downwithtyrrany | [Update: It's been suggested in comments (initially here)
that Clinton's "we" in her answer to Blankfein's question was a
reference to China's policy, not our own. I'm doubtful that's true, but
it's an interpretation worth considering. Even so, the U.S. and Chinese
policies toward the two Koreas are certainly aligned, and, as Clinton
says, "for the obvious economic and political reasons." (That argument
was also expressed in comments here.) I therefore think the thrust of the piece below is valid under either interpretation of Clinton's use of "we." –GP]
"We don't want a unified Korean peninsula ... We [also] don't want
the North Koreans to cause more trouble than the system can absorb."
Our policy toward North Korea is not what most people think it is. We
don't want the North Koreans to go away. In fact, we like them doing
what they're doing; we just want less of it than they've been doing
lately. If this sounds confusing, it's because this policy is unlike
what the public has been led to assume. Thanks to something uncovered by
WikiLeaks, the American public has a chance to be unconfused about
what's really going on with respect to our policies in Korea.
This piece isn't intended to criticize that policy; it may be an excellent one. I just want to help us understand it better.
Our source for the U.S. government's actual Korean policy — going back
decades really — is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She
resigned that position in February 2013,
and on June 4, 2013 she gave a speech at Goldman Sachs with Lloyd
Blankfein present (perhaps on stage with her) in which she discussed in
what sounds like a very frank manner, among many other things, the U.S.
policy toward the two Korea and the relationship of that policy to
China.
That speech and two others were sent by Tony Carrk
of the Clinton campaign to a number of others in the campaign,
including John Podesta. WikiLeaks subsequently released that email as
part of its release of other Podesta emails (source email with
attachments here).
In that speech, Clinton spoke confidentially and, I believe, honestly.
What she said in that speech, I take her as meaning truthfully. There's
certainly no reason for her to lie to her peers, and in some cases her
betters, at Goldman Sachs. The entire speech reads like elites talking
with elites in a space reserved just for them.
kunstler | If you thought banking in our time was a miserable racket — which it
is, of course, and by “racket” I mean a criminal enterprise — then
so-called health care has it beat by a country mile, with an added layer
of sadism and cruelty built into its operations. Lots of people
willingly sign onto mortgages and car loans they wouldn’t qualify for in
an ethically sound society, but the interest rates and payments are
generally spelled out on paper. They know what they’re signing on for,
even if the contract is reckless and stupid on the parts of both
borrower and lender. Pension funds and insurance companies foolishly
bought bundled mortgage bonds of this crap concocted in the housing
bubble. They did it out of greed and desperation, but a little due
diligence would have clued them into the fraud being served up by the
likes of Goldman Sachs.
Medicine is utterly opaque cost-wise, and that is the heart of the
issue. Nobody in the system will say what anything costs and nobody
wants to because it would break the spell that they work in an honest,
legit business. There is no rational scheme for the cost of any service
from one “provider” to the next or even one patient to the next. Anyway,
the costs are obscenely inflated and concealed in so many deliberately
deceptive coding schemes that even actuaries and professors of economics
are confounded by their bills. The services are provided when the
customer is under the utmost duress, often life-threatening, and the
outcome even in a successful recovery from illness is financial ruin
that leaves a lot of people better off dead.
It is a hostage racket, in plain English, a disgrace to the
profession that has adopted it, and an insult to the nation. All the
idiotic negotiations in congress around the role of insurance companies
are a grand dodge to avoid acknowledging the essential racketeering of
the “providers” — doctors and hospitals. We are never going to reform it
in its current incarnation. For all his personality deformities,
President Trump is right in saying that ObamaCare is going to implode.
It is only a carbuncle on the gangrenous body of the US medical
establishment. The whole system will go down with it.
The New York Times departed from its usual obsessions with
Russian turpitude and transgender life last week to publish a valuable
briefing on this aspect of the health care racket: Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much
by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Much of this covers ground exposed in the now
famous March 4, 2013 Time Magazine cover story (it took up the whole
issue): Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,
by Steven Brill. The American public and its government have been
adequately informed about the gross and lawless chiseling rampant in
every quarter of medicine. The system is one of engineered criminality.
It is inflicting ruin on millions. It is really a wonder that the public
has not stormed the hospitals with pitchforks and flaming brands to
string up that gang in the parking lots high above their Beemers and
Lexuses.
unz | In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre
request for young people (especially young women) to become politically
active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange is
that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to
discourage millennials from running. There are few young candidates –
except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running as Blue Dog
Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade –
unless it confines itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual
content. For Hillary’s DNC coterie the problem with millennials is that
they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is
exemplary. The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party’s ranks, the blame
game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars
running up to the election. But when Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and
other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help.
Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the
lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and
identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most
voters’ minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her the $1 billion spent on data
polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast
exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary
losing. Did the Democratic leadership really prefer to lose with Hillary
than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn’t learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis
showed that FBI director Comey’s reports “rais[ing] doubts that were
groundless, baseless,” stopped her momentum. This was on a par with the New York Times
analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability of winning
last Tuesday. She still hasn’t admitted that here analysis was
inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor and
progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be
captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup
gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016
election sounded the death knell for identity politics. Its aim was to
persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms,
but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups
first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This
strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed.
NYTimes | Mr. Bannon is in some ways a perplexing figure: a far-right ideologue who made his millions investing in “Seinfeld”; a former Goldman Sachs banker who has reportedly called himself a “Leninist” with a goal “to destroy the state” and “bring everything crashing down.” He has also called progressive women “a bunch of dykes” and, in a 2014 email to one of his editors, wrote
of the Republican leadership, “Let the grassroots turn on the hate
because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty.”
A
few conservatives have spoken out against Mr. Bannon. Ben Shapiro, a
former Breitbart News editor who resigned in protest last spring, said Mr. Bannon was a “vindictive, nasty figure.” Glenn Beck called him a “nightmare” and a “terrifying man.”
But most Republican officeholders have so far remained silent. Some have dismissed fears
about Mr. Bannon. Other Republicans have praised him, like Reince
Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, whom Mr.
Trump announced as his chief of staff on Sunday, and who said
Mr. Bannon could not be such a bad guy because he served in the Navy
and went to Harvard Business School. Some saw the pick of Mr. Priebus as
evidence that Mr. Trump would not be leaning so much on Mr. Bannon. But
don’t be fooled by Mr. Priebus’s elevated title; in the press release
announcing both hires, Mr. Bannon’s name appeared above Mr. Priebus’s. In a little more than two months Mr. Bannon, and his toxic ideology, will be sitting down the hall from the Oval Office.
bostonglobe | “I’m ready,” Warren said in an interview with The Globe. “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”
She added: “I’m supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a fighter, a fighter with guts.”
Asked whether Clinton should release the transcripts of paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs, Warren said: “That’s for her to decide — there will be a whole lot of issues to talk about over the next several months.”
Sanders frequently calls on Clinton to release them.
She praised Sanders, saying that he has run an “incredible campaign.”
Warren, a champion of the left who passed up a presidential bid of her own, despite the urging of legions of followers, is uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the establishment candidacy of Clinton and Sanders supporters, who are being forced to come to terms with the Vermont senator’s loss.
Democrats view the freshman Massachusetts senator as a path of sorts to party unity, which helps explain an upsurge in buzz about Warren as a potential vice presidential pick. Senators and top staff say talking up Warren for vice president is a way to show Sanders and his millions of followers that the party establishment heard them loud and clear.
Warren and Clinton haven’t always been close — Warren called out Clinton in her book “The Two Income Trap” for switching her vote on legislation to overhaul bankruptcy laws when Clinton was in the Senate.
“Hillary Clinton could not afford such a principled position. Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn’t coming from families in financial trouble,” Warren wrote in a biting critique of the episode in which Clinton sided with the financial services sector and helped pass an industry-friendly overhaul of the bankruptcy laws.
Warren did not directly address the issue when asked about it Thursday. Instead, Warren told the Globe, “She’s someone who has had to take on a lot, and she’s going to fight back.”
theintercept |When Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law sought funding for his new
hedge fund in 2011, he found financial backing from one of the biggest
names on Wall Street: Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.
The fund, called Eaglevale Partners, was founded by Chelsea Clinton’s
husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and two of his partners. Blankfein not only
personally invested in the fund, but allowed his association with it to
be used in the fund’s marketing.
The investment did not turn out to be a savvy business decision.
Earlier this month, Mezvinsky was forced to shutter one of the
investment vehicles he launched under Eaglevale, called Eaglevale
Hellenic Opportunity, after losing 90 percent of its money betting on the Greek recovery. The flagship Eaglevale fund has also lost money, according to the New York Times.
There has been minimal reporting on the Blankfein investment in
Eaglevale Partners, which is a private fund that faces few disclosure
requirements. At a campaign rally in downtown San Francisco on Thursday,
I attempted to ask Hillary Clinton if she knew the amount that
Blankfein invested in her son-in-law’s fund.
NYPost | "Follow the money.” That telling phrase, which has come to summarize
the Watergate scandal, has been a part of the lexicon since 1976. It’s
shorthand for political corruption: At what point do “contributions”
become bribes, “constituent services” turn into quid pro quos and
“charities” become slush funds?
Ronald Reagan was severely criticized in 1989 when, after he left
office, he was paid $2 million for a couple of speeches in Japan. “The
founding fathers would have been stunned that an occupant of the highest
office in this land turned it into bucks,” sniffed a Columbia
professor.
So what would Washington and Jefferson make of Hillary Rodham
Clinton? Mandatory financial disclosures released this month show that,
in just the two years from April 2013 to March 2015, the former first
lady, senator and secretary of state collected $21,667,000 in “speaking
fees,” not to mention the cool $5 mil she corralled as an advance for
her 2014 flop book, “Hard Choices.”
Throw in the additional $26,630,000 her ex-president husband hoovered
up in personal-appearance “honoraria,” and the nation can breathe a
collective sigh of relief that the former first couple — who, according
to Hillary, were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001
with some of the furniture in tow — can finally make ends meet.
No wonder Donald Trump calls her “crooked Hillary.”
A look at Mrs. Clinton’s speaking venues and the whopping sums she’s
received since she left State gives us an indication who’s desperate for
a place at the trough — and whom another Clinton administration might
favor.
First off, there’s Wall Street and the financial-services industry.
Democratic champions of the Little Guy are always in bed with the Street
— they don’t call Barack Obama “President Goldman Sachs” for nothing,
but Mrs. Clinton has room for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and their
10 best friends. Multiple trips to Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley.
Deutsche Bank. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. UBS Wealth Management.
As the character of Che Guevara sings in “Evita”: “And the money kept
rolling in.” And all at the bargain price of $225,000 a pop . . . to
say what? We don’t know, because Hillary won’t release the transcripts.
theintercept | So if you’re a plutocrat with ownership of the nation’s largest and
most influential media outlets, what do you do? You dispense with
democracy altogether – after all, it keeps empowering candidates and
policies you dislike – by exploiting your media outlets to incite unrest
and then install a candidate who could never get elected on his own,
yet will faithfully serve your political agenda and ideology.
That’s exactly what Brazil is going to do today. The Brazilian Senate
will vote later today to agree to a trial on the lower House’s
impeachment charges, which will automatically result in Dilma’s
suspension from the presidency pending the end of the trial.
Her successor will be Vice President Michel Temer of the PMDB party
(pictured, above). So unlike impeachment in most other countries with a
presidential system, impeachment here will empower a person from a
different party than that of the elected President. In this particular
case, the person to be installed is awash in corruption: accused by
informants of involvement in an illegal ethanol-purchasing scheme, he
was just found guilty of, and fined for, election spending violations
and faces an 8-year-ban on running for any office. He’s deeply unpopular: only 2% would support him for President and almost 60% want him impeached (the
same number that favors Dilma’s impeachment). But he will faithfully
serve the interests of Brazil’s richest: he’s planning to appoint Goldman, Sachs and IMF officials to run the economy and otherwise install a totally unrepresentative, neoliberal team (composed in part of the same party – PSDB – that has lost 4 straight elections to the PT).
None of this is a defense of PT. That party – as even Lula acknowledged to me
in my interview of him – is filled with serious corruption. Dilma, in
many critical ways, has been a failed president, and is deeply
unpopular. They have often aligned with and served the country’s elite at the expense of their base of poor supporters. The country is suffering economically and in almost every other way.
But the solution to that is to defeat them at the ballot box, not
simply remove them and replace them with someone more suitable to the
nation’s richest. Whatever damage PT is doing to Brazil, the plutocrats
and their journalist-propagandists and the band of thieves in Brasilia
engineering this travesty are far more dangerous. They are literally
dismantling – crushing – democracy in the world’s fifth-largest country.
Even The Economist – which is hostile to even the most moderate left-wing parties, hates PT and wants Dilma to resign – has denounced impeachment as “a pretext for ousting an unpopular president” and just two weeks ago warned
that “what is alarming is that those who are working for her removal
are in many ways worse.” Before he became an active plotter in his own
empowerment, Temer himself said last
year that “impeachment is unthinkable, would create an institutional
crisis. There is no judicial or political basis for it.”
theintercept |FOR YEARS, THE Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United was
depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the
core argument embraced by the Court’s conservatives to justify their
ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary
Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the
huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying,
frequently invoke that very same reasoning.
The crux of the Citizens United ruling was that a legal ban
on independent corporate campaign expenditures constituted a limit on
political speech without sufficient justification, and thus violated the
First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. A primary argument of the
Obama Justice Department and Democrats generally in order to uphold that
campaign finance law was that corporate expenditures are so corrupting
of the political process that limits are justified even if they
infringe free speech. In rejecting that view, this was the key argument
of Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-judge conservative
majority (emphasis added):
For the reasons explained above, we now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
Does that sound familiar? It should. That key argument of the right-wing justices in Citizens United
has now become the key argument of the Clinton campaign and its media
supporters to justify her personal and political receipt of millions
upon millions of dollars in corporate money: “Expenditures, including
those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the
appearance of corruption” — at least when the candidate in question is
Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, the Clinton argument actually goes well beyond the Court’s conservatives: In Citizens United, the right-wing justices merely denied the corrupting effect of independent
expenditures (i.e., ones not coordinated with the campaign). But
Clinton supporters in 2016 are denying the corrupting effect of direct campaign donations by large banks and corporations and, even worse, huge speaking fees paid to an individual politician shortly before and after that person holds massive political power.
Another critical aspect of the right-wing majority argument in Citizens United was
that actual corruption requires proof of a “quid pro quo” arrangement:
meaning that the politician is paid to vote a certain way (which is,
basically, bribery). Prior precedent, said the Citizens United majority, “was limited to quid pro quocorruption,” quoting a prior case as holding that “the hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.”
Does that sound familiar? It should. That, too, has become a core Clinton-supporting argument: Look, if you can’t prove that Hillary changed her vote in exchange for Goldman Sachs speaking fees or JPMorgan Chase donations (and just by the way, Elizabeth Warren believes she can prove that),then you can’t prove that these donations are corrupting. After all, argue Clinton supporters (echoing the Citizens United majority), “the hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.”
libertyblitzkrieg |The increased use of eminent domain to transfer property
to powerful political interests, the ramifications of the wars on
terrorism and drugs, and the violation of the property rights of
bondholders in the auto-bailout case have weakened the tradition of
strong adherence to the rule of law in United States. We believe these
factors have contributed to the sharp decline in the rating for the
legal-system area.
To a large degree, the United States has experienced a
significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated,
politicized, and heavily policed state.
The American public should be out in the streets by the hundreds of
thousands demanding the resignation of President Barack Obama in
response to the total sham settlement just announced by the U.S.
government with Goldman Sachs. This farce should be seen for what it
really is; a gigantic establishment middle finger waving
contemptuously in the face of the reliably neutered and long-suffering
American public.
A criminal financial organization that engaged in billions upon
billions in fraud against the “muppet” public is once again getting off
with barely a slap on the wrist and nobody’s going to do a thing about
it. As I’ve said for years and years, until the public says enough is
enough nothing is going to change. I suppose that’s simply not going to
happen until the next economic downturn, which could emerge in earnest
any day now.
David Dayan knows as much about this issue as anyone, and he just
penned a scathing assessment of this perversion of justice at the New Republic. Here are a few excerpts from his piece, Why the Goldman Sachs Settlement Is a $5 Billion Sham:
williamblum | If the American presidential election winds up with Hillary Clinton
vs. Donald Trump, and my passport is confiscated, and I’m somehow FORCED
to choose one or the other, or I’m PAID to do so, paid well … I would
vote for Trump.
My main concern is foreign policy. American foreign policy is the
greatest threat to world peace, prosperity, and the environment. And
when it comes to foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is an unholy disaster.
From Iraq and Syria to Libya and Honduras the world is a much worse
place because of her; so much so that I’d call her a war criminal who
should be prosecuted. And not much better can be expected on domestic
issues from this woman who was paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs – one of
the most reactionary, anti-social corporations in this sad world – for
four speeches and even more than that in political donations in recent
years. Add to that Hillary’s willingness to serve for six years on the
board of Walmart while her husband was governor of Arkansas. Can we
expect to change corporate behavior by taking their money?
The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial the day after the
multiple primary elections of March 1 which began: “Donald Trump is not
fit to be president of the United States,” and then declared: “The
reality is that Trump has no experience whatsoever in government.”
When I need to have my car fixed I look for a mechanic with
experience with my type of auto. When I have a medical problem I prefer a
doctor who specializes in the part of my body that’s ill. But when it
comes to politicians, experience means nothing. The only thing that
counts is the person’s ideology. Who would you sooner vote for, a person
with 30 years in Congress who doesn’t share your political and social
views at all, is even hostile to them, or someone who has never held
public office before but is an ideological comrade on every important
issue? Clinton’s 12 years in high government positions carries no weight
with me.
The Times continued about Trump: “He has shamefully little knowledge of the issues facing the country and the world.”
Again, knowledge is trumped (no pun intended) by ideology. As
Secretary of State (January 2009-February 2013), with great access to
knowledge, Clinton played a key role in the 2011 destruction of Libya’s
modern and secular welfare state, sending it crashing in utter chaos
into a failed state, leading to the widespread dispersal throughout
North African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of
weaponry that Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya is
now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had
been a leading foe of terrorists.
What good did Secretary of State Clinton’s knowledge do? It was
enough for her to know that Gaddafi’s Libya, for several reasons, would
never be a properly obedient client state of Washington. Thus it was
that the United States, along with NATO, bombed the people of Libya
almost daily for more than six months, giving as an excuse that Gaddafi
was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so
the United States was thus saving the people of that city from a
massacre. The American people and the American media of course swallowed
this story, though no convincing evidence of the alleged impending
massacre has ever been presented. (The nearest thing to an official US
government account of the matter – a Congressional Research Service
report on events in Libya for the period – makes no mention at all of
the threatened massacre.)
The Western intervention in Libya was one that the New York Times
said Clinton had “championed”, convincing Obama in “what was arguably
her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state.”
All the knowledge she was privy to did not keep her from this
disastrous mistake in Libya. And the same can be said about her support
of placing regime change in Syria ahead of supporting the Syrian
government in its struggle against ISIS and other terrorist groups. Even
more disastrous was the 2003 US invasion of Iraq which she as a senator
supported. Both policies were of course clear violations of
international law and the UN Charter.
HuffPo | Since leaving office, both Bill and Hillary have made millions of dollars giving speeches to banks while being remarkably quiet about prosecution of financial crime, not to mention the Obama administration's appalling record since the crisis - zero prosecutions, bankers in senior regulatory positions, inviting bank CEOs to state dinners dozens of times, et cetera. Now Hillary says she'll rely on Bill for economic policy. Bad idea. The financial sector became a pervasively criminal and economically destabilizing industry largely through Clinton policies, and now Hillary takes their money. When pressed, Democratic insiders concede all this, but then say, well, OK, the financial sector is just too powerful to rein in, but think of what Hillary could do in, say, education.
Let us therefore take a brief tour of the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), one of the most repulsively predatory companies in America. EDMC specialized in exploiting poor people seeking to better themselves educationally. It used fraudulent marketing, luring students into paying high tuition - by taking out student loans signed over to EDMC. EDMC kept all the money, but provided abysmal schooling with high dropout rates. EDMC made huge profits while poor students wasted time, obtained no skills, and dropped out with crushing debts.
EDMC raked in $11 billion this way. Assuming, say, $11,000 per student, EDMC screwed one million poor Americans. Eventually the Justice Department sued, but as usual the settlement was a wrist-slap with no criminal prosecutions, no admission of guilt, and no financial relief to victims.
But why am I telling you all this?
Well, now. Who devised EDMC's strategy, aided by relaxed Federal regulation? Who was EDMC's largest shareholder, buying 41% of the company in 2006?
Goldman Sachs.
Now, Hillary, when you and Bill have your little cocktail parties for the Clinton Foundation in Goldman Sachs offices, when you give your speeches to Goldman Sachs executives, when you chat them up for donations, when you meet them at White House state dinners, just how frequently do you bring this up?
OK, Hillary ain't so great. But could Bernie do any better? Well, he could appoint an Attorney General and a head of the DOJ Criminal Division whohaven'tspent their careers defending corporate criminals, and then invite the Justice Department to put lots of bankers in jail. (There is overwhelming evidence to justify doing so; for details, readthis,or chapter 6 ofthis.) Bernie could also appoint an Antitrust Division head who would actually investigate the cozy, cartel-like arrangements that pervade finance, and bring major cases against the banks. He could appoint a Federal Reserve chair who would require banks to divest assets and operate safely, plus regulating bankers' compensation so that if you caused a disaster, you couldn't profit from it. All this can be done without a single new law, and both Bill Clinton and Obama could have done them too.
slate |Pressed during Thursday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said that she would “certainly look into” releasing the transcripts of the paid speeches she gave in private to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street institutions. By Sunday, her promised careful consideration was apparently complete. “Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time,”Clinton said on ABC’sThis Week, noting that her opponents from both parties have also “given speeches to groups.” Her conclusion: “These rules need to apply to everyone.”
The answer was both tone-deaf and disingenuous. Clinton’s six-figure speeches are a point of contention in the Democratic race not because she was paid to give them but because ofwhopaid her to give them. Bernie Sanders is running on the idea that Washington and Wall Street are too cozy and that the former will never be able to effectively regulate the latter as long as the status quo continues. He’s not challenging Clinton because he thinks she rigged the game; he simply contends that she is playing it like everyone else in politics.
Clinton’s decision to ignore the transcript controversy in hopes it will go away is hardly a surprise. She deployed a similar strategy early last year in the face of questions about the overlap between her family’s financial interestsand those of the Clinton Foundation’s global donors, and to defend her use of a private email server to conduct official government business while secretary of state. Hillary responded to those controversies like she is responding to this one: by suggesting they are not controversies at all. Most politicians, she says, do the same thing, but she alone is treated differently. Many of her supporters agree,though many Democratic voters do not.
realclearpolitics | TODD: Thank you both. Let me move on to our next question here, and in fact it comes to us through New England Cable News.
Secretary Clinton, it's addressed to you, and it's about this issue of
the speeches, particularly to Goldman Sachs. This is what the questioner
wrote verbatim.
"I am concerned with the abuses of Wall Street has taken with the
American taxpayers money," and then she asks whether you would release
the transcripts of your Goldman Sachs speeches, and then added, "Don't
you think the voting public has a right to know what was said?"
But, let's make that bigger. Are you willing to release the transcripts
of all your paid speeches? We do know through reporting that there were
transcription services for all of those paid speeches. In full
disclosure, would you release all of them?
CLINTON: I will look into it. I don't know the status, but I will
certainly look into it. But, I can only repeat what is the fact that I
spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents,
a lot of different kinds of members about issues that had to do with
world affairs. I probably described more times than I can remember how
stressful it was advising the President about going after Bin Laden.
realclearpolitics | NBC's Andrea Mitchell says Hill Clinton should release transcripts she
gave to investment banks to reassure the public she was not talking
about something that involves a conflict of interest. At Thursday's
Democratic primary debate moderated by MSNBC, former Secretary of State
Clinton said she would look into releasing the transcripts.
"It's very hard for the average working person to believe that someone
could make that much money from a speech and that there is nothing given
in return if it's someone who just left government," Mitchell said.
"She's been claiming all along that I'm invited to speak to these
investment banks because they want to know my world view -- what do I
think of Russia, what do I think of China, I'm a former Secretary of
State and all former Secretaries of State have done this in recent
decades. And if the transcripts shows that they were talking about
something that involves a conflict of interest, I mean, I have no idea.
But just to settle it, reassure the public that they are being brought
inside these secret board rooms and they know what's going on," Mitchell
said.
thefederalist | During the Democratic town hall that aired on CNN Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton completely fell apart onstage when Anderson Cooper asked her about $675,000 she received for delivering three speeches at Goldman Sachs.
Throughout the campaign, her opponentBernie Sanders has criticized Clinton’sability to deliver on her promises to crack down on Wall Street after taking more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in a year.
“Was that a mistake? Was that a bad error in judgement?” Anderson asked.
“Well, I dunno,” Clinton said. “That’s what they offered. Every secretary of State that I know has done that.”
Clinton’s remarks during the televised town hall may have given off the impression that she wasn’t very involved when negotiating speaking deals, but the truth is, she is actually a heavy-handed negotiator.
TheWashington Postreportedthat when Clinton agreed to deliver a speech at the University of California Los Angeles in 2014, she charged the publicly-funded school $300,000. When school administrators asked for a discounted rate, Clinton’s handlers informed UCLA that $300,000was the special, discounted rate for public universities.
thenation | The starting point for understanding Bill Clinton’s economic program is
to recognize that it was thoroughly beholden to Wall Street, as Clinton
himself acknowledged almost immediately after he was elected. Clinton
won the 1992 election by pledging to end the economic stagnation that
had enveloped the last two years of the George H.W. Bush administration
and advance a program of “Putting People First.” This meant large
investments in job training, education, and public infrastructure.
But Clinton’s priorities shifted drastically during the two-month
interregnum between his November election and his inauguration in
January 1993, as documented in compelling detail by Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward in his 1994 book The Agenda. As Woodward
recounts, Clinton stated only weeks after winning the election that
“we’re Eisenhower Republicans here…. We stand for lower deficits, free
trade, and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Clinton further conceded
that with his new policy focus, “we help the bond market, and we hurt
the people who voted us in.”
How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening-fast reversal? The
answer is straightforward, and explained with candor by Robert Rubin,
who had been co-chair of Goldman Sachs before becoming Clinton’s
Treasury secretary. Even before the inauguration, Rubin explained to
more populist members of the incoming administration that the rich “are
running the economy and make the decisions about the economy.”
Wall Street certainly flourished under Clinton. By 1999, the average
price of stocks had risen to 44 times these companies’ earnings.
Historically, stock prices had averaged about 14 times more than
earnings. Even during the 1920s bubble, stock prices rose only to 33
times earnings right before the 1929 crash.
globalresearch | In the first phase of the 2016 Presidential election cycle, according to the New York Times, 158 wealthy donors provided half of all campaign contributions, 138 of them backing Republicans, 20 backing Democrats. No candidate can easily compete without huge amounts of money. And if you get it from small donors, as Bernie Sanders has done the most of, you’ll be largely shut out of free media coverage, and belittled in the bit of coverage you’re granted. The media coverage, the debate questions, and the topics discussed are determined by the interests of the wealthy in this national oligarchy.
Then there’s the corrupt foundation money and speaking fees flowing into the Clinton family from wealthy sources in the U.S. and abroad. While most Americans are unable to sit through a full presidential debate, Wall Street, Big Pharma, and corporate technology interests have shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars supposedly just to hear Hillary or Bill Clinton speak.
According to a new report by Consortium News, Hillary Clinton took in $11.8 million in 51 speaking fees between January 2014 to May 2015. Bill Clinton delivered 53 paid speeches to bring in $13.3 million during that same period. That’s over $25 million total, largely if not entirely from wealthy parties with a strong interest in influencing U.S. government policy.
This system of rewarding former politicians is one of the great corrupting forces in Washington, DC, but the revolving door that brings such politicians back into power makes it many times worse.
According to the Washington Post, since 1974 the Clintons have raised at least $3 billion, including at least $69 million just from the employees and PACs of banks, insurance companies, and securities and investment firms.
According to the International Business Times, the Clintons’ foundation took in money from foreign nations while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, nations such as Saudi Arabia for which she then waived restrictions on U.S. weapons sales. (Also on that list: Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar.) I brought this up on a recent television program, and one of the other guests protested that I was not, at that moment, criticizing Donald Trump. But, even if we assume Trump is the worst person on earth, what has he done that is worse than taking a bribe to supply Saudi Arabia with the weapons that have since been used to slaughter children in Yemen? And what does Trump have to do with bribery? He’s self-corrupted. He’s in the race because of the financial barrier keeping decent people out. But he hasn’t been bribed to act like a fascist.
The Wall Street Journal reports that during the same period, Bill Clinton was bringing in big speaking fees from companies, groups, and a foreign government with interests in influencing the U.S. State Department. Eight-digit donors to the Clintons’ foundations include Saudi Arabia and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. Seven digit donors include: Kuwait, Exxon Mobil, Friends of Saudi Arabia, James Murdoch (son of Rupert), Qatar, Boeing, Dow, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart and the United Arab Emirates. Those chipping in at least half a million include Bank of America, Chevron, Monsanto, Citigroup, and the Soros Foundation. And they don’t even get a speech!
zerohedge | Obviously, the potential exists for those paying for the speeches to use the lucrative events as a way to gain undue influence over what goes on in Washington. For instance, some suggest there may be a connection between a $200,000 payment made to Bill Clinton by Goldman Sachs in 2011 and the bank’s efforts to lobby the State Department ahead of legislation involving the Export-Import Bank which was set to provide a loan that would end up financing the purchase of millions of dollars in aircraft from a company partially owned by Goldman.
On Thursday,WSJ is out with a fresh lookat the connection between Clinton's State Department and her husband's speaking tour.
"More than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department," The Journal says, adding that "fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity."
And on, and on.
Of course the Clinton's deny there's any connection despite the rather obvious parallels and convenient timing."No evidence exists" to link any actions taken by Mrs. Clinton’s State Department to organizations hosting Mr. Clinton’s speeches, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told The Journal.
Yes, "no evidence exists," other than the $8 million Bill made from speeches made to companies who had "matters pending" with Hillary's State Department. That's just a coincidence.
Don't worry though - none of this will happen if Hillary wins the White House. Bill says that although he'll still give speeches "on subjects [he's] interested in," he "doesn't think" he'll accept any payment.
kunstler |Mr. Bernanke now says he
“regrets” that nobody went to jail. That’s interesting. More to the
point perhaps he might explain why the Federal Reserve and the
Securities and Exchange Commission did not make any criminal referrals
to the US Attorney General in such cases as, for instance, Goldman Sachs
(and others) peddling bonds deliberately constructed to fail, on which
they had placed bets favoring that very failure.
There were a great many such
cases, explicated in full by people and organizations outside the
regulating community. For instance, the Pro Publica news organization
did enough investigative reporting on the racket of collateralized debt
obligations to send many banking executives to jail. But the authorities
turned a blind eye to it, and to the reporting of others, mostly on the
web, since the legacy news media just didn’t want to press too hard.
In effect, the rule of law was
replaced with a patch of official accounting fraud, starting with the
April 2009 move by the Financial Accounting Standards Board involving
their Rule 157, which had required banks to report the verifiable
mark-to-market value of the collateral they held. It was essentially
nullified, allowing the banks to value their collateral at whatever they
felt like saying.
Accounting fraud remains at the
heart of the fix instituted by Ben Bernanke and the ploy has been copied
by authorities throughout the global financial system, including the
central banks of China, Japan, and the European Community. That it
seemed to work for the past seven years in propping up global finance
has given too many people the dangerous conviction that reality is
optional in economic relations. The recovery of equity markets from the
disturbances of August has apparently convinced the market players that
stocks are invincible. Complacency reigns at epic levels. Few are ready
for what is coming.
bloomberg | Not content with the blow it’s dealt to U.S. oil drillers, Saudi
Arabia is set to escalate the battle for market share by raising
production to maximum levels.
The world’s largest oil exporter has already increased output to a
30-year high of 10.3 million barrels a day in a bid to check growth from
nations including the U.S., Canada and Brazil. It will add even more to
the global glut, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Citigroup Inc.
predicts the kingdom will push toward its maximum daily capacity, which
the bank estimates at about 11 million barrels, in the second half of
2015.
Saudi Arabia steered the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries in November to protect its market share in the face of
swelling U.S. crude output, rather than cut supplies to shore up prices
as it did in the past. Having abandoned the role of swing supplier --
adjusting production in line with demand -- the kingdom will maximize
sales to increase pressure on producers outside the group, the banks
said.
“If you are Saudi Arabia and you’re looking at the new oil order we
live in, you would go to full capacity,” Jeff Currie, head of
commodities research at Goldman Sachs in New York, said by e-mail on
June 15. “The world has come around to the realization that the U.S.
shale barrel is the swing barrel.”
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