German Publishing’s Man in the White House
Largely thanks to the Bertelsmann deal, Obama went from earning just over $85,000 in 2004 (see statement 3 in Barack and Michelle Obamas’ joint 2004 tax return here) to well over $1 million in 2005. His senate salary of $154,000 was dwarfed in that year by a reported $874,000 in income from Random House plus another $336,000 from literary agent Dystel & Goderich. (See statements 5 and 10 in the Obamas’ 2005 return here.) The Obamas’ most recent 2007 return lists a staggering $3,279,000 in income from Random House plus another nearly $816,000 from literary agent Dystel & Goderich, adding up to over $4 million in book-related revenues in all. (As so happens, Jane Dystel is Obama’s former literary agent, whom he is reported to have unceremoniously dumped before signing the Random House deal. That Obama should be receiving such large sums from Dystel & Goderich suggests some sort of complicated settlement between the three parties and this suggests in turn that the sums could well represent additional indirect payments to Obama from Random House. In any case, it is unusual for an agent to be paying a client rather than vice versa.) All told, from 2005 to 2007, Obama received some $4,556,636 in income from the Random House division of Bertelsmann and another $1,299,167 from Dystel & Goderich, adding up to nearly $6 million — presumably all of it related in one way or another to the Bertelsmann/Random House deal.
In the interest of transparency, Obama should surely now release the full details of his contractual relationship with the Bertelsmann Corporation. After all, if one is to judge by his recent tax returns, even as president, he will be paid far more by Bertelsmann than by the American taxpayers. For him to be taking advice from the Bertelsmann Foundation suggests conflict of interest on a magnitude that has perhaps never before been seen in the history of the American presidency. Although legally distinct, the foundation and the corporation are, in effect, just functionally distinct parts of a single entity. The Bertelsmann Foundation is in fact the majority shareholder in the corporation, presently holding roughly three-quarters of the company shares, to which, however, there correspond no voting rights. All the remaining shares are held by the Mohn family: family patriarch Reinhard, his wife Liz, and their children. The Mohns in turn control the foundation (to which Reinhard Mohn assigned a large part of the company capital in 1993), such that foundation and corporation are perfectly intertwined and both are, in effect, emanations of the Mohn family’s power.
It might be considered irrelevant today that Bertelsmann massively collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II. (For more on this, see “Bill Clinton’s German Paymasters.”) But it is surely not irrelevant that when German researcher Hersch Fischler first brought this fact to light, the family proposed to have the matter further investigated by one Dirk Bavendamm. Bavendamm is the family’s “in-house” historian, having written no fewer than three commissioned histories of the Mohn family and the Bertelsmann Corporation. As so happens, he is also an open revisionist, who calls World War II “Roosevelt’s War” and suggests — à la contemporary 9/11 conspiracy theorists writing on George W. Bush — that Franklin Delano Roosevelt intentionally permitted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to occur. Bavendamm has even written a book on the subject with the curious title Roosevelt’s War 1937-45 and the Puzzle of Pearl Harbor [Roosevelts Krieg 1937 -- 45 und das Rätsel von Pearl Harbor]. “With the events of December 7-8, 1941 [i.e., the attack on Pearl Harbor], Roosevelt … had achieved his most important aims,” Bavendamm has written in an essay on the subject [German link], “America’s entry into the War occurred with the enthusiastic consent of the overwhelming majority of the American people — … Roosevelt had finally convinced them that it was their sacred duty, guns in hand to defend freedom, democracy, and prosperity around the world.” (For more on Bavendamm, see Hersch Fischler and John Friedman’s “Bertelsmann’s Revisionist” here.)
The theory that the Pearl Harbor attack was a set-up is, incidentally, standard neo-Nazi fare. Interestingly enough, in his infamous “God Damn America!” sermon, Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright invokes precisely this theory as apparently well-established fact: “The government lied about Pearl Harbor too,” he says. “They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Governments lie.”
The Obama team and the Mohns would undoubtedly say that it is scandalous to suggest that the Mohns were using their millions to influence the American presidency or that Obama could possibly be corrupted. But as a reputed former professor of constitutional law, Obama will surely recall the famous words of James Madison in the Federalist Papers: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The president-elect’s most fervent followers may well be convinced that he is divine. But his financial relationship to Bertelsmann proves, after all, that he is only human.
Change we CAN believe in. To the left of corruptness. Yay.
Check your reporting: It is not unusual for agents to “pay authors” as you say. The royalties from the publisher go to the agent who takes his or her 10-15% and then pays the author. I suspect Jane Dystel’s money is for the first book, for which she still gets a percentage of royalties even if Obama fired her before his second book. Check your reporting.
The change is that the self-and-own-cuture-loathing mobbed-up Marxist murtadd Muslim manifestation of Arab-African evil, B Milhous bin B Hussayn bin Hussayn Muhummad Ubambi’s so obscenly profiting from his close companionship with RICO racketeers, ratbag terrorists and from every other imaginable and unimaginable enemy of America and of Individual Liberty is so open to inspection.
This elitist empty galabia has learned from America’s worst and doesn’t care what we see.
Brian Richard Allen
Los Angeles – CalifOBAMAcated 90028
Silly numbers are used in quoting book advances (I know from experience) A “million pound book deal” could mean “Here’s £5000 towards expenses, you get £80,000 for 100,000 sales £100,000 for 250,000 sales and then extra guaranteed sums for fiml rights, serialisations etc.
But who can blame Obama for milking his fame. If he is impeached for accepting illegal campaign contributions he is virtually unemployable. His CV barely qualifies him to stack shelves or flip burgers and what minimum wage employer would take on a man who spent most of his career as a civil rights agitator.
Surely you jest. He won’t even cough up his Birth Certificate, and having gotten one lawsuit to produce it dismissed, is currently fighting to get another lawsuit dosmissed.
Transparency? Are you kidding?
YOU OUGHT TO TRY FICTION
Egad. We’re finally starting to see the obots here crack up just like in this news report:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_win_causes_obsessive
Hurley, I think there are 12-step programs.
ooh la la, I smell a conspiration
I happened to watch Arte, cuz it’s one of the “cultural” medias left in the nowadays medias cafarnaum, didn’t see that they were “anti-americans”, OK Im not a TV watch, but bizarely our immigrants-pro Pals would rather say that Arte is sold to the Americano-sionism lobbie, cuz they can’t see their cause well spread
Truth is stranger than fiction.
This is just another area in which Obama and his leftist illuminati practices are questionable. There are going to be a lot of interesting things that come out of the woodwork over the next four years.
Help me understand this controversy. A very public and popular politician and his agent sign a book deal with Random House and (OMG!)they get paid for it. That payment is fully disclosed. Because Random House is owned by a German company, you suspect that this politician is now under the direct influence and control of this foreign corporation and its investors. I am all for full disclosure but this article is wingnuttery at its best.
Of course, these questions will never appear in any newspaper or TV channel.
“There are none so blind as they who will not see.”
–– Jonathan Swift, 1738, in his ‘Polite Conversation’
@Lee
The advance on his book isn’t exactly coming from an unbiased, non-political source, is it? Bertelsmann ain’t Random House.
So the puppet-master is himself a puppet? Who would have guessed!?
For those of you reading German here an article about The Bertelsmann Stiftung and its activities in Islamization of our society. Here you find an article from their site in English: “Muslims in Germany are very religious”. Watch the photo, please, to get an idea, how they are thinking about Muslim women: two joung ladies with headscarfs.
Obama should do what Bush did with the proceeds of “A Charge to Keep” while he was in the White House: donate them to charity.
I am curious. How many of Obama’s books sold and did that number justify his advances or the continuing payments of large sums?