I have been asked by some Kossacks with whom I have been conversing to explain why the admittedly very large public speaking fees Hillary has received after leaving the State Department are not indisputable proof that she has been corrupted, on the theory that the only possible reason anybody would pay her fees that large must be to improperly influence her decisions as President. I have decided to put my analysis in this new diary, so that many more of you can be given the opportunity, if you so choose, to jump down my throat. My diary will be a calm, rational, invective-free, respectful, and hopefully amusing series of arguments, and I hope that any comments follow in the same vein; but I will not hold my breath.
Let me begin by asking you to write down your immediate best estimate, without doing any investigation, on how much you think each of the following persons earns for an average hour-long public speaking engagement. Or at least rank them in order of amount. Later in this diary I will give you the answers (with links to public information listing the fees):
Magic Johnson
Alan Greenspan
Al Gore
Ben Bernanke
Malcolm Gladwell
Rudy Giuliani
Richard Branson
Lance Armstrong
Donald Trump
Gary Kasparov
Have you completed your list? Okay, then you have my permission to read on. Don’t peek, I’ll give you the answers later.
The following points are not listed in order of importance, but we need to start somewhere, so let’s start with a list of all of Hillary’s speaking fees as a private citizen, from 2013 to 2015. This list has appeared in a diary or two in DKos by people making the argument that I seek to counter. Here is the list in one form:
http://citizenuprising.com/hillary-clintons-speaking-fees-2013-2015/
It of course lists the 3 engagements with Goldman Sachs and the engagements with various other financial institutions and for profit corporations, including Deutsch Bank, Verizon Communications, the Boston Consulting Group, GE, and various others. The fee Hillary received from each of these institutions was basically $225,000 for an hour-long presentation, by now a familiar number to us all.
There are also listed speeches given to the following, among others, each of whom also paid her around $225,000 (some a little more, some a little less) for a one hour speech:
American Camping Association (J-1 Visa Program)
eBay Inc.
Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women
Massachusetts Conference for Women
Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed)
Commercial Real Estate Women Network
Cardiovascular Research Foundation
Ameriprise
Biotechnology Industry Organization
Innovation Arts and Entertainment
United Fresh Produce Association
International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association
Let's Talk Entertainment
National Council for Behavior
California Medical Association
World Affairs Council
Academic Partnerships
Drug Chemical and Associated Technologies
Association of Corporate Counsel - Southern California
A&E Television Networks
National Automobile Dealers Association
U.S. Green Building Council
CB Richard Ellis, Inc.
Mediacorp Canada, Inc.
National Association of Realtors
Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago
Beth El Synagogue
National Association of Convenience Stores
Long Island Association
American Society of Travel Agents, Inc.
American Society for Clinical Pathology
National Association of Chain Drug Stores
Global Business Travel Association
American Jewish University
Economic Club of Grand Rapids
Society for Human Resource Management
Gap, Inc.
National Multi Housing Council
That’s right, each of these organizations paid Hillary about the same fee (and some more) than that which Goldman Sachs paid her for a measly 3 out of the total of 91 speeches she gave. Are they all trying to bribe her, to corrupt her once she is back in office? What is the Massachusetts Conference for Women bribing her to do? The United Jewish Fund? A & E Television networks? Any other of the organizations listed above, each of which thought it was a good move to get Hillary to come speak to them at the whopping fee of around $225,000 per hour long speech? She must have made a secret pact with the devil with each of them, right?
Well, no. As you can easily learn from people in the business of booking public speaking engagements (such as the Washington Speakers Bureau), there are many reasons, other than committing a federal crime, for an organization to hire Hillary (or any of the 10 gentlemen I listed earlier) to speak at an event at this price tag, which happens to be the fair market value of the engagement. Some of these reasons are:
1. They may raise more money, maybe for charity, at the event if she speaks. Suppose you are trying to raise money, and the cost of the ballroom dinner not including a speaker (space, food, etc.) comes out to $7.775 million and your goal is to net $2 million after expenses. So you need to sell some very expensive tickets totaling almost $10 million to get there. So they ask someone like the Washington Speakers Bureau who they can get who will bring them $10 million in ticket sales. The WSB says we can get you Hillary for $225,000. And bingo, a match made in heaven; their total expenses including her fee are now $8 million, they sell their $10 million in tickets, and they’ve raised their $2 million for charity or whatever. Now they could have gone with Magic Johnson for — SPOILER ALERT — $50,000, but they were advised that Magic would probably only sell $7 million in tickets, because he is not nearly as big a draw as Hillary. So instead of losing almost $1 million with Magic they decide to raise $2 million with Hillary, a pretty sensible decision it seems to me. So did they do it to bribe Hillary, as an obvious quid pro quo for a criminal conspiracy to influence national policy? No, they did it to raise their $2 million for charity at their dinner, because people want to see Hillary, possibly the next President of the United States, and maybe get to shake her hand and tell their friends about it.
2. They might actually think that she knows and can share something of importance to their organization, having had 25 years of experience at the highest levels of government imaginable. Not classified information, just the wisdom she has accumulated over her life of public service. Which is of course also connected to how she will increase their attendance, but we’ve covered that already. So maybe the National Association of Convenience Stores wants to know what she thinks is going on in the world that might affect their business. Maybe the American Jewish University wants her take on the current situation in the Middle East, so they can decide whether they should send students there for study abroad. And maybe, just maybe, they are right, that hearing what she knows on the subject is worth the money they pay her to speak. In addition to all of the other benefits they receive that I describe above and below.
3. They may have other perfectly good business reasons to want her to come speak to them. It gives them great prestige to be able to present Hillary Clinton at their event, which they consider extremely valuable to them. It gets them great publicity, puts them on the map, and raises awareness of them and the issues that concern them. They can invite clients and potential clients to the event and impress them, and get more business from them. Maybe, to put it crudely, they think it will help their business just because it makes them look like Big Swinging Dicks. Well, probably not in the case of the Massachusetts Conference for Women, but I think you get my drift.
There are other reasons, but I hope that’s enough for now to at least get the most open-minded of you to consider the outside possibility that Hillary’s speaking engagements were not necessarily all “pay to play" events.
So now, before moving on to my next argument — SPOILER ALERT AGAIN — let me list the answers to the little quiz I started out with, the high end of how much each of those people are paid for one hour of their time, this time in order by amount from lowest to highest:
Magic Johnson $50,000
Gary Kasparov $75,000
Malcolm Gladwell (who ???) $80,000
Lance Armstrong $100,000
Richard Branson $100,000
Al Gore $175,000
Alan Greenspan $250,000
Rudy Giuliani $270,000
Ben Bernanke $400,000
Donald Trump $1,500,000
Sources: http://qz.com/441327/yes-hillary-clintons-speaking-fees-are-high-but-only-compared-with-other-women/; http://publicspeaking.co.ke/post/10-highest-paid-public-speakers-in-the-world; http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/social-media/excerpts/9780596802004/why-speakers-earn-30k-an-hour.html
I don’t know about you, but I was certainly surprised by some of that. That a Canadian journalist I’d never heard of is paid $80,000; that people are willing to pay $75,000 in the hope of improving their chess games through osmosis; that people will pay Al Gore $175,000 to speak about climate change; that anyone is interested in hearing what Rudy Giuliani might say; that people pay $400,000 to hear the retired former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke talk, even though he can’t unlawfully manipulate the economy any more on their behalf; and I won’t even go into Donald Drumpf.
At any rate, I find it hard to believe that the organizations who hire all these speakers are doing it for nefarious reasons, like to bribe them for their financial benefit or, in the case of Lance Armstrong, to purchase performance-enhancing drugs. I suspect they think these guys are worth it for the reasons I mentioned above, among other perfectly legitimate reasons.
But let’s look at the obvious evil motives Hillary had to set her apart from these 10 guys. She obviously desperately needed the cash, a lot more than they did. No, wait a minute, she and Bill have a net worth of about $130 million; is she really that stupid that she would sell the entire country down the river because she got maybe $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches? Actually, $675,000 minus the fee paid to her agent (maybe the Washington Speakers Bureau, I’m not sure which), minus expenses (which for her must be quite substantial given the size of her entourage), minus taxes in her highest of tax brackets (the higher bracket she has pushed for her whole career, although not in her personal financial interest) — I’m guessing here, but maybe she netted from GS a total of $200,000 after taxes for 3 hours of work? Well, actually a lot more than 3 hours, because that was just the length of her presentation. She had to travel all over the continent, prepare and practice her speeches, etc., so the actual time she spent was probably about 10 times the 1 hour for giving the speech itself. I’m speculating here, but the exact number isn't really that important.
So to conclude that she MUST have given these speeches as part of a quid pro quo to do the bidding of these evil organizations, like the U.S. Green Building Council, strikes me as just a little far-fetched. All for a couple of hundred thousand dollars to add to her $130 million? It reminds me of a hysterical comedy routine Robert Klein did many years ago that I can’t find on the internet. Klein talks about Agnew being forced from the VP office in the 70’s when it was shown that he received a couple of previously undisclosed $5,000 bribes while governor of Maryland. Klein said that what offended him the most was not that Agnew had taken bribes but rather how puny the bribes were and how petty that looked, that a governor could be bought off for a couple of thousand bucks, lacking the self-respect to hold out for more. He pretended to be Agnew and said something like “Vinny’s Crab Emporium, that's $5,000 !!!” with total delight, rubbing his hands and licking his lips voraciously. Well, I’m not helping my case here, I guess if Spiro Agnew actually did this, Hillary must be capable of it too.
Finally, as in the case of Agnew, it has been my experience that when a politician accepts a bribe they usually don’t report it publicly. They prefer their bribes to be secret from the public; it is just so more effective that way and it keeps them — well, maybe not a complete moron like Agnew — from being found out and prosecuted. Since I think Hillary is just a tad brighter than Agnew was, I don’t understand how she could have been so stupid as to publicly report these public speaking fees that must have been pay for play bribes, because there simply isn’t any possible non-nefarious motive for them. That is, apart from all the motives I list in this diary.
All that said, does Hillary now regret making all these speeches for all this money? Probably she does, but not because she has been found out to have committed crimes and misdemeanors. No, it’s more likely because she didn't anticipate that people in her own Democratic party with a visceral hate for her would look for any and all reasons to tear down her candidacy. And call her corrupt and a taker of bribes. Because at the time she was probably thinking more about building up her war chest to raise enough money to keep the Republicans out of the White House and keep democracy safe in America. After all, her likely opponent in the fall, Donald Drumpf, was making about 6 times more per speech than she was.
Okay, that’s enough for now. Thanks for listening, and hopefully opening your minds a little more. And so now let the barrage of insults and outrage begin !!!!
Saturday, Mar 5, 2016 · 6:47:31 PM +00:00
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Dave G
Thank you for the mostly serious, thoughtful, and polite comments. One of which was from Contenius, who noted that more than half of the fees pre-tax, a total of $17.6 million, was donated by Hillary to charity, meaning that she netted far less than I had thought from GS or anyone else for her speeches. He cited to a very well-researched site for this that I recommend you look at if you are interested in the same subject as my diary:
zfacts.com/…