There’s the possibility — though I think it’s very remote — that Clinton simply wasn’t expecting the question and didn’t want to commit to anything in the moment. I say I think that’s unlikely because Clinton is (a) always very, very well prepared for debates and (b) Bernie Sanders has been hitting Clinton on her paid speech to Goldman Sachs for much of the past two weeks.
Assuming Clinton wasn’t simply surprised by Todd’s question, then she and her team had, at some point in the not-too-distant past, made the conscious choice not to release the speeches.
.. My guess is that in the speeches, Clinton acknowledges her various friends and acquaintances at Goldman Sachs (and other Wall Street firms) and praises them for the work they are doing. “You guys get a bad rap but . . .”
Yes, it’s standard-issue small talk. But it could look really, really bad in the context of the campaign. Imagine a transcript of Clinton speaking to some big bank or investment firm, thanking a litany of people she’s “been friends with forever” and praising the broader enterprise for “all you do.”
In the hands of Sanders and his campaign team and supporters, that sort of thing could wind up being problematic for Clinton as she attempts, already clumsily, to cast herself as a true progressive fighter for the 99 percent against the 1 percent. It might even prove fatal to those attempts.
.. So, no speech transcripts. Not today, and my guess is not ever.
The Clinton System
there is the stream of six-figure lecture fees paid to Bill and Hillary Clinton, mostly from large corporations and banks, which have earned them more than $125 million in the fifteen years since Bill Clinton left office in 2001. There are the direct payments to Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns, including for the Senate in 2000 and for the presidency in 2008 and now in 2016, which had reached a total of $712.4 million as of September 30, 2015, the most recent figures compiled by Open Secrets. Four of the top five sources of these funds are major banks: Citigroup Inc, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Morgan Stanley. The Clinton campaign meanwhile has set a goal of raising $1 billion for her Super PAC for the 2016 election.
.. For these mainly corporate donors, access to the Clintons may be as important as the purposes for which their donations are used. According to a February 2015 analysis of Clinton Foundation funding by The Washington Post, the financial services industry has accounted for the largest single share of the foundation’s corporate donors. Other major donors to the foundation have included US defense and energy corporations and their overseas government clients.
.. Alec MacGillis described the annual CGI meeting as a complicated give and take in which CEOs provide cash for CGI projects in exchange for access to Bill Clinton.
.. Data drawn from the Clintons’ annual financial statements, the Clinton Foundation, and the banks themselves show that between 2001 and 2014 Bill Clinton earned $1.52 million in fees from UBS, $1.35 million from Goldman Sachs, $900,000 from the Bank of America, $770,000 from Deutsche Bank, and $650,000 from Barclays Capital.
.. During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, US defense corporations and their overseas clients also contributed between $54 and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation.
.. During Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state, arms sales to the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation ran at nearly double the value of sales to the same nations during George W. Bush’s second term.
.. Bill Clinton’s political influence and personal contacts with foreign heads of state have been crucial to Giustra’s international business interests.
.. In September 2005, Bill Clinton and Giustra travelled to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. At their meeting Clinton told Nazarbayev that he would support Kazakhstan’s bid to become chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE is a body with the responsibility for verifying, among other things, the fairness of elections among member states.
.. In September 2005, Bill Clinton and Giustra travelled to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. At their meeting Clinton told Nazarbayev that he would support Kazakhstan’s bid to become chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE is a body with the responsibility for verifying, among other things, the fairness of elections among member states.
.. In a January 31, 2008 article in The New York Times, Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr., provided detailed evidence that Nazarbayev brought his influence to bear to enable Giustra to beat out better-qualified competitors for a stake in Kazakhstan’s uranium mines worth $350 million
.. Giustra told Remnick that “all of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”
.. These contacts appear to have born fruit for Giustra. In 2007 Pacific Rubiales signed a $300 million deal with Ecopetrol to build a 250 kilometer pipeline between Meta and Casanare provinces in Central Colombia. In the same year, Pacific Rubiales gained control of the Rubiales oilfield, Colombia’s largest.
.. Yet Uribe and his political allies had longstanding connections to the Colombian drug cartels. In a 1991 intelligence report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), declassified in August 2004, described Uribe as “a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels…. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States. [He] has worked for the Medellín cartel” and is “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria,” the longtime drug kingpin.
.. In an email message relayed to Secretary Clinton by the US Embassy in Bogota, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts warned that “while in Colombia, the most important thing the Secretary can do is to avoid effusive praise for President Álvaro Uribe.”
Hillary Clinton chose to ignore the warning. Addressing Uribe in the visit’s keynote speech, Clinton described him as an “essential partner to the United States” whose “commitment to building strong democratic institutions here in Colombia” would “leave a legacy of great progress that will be viewed in historic terms.”
.. The record of the Clinton System raises deep questions about whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would take on the growing political influence of large corporate interests and Wall Street banks. The next president will need to address critical economic and social issues, including the stagnating incomes of the middle class, the tax loopholes that allow hedge-funders and other members of the super-rich to be taxed at lower rates than many average Americans, and the runaway costs of higher education. Above all is the question of further reform of Wall Street and the banking system to prevent a recurrence of the behavior that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Hillary asked to release transcripts of Wall Street paid speeches
But Thursday night also opened up a new, unexpected front for Clinton on the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street after she left office. After struggling on Wednesday to answer why she took $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, she was asked on Thursday to release transcripts of all her paid speeches to large corporations. It’s a question that clearly caught her off guard, and one her campaign will now be forced to address.
.. Sanders didn’t say it directly – but he didn’t back down, either, even as Clinton shouted over him. “Let’s talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated,” he said. “Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.” “There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system,” Sanders continued. “And in my view, it is undermining American democracy, and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors, and not the working families of this country!”
Hillary’s Sincerity Problem
For instance, whenever she’s asked an awkward question she laughs so artificially it makes my dogs bark at the TV screen. When asked if she “wiped” her server, she responded, “Like with a cloth or something?” No doubt she thought this was a clever retort, but the retort landed squarely in the land between sincerity and humor known as failed sarcasm. Almost all of her “jokes” and a lot of her “sincerity” land there because the only feeling she’s really in touch with is resentment at having to answer to all the little people. Bill Clinton could have sold the line about being “broke” coming out of the White House because Bill can fake sincerity the way a prostitute can fake enjoyment; he knows exactly what it’s supposed to sound like.
.. Anyway, back to Bernie and Brecht. My problem with Sanders is that he’s ultimately a coward. He talks a great game about being dedicated to a “political revolution,” but he is utterly unwilling to employ the means required to achieve the ends desired. For instance, Sanders is happy to denounce the political system as corrupt, but refuses — save by innuendo — to connect the corruption of the political system to the corruption of House Clinton.
.. It’s not artful and not a smear. At least by the standard of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton is incredibly corrupt. The Clinton Foundation alone is a violation of everything Sanders stands for. It’s one giant access-selling enterprise masquerading as a charity.
.. The Clintons rented out the Lincoln bedroom, sold pardons — including to a shadowy fugitive billionaire! Talk about catering to the “billionaire class” — and drained so much money from foreign donors (some of it laundered through a Buddhist temple) that 94 people either fled the country, refused to testify, or pled the Fifth.
.. Bernie Sanders has to believe Hillary Clinton is part of the problem. But he won’t say so, save to prattle on about Clinton’s super PACs and speaking fees. That’s amateur-hour stuff. It’s academic-seminar-level griping, not revolution-fomenting. He wants to talk about the system, but he won’t do what is minimally required to change it. And right now, the first step on that long road is steamrolling Hillary Clinton. It’s like saying you want to do whatever it takes to fight malaria, but refusing to say much about the huge, sprawling, and fetid marshlands in the middle of downtown. The Clintons are swamp creatures, taking what they need and leaving in their retromingent wake the stench of corruption.
.. If he honestly believes the stakes are what he says they are, then surely it’s worth getting a little dirty. It’s not like the Clintons aren’t willing to get dirty.
.. Gaslighting is when you violate all sorts of norms of decent behavior and pretend that the people who notice or care are the weird ones. Hillary Clinton’s crimes are a thousand times worse than the accidental outing of Valerie Plame.