US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5597

On October 16 2016 07:30 GreenHorizons wrote:


Of course that's the problem. But her supporters are so far from recognizing that, it's not even worth broaching. If they didn't type out a contract of quid per quo, it's just good politics by their metric at this point.

The idea that she thinks her presence and those words were worth $250k/hr, but $15/hr for women working their asses off, is too high a burden for the economy to handle, is the kind of thing that used to sit sour on the left.

On October 16 2016 07:35 Nebuchad wrote:


It is stupid bullshit to call Obama a muslim or a foreigner, and so it makes sense not to humor them.
It is not stupid to wonder whether a politician who says she will do things for you is actually beholden to the rich, which would diminish her capacity to deliver on these promises. And so it doesn't make sense not to humor them.

Clinton dissed environmentalists in private meeting with unions

Hillary Clinton dismissed climate activists in withering terms during a meeting with labor unions last year, saying the environmentalists pressing her to renounce fossil fuels should "get a life," according to allegedly hacked emails released Friday by WikiLeaks.

Clinton's private remarks came as she was fighting off a challenge from Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and getting accosted at rallies by environmental activists asking her to join the Vermont senator's call to stop oil and gas drilling on federal lands and to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. Since winning the nomination, Clinton has made amends with Sanders, and green groups have united behind her campaign to head off the threat posed by Donald Trump. But revelation of the private remarks may complicate that relationship.

"I'm already at odds with the most organized and wildest" of the environmental movement, Clinton told building trades unions in September 2015, according to a transcript of the remarks apparently circulated by her aides. "They come to my rallies and they yell at me and, you know, all the rest of it. They say, 'Will you promise never to take any fossil fuels out of the earth ever again?' No. I won't promise that. Get a life, you know."

WikiLeaks, which the Clinton campaign accuses of working with Russia to undermine her campaign, already has released pro-fracking excerpts of Clinton's Wall Street speeches, but the new comments from Clinton are more sharply critical of green activists.

Clinton's comments came weeks before she announced her opposition to Keystone XL, a decision that she previewed at the meeting for labor groups — most of which supported the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline. Given that she also sought the unions' endorsement, however, Clinton couched her rejection of Keystone as an opportunity to focus on plans she released later that month to repair and replace existing natural gas infrastructure.

"Bernie Sanders is getting lots of support from the most radical environmentalists because he's out there every day bashing the Keystone pipeline. And, you know, I'm not into it for that," Clinton told the unions, according to the transcript. "My view is, I want to defend natural gas. ... I want to defend fracking under the right circumstances."

Clinton has supported President Barack Obama's moratorium on federal coal leasing, and has encouraged him to make the Arctic off limits in the offshore drilling plan he is scheduled to release before leaving office. But she has stopped short of endorsing a phaseout of drilling on federal lands that greens would like to see.

In her speech to the unions, she took aim at that emerging "keep it in the ground" strategy.

"They are after everything and I'm just talking through them. And of course they go support somebody else," she said, according to the transcript. "That's fine and I don't particularly care. But I do think I have to say, look, given everything else we have to do in this country, this is not an issue for me that I'm going to say I support. I want to work on other stuff."

Bill McKibben, the co-founder of green group 350.org, which has made its name on the fight against Keystone and has led efforts to target Clinton during public events, said activists would not be deterred.

"We'd actually love to do something with our lives other than endlessly fight the fossil fuel infrastructure that will raise the planet's temperature past the breaking point," McKibben said. "If Secretary Clinton is willing to lend a hand in the task, we'd love to move on to things that are more rewarding, like building out a solar and wind-fueled future. In the meantime, though, someone's got to do it. And the day the election is over and the creepy perv beaten, we'll be back hard at work."

The Clinton campaign has declined to confirm the authenticity of the emails released by WikiLeaks, which it accuses of working to benefit Russia and the Donald Trump campaign by hacking campaign chairman John Podesta.

"By dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing [Vladimir] Putin's dirty work to help elect Donald Trump," Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin said in a statement earlier this week.

On October 16 2016 07:43 zlefin wrote:

it is troublesome; but it's also hard to assess value; and it's hard to police estimates of value if people are overpaying. also iirc they weren't done while she was in office.
And given the value of advertisement, it's hard to assess the value of the advertising boost they can get from such a talk.
What actions could we take to address the issue?

On October 16 2016 08:16 Dan HH wrote:

She was in office non stop from 2001 to 2013 during which most of these speeches were, being invested in by companies is just as much of a conflict of interest for a senator as for the SoS.

There's no need to assess value, it shouldn't be legal, period. You want to speak in private to certain companies or representatives of certain industries while in office? Do it for free or not at all. Of course this doesn't fully solve the problem, since there's plenty of retired politicians that still wield enough sway in their party or a certain faction of their party to be worth buying, and in Hillary's case she could have just sent Bill to rake it all in instead of dividing the work. But it would be a small step forward from the current situation of unashamed corporate money in politics that they don't even have to bother to hide.

On October 16 2016 08:20 zlefin wrote:

hmm, maybe I misread when the speeches were. I was focusing on the specific wall street ones, but I guess there's a fair number of others.
Could you cite a specific paid speech when she was in office?

On October 16 2016 08:20 zlefin wrote:

hmm, maybe I misread when the speeches were. I was focusing on the specific wall street ones, but I guess there's a fair number of others.
Could you cite a specific paid speech when she was in office?

On October 16 2016 08:41 GoTuNk! wrote:


To put it in perspective, Hillary and Bill Clinton made more than 153 MILLION DOLLARS for 729 paid speeches between february 2001 and May 2015 - recieving and average fee of $210.975 PER SPEECH.

Source: https://archive.org/details/HRCPaidSpeechesFlags

In no world this is not a simple cover up for bribery.

Here you have full breakdown if you want more details:

https://youtu.be/TuLtbcclcfM

On October 16 2016 08:51 OuchyDathurts wrote:
Its only a cover up for bribery in your own mind. People pay money for speeches. Molyneux is a liar, an idiot, and a fraud so great source there.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/washingtons-highest-lowest-speaking-fees/story?id=24551590

On October 16 2016 08:54 GoTuNk! wrote:


Yeah the bribery part is my acussation. Please do tell me where is Molyneux lying.

According to Steve Hassan, a licensed mental health counselor and leading American cult expert, "Partly what’s going on with the people on the Internet who are indoctrinated, they spend lots of hours on the computer. Videos can have them up all night for several nights in a row. Molyneux knows how to talk like he knows what he’s talking about—despite very, very little academic research. He cites this and cites that, and presents it as the whole truth. It dismantles people’s sense of self and replaces it with his sense of confidence about how to fix the world."

On October 16 2016 09:02 Nyxisto wrote:
Apart from the fact that bribery is obviously nonsense because they're openly paid for this which is perfectly legal, you do know that you can't just bribe the President of the United States to do things for you right? He's not the supreme leader, that's not how the United States work. If you'd want to buy political influence you try to influence local lawmakers, you don't bribe Hillary

On October 16 2016 09:23 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/11011
Speaking about financial regulations Clinton said "The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry"

Self regulation for the banks.How'd that work out post Glass-Steagall? Easy to see why Clinton gets the vast majority of Wall St donations both in the dem primary and the general campaign.

MR. O'NEILL: Let's come back to the US. Since 2008, there's been an awful lot of seismic activity around Wall Street and the big banks and regulators and politicians.
Now, without going over how we got to where we are right now, what would be your advice to the Wall Street community and the big banks as to the way forward with those two important decisions?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I represented all of you for eight years. I had great relations and worked so close together after 9/11 to rebuild downtown, and a lot of respect for the work you do and the people who do it, but I do -- I think that when we talk about the regulators and the politicians, the economic consequences of bad decisions back in '08, you know, were devastating, and they had repercussions throughout the world.
That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February of '09, so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that's an oversimplification we know, but it was the conventional wisdom.
And I think that there's a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened with greater transparency, with greater openness on all sides, you know, what happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening? You guys help us figure it out and let's make sure that we do it right this time.
And I think that everybody was desperately trying to fend off the worst effects institutionally, governmentally, and there just wasn't that opportunity to try to sort this out, and that came later.
I mean, it's still happening, as you know. People are looking back and trying to, you know, get compensation for bad mortgages and all the rest of it in some of the agreements that are being reached.
There's nothing magic about regulations, too much is bad, too little is bad. How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.
And I think there has to be a recognition that, you know, there's so much at stake now, I mean, the business has changed so much and decisions are made so quickly, in nano seconds basically. We spend trillions of dollars to travel around the world, but it's in everybody's interest that we have a better framework, and not just for the United States but for the entire world, in which to operate and trade.
You know, I remember having a long conversation with Warren Buffett, who is obviously a friend of mine, but I think he's the greatest investor of our modern era, and he said, you know, I would go and I'd talk to my friends and I'd ask them to explain to me what a default credit swap was, and by the time they got into their fifth minute, I had no idea what they were talking about. And when they got into their tenth minute, I realized they didn't have any idea what they were talking about.
I mean, Alan Greenspan said, I didn't understand at all what they were trading. So I think it's in everybody's interest to get back to a better transparent model.
And we need banking. I mean, right now, there are so many places in our country where the banks are not doing what they need to do because they're scared of regulations, they're scared of the other shoe dropping, they're just plain scared, so credit is not flowing the way it needs to to restart economic growth.
So people are, you know, a little -- they're still uncertain, and they're uncertain both because they don't know what might come next in terms of regulations, but they're also uncertain because of changes in a global economy that we're only beginning to take hold of.
So first and foremost, more transparency, more openness, you know, trying to figure out, we're all in this together, how we keep this incredible economic engine in this country going. And this is, you know, the nerves, the spinal column.
And with political people, again, I would say the same thing, you know, there was a lot of complaining about Dodd-Frank, but there was also a need to do something because for political reasons, if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it's all the fault of Wall Street, you can't sit idly by and do nothing, but what you do is really important.
And I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through it all.
And, of course, I don't, you know, I know that banks and others were worried about continued liability and other problems down the road, so it would be better if we could have had a more open exchange about what we needed to do to fix what had broken and then try to make sure it didn't happen again, but we will keep working on it.

On October 16 2016 09:31 oBlade wrote:

If it were impossible to influence the president because they have no power, this wouldn't be the most contentious election in decades.