With the increasing discomfort of voters over the huge speaking fees that Hillary Clinton received from Wall Street and other business groups, it was astonishing to see Clinton leave the tough Iowa campaign to go to Philadelphia to meet with financial industry wealthy to collect more donations. The campaign decided to do the fundraiser just a week before the Iowa caucuses despite Clinton’s personal and campaign money from lobbyists and industry executives growing as a key issue for undecided voters. The decision is baffling for a campaign that is famous for controlling the message and image of Clinton. It did not go unnoticed by Bernie Sanders who hit Clinton last night with this zinger: “My opponent is not in Iowa tonight. She is raising money from a Philadelphia investment firm. Frankly, I’d rather be here with you.” Ouch.
Sanders also used the evening to highlight his endorsement from actress Susan Sarandon who also slammed Clinton over her Wall Street ties and vote in favor of the Iraq War.
It would seem that whatever cash is raised, the campaign just gave Sanders a huge news cycle hit that would be worth much more in terms of damage to Clinton and coverage. Moreover, Clinton’s direct involvement prevents any type of pivot or spin. She has to again embrace such donors at a time when people question her honesty and credibility on financial industry reforms and other issues. Curious political choice.
It is equally curious to see the Clinton camp reportedly spreading the rumor that some people in the caucuses may be young people who perjure themselves to support Sanders. Sanders reacted angrily and said that young people were coming to help get out the vote, not to vote — a standard practice in Iowa. However, with Clinton’s worsening numbers with younger voters, this is not a very helpful attack if she wants these people to support her in the general.
The decision to continue to attend such fundraisers may reflect reports of diminishing financial support for Clinton. One of the most fascinating aspects of this election has been Sanders’ ability to raise a large war chest off small donations while refusing support from super Pacs. It is a claim that the Clinton camp has not been able to attack and clearly resonates with voters particularly as critics have increasingly objected to Clinton’s association with people they call “attack dogs” like David Brock while she objects to Sanders raising her contributions from Wall Street, drug companies, and other industries.
It is a good thing to see scrutiny of such fundraising sources in my view. Ironically, it may show that, even after Citizens United, it is possible for the public to monitor and respond to the influence of such groups. However, Clinton has argued that there is nothing wrong with accepting such money either personally in speaking fees or as donations. After all, these are successful people who want to support candidates that they believe in. It is possible for a financial industry executive to favor someone because she or he believes that the candidate will bring greater stability or prosperity for the country. It is also certainly true that such contributions are often made to influence candidates. Yet, these are successful people who want to back a candidate that they favor.
I honestly can see both sides on this issue. Is it far to object to such fundraisers by candidates like Clinton? What do you think?
Accused Sexual Abuser Bill Clinton Says Sanders Supporters are Sexist
February 8, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
The Clinton campaign’s Bernie Bros narrative worked better when it was being outsourced to the media and progressive groups. But Hillary Clinton inevitably decided to unleash Bill, or Bill decided to unleash himself, and so we have the strange spectacle of a man accused of everything from rape to sexual harassment ranting about how sexist Bernie Sanders supporters are.
Bill Clinton was somewhat on point in calling out the hypocrisy of Bernie Sanders on campaign finance.
Clinton accused Sanders of hypocrisy for portraying his wife as beholden to Wall Street because of campaign donations and speaking fees she has accepted from firms like Goldman Sachs. He said he “frankly, fell out of my chair” after reading a CNN report that Sanders has been a prolific Democratic fundraiser, raising cash from the financial sector at retreats in Palm Beach and Martha’s Vineyard. “Anybody who takes money from Goldman Sachs couldn’t possibly be President,” Clinton said. “He may have to tweak that answer a little bit, or we may have to get a write-in candidate.”
“When you’re making a revolution you can’t be too careful with the facts,” Clinton said, deriding Sanders’ oft-mentioned call for a political revolution.
“‘Anybody that doesn’t agree with me is a tool of the establishment,’” Bill Clinton said, mocking what he described as the central critique of Hillary Clinton by Sanders.
And he brought up Sanders’ 2000 vote in favor of the commodities futures modernization act — a bill Clinton signed into law. “He voted for that bill,” he said, ”but you will never hear her say he is a tool of Wall Street because of it, because they made a mistake.”
These attacks are on point. The CNN story is particularly damning. Bill Clinton is going after the core of Bernie Sanders’ appeal by showing that he’s a hypocrite. It’s a line of attack that may end up working no better in the Democratic primaries than it did in the Republican primaries, true believers aren’t easily swayed with facts, but that’s weakened by Bill Clinton hitting his own weak point. Sexism.
Bill Clinton claims that some left-wing blogger has to operate under a fake name because of how mean Bernie Sanders supporters are.
She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary and explain, just explain, why they supported her have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane — not to mention sexist — to repeat. All four of them have been subject to these unbelievable personal attacks.
Really? Bill Clinton complaining about personal attacks? Not to mention profane and sexist behavior?
This is what gets the most coverage and it’s where the wheels come off the wagon. Bill Clinton is trying to attack an area where he is weaker than Bernie Sanders. It’s bad judo. And he once again comes off as having overreacted, the way that he did in 2008.
Bernie Sanders Really Hated All That Fundraising w/Big Banks He Used to Do
Bernie Sanders 2016: There’s a Socialist sucker born every minute.
February 8, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
If you listen to one of Bernie Sanders’ rants about campaign finance, you get the idea that he’s just a little guy raising money from ordinary people. As he likes to yell, “$27 dollars”, who is a world away from the high finance world of campaign fundraising and big donors, and wants to tear it all down. But Bernie’s authenticity is a scam. Politicians cultivate a particular image. Bernie Sanders is a successful politician who cultivates the image of an eccentric grass roots politician who has nothing to do with big time fundraising. The truth is he has always been a big part of that world.
In recent years, Sanders has been billed as one of the hosts for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s retreats for the “Majority Trust” — an elite group of top donors who give more than $30,000 per year — at Martha’s Vineyard in the summer and Palm Beach, Florida, in the winter. CNN has obtained invitations that listed Sanders as a host for at least one Majority Trust event in each year since 2011.
The retreats are typically attended by 100 or more donors who have either contributed the annual legal maximum of $33,400 to the DSCC, raised more than $100,000 for the party or both.
Sanders has based his presidential campaign on a fire-and-brimstone critique of a broken campaign finance system — and of Hillary Clinton for her reliance on big-dollar Wall Street donors. But Sanders is part of that system, and has helped Democrats court many of the same donors.
He is indeed. At the last Dem debate, he admitted that he had considered setting up a SuperPAC. Despite his rants about SuperPACs. (But then again Obama claimed to hate SuperPACs until he literally became one.)
A Democratic lobbyist and donor who has attended the retreats told CNN that about 25% of the attendees there represent the financial sector — and that Sanders and his wife, Jane, are always present.
“At each of the events all the senators speak. And I don’t recall him ever giving a speech attacking us,” the donor said. “While progressive, his remarks were always in the mainstream of what you hear from senators.”
Of course he did. Bernie Sanders doesn’t speak truth to power. He speaks applause lines to audiences. And his wife has certainly benefited from certain financial arrangements back in Vermont.
Sanders’ political leanings were well known by the donors who attended the retreats. “Nobody was more surprised that Bernie was there than the donors were,” said another Democrat who attended the retreats.
Bernie Gotta Eat.
But Sanders maintains that members of Congress now spend far too much time making calls seeking campaign contributions — or “dialing for dollars,” he said during a speech at the New England Council’s “Politics and Eggs” event Friday morning.
“That’s what they do. And not only should members who are elected be working for the people, not raising money — if you think you could simply divide your brain in half, if you’re working on unemployment or health care and think, now I’ve gotta go out and raise money, it affects your entire being,” he said.
Yeah, it diverts Bernie Sanders from the two of the three bills he actually cosponsored that got passed, to rename Vermont post offices. But really the fake authenticity that Bernie Sanders brings to the table aids the fundraising.
Michael Briggs, a Sanders spokesman, said Sanders has “raised more money for the Senate Democrats than almost any other member of the Senate Democratic caucus” because he sees helping the party regain the majority as critical.
So the Independent thing is also a scam.
In 2006, when Sanders ran for the Senate, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pumped $37,300 into his race and included him in fundraising efforts for the party’s Senate candidates.
The party also spent $60,000 on ads for Sanders, and contributed $100,000 to the Vermont Democratic Party — which was behind Sanders even as he ran as an independent.
Among the DSCC’s top contributors that year: Goldman Sachs at $685,000, Citigroup at $326,000, Morgan Stanley at $260,000 and JPMorgan Chase & Co. at $207,000.
Sanders was among the senators who met with Sen. Chuck Schumer’s “Legacy Circle” donors who had given the legal maximum to the DSCC five years in a row or $500,000 over their lifetimes.
He paid dues to the DSCC, too, with his Progressive Voters of America political action committee cutting checks for $30,000 to the group during the 2014 election cycle.
Oh tell us more.
The 2007 Martha’s Vineyard fundraiser guest list included professional lobbyists, corporate executives, trade association heads, labor union brass and wealthy individual donors.
Some are government relations executives directly employed by corporations such as the financial firms Blackrock and Prudential Financial, or the defense contractor Raytheon. Others represent large Washington law and lobbying firms, such as DLA Piper, Patton Boggs, and Akin Gump.
Some names stand out, like John Breaux, the former Democratic senator from Louisiana turned mega-lobbyist who has worked for Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Chevron, ExxonMobil and more. Then there’s former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, who has represented many petrochemical and pipeline companies as well as Stanford Financial, the now defunct financial firm felled by an alleged Ponzi scheme.
Other guests included a lobbyist for the private equity firm Blackstone Group as well as those who have represented pipeline company Kinder Morgan, the American Petroleum Institute, pharmaceutical giants such as Merck and Allergan (now involved in a controversial inversion deal), and the pharmaceutical trade association, among others.
Translation, every word you hear coming out of the Bernie Sanders liehole is a lie. He’s not some independent insurgent who is outside the system. He’s what the system was built on. And he’s lying to his supporters while pumping them for money, telling them what they want to hear, exactly the way he told the big donors what they wanted to hear while pumping them for cash.
Bernie Sanders 2016. Because there’s a Socialist sucker born every minute.
@Prairie Rose
1, January 31, 2016 at 11:24 pm
“I will have to wait to watch the other video you recommended. It is late and tomorrow is a busy day.”
No problem. We won’t start the revolution without you. 🙂
@JT
“It is a good thing to see scrutiny of such fundraising sources in my view. Ironically, it may show that, even after Citizens United, it is possible for the public to monitor and respond to the influence of such groups.”
In this essay by Nomi Prins, former Wall Street executive and author of All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power , she compares the amounts and sources of donations to several of the Republican and to two of the Democratic candidates:
“Democracy of the Billionaires
“Speaking of the need for citizen participation in our national politics in his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, ‘Our brand of democracy is hard.’ A more accurate characterization might have been: ‘Our brand of democracy is cold hard cash.’
“Cash, mountains of it, is increasingly the necessary tool for presidential candidates. Several Powerball jackpots could already be fueled from the billions of dollars in contributions in play in election 2016. When considering the present donation season, however, the devil lies in the details, which is why the details follow.
“With three 2016 debates down and six more scheduled, the two fundraisers with the most surprising amount in common are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Neither has billionaire-infused super PACs, but for vastly different reasons. Bernie has made it clear billionaires won’t ever hold sway in his court. While Trump… well, you know, he’s not only a billionaire but has the knack for getting the sort of attention that even billions can’t buy.
“Regarding the rest of the field, each candidate is counting on the reliability of his or her own arsenal of billionaire sponsors and corporate nabobs when the you-know-what hits the fan. And at this point, believe it or not, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010 and the super PACs that arose from it, all the billionaires aren’t even nailed down or faintly tapped out yet. In fact, some of them are already preparing to jump ship on their initial candidate of choice or reserving the really big bucks for closer to game time, when only two nominees will be duking it out for the White House.
“For your amusement and mine, this being an all-fun-all-the-time election campaign, let’s examine the relationships between our twenty-first-century plutocrats and the contenders who have raised $5 million or more in individual contributions or through super PACs and are at 5% or more in composite national polls. I’ll refrain from using the politically correct phrases that feed into the illusion of distance between super PACs that allegedly support candidates’ causes and the candidates themselves, because in practice there is no distinction.
“On the Republican Side:
1. Ted Cruz: Most “God-Fearing” Billionaires
2. Marco Rubio: Most Diverse Billionaires
3. Jeb Bush: Most Disappointed Billionaires
4. Ben Carson: No Love For Billionaires
5. Chris Christie: Most Sketchy Billionaires
6. Donald Trump: I Am A Billionaire
“On The Democratic Side:
1. Hillary Clinton: A Dynasty of Billionaires
2. Bernie Sanders: No Billionaires Allowed”
“It would, of course, be an irony of ironies if what has been a billionaire’s playground since the Citizens United decision became, in November, a billionaire’s graveyard with literally billions of plutocratic dollars interred in a grave marked: here lies campaign 2016.”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176097/tomgram%3A_nomi_prins%2C_the_big_money_and_what_it_means_in_election_2016/#more
Ken,
One thing I left out of my comment on the Steele video: I think he has an excellent idea to unleash the power of bloggers, holding corporations to task for corporatism and other problematic behavior.
I will have to wait to watch the other video you recommended. It is late and tomorrow is a busy day.
JT said:
“It is a good thing to see scrutiny of such fundraising sources in my view. Ironically, it may show that, even after Citizens United, it is possible for the public to monitor and respond to the influence of such groups.”
No JT, it is not “even after” Citizen’s United, it irrespective of Citizens United.
After a very low threshold, the amount of money a candidate spends is going to have only a logarithmic effect on voter support, truly a case of diminishing returns, as you note the people will not be bought into voting for them if they simply do not like them.
This fact have been proved over and over, countering the sky is falling hysteria that the Left heralded about Citizens United. So many campaigns where the uber-spenders on their campaigns, simply were not liked by the voters, and the financial underdog winned the election.
Citizens United was a good decision, that upheld freedom of speech. The opposite would be a very slippery slope of censorship.
@Prairie Rose
1, January 30, 2016 at 11:09 pm
I watched the Steele video again, myself, and can see why he may have been a little difficult to follow as he jumped from topic to topic, unless you’re already familiar with a lot of the background of his remarks.
Regarding Steele’s most important point, the extremely deleterious political and economic power of the Federal Reserve System and central banking around the world, I highly recommend watching the Griffin video above, which requires no prior knowledge whatsoever to follow and understand.
As Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), the Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel of Europe, reportedly said, “Give me control of a nation’s money, and I care not who makes the laws.”*
Unless we understand the power of the central bankers over politicians and their countries’ economies, our knowledge of politics is doomed to superficiality.
*The Creature from Jekyll Island(American Opinion Publishing), p. 218
@Prairie Rose
1, January 30, 2016 at 11:09 pm
“Ken,
“Regarding the Steele link, apparently I am going to have to learn more because it seems he was assuming a greater degree of prior knowledge than what I have, or, the clips of a larger talk left out pertinent details.”
Thanks for watching it, PR.
I don’t have time right now to do justice to a reply, but will write one later tonight or tomorrow.
Ken,
Regarding the Steele link, apparently I am going to have to learn more because it seems he was assuming a greater degree of prior knowledge than what I have, or, the clips of a larger talk left out pertinent details. It went rather fast, jumping from topic to topic without sufficient discussion (at least for me). While there were tidbits with which I agree, I cannot summarize his talk with any clarity, so I am not sure what I think of it. Guess I will have to conduct background research using topical keywords to help me. He seems to be an interesting fellow. Unfortunately, I think the video should have prerequisites.
Sorry I cannot give it a more positive review.
@John
1, January 30, 2016 at 3:19 pm
“the people are nothing but a great beast…
I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”
-Alexander Hamilton
—————————————–
Regarding Alexander Hamilton, that consummate authoritarian, economist Thomas DiLorenzo has written:
“The current economic crisis is the inevitable consequence of what I call ‘Hamilton’s Curse’ in my new book of that name. It is the legacy of Alexander Hamilton and his political, economic, and constitutional philosophy. As George Will once wrote, ‘Americans are fond of quoting Jefferson, but we live in Hamilton’s country.’
“The great debate between Hamilton and Jefferson over the purpose of government, which animates American politics to this day, was very much about economic policy. Hamilton was a compulsive statist who wanted to bring the corrupt British mercantilist system — the very system the American Revolution was fought to escape from — to America.
“He fought fiercely for his program of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, public debt, pervasive taxation, and a central bank run by politicians and their appointees out of the nation’s capital.
Jefferson and his followers opposed him every step of the way because they understood that Hamilton’s agenda was totally destructive of liberty. And unlike Hamilton, they took Adam Smith’s warnings against economic interventionism seriously. (My emphasis)
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2008/10/thomas-dilorenzo/hamiltons-curse/
“James Carville, the well-known political adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is a bit baffled that more donors have given to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) than to Hillary Clinton, especially given the former secretary of state’s résumé.
” ‘I don’t mean to be cranky, but what in the hell is that all about?!,’ Carville wrote in a fundraising email for Clinton Saturday. ‘We’ve got the best chance we’ve ever had to put a woman in the White House, and oh, by the way, she just happens to be the most qualified candidate maybe since General George Washington himself!!’
“The number of contributions to the Sanders campaign topped 3 million as of Saturday morning.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-carville-hillary-clinton_us_56acdbc9e4b077d4fe8e4cea?ir=Politics%3Fncid%3Dnewsltushpmg00000003
Regarding one of Bill Clinton’s many sexual assault accusers, Carville once observed, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
Wall Street banksters have found that it takes considerably more than $100 to get Carville’s high-class candidate onto one of their CEO’s private jets in order to provide a $250,000 speech, evoking a recollection of the famous riposte attributed to Winston Churchill (among others), “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling about the price.”
“the people are nothing but a great beast…
I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”
-Alexander Hamilton
Sidebar:
Why are political campaigns funded with private voluntary money,
but welfare, in all its forms, is funded by compulsory tax money forcibly confiscated from “free” citizens with a
right to private property.
Welfare, or redistribution of wealth, was private upon ratification of the Constitution in 1789; it was called
charity.
This recent editorial by G. Edward Griffin (author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, on the origins and functions of the US Federal Reserve) provides a timely complement to the previously cited work of political scientist Gene Sharp, regarding the effecting of non-violent revolution.
The second link below is to a video of a presentation Griffin delivered on this most banking powerful institution, which is also the subject of the book by William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.
“The Other Kind of Revolution
“Last week’s editorial concluded that [armed] revolutions are no longer possible because of the vast power of modern weapons available to governments. Prior to the beginning of the last century, revolutionaries could grab their swords and muskets and meet the tyrant’s soldiers on an even footing with the outcome weighted in favor of which side could muster and sustain the largest army.
“The development of aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapons, poison gases, bacteriological agents, laser weapons, microwave weapons, GPS, guided missiles and drones has eliminated that equality forever. It now is possible for an oligarchy of less than one percent of the population, wielding such weapons, to easily defeat any mass uprising.
“Does that mean we are doomed to be subjects of a global tyranny that, in the name of disarmament, controls all weapons of mass destruction? Or is it possible for another kind of revolution to succeed?
“TWO KINDS OF REVOLUTION
“Dictionaries have two definitions for the word revolution. One is the forceful overthrow of a government leading to a new regime, and the other is a drastic change in the attitudes and mores of society.
“Although history books usually focus on the first type, the second type is equally important, if not more so, because physical revolutions cannot happen unless they are preceded by a revolution of ideas.
The American Revolution, for example, was fired by a cluster of ideas related to the single concept of freedom from the oppressive yoke of government. That was the fire in the mind that brought the revolutionaries onto the battlefield and sustained them through great hardship and suffering.
“Yes, you say, but don’t forget that, if the mental revolution had not been followed by a physical one, nothing would have changed. Ideas without actions are useless.
“ALL ACTIONS ARE NOT EQUAL
“True, but what kind of actions are open to us today? Is physical action the only option? As Mao expressed it: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ Are military-style revolutions the only way to replace a tyrannical oligarchy?
“That question can be answered by asking another question: Did the present collectivist oligarchy seize control of government by physical revolution? The United States once had an enviable political system of checks and balances, once enjoyed no bureaucratic control over the lives of the people, once had local police who actually served and protected its citizens, once had almost no confiscation of personal income or wealth, and once was admired around the world.
“All that is now history. A revolution began in America starting full force in the early 1900s and was complete fifty years later. Were there barricades in the streets, mobs storming the White House, raging gun battles between patriots and soldiers?
“None of this happened. It was a ‘soft’ revolution. The government was seized through the mass media, the educational system, the entertainment industry, the banking system, and the ballot. Had it been attempted through force and violence it would have failed.
“That is the key to how we must shape our own strategy. There are new battlefields out there. Why would we want to grab our muskets and head for the monuments of our forefathers? The new battlefields are the power centers of society: the organizations and institutions that shape national policy. That’s where we lost control to the collectivists and, if we are ever going to get it back, that’s where we will do it.
“THE KIDS ARE AWAKENING
“In the 1960s, when I began studying the ideology of collectivism, I recall reading a statement from a Communist organizer in which he explained why Communism eventually would conquer the United States. He said something like this: ‘You wealthy and powerful capitalists are in control today, but we will be in control tomorrow. Why am I so sure? It’s because we are recruiting your children. Right now, we are winning their hearts and minds and, when you die, your empire will belong to us.’
“In retrospect, I can see that he was half right. In the universities, large numbers of wealthy kids were recruited into the Marxist/Leninist ideology, but what the comrades had not anticipated was that the empire they were hoping to replace with communism was well on its way to BEING communism under a different name.
“So, when the kids eventually inherited the empires of their fathers, they were able to implement the collectivist ideology they learned in school without having to join the Communist Party. They merely continued to call themselves capitalists, and very few noticed the switch.
“We who are hoping to bring about a revolution of ideas on behalf of freedom are in much the same situation as the comrades back in the 1920s and 1930s. Collectivists are in control today, but have you noticed? Their kids are awakening! The ideology of individualism is rapidly spreading through the universities, which are the incubators of future leaders. If we follow the strategy of a soft revolution, we will possess the future.
G. Edward Griffin
2016 January 29
http://needtoknow.news/archives/2016-2/2016-01-29/
To see the video of Griffin’s presentation on the Federal Reserve:
More on Hillary’s Financial Industry Backers
“In one of the few journalistic reports on Hillary’s private Wall Street speeches, Politico indicates that Goldman Sachs executives were quite comfortable with her message.
“Ordinarily these masters of the universe might have groaned at the idea of a politician taking the microphone… But Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish… Certainly, Clinton offered the money men — and yes, they are mostly men — at Goldman’s HQ a bit of a morale boost… [Clinton’s remarks] did register as a repudiation of some of the angry anti-Wall Street rhetoric emanating from liberals rallying behind the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren…
“The only way for Hillary to relieve Democratic voters’ valid worry of a devastating bombshell from a leak of one of her private Wall Street speeches is to release the transcripts early in the primary season.
And journalists, who have so aggressively sought Hillary’s email transcripts, should equally aggressively seek transcripts of her private paid speeches, which her speaking contract indicates she’s in possession of.
“The contract, made public through a Nevada’s public records law after she spoke at UNLV, stipulates that the only record of her speaking events allowed are made by a stenographer approved by Clinton whose transcription will be given only to Clinton.
“It also provided that she must travel only on a $39 million Gulfstream G450 jet or larger, be put up in the Presidential Suite of a luxury hotel of her choosing (along with five more rooms for her advance staff), detailed requirements on the refreshments to be provided in the green room, and Clinton’s approval of all publicity, moderators or introducers. (Emphasis added)
“While Hillary hasn’t driven a car since 1996, until recently Bernie Sanders flew home most weekends from Washington coach-class on Southwest. Those who remember how the first President’s Bush’s befuddlement at seeing a scanner at a grocery store check-out counter reinforced his image as an out-of-touch Washington politician and helped him lose his 1992 reelection campaign, might want to consider how Hillary’s taste for the lifestyle of the rich and famous might impact ordinary voters.
“The millions of dollars in personal payments Wall Street and other business interests have paid to the Clintons at least raise questions about how serious Hillary’s promises to rein in Wall Street should be taken by voters.
“And even Democratic voters who otherwise prefer Hillary should worry about what bombshell remarks from her secretive Wall Street speeches might be released by Republican dirty-tricksters during the general election campaign, if she’s the nominee, and help put Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or another right-wing Republican in the White House.
“Art Garfunkel told CNN that he and Paul Simon allowed Bernie Sanders to use their song ‘America’ in a campaign commercial because of Hillary’s speaking fees.
“So I ask again, what does $250,000 an hour from a Wall Street bank buy from a politician? If it’s not special access, the ability of Wall Street lobbyists to help write financial legislation and regulations, and the avoidance of criminal prosecution, both past and future, then banks’ shareholders haven’t been getting their money’s worth and should fire their $20 million a year billionaire CEOs who’ve been paying millions of dollars to the Clintons.” (My emphasis)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/clintonss-200000-an-hour_b_9069720.html
@Prairie Rose
1, January 29, 2016 at 10:11 pm
“Thank you for the link, Ken. I will look into it.”
If you’re referring to the link to the Steele video, I think you’ll wish you’d seen it before now.
Let me know what you think of it.
Thank you for the link, Ken. I will look into it.