(NOTE TO READERS: Please reference my very understated “UPDATE” at the bottom of this post.)
Howard Friel
Common Dreams
Monday, February 22, 2016
Black’s Law Dictionary defines “recusal” as “removal of oneself as judge or policy-maker in a particular matter, esp. because of a conflict of interest.”
In the federal judiciary—a coequal branch with the executive—judges as well as Supreme Court justices are expected to recuse themselves, and do recuse themselves, from hearing cases with conflicts of interest that are less pronounced as Mrs. Clinton’s.
For example, Wikipedia observes that “in the Supreme Court of the United States, the Justices typically recuse themselves from participating in cases in which they have financial interests.”
In the same rough sense, shouldn’t a presidential candidate recuse herself from the presidency after accepting more than a million dollars of speaking fees from the country’s most powerful investment banks, given the obvious conflicts of interest as potentially the country’s next chief policymaker? If not as a matter of current law, then out of a commitment to political ethics and respect for the office of the presidency?
According to a recent report by CNN, Hillary Clinton was paid more than $21 million for making speeches to private concerns from April 2013 to March 2015, and thus a mere one month prior to her formal announcement as a candidate for president in April 2015.
Of the $21 million, she was paid $1.8 million by Goldman Sachs, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and Deutsche Bank.
Her husband, Bill Clinton, according to CNN, was paid at least $5.9 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS.
This adds up to Clinton-household income of at least $7.7 million from “big banks” prior to Hillary Clinton’s 2015 announcement as a candidate for president.
Furthermore, according to an online list of all Hillary Clinton speeches from 2013 to 2015, she was also paid $225,000 and upwards per speech by Fidelity Investments, Verizon Communications, Sanford C. Bernstein, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, CME Group, Boston Consulting Group, SAP Global Marketing, Accenture, General Electric, Xerox Corporation, Cisco, Qualcomm, Drug Chemical and Associated Technologies, California Medical Association, Healthcare Information and Management Association, Biotechnology Industry Organization, Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and many others.
It is difficult to imagine no breach of ethics when a high-profile, presumptive candidate for president is paid more than $21 million in less than two years for almost no work from corporate, healthcare, investment banks and other concerns, only to announce one month after the speaking tour has ended that she is indeed running for president.
It is very likely, given the tight chronology, that she was planning to run for president while taking the money for the speeches, contrary to her denial on that count to Anderson Cooper during a recent town hall event.
Clinton has claimed no conflicts of interest in accepting speaking fees, for example, from Wall Street investment banks. However, on February 8, CNN reported that “Hillary Clinton won’t rule out appointing a Wall Street veteran to the top economic post in the White House.” CNN also noted that “when Clinton was pressed [on NBC’s Meet the Press] on whether she would appoint someone from Wall Street to be her Treasury Secretary, she refused to say no.”
Doesn’t this at least look like a pay-to-play arrangement orchestrated by a leading candidate for the presidency? With more of the same likely to follow if she’s elected?
Hillary Clinton took the money from all of the above. No law against it, currently. But she shouldn’t now be a candidate for president as a result.
Here is the Bill and Hillary Clinton Speaking Fees Chart as Published in Full by CNN on February 5.
Total Bill and Hillary Clinton Speech Income:
February 2001 thru May 2015
Total: $153,669,691
Average: $210,795
Speeches: 729
Total Bill Clinton Speech Income, February 2001 thru May 2015:
Total: $132,021,691
Average: $207,255
Speeches: 637
Total Hillary Clinton Speech Income, April 2013 thru March 2015:
Total: $21,648,000
Average: $235,304
Speeches: 92
Bill and Hillary Speech Income from “Big Banks”:
At Least $7.7 Million for at Least 39 Speeches
Hillary Speech Income from “Big Banks”:
At Least $1.8 Million for at Least 8 Speeches
[WJC = William Jefferson Clinton; HRC = Hillary Rodham Clinton]
Bill and Hillary Paid Speeches to Goldman Sachs
Total: $2,225,000 (12 Speeches Total: 9 Bill, 3 Hillary)
12/3/2004 $125,000 WJC New York, New York
4/20/2005 $125,000 WJC Kiawah Island, South Carolina
6/6/2005 $250,000 WJC Paris, France
6/13/2005 $150,000 WJC Greensboro, Georgia
3/1/2007 $150,000 WJC Miami, Florida
3/8/2007 $150,000 WJC Phoenix, Arizona
4/11/2011 $200,000 WJC New York, New York
10/23/2012 $200,000 WJC Newport Beach, California
6/6/2013 $200,000 WJC New York, New York
6/4/2013 $225,000 HRC Palmetto Bluffs, South Carolina
10/24/2013 $225,000 HRC New York, New York
10/29/2013 $225,000 HRC Tucson, Arizona
Bill and Hillary Paid Speeches to UBS
Total $1,915,000 (10 Speeches: 9 Bill, 1 Hillary)
8/1/2011 $165,000 WJC Dallas, Texas
10/17/2011 $150,000 WJC Los Angeles, California
2/21/2012 $175,000 WJC Miami, Florida
4/17/2012 $175,000 WJC Chicago, Illinois
10/18/2012 $175,000 WJC Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
5/9/2013 $175,000 WJC San Francisco, California
5/19/2014 $225,000 WJC Washington, D.C,
10/14/2014 $225,000 WJC Boston, Massachusetts
2/9/2015 $225,000 WJC Nashville, Tennessee
7/11/2013 $225,000 HRC New York, New York
Bill and Hillary Paid Speeches to Morgan Stanley
Total $350,000 (2 Speeches: 1 Bill; 1 Hillary)
2/5/2001 $125,000 WJC New York, New York
4/18/2013 $225,000 HRC Washington, D.C.
Bill and Hillary Paid Speeches to Bank of America/Merrill Lynch
Total $1,300,000 (5 Speeches: 4 Bill, 1 Hillary)
11/30/2007 $175,000 WJC New York, New York
12/1/2011 $200,000 WJC Orlando, Florida
11/13/2012 $200,000 WJC Palm Beach, Florida
3/6/2014 $500,000 WJC London, England
11/13/2013 $225,000 HRC Bluffton, South Carolina
Bill and Hillary Paid Speeches to Deutsche Bank
Total $1,255,000 (6 Speeches: 4 Bill, 2 Hillary)
5/4/2005 $150,000 WJC Baltimore, Maryland
8/11/2005 $150,000 WJC New York, New York
10/10/2012 $200,000 WJC Scottsdale, Arizona
8/27/2014 $270,000 WJC Boston, Maryland
4/24/2013 $225,000 HRC Washington, D.C.
10/7/2014 $260,000 HRC New York, New York
Bill Paid Speeches to Citigroup
Total $700,000 – (4 Speeches: all Bill, No Hillary)
3/12/2004 $250,000 WJC Paris, France
9/13/2006 $150,000 WJC New York, New York
11/15/2006 $150,000 WJC New York, New York
5/3/2007 $150,000 WJC New York, New York
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Howard Friel
Howard Friel is author of Chomsky and Dershowitz: On Endless War and the End of Civil Liberties (Olive Branch Press). He also wrote the The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight about Global Warming (Yale University Press, 2010), and is co-author with Richard Falk of Israel-Palestine on Record: How The New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (Verso, 2007), and The Record of the Paper: How The New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004).
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Yes, it’s all “perfectly legal.”
On a good day, what we continue to hear about all of this from the neoliberal, senior management (wing) of the Democratic Party is: “Nothing to see here. Move along...”
But, loyal Democratic readers need to remind themselves that this is only one card in the “royal corruption flush” that the FBI and the GOP are holding this election cycle.
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Then there’s the Clinton Foundation, where at least/approximately 80%+ of the $3 billion it’s received since its inception has gone to truly noble humanitarian work, around the globe.
Then again, let’s do some “advanced” math: 20% X $3 billion = $600 million.
We know where at least $500,000+ of that $600mm went (from The Guardian, May 28th, 2015):
...Politico reported on Thursday that Blumenthal was being paid $10,000 a month by the Clinton Foundation from 2009 to 2013, after top Obama aides blocked him from a job at the State Department. At the time, Blumenthal was also on the payroll of two pro-Clinton groups, American Bridge and Media Matters. Both organisations are run by Clinton ally David Brock.
Questions have been raised about how Blumenthal received the intelligence he used for his reports to Clinton. The former writer for the New Republic and the New Yorker is not a foreign policy expert but had connections to investors pursuing business opportunities in Libya in the aftermath of the collapse of the Gaddafi regime…
...
...She went on to describe their interactions... ...“He sent me unsolicited emails which I passed on in some instances and I say that’s just part of the give and take.”
(Bold, italicized type is diarist’s emphasis.)
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Here’s some more information about all of that Clinton Foundation “give and take”:
One of the very best, concise articles about all of this “give and take” was authored by David Sirota and Andrew Perez, over at the International Business Times, on May 26th, 2015: “Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton's State Department.” It’s definitely one of the most stunning pieces I’ve read on this subject.
Another of the many incisive pieces of reportage published last year concerning this “scandalous” (that’s the author’s word not this diarist’s), yet “perfectly legal” corruption “give and take” occurring over at the Clinton Foundation was written by Vox’s Jonathan Allen: “181 Clinton Foundation donors who lobbied Hillary's State Department,” April 28th, 2015. (The chart in the piece, alone, is worth the read.) But, here are a few paragraphs…
The size and scope of the symbiotic relationship between the Clintons and their donors is striking. At least 181 companies, individuals, and foreign governments that have given to the Clinton Foundation also lobbied the State Department when Hillary Clinton ran the place, according to a Vox analysis of foundation records and federal lobbying disclosures…
Regarding the list of those 181 corporations, Allen notes that it’s “...not illegal, but it is scandalous.” He continues describing the list, and then states:
...There's a household name at the nexus of the foundation and the State Department for every letter of the alphabet but "X" (often more than one): Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, Chevron, (John) Deere, Eli Lilly, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, HBO, Intel, JP Morgan, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, NBC Universal, Oracle, Procter & Gamble, Qualcomm, Rotary International, Siemens, Target, Unilever, Verizon, Walmart, Yahoo, and Ze-gen.
The set includes oil, defense, drug, tech, and news companies, as well as labor unions and foreign interests. It includes organizations as innocuous as the Girl Scouts and those as in need of brand-burnishing as Nike, which was once forced to vow that it would end the use of child labor in foreign sweatshops. This list of donors to the Clinton foundation who lobbied State matters because it gives a sense of just how common it was for influence-seekers to give to the Clinton Foundation, and exactly which ones did…
(Bold type is diarist’s emphasis.)
Repeating the typical, “loyal, neoliberal, Democratic” response to all of this, there’s: “Nothing to see here. Move along...”
To that I’d respond, “Tell that to the 150 FBI agents currently investigating all of this.”
Perhaps even more pragmatically in this age of perception politics, tell that to the Republican Party and their array of PACs as they sit around planning and implementing their billion-dollar-plus media buy over the next eight months.
The title of the commondreams.org piece which headlines this post is: “Hillary Clinton’s Pay-to-Play Speaking Fees Disqualify Her as a Presidential Candidate.”
Regrettably, it’s pretty self-evident that those speaking fees are just the tip of this election cycle’s impending GOP media sh*tstorm if the former Secretary of State is the nominee of the Democratic Party.
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(MAJOR) UPDATE 1:11PM EST, 2/23/16: Are these the type of headlines and news stories (it’s a major story currently up at the WaPo’s website) about our Party’s presidential nominee that downticket Democratic candidates need in what’s already being noted as an adverse presidential election cycle? Is this the type of unrelenting cannon fodder our Party should be tacitly providing to an already-craven opposition party?
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