Sunday, April 24, 2016

Hillary speaks --someone pays $250,000 ?


No one paid Hillary for speeches because she was a good public speaker. 

They paid for her speeches, and  her husband's speeches, and gave money to her campaign, PACs and Clinton Foundation, because they expect her to be the next President … and when she is President they want to be treated well, even if during the campaign she seems to be running "against" Wall Street  and big business.


It's almost certain, in my opinion, that no Hillary speech transcripts will be released if Bernie Sanders has any chance of being nominated … or ever.



Hillary has every right to keep the transcripts private. 


She can keep her medical records secret. 


She could have kept her income tax return secret too.



But Hillary had no right to take possession all her State Department e-Mails, and then decide by herself that she didn't feel like turning over more than half of them in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request.

Reminds me how she "lost" the Rose Law Firm Whitewater billing records until just after the statute of limitations for prosecution was up ... and then they were suddenly "discovered" in the White House.  Crooked Hillary !


I love the new Trump term: "Crooked Hillary".  

No other word describes her lifestyle, from the $100,000 cattle futures bribe in the 1970s to stealing furniture and other public property from the White House when she left in 2001.


Donald Trump apparently wanted to practice ridiculing fellow Republicans and the Republican National Committee to fine-tune his skills for attacking Hillary.



What Trump did will haunt him on Election Day if he's nominated, and later wants votes of all "Low Energy Jeb", "Little Marco" and "Lyin' Ted" supporters. The only word for Trump's strategy is "counterproductive".



I sure hope Trump and Hillary are not nominated: Just the thought of two old white people, Loudmouth Donald and Shrill Hillary, getting angry, and bellowing at each other on a stage, is enough to make me ill.



Here's what I could find out about Hillary Clinton’s infamous $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs in late 2013.

 
Hillary says she will release a transcript if Republicans release their speech transcripts, assuming they made any paid speeches. 

That's a weird excuse -- what do Republicans have to do with this?  

Meanwhile, we've been waiting over two months, and I think we'll be waiting forever.



No wonder millions of voters doubt her honesty.



Bernie Sanders says Clinton got so much money because it was intended to buy influence, and/or Wall Streeters enjoyed hearing a defense of Wall Street coming from the top Democrat.



----- Former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey:
“Making the transcripts of the Goldman speeches public would have been devastating….[and] when the GOP gets done telling the Clinton Global Initiative fund-raising and expense story, Bernie supporters will wonder why he didn’t do the same….[As for] the email story, it’s not about emails. It is about [Hillary] wanting to avoid the reach of citizens using the Freedom of Information Act to find out what their government is doing, and then not telling the truth about why she did.”

----- From Politico:
"When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks."



"Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman’s workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis."


 
----- From Goldman Sachs Employee #1 (present at one speech):
“[The speech] was pretty glowing about [Goldman Sachs]. It’s so far from what she sounds like as a candidate now. It was like a ‘rah-rah’ speech. She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director.”


----- From Goldman Sachs Employee #2 (present at one speech):
“In this environment, [what she said to us at Goldman Sachs] could be made to look really bad.”


----- From Goldman Sachs Employee #3 (present at one speech):
“It was like, ‘Here’s someone who doesn’t want to vilify us but wants to get business back in the game. Like, maybe here’s someone who can lead us out of the wilderness.’”

 
----- From Goldman Sachs Executive or Client (present at one speech):
“Mrs. Clinton didn’t single out bankers or any other group for causing the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, she effectively said, ‘We’re all in this together, we’ve got to find our way out of it together.’”


 
----- Paraphrase of Several Attendees’ Accounts From Wall Street Journal:
“She didn’t often talk about the financial crisis, but when she did, she almost always struck an amicable tone. In some cases, she thanked the audience for what they had done for the country. One attendee said the warmth with which Mrs. Clinton greeted guests bordered on ‘gushy.’ She spoke sympathetically about the financial industry.”



----- Paraphrase of Several Attendees’ Accounts From Politico:
“Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, ‘We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.’”

The quotes above strongly suggest Hillary is fond of Wall Street speculators but unwilling to blame them for the last recession. 


I don't blame Wall Street either -- but the bond rating companies were so inept with their ratings of mortgage backed bonds that it bordered on fraud.

When campaigning Mrs. Clinton said, “I did stand up to the banks.” 


No attendee at her quarter-of-a-million-dollar speeches can recall anything like that.


As a New York Senator in 2008, Hillary said this about the TARP bank bailout:  “I think that the banks of New York and our other financial institutions are probably the biggest winners in this, which is one of the reasons why, at the end, despite my serious questions about it, I supported it.”



A person  who saw Clinton’s Arizona remarks to Goldman said they thought there was no chance the campaign would ever release them.  


“It would bury her against Sanders,” this person said. “It really makes her look like an ally of the firm.”

 
Hillary's comment that she took the $675,000 from Goldman for speeches because: “that’s what they offered”, demonstrates her questionable political skills.