Hillary:
Wall Street’s Golden Girl
By Pepe Escobar
April 28,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Counterpunch"-
So it’s
a go for Zeus to launch the thunderbolt. Neo-Athena
– minus the wisdom – Hillary Clinton, Queen of
Chaos, Goddess of War, Empress of the Perma-Smirk,
will finally have her shot at the U.S. presidency.
After the Battle of New York, she’s on top on number
of votes; number of states; number of pledged
delegates; number of superdelegates.
It seems as
inevitable as death and offshore accounts. “I don’t
think she’s going to be indicted”; thus spoke Donald
Trump to Fox News in relation to Servergate. “The
Democratic Party is going to protect her.” And yet,
assuming he clinches the presidency, Trump said he
would pursue charges against Hillary concerning her
subterranean email server.
Charles
Koch, for his part, now admits Hillary might make a
better President than, well, Trump or any other
Republican (“It’s possible, it’s possible) – as much
as, in some respects, he considers Bill was a better
President than George W. Bush. So would Koch’s
billions support Hillary? “We would have to believe
her actions would be quite different from her
rhetoric.”
Which
brings us to Hillary as Queen of Turbo-Charged
Casino Neoliberalism. And once again, the evidence
insists to suggest that her actions do not exactly
match her rhetoric.
Hillary
takes no prisoners when it comes to imprint on
public opinion she’s a dedicated apostle of the No
Bank Is Too Big To Fail ethos, and is fully
committed to their “reform”. She may have won the
Battle of Wall Street, at least as far as the
Democratic Party is concerned. But that was never a
battle.
Enter, once
again, those by now notorious three Hillary Clinton
speeches to Goldman Sachs executives in the fall of
2013, which translated into a hefty $675,000 add-on
to Hillary’s piggy bank.
This may –
or may not – be a Pandora’s box. One of the speeches
($225,000) was in a summit in Arizona, where Hillary
seems to have been
busy impersonating a Goldman Sachs managing
director. Glow, Goldman, glow.
Other speeches were, at a minimum, “friendly”.
Hillary
repeatedly refused to release transcripts of the
speeches. So it’s up to at least another speech to
offer a lateral clue. Here is Hillary
talking to Goldman Sachs executives –
including CEO Lloyd Blankfein – on September 2014,
during the annual meeting of the Clinton Global
Initiative (CGI) in New York. Goldman Sachs,
predictably, is a top CGI sponsor.
My
machine is Too Big To Fail
The Clinton
machine-Goldman Sachs dangerous liaisons stretch
back to the early go-go 1990s, when Bubba was not
even in da (White) House. Most of the trail is a
mater of public domain; Bob Rubin – then co-senior
partner of Goldman Sachs – falling in love with Bill
and becoming the economic advisor to his 1992
presidential campaign; Rubin engineering the
deregulation frenzy that gave us toxic CDOs and
apocalyptic derivatives; Goldman Sachs as a top
financier of Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, only
behind Citigroup; Bill bagging $650,000 for four
speeches between December 2004 and June 2005 (once
again; no transcripts); then bagging another
$600,000 between 2006 and 2014.
In 2011 the
Clinton Foundation moved to a new HQ in downtown
Manhattan – conveniently, in a Goldman Sachs
building. In the spring of 2014, top Clinton
Foundation donors discussed a bright future together
inside Goldman Sachs’s corporate HQ. Gary Gensler,
formerly from Goldman Sachs and also former chairman
of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is the
Hillary Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer.
As
extensively dissected, the record spells out
Goldman Sachs as “the Clintons’ number one Wall
Street contributor, based on speaking fees,
charitable donations, and campaign contributions”,
the three foundations of what Simon Head chose to
brand, appropriately, the Clinton system.
So forget
about the extensively documented dodgy practices of
Goldman Sachs before, during and after the 2008
financial crisis. Forget about Goldman Sachs being
ordered to
pay a paltry $5 billion for its mortgage racket
(Hillary: no comments.)
The record
shows that for the Clinton system, Goldman Sachs is
a sacred cow. Thus those lavish speeches, the
glowing P.R., the revolving door always open. Not
exactly poetic justice rules that the system (Clintonian
and otherwise) as well as stalwart Goldman Sachs are
Too Big To Fail. You don’t need to be Leibniz to
know that’s the best of all possible worlds for the
Goldman Golden Girl.
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