In secret Goldman Sachs speeches, Clinton explains why the rich should rule
In secret Goldman Sachs speeches, Clinton explains why the rich should rule
By Tom Carter
17 October 2016
In one question-and-answer session on October 24, 2013 at Goldman Sachs, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein in attendance, an audience member asked the current Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the following question: “And Mike Bloomberg had 30 billion other reasons than to take office. Do we need a wholesale change in Washington that has more to do with people that don’t need the job than have the job?”
Clinton’s answer was revealing. “That’s a really interesting question,” she said. “You know, I would like to see more successful business people run for office. I really would like to see that because I do think, you know, you don’t have to have 30 billion, but you have a certain level of freedom. And there’s that memorable phrase from a former member of the Senate: You can be maybe rented, but never bought. And I think it’s important to have people with those experiences.”
Clinton’s response is an open defense of the aristocratic principle: the rich should rule. By virtue of being very wealthy, the rich have the leisure time to pursue a political career. Moreover, they supposedly have immunity from being bribed, since they are already so wealthy. Finally, they have the “experience in business” necessary to preside over a social system that benefits the social layer which appropriates all the profits from business and finance. These are sentiments that any 18th or 19th century aristocrat would recognize and embrace.
Clinton merely echoes, in a more crude form, the patrician arrogance of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), whose views were summed up by historian Barbara Tuchman:
He did not believe in political equality. There was the multitude, he said, and there were the “natural” leaders. “Always wealth, in some countries birth, and in all countries intellectual power and culture mark out the man to whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.” These men had the leisure for it and the fortune, “so that the struggles for ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed… They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word… The important point is that the rulers of a country should be taken from among them,” and as a class they should retain that “political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer.”
Clinton’s argument that her own wealth entitles her to govern America is an argument also made repeatedly by Donald Trump, who touts his own billions as a reason he will remain immune to “special interests.”
The “former member of the Senate” to whom Clinton was apparently referring was John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who held office from 1987 to 2005. Considered one of the most conservative Democrats ever to take office, Clinton’s role model went on to pursue a lucrative lobbying career at the firm Squire Patton Boggs. His name is synonymous with Washington’s corrupt “revolving door.”
"On Saturday, WikiLeaks published the
transcripts of three lavishly paid speeches
given by Clinton at gatherings held by
Goldman Sachs, dating from June 4, October
24 and October 29, 2013. All three feature a
mix of groveling before the financial
malefactors who hired her to speak and
gloating over her own wealth."
In one of her secret Wall Street speeches, Clinton frankly admitted that she has a “public position” and a “private position.” The private position is expressed in “backroom discussions,” while the “public position” consists of the lies she tells to the rest of the population.
The fact that Clinton addressed the notorious
investment bank in the first place highlights the
extent to which the American corporate, financial
and political establishment is drenched in
corruption and criminality. In April 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report entitled “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse.” This report exhaustively documented that the financial crash of 2008 and the recession that followed were the product of fraud and illegality on the part of mortgage lenders and banks such as Goldman Sachs, with government regulatory bodies as well as credit rating agencies serving as accessories.
Forty percent of the 639-page report, or some 240 pages,
were devoted to the fraudulent and deceptive practices of
Goldman Sachs. The report presented documents, emails,
internal communications and other evidence showing that
the largest US investment bank had sold billions of dollars in
subprime mortgage-backed securities to investors, vouching
for their value, even as it was betting that the investments
would fail. Goldman made billions and CEO Blankfein and
other top executives pocketed millions in bonuses by
accelerating the collapse of the financial system.
Michigan Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate subcommittee, famously described how the investigation had uncovered “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”
“Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the subcommittee,” Levin said, “the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high-risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them. Rampant conflicts of interest are the threads that run through every chapter of this sordid story.”
So when Clinton was hobnobbing with
Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein in 2013, while
investigations of wrongdoing by Goldman
and the other Wall Street banks were still
ongoing, she was consorting with a man who
belonged in prison. In 2011, Levin had recommended that the Justice Department criminally prosecute Blankfein for his fraudulent and deceptive conduct, and the Senate subcommittee charged that he had perjured himself in testimony in 2010 regarding his bank’s role in the financial crash. Nevertheless, no charges were brought, and in 2013 Clinton was accepting upwards of $225,000 per speech from Blankfein’s firm.
Hillary and Bill Clinton have accumulated a total of $153 million in speaking fees since Bill Clinton left the White House. Only the very naive could believe that these vast sums were paid for the speeches themselves. They were payment for services rendered to the American financial aristocracy over a protracted period.
Clinton’s Wall Street speeches deserve to be widely read. They provide an invaluable first-hand education in the sheer cynicism of the American ruling class. While the Obama administration publicly insisted that the Dodd-Frank reforms of 2010 were “strict regulations” that would ensure that the 2008 crash would “never happen again,” Clinton privately told her Goldman audience not to worry, that these cosmetic reforms had to be passed for “political reasons,” to provide the appearance that the government did not “sit idly by and do nothing” as people lost their jobs, homes and life savings.
When Blankfein snidely asked Clinton how, should he decide to run for president, he should conduct his campaign, Clinton responded with her own cynical joke. “I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a soup kitchen somewhere,” Clinton replied, to the merriment of the assembled guests.
The response to the publication of these
speeches by so-called “socialist” Bernie
Sanders exposes the utterly fraudulent
character of his entire presidential bid. While
he postured during the Democratic Party
primaries as a proponent of a “political
revolution” against the “billionaire class,”
Sanders now functions shamelessly as a
sideshow for the Clinton campaign,
browbeating his (now much smaller)
audiences with admonitions to vote for the
preferred candidate of the “billionaire class”
he claimed to oppose.
During his run for the Democratic nomination, Sanders repeatedly called on Clinton to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches, which she refused to do. He charged that the speeches would show her subservience to the bankers. Now, transcripts have been leaked to the public, completely substantiating his accusations. His silence only underscores the depth of his political treachery and dishonesty.
Meanwhile, emails published by WikiLeaks to and from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, reveal the consummate cynicism with which Hillary Clinton sought to portray herself as a champion of “everyday Americans,” small businesses, unionized workers, minorities and women. Having no connection whatsoever to any popular movement or any policies that have benefited the bottom 90 percent of American society, Clinton relies on a network of “community leaders,” union bureaucrats, academics, celebrities and media “surrogates,” who use empty demagogy and identity politics to market her brand to voters.
In one particularly Machiavellian email, one of Clinton’s aides discussed adding a “riff” of demagogic statements against Wall Street in a speech to Deutsche Bank in 2015, “precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats.”
“I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way,” the aide wrote. “Perhaps at some point there will be value in sharing this with a reporter and getting a story written. Upside would be that when people say she’s too close to Wall Street and has taken too much money from bankers, we can point to evidence that she wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power.”
In another email, Podesta frankly noted that Clinton hated the phrase “everyday Americans,” but Podesta urged her to use it anyway. “I know she has begun to hate everyday Americans, but I think we should use it once the first time she says I’m running for president because you and everyday Americans need a champion,” Podesta wrote.
The cynicism of Clinton’s campaign knows no bounds. Her staff actually worked to help Donald Trump secure the Republican nomination, believing that Clinton would have a better chance of defeating Trump in the election than a more conventional Republican candidate. The media was encouraged to “take him seriously,” and Clinton was urged to single Trump out for criticism in order to “help him cement his front runner status” among the Republican primary candidates.
Around 11,000 out of 50,000 emails obtained by WikiLeaks have been published. The Clinton campaign’s response to these exposures has been to blame Russia, in line with the Obama administration’s campaign of saber-rattling against the Putin administration. In an interview last weekend on Fox News, Podesta suggested that the emails were not authentic, while simultaneously (and inconsistently) arguing that the emails were acquired by “the Russians,” who are supposedly attempting to deliver the election to Donald Trump.
On Friday, Podesta taunted WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange with a picture of a number of uniformed chefs preparing a luxurious private dinner for the Hillary Victory Fund. “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy,” Podesta wrote as the caption to the photograph on Twitter, referring to the fact that Assange has been a de facto prisoner at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since he sought asylum there in June 2012. Assange immediately replied, “Yes, we get it. The elite eat better than the peasants they abuse.”
“Sanders, who spoke for about a half hour,
advanced his boilerplate pitch, promising that Clinton would redress a myriad
of ills—income inequality, lack of access to healthcare, crumbling
infrastructure, poverty wages and overflowing prisons. He spoke as if the
disastrous social conditions in the US were unrelated to the policies pursued
by President Obama and the Democratic Party for the past eight years.”
THE SMELL OF MONEY:
Senator Bernie Sanders Takes the Crooked Road For
Obama’s Crony Banksters for Hillary Clinton
Much more here:
AMERICA’S ECONOMIC ARMAGEDDON
Under Obama-Clintonomics, the rich became VERY rich and we got the tax bills for their bailouts and crimes!
"Barack Obama will shortly take a similar path, reaping his reward from the financial aristocracy whose interests he safeguarded so assiduously over the past eight years."
"Even as Citigroup and its Wall Street
counterparts were dragging the US and world
economy into its deepest crisis since the
1930s, they remained, as the email shows, the
real power behind the façade of American
democracy and its electoral process."
THE VERY BANKSTERS THAT ALL BUT DESTROYED
AMERICA'S ECONOMY AND A TRILLION DOLLARS IN
HOME EQUITY HAD ALREADY BOUGHT BARACK OBAMA
BEFORE HIS FIRST CORRUPT DAY IN OFFICE!
Citigroup chose Obama’s 2008 cabinet, WikiLeaks document reveals
By Tom Eley
15 October 2016
One month before the presidential election of 2008, the giant
Wall Street bank Citigroup submitted to the Obama
campaign a list of its preferred candidates for cabinet
positions in an Obama administration. This list corresponds
almost exactly to the eventual composition of Barack
Obama’s cabinet.
The memorandum, revealed by WikiLeaks in a recent document release from the email account of John Podesta, who currently serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, was written by Michael Froman, who was then an executive with Citigroup and currently serves as US trade representative. The email is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject line “Lists.” It went to Podesta a month before he was named chairman of President-Elect Obama’s transition team.
The email was sent at the height of the financial meltdown that erupted after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15. Even as Citigroup and its
Wall Street counterparts were dragging the
US and world economy into its deepest crisis
since the 1930s, they remained, as the email
shows, the real power behind the façade of
American democracy and its electoral process.
Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient. As it proposed,
Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, became secretary of Defense;
Eric Holder became attorney general; Janet Napolitano,
secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel, White
House chief of staff; Susan Rice, United Nations ambassador;
Arne Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius,
secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag, head
of the Office of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki,
secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Melody Barnes, chief of the
Domestic Policy Council.
For the highly sensitive position of secretary of the Treasury,
three possibilities were presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s
close disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner.
Obama chose Geithner, then president of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush
Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry
Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, had played the
leading role in organizing the Wall Street bailout.
Rubin had served as Treasury secretary in the Bill Clinton administration from 1995 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Summers. In that capacity, Rubin and Summers oversaw the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which had imposed a legal wall separating commercial banking from investment banking. Immediately after leaving Treasury, Rubin became a top executive at Citigroup, remaining there until 2009.
A notable aspect of the Froman memo is its use of identity politics. Among the Citigroup executive’s lists of proposed hires to Podesta were a “Diversity List” including “African American, Latino and Asian American candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level,” in Froman’s words, and “a similar document on women.” Froman also took diversity into account for his White House cabinet list, “probability-weighting the likelihood of appointing a diverse candidate for each position.” This list concluded with a table breaking down the 31 assignments by race and gender.
Citigroup’s recommendations came just three
days after then-President George W. Bush
signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief
Program, which allocated $700 billion in
taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall
Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary
was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion in
cash in the form of a government stock
purchase, plus a $306 billion government
guarantee to back up its worthless mortgage-
related assets.
Then-presidential candidate Obama played a critical political role in shepherding the massively unpopular bank bailout through Congress. The September financial crash convinced decisive sections of the US corporate-financial elite that the Democratic candidate of “hope” and “change” would be better positioned to contain popular opposition to the bailout than his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
As president, Obama not only funneled trillions of
dollars to the banks, he saw to it that not a single
leading Wall Street executive faced prosecution for
the orgy of speculation and swindling that led to the
financial collapse and Great Recession, and he
personally intervened to block legislation capping
executive pay at bailed-out firms.
The same furtive and corrupt process is underway in relation to a Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump administration. Froman’s email is one of many thousands released by WikiLeaks from the account of Podesta. Those communications, such as the Frohman email, which expose who really rules America, have been virtually ignored by the media. The pro-Democratic Party New Republic called attention to it in an article published Friday, but the story has received little if any further coverage.
The media has instead focused on salacious details of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed, in part, to divert attention from the substance of the Clinton campaign-related emails being released by WikiLeaks and other sources.
The New Republic drew attention to the Froman memo not because it opposes such machinations, but as a warning to the interests it represents that they must move now to influence the eventual composition of a Hillary Clinton administration.
“If the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication, the next four years of public policy are being hashed out right now, behind closed doors,” wrote New Republic author David Dayen. “And if liberals want to have an impact on that process, waiting until after the election will be too late.”
AMERICA’S TWISTED ROAD TO
REVOLUTION:
Fighting back Wall Street’s
Looting and Rule
Bernie Sanders stumps
for Clinton in Michigan
By Shannon Jones
7 October 2016
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders continued his
campaign for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Michigan
Thursday, making appearances in four cities. His stops included a United Auto
Workers (UAW) union hall in Dearborn, the University of Michigan campus in Ann
Arbor, Michigan State University in East Lansing and a high school in Grand
Rapids. He moves on to New Hampshire Friday.
The former Democratic candidate is seeking to
rebrand his “political revolution” into a get out the vote effort for Clinton,
the favored candidate of Wall Street and the military intelligence apparatus.
However, instead of the crowds of thousands he addressed during his primary
campaign, Sanders spoke before audiences of only several hundreds, largely made
up of Democratic Party faithful.
At his first stop at the UAW Local 600 union
hall, he addressed an audience of 200 to 300 people mobilized by the UAW. In
her introductory remarks, UAW Vice President for General Motors Cindy Estrada
noted the difficulties Clinton faced in attracting young voters. She called on
those in attendance not to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or other
“third party candidates.” She urged union members and others in the audience to
make an all out effort to get out the vote for Clinton and to register those
not already registered.
During the revolt of autoworkers against
UAW-backed contracts last fall, Estrada played the lead role in ramming through
the concessions agreement at Ford. The vote ended in a supposed “yes” vote at
Local 600 that gave the UAW just barely enough votes to claim that the contract
passed, amidst accusations from workers of ballot stuffing.
Sanders, who spoke for about a half hour,
advanced his boilerplate pitch, promising that Clinton would redress a myriad
of ills—income inequality, lack of access to healthcare, crumbling
infrastructure, poverty wages and overflowing prisons. He spoke as if the
disastrous social conditions in the US were unrelated to the policies pursued
by President Obama and the Democratic Party for the past eight years.
Sanders heaped praise on the unions, calling the
Local 600 union hall “hallowed ground.” He said nothing about the miserable
sellout foisted on US autoworkers last year by the UAW or its role in
suppressing the class struggle for the past three decades. Likewise he made no
mention of the ongoing struggles of nurses in Minneapolis, teachers in
Cleveland and Chicago, Canadian autoworkers or symphony musicians in Pittsburgh
and Philadelphia, who are among tens of thousands locked in bitter contract
battles.
A little later, at the University of Michigan,
Sanders spoke before an audience of several hundred, mainly students. In
contrast to the enthusiastic crowds of students he addressed last spring, this
campus visit was noticeably subdued. At UM he continued his effort to blackmail
young people into voting for Clinton by appealing to hatred of the fascistic
Trump.
Sanders has been assigned the role by the
American ruling class of channeling growing opposition to endless war and
social inequality back into the Democratic Party. To do this he attempted to
tap into the growing interest and support for socialism among workers and young
people in order only to demoralize and smother it.
A Socialist Equality Party campaign team
distributed information about the party’s election campaign of Jerry White for
president and Niles Niemuth for vice president to students attending the
Sanders event in Ann Arbor. Niemuth joined the campaign and used the
opportunity to talk to young people about the November 5 conference, Socialism vs. Capitalism and War, at Wayne
State University in Detroit.
Many students indicated to Niemuth and SEP
supporters that they only planned to vote for Clinton as the “lesser of two
evils.” There was widespread dislike for the Democratic nominee, as well as a
frustration over the outcome of the Democratic primary and a feeling there was
no choice but to vote for Clinton to stop Trump’s election.
SEP supporters asked one student, Zainab, what
she thought of Sanders’ decision to endorse Clinton. “He had to do it, but I
don’t agree,” she said. “We shouldn’t play off the fear for Trump to support
someone who is almost as bad.”
On Clinton’s record of support for war, Zainab
said the US has “caused chaos in the Middle East with billions of dollars lost.
It has cultivated animosity and created a vacuum in Iraq, displacing so many
families and turning them into refugees. It’s all for money and power, which go
hand in hand. We haven’t even gotten over colonialism. Honestly I don’t see a
difference between Democrats and Republicans. Clinton is not anti-war. And with
Trump, I can’t even understand him.”
When asked about attending the November 5
conference against war, she said: “It’s a great idea. I don’t even know how to
put it in a sentence, but yeah! I’m for it. An international movement would be
interesting because there are so many people in the Middle East who are
anti-war, who are opposed to the invasions and occupations of their countries.
I want to know how we can unite them.”
Another student, Korey, said he was a supporter
of the Green Party but was voting for Clinton. “I voted for Sanders in the
primary, and I support Clinton because she’ll appoint liberals to the Supreme
Court.”
Niemuth noted that Clinton and Trump both
represent the financial aristocracy, and that regardless of who is elected the
next administration will expand war and intensify the attack on the working
class. Korey replied, “I don’t like her positions on the wars. I’m against
intervention, and I don’t believe in the occupations, and Clinton’s record has
contributed to the crisis in the Middle East. I don’t agree with the US
involvement in Syria and I’m also against these drone strikes, but I’m worried
about a Trump presidency.”
Another student, Gary, who was originally from
England, said, “I’m a socialist. I think everyone should be given a decent shot
at life. I think the state should help people. Sanders was the only American
political campaign I’ve ever contributed to. I think he had to endorse
Clinton.”
A SEP supporter asked him whether there was a
contradiction between Sanders’ self-proclaimed “democratic socialism” and his
support for the pro-war, pro-Wall Street Clinton campaign. He said, “I don’t
like it, but she’s better than Trump. I wouldn’t say I’m entirely anti-war, but
I’m anti-unjust wars.” When asked whether any of the US wars of the last 15
years were just, he said: “No. They are not justified.”
Courtney said, “The wars are to get oil. Clinton
is a billionaire and she’s in it for the business.”
Her friend Aji said, “Everyone in politics is
stupid, and we tend to do things for financial gain.” When Niemuth explained
that the wars are not the product of general “greed,” but of the capitalist
system, Courtney said: “Oh, I hate capitalism, basically for the reasons I
already said. I think socialism would be better.”
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
THE FINAL TRANSFER OF AMERICA’ ECONOMY TO THE SUPER RICH!
THE GREAT DEPRESSION IS JUST AROUND
THE/ALL CORNERS!
AMERICA’S
ECONOMIC ARMAGEDDON
Under
Obama-Clintonomics, the rich became VERY rich and we got the tax bills for
their bailouts and crimes!
30
REASONS FOR 30 YEARS IN PRISON FOR HILLARY!
THE UGLY, SORDID, CORRUPT AND SLEAZY LIFE OF BILLARY AND HILLARY CLINTON:Thirty reasons
not to vote for Hillary
She would make a terrible president and Bill an equally terrible
“First Gentleman” for these thirty reasons.