Insiders Don’t Criticize Other Insiders

Since leaving office President Obama has drawn widespread criticism for accepting a $400,000 speaking fee from the Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, including from Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Only a few months out of office, the move has been viewed as emblematic of the cozy relationship between the financial sector and political elites.

But as the President’s critics have voiced outrage over the decision many have been reluctant to criticize the record-setting $65 million book deal that Barack and Michelle Obama landed jointly this February with Penguin Random House (PRH)…

While the Obamas’ deal is unique for the amount of money involved, outsized book contracts between politicians and industries they’ve benefitted has precedent. In a recent report issued by the Roosevelt Institute, the study’s authors, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, argue that the mainstream approach to money in politics fails to recognize major sources of political spending. Among the least appreciated avenues for political money, they argue, are payments to political figures in the form of director’s fees, speaking fees, and book contracts.

From the 2017 Naked Capitalism piece: The “Market Forces” Behind the Obamas’ Record-Setting Book Deal

Back in 2009, when the Obama administration was busy ensuring the nation’s financiers would become larger, more powerful and never serve a day in jail despite their historic crime spree, Larry Summers had dinner with Elizabeth Warren. During the course of that meal, he instructed her about how power really functions in the U.S.:

A telling anecdote involves a dinner that Ms. Warren had with Lawrence H. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. The dinner took place in the spring of 2009, after the oversight panel had produced its third report, concluding that American taxpayers were at far greater risk to losses in TARP than the Treasury had let on.

After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.

“I had been warned,” Ms. Warren concluded.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly in the context of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. Whether or not he was linked to one or more intelligence agencies, Epstein was undeniably the consummate insider. He was involved in close relationships with a vast cross-section of “elite” American society that crossed all political lines, yet nobody ever called him out for what his real job apparently was — the sexual abuse and trafficking of children. Now that he’s dead though, all these respectable denizens of high society; from former presidents, to billionaires and British royals, are in complete shock. Nobody knew!

While some of his more casual acquaintances may have been entirely ignorant, nobody has convinced me that those closest to Epstein over the years didn’t have at least some understanding of what was going on. The U.S. government knew what he was up to when he was given his ridiculous and unprecedented sweetheart deal in 2008. They knew, but it didn’t matter. Insiders protect other insiders. 

Many of the elites surrounding Epstein may not have known the entire picture, but they must have known something was off. Nevertheless, they continued to party with the guy and protect him. For some, silence on Epstein may have been driven by fear, while others may have wanted to continue to participate in his “services,” but perhaps something else was also going on. Epstein was an insider, and insiders don’t criticize other insiders. Larry Summers, another consummate insider, said so himself.

If this is in fact the code Larry Summers and other insiders live by, then it’s not a stretch to think these people would simply never criticize one of their own. This twisted mentality is a big part of why super predators like Epstein can spend their entire lives abusing children and never face justice. I guess this is how sociopaths operate.

It’s also worth noting that Larry Summers gave that insider speech to Elizabeth Warren years before she was elected to the U.S. Senate. He was warning her that unless she stopped causing problems and agreed to play the game by this gangster code, she would never get anywhere and no one would ever listen to her.

Additionally, Summers can’t pretend his commentary to Warren was some off the cuff statement he later regretted. He said almost the exact same thing to former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis in the midst of that country’s crisis.

Via The Guardian:

Yet Varoufakis’s account of the crisis that has scarred Greece between 2010 and today also stands in a category of its own: it is the inside story of high politics told by an outsider. Varoufakis began on the outside – both of elite politics and the Greek far left – swerved to the inside, and then abruptly abandoned it, after he was sacked by his former ally, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, in July 2015. He dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.

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8 thoughts on “Insiders Don’t Criticize Other Insiders”

  1. I’ve read most of the stuff Varoufakis has written. It’s eye opening, particularly “Adults in the Room”. There definitely are weird gatekeeper types like Larry Summers lurking around out there. We can only hope their grip is weakening.

    Obama is following the trend established by Clinton in the US and Blair in the UK, to strike it rich after serving elites in office. In typical American fashion, when people started criticizing Clinton for this in the 2000s, they ruined it by holding W Bush aloft as comparatively virtuous. He’s already rich they said, therefore he would never sell anyone out. He’s a good Christian man!

    People are definitely waking up to the fact that something is very wrong with our society, but they’re still confused about what happened. They’re easily distracted, particularly by the red/blue game. Epstein and Summers are big clues about overarching corruption, but they can’t seem to stay in public consciousness very long. Even today most people probably remember Summers as a minor character in “The Social Network”, if they know who he is at all.

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  2. BTW, does Bernie Sanders ever criticize “russiagate” hoaxers all while getting himself accusations of not fighting evil Russians enough?

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  3. This was a good post by M.K. on the real power structure and how it works for the power brokers and their hirelings. I’ll add to this by pointing out that the pyramid cap of this control system directly own and control the financial structure which is the backbone of this control system. The ‘cap’ has unlimited access to any amount of money for whatever purposes they need to finance or they can reverse the process and collapse any sector of, or the entire human economy by next Tuesday if it so pleases them.. They can levitate the stock market, specific asset prices or pay chicken fed to ex-presidents for services rendered via book deals.Of course almost all elected to office were selected by talent scouts operating within the ‘democratic system’. As far as I can see the only way for the working classes, from that waitress we like to the accomplished brain surgeon to have any say that has any meaning is to change how we operate a democracy to something in the people’s favor.

    Brandon Smith of the Alt Market web site proposed that office holders should be selected like jury members. Citizens would then be more inclined to be informed. Even if one bunch were to prove somewhat incompetent this would still be a great improvement over an entrenched psychopathic oligarchy – their morally degenerate sycophant politicians, backed by the monsters running violence dealing government agencies with their supporting repeating stations and the soulless NPCs in the MSM.

    What will bring the people to their feet? When their daughters and sons are not just drafted through constructed economic circumstances as killers for the oligarchy but also similarly drafted to be the sex slaves of the oligarchy’s minions or as an industry in itself? ,,,,,Apparently not!

    In the cliches with the current operating system always be prepared to protect you and yours to the Nth degree.

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  4. “People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

    Then there is the Hidden Hand:

    “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

    – Woodrow Wilson, (The New Freedom)

    The 4 Horsemen

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OiZRr9V7Z4

    Larry Summers has spent his entire adult life as one of the 4 Horsemen’s shineboy. The Grifter from Hawaii named Barry was more than happy to Step’n Fetch it.

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