Hillary Clinton is an exceptionally skillful politician. Collectively, she and her husband Bill have parlayed their political experience into at least $125 million in speaking fees alone. According to Bloomberg, Hillary was paid $12 million in the 16 months after leaving her role as US secretary of state. Knowing she’d likely run for president, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley (and other big Wall Street corporations) gladly paid her $2.9 million in speaking fees alone. The same Wall Street corporations then gave her campaign super PACs millions more. Coincidence?
Clinton is surely aware that Wall Street won’t give politicians millions without expecting something big in return. In a Des Moines Register interview, she justified her $250,000-per-event Wall Street speaking fees, saying, “What they were interested in were my views on what was going on in the world … there’s a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world.” Does she honestly expect the American people to believe Wall Street pays her $250,000 for a one-hour talk because they want her views on the world? She most surely knows that Wall Street wants her political influence.
In that same interview (as if to say, “Bernie does it too”), Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for his 2000 vote for deregulating swaps and derivatives (the Commodity Futures Modernization Act), which was one of the main causes of the economic collapse in 2008. Of course, she didn’t mention that Sanders forcefully spoke out against the bill, and Sanders, like the rest of Congress, was essentially blackmailed into voting for it.