Sunday, October 16, 2016

WikiLeaks Continuing Fail: Clinton Is Polite to Bankers When She Is Face-to-Face with Them.

WikiLeaks releases transcripts of the Goldman Sachs speeches. The smoking gun is that she is polite without saying anything remotely controversial. Fire up the Fox News outrage!!

Hillary Clinton to Wall Street bankers: no wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

Excepts to other Clinton speeches have come out in the past week, but Saturday WikiLeaks apparently dropped the entire transcripts of all three (?) Goldman Sachs speeches, and analysis of them is starting to come out.

Betsy Woodruff offers a take on them, and although she tosses out a "Two-faced?" at the top of the column and hints throughout that there's a divergence between what she tells bankers and what she's offered on the campaign trail, I find the difference innocuous enough that I'm inclined to issue an official meh.

In the speeches she does 1) tell bankers that politicians will inevitably come to them for cash and they will inevitably cough some up, 2) encourage them to use their money to promote policy and changes in the country that they support, and 3) encourage wealthy people to run for office because their wealth may shield them from getting bought out in the process.

Yes, she's harder on them out on the campaign trail. However, on the campaign trail her rhetoric is aimed at getting people to understand that increased taxes on the rich are to benefit those down the income ladder that couldn't finance those benefits if they tried, and that the reduced income inequality that would lead from these tax increases would be a plus. Not Republican goals, but not controversial socialist/new world order dicta either.

That she doesn't openly declare in her Goldman Sachs speeches that "When I get into office my tax increases are going to fuck you up but good" is not surprising. That instead she says "Use your money as a force for good" while not deriding them for abusing derivatives is also not surprising.

Here's Woodruff:
 None of this is necessarily controversial. But it doesn’t exactly comport with Clinton’s campaign trail messaging. On the page of her campaign site about campaign finance reform, she rips the influence donors have on elected politicians.
The bottom line -- as I can make it out so far -- is she tells her supporters on the campaign trail she'll expect the wealthy to pay their fair share and tells Wall Streeters to be thoughtful and constructive with their donations. Sure, donations from Sheldon Adelson are not a force for good in the way, say, those from George Soros are. They're both ridiculously wealthy people, but they use their money for quite different things. Which kind of donation is Hillary encouraging Goldman Sachs people to make?

Nothing nefarious here, but Fox News will use it 24-hours non-stop to cover up new sexual-predator allegations against Trump. Which is worse? The Fox News behavior, I'll warrant.


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