Bill Clinton’s German Paymasters

Via Glenn Reynolds:

DUBIOUS BOOK ADVANCES FOR POLITICIANS. As far as I can recall, the only time this was regarded as an ethical problem was when Newt Gingrich was involved.

Ah, yes, do you remember the OUTRAGE about the advance on Newt Gingrich's book? So what if a Nazi publisher pays Bill about $30 million?

Apart from the sheer mass of the Clintons’ earnings, perhaps the most intriguing revelation contained in the release of the Clinton tax data last week was that Bill Clinton received a whopping $15 million advance in 2001 for what would become his autobiography, My Life.
...
Bill Clinton is reported to have earned $6.3 million from his 2007 volume Giving, which is likewise published by Knopf. This would bring Clinton’s total income from Bertelsmann to nearly $30 million. Just how or why Bertelsmann would pay Bill Clinton $6.3 million for Giving constitutes perhaps an even greater mystery than its $15 million advance for My Life. As of this writing, just over six months after its release, the book is languishing at #1,953 on the Amazon.com sales chart.

And the Bertelsmann ties to the Nazis?

Bertelsmann had massively profited from a close collaboration with the Nazi regime, serving notably as the principal supplier of so-called “front literature” for the Wehrmacht. Heinrich Mohn, it turned out, had himself been an honorary member of the SS — an “honor” obtained by virtue of his generous financial donations to the Nazis’ elite paramilitary force. More damningly still, as Fischler and co-author Franck Böckelmann discuss in their 2004 book-length exposé of Bertelsmann, the current family patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, helped to cover up his father’s ties to the Nazi regime from the Allied occupation authorities, thus permitting the company to resume publishing after the War. Reinhard Mohn’s role in this latter connection makes the company’s subsequent pleadings of ignorance about its Nazi-era history appear particularly disingenuous.

And now for Obama:

Incidentally, a large chunk of Barack Obama’s income — far outstripping his Senate salary — is also reported to come from a book deal. In late 2004, shortly before joining the Senate, he signed a deal for three books that promised him a healthy $1.9 million in advances. This included $850,000 for what would become The Audacity of Hope. Obama’s publisher is the Crown Publishing Group, yet another division of Random House. Or in other words, Bertelsmann.