists who thought Obama was going to shut them out ) and then of course the fact that you don't have all intelligence reports until you are in office...

Either way, the 'changes' that have been taking place lean more towards special interests and I don't forsee that changing any time soon.

Him doling out Trillions of dollars has to go to special interests. No one has done more for them to date and should make him a very wealthy man once he leaves office and he can reclaim his share.

[The_Dude 1,142]

Him doling out Trillions of dollars has to go to special interests. No one has done more for them to date and should make him a very wealthy man once he leaves office and he can reclaim his share.

Care to substantiate that claim? Didn't think so. Maybe you should save those brain cells.

Edited February 7, 2011 by Rob & Mel

[luckytxn 2,265]

Care to substantiate that claim? Didn't think so. Maybe you should save those brain cells.

He has spent Trillions of dollars. We are projected to have a Trillion and a half deficit just this year alone. This is money spent by the Feds to many corporations and to the states who then spend it and pay companies. Each corporation is a special interest. All the past presidents get paid big money by speaking at these companies every year and even get them to sit on boards to pay them their share of what they brought them. (Also to insure they have their voice speaking for them to keep the dole coming) With the record amount of spending by Obama the Socialist he is due a lot of money to come his way. It has been this way for a long time now. Maybe it is news to some but it is old news nonetheless.

It is probably news to sheep and especially to any that think Obama the Socialist is the one that could never be like others.

[The_Dude 1,142]

He has spent Trillions of dollars. We are projected to have a Trillion and a half deficit just this year alone. This is money spent by the Feds to many corporations and to the states who then spend it and pay companies. Each corporation is a special interest. All the past presidents get paid big money by speaking at these companies every year and even get them to sit on boards to pay them their share of what they brought them. (Also to insure they have their voice speaking for them to keep the dole coming) With the record amount of spending by Obama the Socialist he is due a lot of money to come his way. It has been this way for a long time now. Maybe it is news to some but it is old news nonetheless.

It is probably news to sheep and especially to any that think Obama the Socialist is the one that could never be like others.

I'll ask again, please substantiate your claims.

[luckytxn 2,265]

I'll ask again, please substantiate your claims.

Have many but here is one and I will post a few more.

Bill Clinton:

Hillary Clinton may not have won the Democratic presidential nomination, but the Clinton family shouldn’t be standing in any bread lines in the foreseeable future. Bill Clinton pulls in $250,000 to give a speech, which has been a fairly lucrative racket for him. A 2007 report in the British newspaper The Independent estimated Clinton’s earnings from speeches alone at somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million since he left office six years earlier. Clinton also sold his memoir My Life to Knopf for $15 million, and he serves as an advisor for the private equity firm Yucaipa Companies, a post that has pulled in at least $12.6 million. When the Clintons released their tax data in April as part of Hillary’s campaign disclosures, they showed income of $109 million since leaving the White House

[luckytxn 2,265]

That leaves the time-honored and highly lucrative field of crony capitalism, or, as it's known more genteelly today: private equity. Out of public view, magnates routinely provide nice incomes to pols who can open doors and help raise funds. Former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow hang their hats at Cerberus Capital Management. Bill Clinton was dealt into a fund run by ally Ron Burkle. The Carlyle Group has been a bipartisan haven for Washington A-listers, including former President George H.W. Bush. Bush the Younger has friends in this world, including Tom Hicks, the private-equity baron who helped W. make his fortune with the Texas Rangers.

[The_Dude 1,142]

Have many but here is one and I will post a few more.

Bill Clinton:

Hillary Clinton may not have won the Democratic presidential nomination, but the Clinton family shouldn’t be standing in any bread lines in the foreseeable future. Bill Clinton pulls in $250,000 to give a speech, which has been a fairly lucrative racket for him. A 2007 report in the British newspaper The Independent estimated Clinton’s earnings from speeches alone at somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million since he left office six years earlier. Clinton also sold his memoir My Life to Knopf for $15 million, and he serves as an advisor for the private equity firm Yucaipa Companies, a post that has pulled in at least $12.6 million. When the Clintons released their tax data in April as part of Hillary’s campaign disclosures, they showed income of $109 million since leaving the White House

No, I wanted you to post something that would substantiate your claim, not an article about Clinton income. They make a ton of money from speaking engagements, books, etc. All modern presidents have made a fortune after leaving office.

You seem to subconciously make these bombastic claims about the president, and even more mean spirited towards his wife with nothing to back up your statements. There are legitimate complaints about the president and his policies, and then there are your over the top fictional statements that you heard on some conservative talk show.

That leaves the time-honored and highly lucrative field of crony capitalism, or, as it's known more genteelly today: private equity. Out of public view, magnates routinely provide nice incomes to pols who can open doors and help raise funds. Former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow hang their hats at Cerberus Capital Management. Bill Clinton was dealt into a fund run by ally Ron Burkle. The Carlyle Group has been a bipartisan haven for Washington A-listers, including former President George H.W. Bush. Bush the Younger has friends in this world, including Tom Hicks, the private-equity baron who helped W. make his fortune with the Texas Rangers.

Cite your sources, I know you didn't write that.

[luckytxn 2,265]

The ex-presidents' club

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• Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger
• The Guardian, Wednesday 31 October 2001
• Article history

It is hard to imagine an address closer to the heart of American power. The offices of the Carlyle Group are on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, midway between the White House and the Capitol building, and within a stone's throw of the headquarters of the FBI and numerous government departments. The address reflects Carlyle's position at the very centre of the Washington establishment, but amid the frenetic politicking that has occupied the higher reaches of that world in recent weeks, few have paid it much attention. Elsewhere, few have even heard of it.This is exactly the way Carlyle likes it. For 14 years now, with almost no publicity, the company has been signing up an impressive list of former politicians - including the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker; John Major; one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi and several south-east Asian powerbrokers - and using their contacts and influence to promote the group. Among the companies Carlyle owns are those which make equipment, vehicles and munitions for the US military, and its celebrity employees have long served an ingenious dual purpose, helping encourage investments from the very wealthy while also smoothing the path for Carlyle's defence firms.

But since the start of the "war on terrorism", the firm - unofficially valued at $3.5bn - has taken on an added significance. Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president's father. And, until earlier this month, Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm's multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden.

The closest the Carlyle Group has previously come to public attention was last May, when a Seoul-based employee called Peter Chung was forced to resign from his £100,000-a-year job after sending an email to friends - subsequently forwarded to thousands of others - boasting of his plans to "#### every hot chick in Korea over the next two years". The more business-oriented activities of Carlyle's staff have been conducted much more quietly: since it was founded in 1987 by David Rubenstein, a policy assistant in Jimmy Carter's administration, and two lawyer friends, the firm has been dispatching an array of former world leaders on a series of strategic networking trips.

Last year, George Bush Sr and John Major travelled to Riyadh to talk with senior Saudi businessmen. In September 2000, Carlyle hired speakers including Colin Powell and AOL Time Warner chair Steve Case to address an extravagant party at Washington's Monarch Hotel. Months later, Major joined James Baker for a function at the Lanesborough Hotel in London, to explain the Florida election controversy to the wealthy attendees.

We can assume that Carlyle pays well. Neither Major's office nor Carlyle will confirm the details of his salary as European chairman - an appointment announced shortly before he left the House of Commons after the election - but we know, for the purposes of comparison, that he is paid £105,000 for 28 days' work a year for an unrelated non-executive directorship. Bush gives speeches for the company and is paid with stakes in the firm's investments, believed to be worth at least $80,000 per appearance. The benefits have attracted political stars from around the world: former Philippines president Fidel Ramos is an adviser, as is former Thai premier Anand Panyarachun - as well as former Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl, and Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, the US stock market regulator.

Carlyle partners, who include Baker and the firm's chairman, Frank Carlucci - Ronald Reagan's defence secretary and a former deputy director of the CIA - own stakes that would be worth $180m each if each partner owned an equal slice. As in many areas of its work, though, Carlyle is not obliged to reveal the details, and chooses not to.

Among the defence firms which benefit from Carlyle's success is United Defense, a Virginia-based contractor which makes vertical missile launch systems currently on board US Navy ships in the Arabian sea, as well as a range of other weapons delivery systems and combat vehicles. Carlyle's other holdings span an improbable range, taking in the French newspaper Le Figaro and the company which bottles Dr Pepper.

"They are big, and they are quiet," says David Mulholland, business editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. "But they're not easy to get information out of, [but] United Defense are going to do well [in the current conflict]." United also owns Bofors, a Swedish munitions manufacturer.

Carlyle has said that it does not lobby the federal government, thus avoiding a conflict of interest when, for example, Carlucci met Rumsfeld in February when several important defence contracts were under consideration. But critics see that as a matter of definition.

"It should be a deep cause for concern that a closely held company like Carlyle can simultaneously have directors and advisers that are doing business and making money and also advising the president of the United States," says Peter Eisner, managing director of the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit-making Washington think-tank. "The problem comes when private business and public policy blend together. What hat is former president Bush wearing when he tells Crown Prince Abdullah not to worry about US policy in the Middle East? What hat does he use when he deals with South Korea, and causes policy changes there? Or when James Baker helps argue the presidential election in the younger Bush's favour? It's a kitchen-cabinet situation, and the informality involved is precisely a mark of Carlyle's success."

The world of private equity is an inherently secretive one. Firms such as Carlyle make most of their money buying firms which are not publicly traded, overhauling them and selling them at a profit, so the process by which likely targets are evaluated is much more confidential than on the open market. "These firms certainly don't go out of their way to get into the headlines," says Steven Bell, chief economist at Deutsche Asset Management. "They'd rather make a splash in Institutional Pensions Week. The aim is to realise very high returns for your investors while exerting a high degree of control over the company. You don't want to get into the headlines when you force the management to fire a director."

The process has worked wonders at United, and this month the firm announced plans to go public, giving Carlyle the chance to cash in its investment.

But what sets Carlyle apart is the way it has exploited its political contacts. When Carlucci arrived there in 1989, he brought with him a phalanx of former subordinates from the CIA and the Pentagon, and an awareness of the scale of business a company like Carlyle could do in the corridors and steak-houses of Washington. In a decade and a half, the firm has been able to realise a 34% rate of return on its investments, and now claims to be the largest private equity firm in the world. Success brought more investors, including the international financier George Soros and, in 1995, the wealthy Saudi Binladin family, who insist they long ago severed all links with their notorious relative. The first president Bush is understood to have visited the Binladins in Saudi Arabia twice on the firm's behalf.

The Carlyle Group does not employ anyone at its Washington headquarters to deal with the press. Inquiries about the links with the Binladins (as most of the family choose to spell their name) are instead referred to someone outside the company, on condition he is referred to only as "a source familiar with the relationship". This source says: "I can confirm the fact that any Binladin Group investment in Carlyle has been terminated or is being terminated. It amounted to a $2m investment in the Carlyle II Fund, which was anyway a very small portion of a $1.3bn fund. In the scheme of the investments and in the scheme of the business of either party it was very small. We have to get this into perspective. But I think there was a sense that there were questions being raised and some controversy, and for such a small amount of money it was something that we wanted to put behind us. It was just a business decision."

But if the Binladins' connection to the Carlyle Group lasted no more than six years, the current President Bush's own links to the firm go far deeper. In 1990, he was appointed to the board of one of Carlyle's first purchases, an airline food business called Caterair, which they eventually sold at a loss. He left the board in 1992, later to become Governor of Texas. Shortly thereafter, he was responsible for appointing several members of the board which controlled the investment of Texas teachers' pension funds. A few years later, the board decided to invest $100m of public money in the Carlyle Group. The firm's magic touch was already bringing results. Today, it is proving as fruitful as ever.

[luckytxn 2,265]

Not even close to being done but will leave with one more. And yes all ex presidents make the big book deal and get paid huge sums of money for speaking engagements. Who hires them to make the speaking engagements? Well the corporations that received the big bucks thrown their way.

[luckytxn 2,265]

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From forgotten scandals to "," read the entire Daily Beast .

Saul Loeb, AFP / Getty Images

The soon-to-be ex-president is planning to “replenish the ol’ coffers” on the lecture circuit. Will anybody be willing to pay?

The lecture circuit is the fate that awaits all ex-presidents of the United States, and a little over a week from now, it will be President Bush's turn to take the gilded podium. According to one industry source, Bush is already in talks with Washington, D.C., lawyer Robert Barnett, who helped manage Bill Clinton's transition to the private sector and negotiated Laura Bush's recent book deal. (Barnett declined to comment for this article). Bush has wondered aloud about his after-dinner career. In an for Robert Draper's 2007 book Dead Certain, Bush said that he planned to “replenish the ol' coffers” on the lecture circuit, where he could make “ridiculous money.”

“My feeling is that for the first year there probably will be minimal interest in him,” said one agent who works in the public speaking business.

“I don’t know what my dad gets. But it’s more than fifty, seventy-five [thousand],” Bush told Draper.

But Bush, of course, is a unique ex-president. He’s far less popular than his dad, or Bill Clinton (who earned more than in speaking fees from 2001 to 2007) or Ronald Reagan (who once made for a single set of speeches in Japan). Throw in the toxic economic environment that emerged on his watch, and it’s worth asking just how much Bush can hope to earn with a speech.

“I imagine people will not pay the same dollars that a compelling speaker like Bill Clinton could command,” says speechwriter Mark Katz, a former Clinton speechwriter who heads a consulting company, the Soundbite Institute. “The George W. Bush years are going to be like our collective junior high school years, something we had to endure but engenders little or no nostalgia.”

Another industry veteran said that Bush will find it rough going at first, but that his value might increase over time, perhaps even approaching Clinton's standard domestic fees of $100,000 to $200,000 a speech if the economy bounces back. The assessment echoes similar valuations of Bush’s planned memoirs, which some think would be worth more if .

“My feeling is that for the first year there probably will be minimal interest in him,” said one agent who works in the public speaking business. “There have been other former presidents who've been unpopular leaving office, but nobody's ever been this unpopular. After a year, though, people forget and then he'll have a very lucrative career.”

Bush’s ex-presidential career may get off to a quicker start than that. According to David Wheeler, president of Chicago-based public relations firm Embark LLC, there's always a demand for members of the elite ex-presidents club, even the members who were all but run out of office.

“I'm certain there's going to be a lot of interest among different organizations around the country and around the world,” Wheeler said. “I don't necessarily agree with him and a lot of others don't I'm sure, but a lot of people didn't agree with Bill Clinton and he was obviously very popular on the lecture circuit.”

[The_Dude 1,142]

Actually, this explains a lot about your postings on here........ You have no idea whats going on do you?

[luckytxn 2,265]

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The fact that Bush isn’t a good speaker shouldn’t impact his value. “We'll probably be surprised at what he'll fetch simply because—and this is the dirty little secret of the lecture circuit—people want to be able to say 'I had dinner with President Bush last night,’ said Christopher Buckley, a former chief speechwriter for Vice President Bush and a veteran speaker himself. “It's about the photo-op beforehand, the meet and greet. They're not paying for the pearls of wisdom.”

Whether a world leader can command top dollar also depends on the global economy. Tony Blair (who also left office with dismal approval ratings) was paid $500,000 for a November 2007 trip to China. Yet top Clinton clients like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers are worse off than they were during the last three years, when the three companies shelled out a combined $1.5 million for Clinton’s speaking services. The nightmare scenario has Bush settling for small-time gatherings, like the orthodontist convention Richard Nixon listlessly addresses at the beginning ofFrost/Nixon.

Which isn’t to say that Bush couldn’t take unilateral action to drum up interest in his services. According to Katz, Bush's best bet to increase his value is to make headlines with a more candid assessment of his record than ever before.

“He's someone who seems to have a fixed perspective and what you want to hear from a former president is the acquired wisdom, the hard-earned wisdom that they acquired in the Oval Office,” Katz said. “We haven't heard many inklings of that so far and that’s what he needs to bring to a speech to really make an impact on the presidential circuit.”

Of course, if that doesn't work, the former president could always go back to the cagey tactics his PR team brought to the White House.

“If I were his booking agent I'd play up the fact he was a living U.S. president,” Katz said, “But I'd try not to be too specific about which one.”

[luckytxn 2,265]

Ok here are a few and I will google and post more later to show you sheep how things are done. (Doubt it will do any good though.)

I figure with the record amount of money that Obama the Socialist is throwing out there he should be able to command at least a Clinton fortune.