Barack Obama To Make $1.3 Million For 3 Wall St Speeches

Why anyone who's been paying attention the last 8-plus years that would be surprised by this news is beyond me.

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Barack Obama Is Taking $400K from Wall Street for Speech

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Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs Speech Problem

WaPo.com:

In a Thursday op-ed headlined "Mrs. Clinton, Show Voters Those Transcripts," the New York Times editorial board gets to the heart of why Hillary Clinton's insistence that she will release her paid speech transcripts when everyone else in the race does makes no sense.
They write:

On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton further complained, “Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?”

The only different standard here is the one Mrs. Clinton set for herself, by personally earning $11 million in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 for 51 speeches to banks and other groups and industries ...

... Her conditioning her releases on what the Republicans might or might not do is mystifying. Republicans make no bones about their commitment to Wall Street deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Mrs. Clinton is laboring to convince struggling Americans that she will rein in big banks, despite taking their money.

Yes, yes yes.  Also, yes.

Clinton — as the Times piece helpfully notes — has run through a series of bad answers about why she gave the speeches and why she is now unwilling to authorize the release of the transcripts of them.  She has migrated from some sort of convoluted citing of Sept. 11, 2001 and her work as New York's senator to justify her speech-giving on Wall Street to her current position, which amounts to "I won't do it unless everyone else does it."

The problem inherent in that point is that everyone else doesn't do it.  No one else in this race has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms. No one else was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs. And, no one else in the race is trying to make the case that despite their financial ties to Wall Street that they are best positioned to hold that industry accountable for its practices.

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Bernie Sanders Has Benefited From Super PACs–And He Accepted Contributions From Wall Street

Townhall.com:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent-turned-Democratic Senator from Vermont, proudly states pervasively that he does not have a super PAC (sorry, Supah PAC), and he’s not beholden to Wall Street ties in the same fashion as Hillary Clinton. That’s true. There is no Bernie super PAC per se, but he does benefit from the super PACs within his coalition. Moreover, he’s benefitted from indirect Wall Street contributions and regularly attended retreats hosted by their lobbyists, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Yet the Vermont senator has benefited from at least $1.5 million in backing from super PACs and from political groups that don’t have to fully disclose their donors, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. 

As a member of Congress, he regularly attended retreats with Wall Street lobbyists and other donors, and as a candidate for the Senate, he benefited from money that indirectly came from them. Last year, he directly accepted about $55,000 in Wall Street contributions for his Democratic presidential campaign, FEC filings show.
[…]
He may not have formed one of his own, but Mr. Sanders is getting help from National Nurses United for Patient Protection, a super PAC that gets its money from the nation’s largest nurses’ union, with nearly 185,000 members.

The union doesn’t have to disclose its donors, but a spokesman said the super PAC money comes exclusively from members’ dues. Representatives from the union have frequently joined the senator at events and this week launched a bus tour across South Carolina ahead of the state’s Feb. 27 primary.
[…]

Mr. Sanders has also regularly attended the DSCC’s retreats, either during the winter in Florida or during summer on Martha’s Vineyard, including one as recently as July. Guests at the retreats are donors who have donated the maximum amount to the party, or raised more than $100,000. Many attendees are lobbyists, lawyers and members of the financial industry.
[…]

Several donors who have attended the retreats said Mr. Sanders fully participated in the events, including socializing, and didn’t take the opportunity to tell Wall Street lobbyists that, as he says on the stump, their industry’s business model is fraud.

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