At the top of the Rec list is a diary, “Hillary's paid speeches revealed: "She sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director."
Attendees of several of Hillary Clinton’s paid Goldman Sachs gigs are speaking to the media today.
Transcripts or no transcripts, thanks to Politico we finally know What Clinton said in her paid speeches.
Guess what? In the speeches, she lavished extravagant praise on the investment bank.
Through that magical moment of luck called serendipity, I recently stumbled upon a related item, a 2013 Politico article called Lament of the Plutocrats. Inside, we get another peak at one of the infamous speeches that Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs.
Certainly, Clinton offered the money men—and, yes, they are mostly men—at Goldman’s HQ a bit of a morale boost. “It was like, ‘Here’s someone who doesn’t want to vilify us but wants to get business back in the game,’” said an attendee. “Like, maybe here’s someone who can lead us out of the wilderness.”
See at the time, the masters of the universe had been feeling kind of down because mean things were being said about them, including being called “fat cats" by President Obama. So it was nice to hear sunnier words for a change, especially from someone who had the intelligence to understand that blaming the financial industry for the financial chaos that happened around 2008 was hurtful and unfair.
Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it. What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop. And indeed Goldman’s Tim O’Neill, who heads the bank’s asset management business, introduced Clinton by saying how courageous she was for speaking at the bank. (Brave, perhaps, but also well-compensated: Clinton’s minimum fee for paid remarks is $200,000).
Well said Tim O’Neill. Hillary Clinton should be viewed as courageous for being willing to accept $200,000 to say nice things about the 0.001% at a private function behind close doors.
Goldman Sachs is people too.
