Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Hillary Clinton Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative, a Program Funded by the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation
To fully get your mind around Hillary Clinton’s new, toothless plan to “Prevent the Next Crash” on Wall Street, you need to know a few things right up front. Hillary hails not from the Democratic Party that genuinely cares about America’s staggering wealth and income inequality and the plight of the little guy, but from a grotesquely disfigured hybrid organization informally known as the “Wall Street Democrats.”
In that hybrid organization, money trumps morals, duty to country and the public interest. It is a shrine to crony capitalism, infused with lawyers who believe “it’s legal if you can get away with it.” Just as Wall Street’s watchdogs suffer from regulatory capture, the Wall Street Democrats are afflicted with “cognitive capture,” a polite way of saying public officials covet the wealth they hang around with on Wall Street and expect equal earning power when they pass through the gold-plated revolving door.
After former President Bill Clinton signed Citigroup’s dream deal in 1999 to repeal the depression era Glass-Steagall Act that separated insured banks from gambling casinos on Wall Street, then U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin (another Wall Street Democrat) who lobbied for the repeal, quickly beat a path to Citigroup’s door where he received compensation of more than $115 million over the next decade. After Bill Clinton left the White House, Citigroup paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees and committed $5.5 million to the Clinton Global Initiative – a program that has become controversial over fears that corporations and foreign governments were attempting to curry favor with Hillary while she was Secretary of State by making donations to the related Clinton Foundation.
Quite recently it was accepted wisdom that all of those speaking fees for both Clintons, plus book royalties and government compensation has pushed the couple into the $100 million net worth area. But Dan Alexander of Forbes writes the following in the current issue:
“Since Bill and Hillary Clinton left the White House in 2001, they have earned more than $230 million. But in federal filings the Clintons claim they are worth somewhere between $11 million and $53 million. After layering years of disclosures on top of annual tax returns, Forbes estimates their combined net worth at $45 million. Where did all of the money go? No one seems to know, and the Clintons aren’t offering any answers.”
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