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.
February 5th, 2016 at 6:32PM
birds of a feather
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hormats
February 6th, 2016 at 1:51AM
Hillary Clinton is being frowned upon for her amoral stance. Sure it’s a vanity play by Goldman Sachs and the rest to pay her $225,000 for a light speech. But they pay her with OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY – that’s the point Sanders needs to hammer. There is no redeeming social value in the exchange but she takes OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY anyway because, well, they offered it. That’s the psychopathic element here. It may not be illegal but it is morally bankrupt, and that’s why we view it as obscene.