Obama’s $400,000 Wall Street Speech By Zach Carter
Former President Barack
Obama will receive $400,000 to speak at a health care conference
organized by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald. It should not be a
surprise. This unseemly and unnecessary cash-in fits a pattern of bad behavior
involving the financial sector, one that spans Obama’s entire presidency. That
governing failure convinced millions of his onetime supporters that the
president and his party were not, in fact, playing for their team, and helped
pave the way for President Donald
Trump. Obama’s Wall Street payday will confirm for many what they have long
suspected: that the Democratic
Party is managed by out-of-touch elites who do not understand or care
about the concerns of ordinary Americans. It’s hard to fault those who come to
this conclusion.
Obama refused to
prosecute the rampant fraud behind the 2008 Wall Street collapse, despite
inking multibillion-dollar settlement after multibillion-dollar settlement with
major firms over misconduct ranging from foreclosure fraud to rigging energy
markets to tax evasion. In some cases, big banks even pleaded guilty to
felonies, but Obama’s Justice Department allowed actual human bankers to ride
into the sunset. Early in his presidency, Obama vowed to spend up to $100
billion to help struggling families avert foreclosure. Instead, the
administration converted the relief plan into a slush fund for big banks, as
top traders at bailed-out firms were allowed to collect six-figure bonuses on
the taxpayers’ dime.
Nothing forced Obama
to govern this way. Had he truly believed that prosecuting bankers for obvious
criminal fraud would cause an economic collapse, Obama would, presumably, have
tried to radically reshape the financial sector. He did not. His
administration’s finance-friendly policies damaged the economic recovery and
generated a new cohort of Trump voters. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times has demonstrated, nearly one-fourth of Obama’s white
working-class supporters in 2012 flipped for Trump in 2016. Racism and
misogyny were surely part of Trump’s appeal, but not all two-time Obama voters
turned to Trump out of bigotry alone.
It’s easier for
Democrats to denounce Trump supporters as morally unworthy individuals than to
consider whether governing failures in the Obama era contributed to Trump’s
popularity.. read more:
