Hillary: A Story of Wall Street
Will you share the transcripts of the speeches you gave to Goldman Sachs?
I would prefer not to.
What point does this Washington Post writer think he’s making when – in the voice of Hillary Clinton saying what she should have said about the now-notorious Goldman Sachs speeches – he has her say this?
And the money? Yeah, it’s hard to turn down that kind of money [$675,000 for three speeches]. So I go, I talk for an hour about the complex challenges America faces in an ever-changing world, blah blah blah, do the grip-and-grin and get a six-figure check. You would too, if you could.
I know it’s an article of faith on Wall Street that everyone is gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy. Another word for people who are gnawingly infinitely grotesquely life-destroyingly greedy is psychopaths, and indeed large numbers of Wall Street people are psychopaths or almost-psychopaths. “[Goldman Sachs wants to hire] people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”
If a deeply disreputable bank offered to fly you first class to some location where you were wined and dined and then asked to mouth cynical bullshit about a country whose problems are actually worth taking seriously… And then if that bank pressed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars into your hands for doing that, for mouthing that bullshit … And then if the bank flew you back first class to the destination of your choice… Would you do it?
Franchement, you couldn’t pay me to swim with vampire squids. Their destructive greed and arrogance disgusts me (and inspires Andy Borowitz), and, as the current presidential campaign suggests, I’m not alone.
You will never catch Bernie Sanders standing in a room as a paid guest of a bank under investigation for ripping billions off pensioners and investors, addressing the audience in the first-person plural.
When mainstream political pundits, like this Washington Post guy, assume we’re all as psychopathically greedy as – well, as he is… And as this observer is… When he makes the same claim that all apologists for America’s culture of wealth inequality make (The rest of us have no considered moral position on this behavior and in fact are simply jealous; every one of us would behave the way psychopathically greedy people behave if we had the opportunity.), he might as well be giving money to the Sanders campaign. Because all he does is make decent Americans angrier.
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There is something disgusting about the spectacle of someone who was already wealthy far beyond the imagining of ordinary Americans continuing to accept what she claims were unsuccessful attempts to bribe her, even as she was on the eve of launching a presidential campaign supposedly dedicated to protecting the interests of those ordinary Americans against the depredations of the very masters of the universe funneling millions of dollars into her personal bank account.
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Notes on greed.
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A bargain at twice the price!
Clinton actually undercharged Goldman Sachs, since she was paid $9,000 less than her average fee.
Friends & Family rate.
The notorious John Thrasher, head of one of America’s most corrupt universities, has endorsed him.
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton struggled Wednesday night to answer a question about why she took more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year.
“Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,” she said…
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In the olden days (2008), Harvard president Larry Summers made do with $135,000 for his speech in front of Goldman Sachs.
When questions were raised, during his subsequent government service, about some of his many hugely paid financial sector stand-ups, Summers donated a sliver of the money to charity.
… of her “fringe and vociferous group,” Women of the Wall. Recall UD, featured here in the Forward (scroll down to her smiling and her holding her prayer shawl), at a rally outside the Israeli embassy on behalf of religious freedom in Israel.
And, well, WOW. We won.
(Your blogueuse.)
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Chelsea Clinton: J’ACCUSE!
Tourism Minister Yariv Levin sharply attacked the American Jewish Reform movement during Sunday’s government hearing on the compromise regarding a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, saying that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to her Jewish partner, officiated by a Reform rabbi and a priest, shows the extent of assimilation among Reform Jews in the United States.
“… [A] man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton’s daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it.”
Consider one of Bernie’s fellow University of Chicago grads, John Martin, who has been honored by that university: He sits on the board of trustees. Martin heads the price-gouging drug firm, Gilead. Here’s a summary of his 2014 compensation.
Gilead — whose hepatitis C treatment, Sovaldi, can cost patients up to $84,000 for a 12-week treatment — said Martin received compensation valued at $18.9 million last year and gained $187.4 million from previously awarded stock options and restricted shares.
Martin’s 2014 pay included a $1.6 million salary, stock award valued at $8.4 million, stock options worth $5.2 million and $3.7 million incentive award. Excluding gains from exercised stock options and vested shares, Martin’s compensation rose 22% from $15.5 million in 2013, Gilead said Friday in an annual proxy filing.
Martin, CEO since 1996, has scored eye-popping equity gains before.
He exercised stock options for a $158.9 million gain and received $4.8 million from vested shares in 2013. And in 2012, his compensation was valued at $95.8 million after receiving about $54.5 million in 2011 and $53.2 million in 2010, according to company filings.
What’s he making this year? You have to figure he’s pulling in around two hundred million. Just this one guy.
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Who cares? Not shareholders. Not one of America’s best universities, which has put one of the country’s great icons of greed and cruelty in charge of its students’ educations. No one who matters cares. On the contrary. They’re thrilled.
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Gilead and Martin play a very small part in a very large story that Americans are having trouble ignoring. 2015 was the year in which everyone loved to hate Martin Shkreli – in the world of vicious rapacity, he got the spotlight. For a few months, Shkreli stood for all the CEOs holding hundreds of millions of dollars while watching people who could benefit from their medications die, or ruin their lives trying to survive.
But Shkreli is the lowlife, the lurid loudmouth easy to see and easy to hate. John Martin is the quiet, dressed for success, face of income inequality. To focus on John Martin is to understand that income inequality and wealth inequality aren’t mere phrases, mere abstractions. To listen to Bernie Sanders is to hear the only politician willing to bring clarity and outrage to what he calls “the great moral issue of our time.”
… UD finds amusing the doublespeak the new policies generate. England has not only given schools the right to ban the burqa, it has given school inspectors the right to “mark down” schools where the burqa seems to hinder learning and interaction.
Outrageous! After all…
‘The veil doesn’t make pupils intelligent or not. It gives them their identity…’
The identity of fully veiled women is that of no identity. Your very mouth is covered. The identity is that of hushed invisibility.
And note the language: It gives them their identity. These are very young girls to whom an identity has been given long before they are even able to formulate the concept ‘identity’ for themselves.
But that’s just the point. The younger you veil them, the better.
“[H]e’s appearing with someone who’s viewed as one of America’s most astounding morons.”
UD anxiously follows the tweets chronicling the situation in Oregon.
… hope.
(So far, only one source – International Business Times – is printing the photograph. I assume it’s authentic, but that could change.)
… isn’t quite so tolerant of new stuff when it comes to his womenfolk. Professor Youssif Omar’s niece, a fourteen year old student at a local high school, apparently decided to experiment with what life without the hijab would be like – I mean, this is America, you get to decide… Or can you decide if you’re fourteen?
Haha, I guess not, because when Uncle Youssif saw her unveiled at her school he grabbed her by the hair, dragged her to his car, and beat the crap out of her.
Among his skills on his Linked In page (a page that lists a staggering number of advanced degrees in a wide variety of fields), Omar features teamwork, and ain’t it the truth. When it comes to keeping the family “team” in working order, Omar goes above and beyond the call of duty. Risks arrest.
I mean, he has been arrested. For felony child abuse. Plenty of time to read through those creative writing entries when he’s in jail.
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UPDATE: Missouri disavows any connection.
… killed at Bataclan.
