[D66] WikiLeaks: Emails Clinton online

[J.N.]

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.”

On 13-10-16 12:49, Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks wrote:
> De emails van Clinton staan online bij WikiLeaks.
>
> Surf naar,
> https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/
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