At Elite Gala With Ex-Bush Official, Obama Implores Wall Street to Thank Him for Making Them so Much Money

GrayzoneProject — Barack Obama urged bankers to thank him for helping make them so much money during his tenure as president. He also boasted of turning the US into the world’s largest oil producer.

Obama made his appeals for elite adulation at a lavish gala hosted by former Secretary of State James Baker and surrounded by wealthy Republicans in tuxedos.

His comments came just a few hours after he met with former Republican President George H. W. Bush at his home in Texas.

If there was any single event that captured Obama’s centrist, neoliberal capitalist politics, it was the former Democratic president’s oligarch lovefest in Houston on November 27.

At this sumptuous black-tie gala, Obama talked the 1,100 elite guests into raising a staggering $5.4 million, in just one night (at an average donation of nearly $5,000), for Rice University’s centrist, pro-corporate Baker Institute for Public Policy, which is chaired by Baker.

Baker joked that Obama would be getting paid ten percent of the $5.4 million in donations. It is unclear how much Obama raked in for his speech, but Baker’s exaggeration might not have been far off.

After begging for the gratitude of the ultra-rich, Obama and Baker rattled off a series of platitudes about the importance of “bipartisanship.” The Baker Institute described the event as a discussion of “political civility.”

“Have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office?”

In one of the most eyebrow-raising moments of the night, Obama pushed back against Wall Street executives who have criticized him. He told the bankers who crashed the global economy in 2008, and who were then bailed out by the US government, that they should have been grateful, because they still made money.

“Sometimes you go to Wall Street, and folks will be grumbling about, ‘Anti-business…’” Obama said. “And I say, ‘Have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office, and where they are now?’ What what are you talking, what are you complaining about?”

“Just say thank you, please,” Obama told the bankers. “Because I want to raise your taxes a couple percent to make sure kids have a chance to go to school?”

Obama also spoke proudly in the discussion of having increased US fossil fuel production each year he was in office.

“I know we’re in oil country, and we need American energy,” Obama said. “And by the way, American energy production — you wouldn’t always know it — but it went up every year I was president. And that whole, ‘Suddenly America is the biggest oil producer’ — that was me, folks people.”

Lamenting decline of US hegemony

In their discussion, both Obama and Baker lamented the decline in US imperial power across the globe. They agreed that the world cannot run smoothly without the United States as an international hegemon.

“People ask me often, John, what surprised me most about the presidency,” Obama said. “It is the degree to which the United States under writes the international order. It is not always in the obvious ways, but if there’s a problem around the world, people do not call Moscow; they do not call Beijing; they call Washington. Even our adversaries expect us to solve problems and expect us to keep things running.”

“And when you start getting dysfunction in Washington,” Obama continued, “that doesn’t just weaken our influence it provides opportunities for disorder to start ramping up all around the world.”