It Will Be Extremely Difficult For Hillary to Say No To Wall Street [View all]

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It Will Be Extremely Difficult For Hillary to Say No To Wall Street
Can Clinton simply disregard the industry's favors to her wealth, political campaigns and foundation?
By Zaid Milani * AlterNet * November 16, 2015

The highlight of Saturday night's Democratic debate was when former Secretary Clinton invoked the September 11 attacks to try to defend her courting of Wall Street donors. The awkward defense of her political ties even spawned a rare New York Times editorial criticizing Clinton.

The fact is, there is no way that Hillary Clinton can pretend she doesn't have a cozy relationship with an industry that personally enriched her family, formed the basis of political support for her career and is doing everything it can to make her president.

Dollar Dollar Bill

After leaving the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a steady source of income; pensions from both the federal government and Arkansas. They also both wrote books that generated millions of dollars of income. That's why, over the next 10 years, Bill Clinton raked in over $125 million in speaking fees, almost all of them from for-profit mega-corporations and trade associations. Shortly after presiding over a historic and catastrophic deregulation of Wall Street, Mr. Clinton's first paid arrangement was a $125,000 speech at Morgan Stanley. His next speech was at Credit Suisse First Boston, for the same asking price. The same year Wall Street banks started to pour funds into the the joint Clinton bank account, Hillary went on to vote for a bankruptcy bill that made it much harder for people to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the bill was backed primarily by banks and credit card issuers.

An interesting figure during this period was Elizabeth Warren. Before she was Senator Warren, she was a consumer advocate and professor at Harvard University. She personally briefed First Lady Hillary Clinton on the perils of rolling back bankruptcy protections. Despite going on to support the bill, Hillary was sympathetic to Warren's arguments, telling her, “Professor Warren, we've got to stop that awful bill.”

Clinton's vote for the “awful bill" in 2001 ultimately did not give it the support it needed to pass, but it did pass four years later. At that time, Clinton didn't vote at all, an easy way to avoid responsibility as she prepped for a presidential race a few years later. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Warren explained the change in attitude from Senator Clinton: “It's a well-financed industry....She has taken money from the groups, and more to the point, she worries about them as a constituency.”

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillary-clinton-simply-cant-stand-wall-st-it-built-her-political-career-and-brought