More DNC leaks, with some interesting reading about how large donations to the DNC correlate with cushy diplomatic positions.
It's nice to see that to be ambassador to the UK you have to donate more than 3x the amount you do to be ambassador to the EU. Though to be fair, perhaps it's actually Sweden who are the ones driving that listed price up.
Probably because London is a much more interesting city than Brussels. It's not like ambassadors to first-world countries these days are anything more than symbolic anyway.
I was quite blessed to be able to talk to a SA ambassador once, and he said part of the issue with multilateralism was that things like the European Union were killing it
Thus if he wanted to make a deal with a Nordic country, he wouldn't have to bother going to their foreign office, he could just go to London and they would force the Nordic country through the EU to do whatever they wanted
Thus, rather naturally, countries that surrender their self-determination to the EU have vestigial ambassadors who are nothing more than symbolic dignitaries, whilst real countries actually warrant a higher bribe price for placement (also I reckon it's to do with returns in shekels). London, New York and Tokyo, anything tied to those cities get higher prices :[
Also dat dank Sweden pricing
On the topic of selling US public office posts, have this blast from the past from the Guardian
Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.
The practice is hardly a new feature of US politics, but career diplomats in Washington are increasingly alarmed at how it has grown. One former ambassador described it as the selling of public office.
On Tuesday, Obama's chief money-raiser Matthew Barzun became the latest major donor to be nominated as an ambassador, when the White House put him forward as the next representative to the Court of St James's, a sought-after posting whose plush residence comes with a garden second only in size to that of Buckingham Palace.
As campaign finance chairman, Barzun helped raise $700m to fund President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. More than $2.3m of this was raised personally by Barzun, pictured, according to party records leaked to the New York Times, even though he had only just finished a posting as ambassador to Sweden after contributing to Obama's first campaign.
State Department veterans are increasingly concerned about the size of donations raised by political supporters who go on to take up top foreign postings. Thomas Pickering, who recently led the investigation into lethal attacks on the US embassy in Libya and represented the US at the United Nations, claimed the practice had become nothing more than "simony" – the selling of public office.
"All these people want to go to places where the lifestyle issues [are pleasant], and to some extent that produces this notion that life in these western European embassies is like Perle Mesta," he told the Guardian, referring to the "hostess with the mostest" who was ambassador to Luxembourg between 1949 and 1953 and who was known for her lavish parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/10/obama-donors-top-embassy-jobs-rewards
Ahahahahaha they literally just want to sell cushy posts in London, my sides are split in furor of keks
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Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1394532 times)