Hillary: Wall Street’s Golden Girl



By Pepe Escobar April 28, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Counterpunch "- So it’s a go for Zeus to launch the thunderbolt. Neo-Athena – minus the wisdom – Hillary Clinton, Queen of Chaos, Goddess of War, Empress of the Perma-Smirk, will finally have her shot at the U.S. presidency. After the Battle of New York, she’s on top on number of votes; number of states; number of pledged delegates; number of superdelegates. It seems as inevitable as death and offshore accounts. “I don’t think she’s going to be indicted”; thus spoke Donald Trump to Fox News in relation to Servergate. “The Democratic Party is going to protect her.” And yet, assuming he clinches the presidency, Trump said he would pursue charges against Hillary concerning her subterranean email server. Charles Koch, for his part, now admits Hillary might make a better President than, well, Trump or any other Republican (“It’s possible, it’s possible) – as much as, in some respects, he considers Bill was a better President than George W. Bush. So would Koch’s billions support Hillary? “We would have to believe her actions would be quite different from her rhetoric.” Which brings us to Hillary as Queen of Turbo-Charged Casino Neoliberalism. And once again, the evidence insists to suggest that her actions do not exactly match her rhetoric. Hillary takes no prisoners when it comes to imprint on public opinion she’s a dedicated apostle of the No Bank Is Too Big To Fail ethos, and is fully committed to their “reform”. She may have won the Battle of Wall Street, at least as far as the Democratic Party is concerned. But that was never a battle. Enter, once again, those by now notorious three Hillary Clinton speeches to Goldman Sachs executives in the fall of 2013, which translated into a hefty $675,000 add-on to Hillary’s piggy bank. This may – or may not – be a Pandora’s box. One of the speeches ($225,000) was in a summit in Arizona, where Hillary seems to have been busy impersonating a Goldman Sachs managing director. Glow, Goldman, glow. Other speeches were, at a minimum, “friendly”. Hillary repeatedly refused to release transcripts of the speeches. So it’s up to at least another speech to offer a lateral clue. Here is Hillary talking to Goldman Sachs executives – including CEO Lloyd Blankfein – on September 2014, during the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in New York. Goldman Sachs, predictably, is a top CGI sponsor. My machine is Too Big To Fail The Clinton machine-Goldman Sachs dangerous liaisons stretch back to the early go-go 1990s, when Bubba was not even in da (White) House. Most of the trail is a mater of public domain; Bob Rubin – then co-senior partner of Goldman Sachs – falling in love with Bill and becoming the economic advisor to his 1992 presidential campaign; Rubin engineering the deregulation frenzy that gave us toxic CDOs and apocalyptic derivatives; Goldman Sachs as a top financier of Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, only behind Citigroup; Bill bagging $650,000 for four speeches between December 2004 and June 2005 (once again; no transcripts); then bagging another $600,000 between 2006 and 2014. In 2011 the Clinton Foundation moved to a new HQ in downtown Manhattan – conveniently, in a Goldman Sachs building. In the spring of 2014, top Clinton Foundation donors discussed a bright future together inside Goldman Sachs’s corporate HQ. Gary Gensler, formerly from Goldman Sachs and also former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is the Hillary Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer. As extensively dissected, the record spells out Goldman Sachs as “the Clintons’ number one Wall Street contributor, based on speaking fees, charitable donations, and campaign contributions”, the three foundations of what Simon Head chose to brand, appropriately, the Clinton system. So forget about the extensively documented dodgy practices of Goldman Sachs before, during and after the 2008 financial crisis. Forget about Goldman Sachs being ordered to pay a paltry $5 billion for its mortgage racket (Hillary: no comments.) The record shows that for the Clinton system, Goldman Sachs is a sacred cow. Thus those lavish speeches, the glowing P.R., the revolving door always open. Not exactly poetic justice rules that the system (Clintonian and otherwise) as well as stalwart Goldman Sachs are Too Big To Fail. You don’t need to be Leibniz to know that’s the best of all possible worlds for the Goldman Golden Girl. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.