04-28-2017, 01:36 PM
|
#4168 (permalink)
|
|
Toasted Poster
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: SoCal by way of Boston
Posts: 11,332
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anteater
This article.
|
https://www.vice.com/en_us
Quote:
Speaking for money is a very large industry. Many people participate in it—journalists, thinkers, college professors, former politicians, consultants of all stripes. Speaking agents routinely field requests from people who are staging events—for profit, for charity, for client entertainment, for education, for employee morale. Many of us, including me, participate in this economy. The fees range all over the place, but it’s extremely lucrative. It’s harder to make more money legally in an hour than you can giving a speech.
The more in-demand you are, the more someone values your presence, the more tickets a producer might be able to sell, the more clients that might be impressed, the greater the entertainment value, the higher the price your agent commands in the market. And, like sports and other entertainment industries, there is a superstar economy. If you’re a company with $50,000 to spend on a speech, you’ll hire Tom Friedman or Malcolm Gladwell. If you have $5,000 or $10,000, you’ll settle for a less luminous nonfiction writer who is an expert on economic and business topics. But there are only so many ex-presidents. So it’s no surprise that the price corporations will pay for Obama, a popular and highly successful ex-president and one of the best orators of our day, is high. There’s a reason Obama’s asking price is $400,000 and George W. Bush gets about $100,000. It’s also no surprise that a firm working in an industry in which conspicuous consumption is a measure of self-worth was the first out of the gate to book Obama.
|
Even CNN's Republican pundits Kayleigh McEnany and Paris Dennard agreed last night that this is much ado about nothing, and both would do it for a ton less money.
Grasping at straws 101.
__________________
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”
Last edited by Chula Vista; 04-28-2017 at 01:46 PM.
|
|
|