What Could This Guy Possibly Say Worth $600,000?

Source: American Thinker

Obama gets a $600,000 payday for a single speech in Colombia

May 29, 2019 | By Monica Showalter

President Obama is off to Colombia, a country he disdained mightily during his time as president, now to collect a $600,000 honorarium for a single speech to a marketing group called EXMA.

It's weird stuff, given that Obama was so contemptuous of Colombia over the first five years of his presidency. He denied the country a free trade pact while communist hellholes such as Nicaragua, and economic rivals such as Peru, got them easily. Colombia's trade minister at the time, Luis Plata, told me the arrangement like this was basically the same as sanctions. He did eventually sign on to free trade with Colombia, dropping the miasma of nonsense from U.S. unions that union organizers were being killed. When I went to Colombia myself in 2008, I learned from the Colombian union organizers themselves that workers were being killed, all right...because they favored free trade, and the AFL-CIO was hypocritically touting their deaths as reason not to allow it.

Obama eventually signed the trade measure, but not without a significant delay. U.S. unions groused quietly.

At this early date, it's unknown if the big payout was quid pro quo for services rendered, but the amount spent — and from a country where the per capita income is only $6,300 — sets off a red flag. Speeches for giant paydays are de rigueur for presidents coming to collect on favors given these days. President George Bush, Sr., who made a lucrative speech in Japan several years ago, pretty well put the game into the forefront. Obama has already collected gargantuan paydays for other speeches, so he's certainly not shunning the practice.

There are other things that don't quite ring right: EXMA, actually, is a pretty obscure group for this kind of cash to be coming from, and a look at its website suggests some generic themes of interest to marketers coming up at this conference — nothing very cutting-edge. Maybe that's fine. But then there's the detail that the conference has attracted only four sponsors, with battered CNN being the only well known one. Could the money for Obama be coming from somewhere else? One wonders.

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