The water she's swimming in

From He-Man and the Masters of the Universe #12.

On May 9 2011, a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS, UBS Wealth Management Americas, held a private event at Lincoln Center in New York thought to have been devoted to the firm's newly released report, Revitalizing America: Forging a New Path Toward Economic Prosperity, which discussed the (asserted) need for "entitlement reform, regulatory streamlining, education overhaul, innovation reinvigoration and tax simplification" along lines that would require "neither a Republican nor a Democratic approach... but instead a comprehensively American one" though that agenda sounds Republican enough to me.

But the big-name speakers at the panel discussion, ex-presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, apparently didn't talk about regulatory streamlining or innovation reinvigoration, whatever those are, as much as about Osama Bin Laden, who had been killed just a week earlier. Or so CNBC was told by anonymous sources, since they couldn't get anybody to talk about it on the record.

And of course nobody would say how much Clinton and Bush got paid for their participation, but we can work up a ball-park idea from the fact that Bush's typical speaking fee ranges between $100,000 and $175,000 and Clinton's rather higher, characteristically $225,000, same as Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton for each of those three currently controversial speeches. That's a one-night gig that could permanently change your life, or mine, even after taxes.

I got to the story rooting around for information on George W's speaking engagements, and specifically whether he does his act for banks like Goldman Sachs or not, which it seems on the whole he doesn't much. Michael Kruze's rundown in Politico from last June of what he does may be the best Politico article I have ever read, and I'm talking about literary style as much as reporting, no snark:

“Evil is real,” he said at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas.

“Bowling is fun,” he said at a get-together for the Bowling Proprietors’ Association of America in Orlando.

“History will ultimately judge whether I made the right decisions or not,” he said at a gathering put on by the Advertising Specialty Institute in Dallas.

He listed for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in a talk at Tulsa’s Hyatt hotel the three best things his father ever gave him — “being raised in West Texas, no money and unconditional love” — and then got back into a motorcade of a couple SUVs and cop cars and flew home on a private plane.

“We paid his regular fee,” Lynne Sipiora told POLITICO. She’s the executive director of the Samaritan Inn, a homeless shelter in McKinney, Texas. “Which is $100,000.”

Sipiora told Politico Bush's fee was "a bargain" compared to the $250,000 she thought she'd have had to pay Hillary Clinton. The homeless shelter cleaned up from the function, pulling in a million dollars in donations. "It was not a very political conversation. I’m sure he’s answered the same questions a million times. But he was very popular and charming and pleasant." And he thoughtfully sent her a thank-you note the very next day.

If you think I'm trying to mimimize in some sense the $225,000 each Hillary Clinton received from speaking to the three Goldman gatherings, Deutsche Bank, Gap Inc., the Society for Human Resource Management, the Grand Rapids Economic Club, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, the American Jewish University, and the Beth El Synagogue in Minneapolis, not to mention $400,000 from the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, and a whole lot more including additional banks, I guess you're right, in a way, in that I find it hard to see this as a way for her to take payment for adopting political positions that favor the donors, I just don't, it's too silly, and it's no different from the way Bush is treated and we know he can't move any legislation.

But at the same time it's awfully disheartening, in the first place because of the evidence that the Masters of the Universe who shell out this money on such meager entertainments are really stupid people, and they do have a lot of power. And that's really so much money that could have been used for some decent purpose.

And then there's this awful story, via my friend seabe in comments at BooMan Tribune:




It's not quite that bad; she was still very new to the Senate and perhaps getting some bad advice (possibly from Joe Biden) on going along to get along, and she thought she'd introduced some valuable protections for women and children into the bill, and it wasn't going to make it in any case because the Senate and House versions couldn't be reconciled, so that the bill died in any case (to her relief, she said later); and by the time the Zombie Bankruptcy Reform rolled around again, in 2005, she declared against it (in the end Bill Clinton had a heart attack just at the wrong moment and she couldn't make it to the Senate for the vote). (See here, here, and here.)

Also, at the time candidate Barack Obama chastised candidate Hillary Clinton for that 2001 vote during the 2008 primary campaign, he was drawing quite a bit more money from the banking industry than she was:

For the first six months of this year, as a presidential candidate, Senator Clinton has received $493,000 from commercial banks. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, a rival for the Democratic nomination, has received more ($607,000) and is the top recipient of contributions from banks among both Democrats and Republicans.

They don't often mention that; and no, I'm not giving up on Obama over that either. It was subsequently under Obama that the horrors of the Bankruptcy Rephorm were rectified with Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Act. But it's what Sam Seder said: "It's the water she's swimming in." And you know a President Sanders is going to have to learn to swim in the same water or he'll simply drown. Ugly thoughts.