South China Morning Post:
Hillary Clinton told bankers behind closed doors that she favoured “open trade and open borders” and said Wall Street executives were best-positioned to help reform the US financial sector, according to transcripts of her private, paid speeches leaked on Friday.
Excerpts of the speeches given in the years before her 2016 presidential campaign included some blunt and unguarded remarks to her private audiences, which collectively had paid her at least US$26.1 million in speaking fees. Clinton had refused to release transcripts of the speeches, despite repeated calls to do so by her primary opponent, Senator. Bernie Sanders.
...
One excerpt put Clinton squarely in the free-trade camp, a position she has retreated on significantly during the 2016 election. In a talk to a Brazilian bank in 2013, she said her “dream” is “a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” and asked her audience to think of what doubling American trade with Latin America “would mean for everybody in this room”.
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The excerpts include quotes from an October 2013 speech at an event sponsored by Goldman Sachs, in which Clinton conceded that presidential candidates need the financial backing of Wall Street to mount a competitive national campaign.
“Running for office in our country takes a lot of money, and candidates have to go out and raise it,” Clinton said. “New York is probably the leading site for contributions for fundraising for candidates on both sides of the aisle, and it’s also our economic centre. And there are a lot of people here who should ask some tough questions before handing over campaign contributions to people who were really playing chicken with our whole economy.”
In the same speech, Clinton was also deferential to the New York finance industry, exhorting wealthy donors to use their political clout for patriotic rather than personal benefit. She also spoke of the need to include Wall Street perspectives in financial reform.
“The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry,” Clinton said. ...
“It is unsavoury, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be,” Clinton said. “But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”
Crude things happen on Wall Street,
and crude men do cruel things that affect others in great measure...
Which do you care more about, American voter? Millennial voters who supported Bernie Sanders? I'm looking at you...
Have you grown up enough to understand the ways of the world yet? Specifically have you overcome your collective Puritanical past to understand how men sometimes talk to each other in the real world, like in those representational rap songs seemingly shared at every intersection and convenience store parking lot on a hot summer day? Not all men converse like that in non-mixed company, but plenty do and did...
I care more about the news that will affect me, my life and my country, than castigating a man for his verbal sins. For that, he will be judged in time. For this voter though, I'm keeping my eyes on the ball, despite the media campaigns: I'm not shocked to learn there is illegal gambling in Casablanca, anymore than I am to learn Donald Trump can talk dirty with a Bush boy...
Call me selfish, but I care more about myself and how I will fare under the policies of a Clinton nation/re-made world where everything is free and financed by others. That Clinton woman has no sympathy, no loyalty other than to herself and her own. Everybody can see that now.
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Make it a great Saturday!
