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This past April, just days before the critical New York primary, the Bernie Sanders campaign released a new ad it hoped would help overcome its rival’s home-state advantage and take the Vermont senator over the top: Wall Street banks shower Washington politicians with campaign contributions and speaking fees [an unseen narrator declares]. While Washington politicians are paid over $200,000 an hour for speeches, they oppose raising the living wage to $15 an hour. Two hundred thousand dollars an hour for them, but not even 15 bucks an hour for all Americans. Enough is enough. The pointedly unsubtle attack hit upon the central theme of the Sanders campaign, and its critique of frontrunner (and eventual nominee) Hillary Clinton. Making note of Clinton’s lucrative speaking fees from Wall Street banks it also employed coded class rhetoric to charge her — and by extension the entire Washington political establishment — of enjoying an incestuous, transactional relationship with powerful private interests at the expense of average Americans. This was the essence of the populist, social-democratic message upon which Sanders founded his presidential campaign. The “rigged economy” of which he spoke was not only one in which corporate greed conspired to create a deeply unequal and unfair society, but also one underpinned by a symbiotic, mutually enriching relationship between plutocrats and politicians in both major parties. And few seemed more emblematic of that relationship than Hillary Clinton. In her time between leaving the State Department in 2012 and launching her own presidential campaign, Clinton personally pocketed a whopping $22 million — nearly four hundred times the median household income in 2015 — from speeches given almost exclusively to interest groups that had recently lobbied the government. (Even this figure paled in comparison to the combined $153 million the Clintons made from paid speeches, many of them to banks, since Bill left office.) While Clinton sometimes made populist gestures in public, they appeared to contrast sharply with her activities in private — especially when it came to her seemingly cozy relationship with Wall Street and the wider financial-corporate complex. During the primaries the Clinton campaign and its sympathizers variously dismissed, punted, deflected, or minimized the issue of her speaking fees along with the wider charge that she was too close to corporate interests. Even superficially critical analyses, like the one offered by Vox’s Jeff Stein, sought to characterize Clinton’s paid speeches as an example of poor political judgment rather than outright corruption. In any case, it somehow proved controversial to assign blame for national problems — from deep and abiding inequality and poverty to the interminable assembly line of corporate-friendly legislation coming out of Congress — to the very visible nexus linking politicians and the wealthy. Through a combination of meddling, obfuscation, and fear-mongering, Democratic National Committee elites and liberal media figures successfully performed damage control and eked out a Clinton win in the primaries. With the Sanders insurgency and its populist message neutralized, many no doubt assumed the issue had been safely put to bed. But in recent weeks, a near continuous stream of documents published or sent to the press by Wikileaks (and several other sources) has, at the very least, rendered that assumption premature — and put the innards of the rigged economy into a much sharper view.