Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at the February 4, 2016 Democratic Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham
The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign has a new strategy to get Senator Bernie Sanders to shut up about the unseemly mountains of money Wall Street has showered on her and Bill Clinton throughout their careers: in campaign funds, in speaking fees, in home mortgages, and in donations to their charity, the Clinton Global Initiative. (Details here.) The new strategy is to effectively socialize Sanders to silence by embarrassing him every time he brings up the subject.
Before Clinton took the stage last night at the MSNBC Democratic Debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, her Press Secretary, Brian Fallon, and Campaign Manager, Robby Mook, met with reporters from Bloomberg News to complain about Sanders’ innuendos that Hillary Clinton can be bought by Wall Street.
According to a report at Bloomberg, Fallon stated at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast earlier yesterday that if Sanders is “going to raise the specter of contributions that have been made to her from the financial industry, he should have to complete the thought, and lay out exactly what he’s accusing her of.” Mook chimed in to challenge the idea that Hillary could be bought by Wall Street by noting that “hedge fund billionaires” are “attacking” her in campaign ads. (It should be noted that other hedge fund billionaires, like George Soros and Paloma Partners’ David Sussman, have contributed over $10 million to Hillary’s Super Pac, Priorities USA, which raked in over $41 million last year, 90 percent of which came from a handful of super wealthy individuals. Sanders has no aligned Super Pac.)
Hillary continued the strategy to silence Sanders on stage last night with this:
“I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent weeks.”
Sanders will, hopefully, not be foolish enough to fall for this socializing to silence routine from a bare-knuckled career politician like Hillary. What he should have said is this:
First, we’re not talking about modest sums. We’re talking about $250,000 and $300,000 speaking fees for one hour speeches. (These fees didn’t go into campaign coffers but directly into the Clintons’ personal bank accounts.) According to the Washington Post, in less than a year and a half, Hillary and Bill Clinton earned over $25 million in speaking fees, a significant portion of which came from Wall Street firms. In 2012, Hillary’s last full year as Secretary of State, Bill Clinton socked away an astonishing $16.3 million in speaking fees.
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