Newt Gingrich the $800,000 "Fellow"

Newt and wife Callista

After I left school, one of my first long-term jobs was as a laborer with an Irish contractor in England.  We laid main sewer lines through the English countryside. It was hard work.  He paid us three pounds ten shillings a day six, sometimes seven days a week.  It was not Union and we worked in trenches sometimes 10 feet deep, no shoring.

After I moved to London I worked as a laborer for a construction company that provided maintenance and light construction at Harrow school, the school that is Eton’s competitor and where the future rulers of the world go before they go to one of their universities like Oxford or Cambridge. I used to work on the roofs there and met all these rich people’s kids like the Duke of Westminster’s offspring who was playing rackets one day.  The children of Arab rulers also went there.

I’m older and retired now and am grateful I came to the US and fell in to a good public sector Union job that could provide me with a retirement I can live on (something we should all have) but reading a piece in the Wall Street Journal today made me think about a job I wouldn’t mind having and might come out of retirement if I can figure out how to get it.

The job is this “Fellow” position that so many notable people have. The WSJ reports that Newt Gingrich (his mother was an avid naturalist) was paid $840,000 for seven years working for that biggest and most successful of gangs in US society, the US Chamber of Commerce.  Gingrich “served as a ‘fellow’ along with about a dozen other former government officials” the Journal claims.  Let me read on.  Perhaps the Journal explains in more detail what the requirements for this “fellow” position are. Hmm! Here it is, “Mr Gingrich’s assignment with the Chamber of Commerce” the paper adds, “was to attend dinner or lunch with Chamber officials every few months and serve as a sounding board on various economic issues…”

Where do we apply for this “fellow” position?  I see that there are various “fellow” positions in all sorts of places, universities, corporations, think tanks and fish tanks.  Some even pay more than the $120,000 a year Newt got for seven years of lunches and dinners.

Another little gem of information has me a bit puzzled.  Newtie received $1.6 million working for Freddie Mac, the nationalized mortgage giant that the private sector detest as a bastion of communism.  But as Newt’s spokesperson points out, Newt is “the best anti-establishment anti-Washington candidate”. Because working in Washington has put him “in the best position to actually break up the status quo….He understands why the system is broken and how it can be fixed.”

To be a “fellow” with the accompanying pay and benefits you have to have integrity I can see.  Newt’s campaign spokespersons say that in the case of Freddie Mac, Newt didn’t “lobby” for the organization, he “was paid (the $1.6 million) to think about Freddie’s problems and provide advice.”

It seems there have been other folks like the esteemed Bill Daley Obama’s chief of staff that have been paid to “think” about things and that a dozen former officials besides Newt and from both Wall Street Parties, who have served as “fellows”  at the Cof C the Journal says.

I am thinking of sending the the following letter to the Wall Street Journal with copies to the members of Congress.

Dear editor of the Wall Street Journal,

I am a retired public sector worker and would like to know how I can become a “fellow”.  Also, can women become fellows as I have some women friends who like the pay and benefits?  Would you please publish the recruiting office for becoming a fellow and how many vacancies there are. I have  eaten a lot of luches and dinners in my life and I do read the Wall Street Journal so I think I have the qualifications to be a fellow.

Sincerely etc. etc.