$153M in Bill and Hillary Clinton speaking fees, documented
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Spending this kind of cash on public servants serves an economic purpose too: it buys access, influence, and favour by association. You can't really prove it, but you can reason that this is to the detriment of the public at large.
The problem isn't that they charged for the speeches, which is standard. The problem is that they kept the money for themselves, which is a huge ethics issue.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation
[2]: http://www.mahablog.com/2016/02/23/elaborating-on-the-dnc-cl...
If she's getting speaking appearances based on her position as secretary of state, I think it's fine as long as the money goes to the state department and there aren't any conflicts of interest. That obviously wasn't the case here though.
They are also greedy. After the first 100 million they have made they should be rich enough to give their wisdom to non profits who have less money than banks.
> indebted to banks
> They are also greedy. After the first 100 million
I am not telling them what to do with their money but it should be clear to everybody who their paymasters are.
> They don't give a lot of money for nothing
- Impressing your clients: "Of course we're large, powerful, and trustworthy - Bill came to talk us last week"
- Hospitality to your clients; offering important clients a chance to come and watch the speaker
- Making the partners feel like Very Important Peoples
- Morale boosting for current and future employees
As a random example, I note that CareerBuilder had Condoleeza Rice speak at their Empower 2015 sales conference. Do you think there was a political / regulatory angle there?
I don't know about CareerBuilder's motivations and I don't know how much they paid.
> It certainly would be interesting to find out if they
> pay the same money for other celebrities.
http://www.cityam.com/221317/forget-politicians-salaries-its...
Blair is an interesting one - USD $600,000 (converted from GBP) for a speech. I'm really not sure what political influence the Filipino company that paid him that could have hoped to get, but I can certainly understand the PR benefits from their perspective.
I think you meant "conflicts-of-interest", as in private citizens don't have conflicts-of-interest about governance and policy in terms of their income. That would be a more valid statement.
> You can't really prove it, but you can reason that
> this is to the detriment of the public at large
It was not always this way. There is a clear conflict of interest.
> It was not always this way
[1] The good ol' days.
This number doesn't surprise me.
I'm surprised people want to hear what he has to say that much but I say if he can get that much, he should keep giving talks.
The Clintons were not born with silver spoons in their mouth, and they grew from modest origins to where they are today. I don't hold it against them that they're able to command such high speaking fees anymore than some musicians can command high prices for concerts, or actors can command high salaries for movie parts.
The whole campaign to argue Hillary is corrupt hasn't really worked, and that's essentially what these kinds of articles are, an extension of the Sanders campaign argument. But her voting record is among the most liberal in Congress, more than her husband, more than Obama, it's more liberal than 82% of all congressional votes. (Susan Sarandon was on Bill Maher the other day and simply didn't want to hear the facts he raised about her voting record.)
Clinton has a penchant for policy wonkishness that doesn't sit well with young impatient progressives who want to make a quantum leap from here to there. So for example, if one is for a $12 minimum wage first, instead of forcing the entire nation to $15 instantly, because one is worried about the effect of a 200% increase to say, Bob's coffee-shop in Nebraska, one get's raked over the coals. Why is it so hard to understand there's a huge cost of living difference in SF/NYC vs other states and a federal minimum wage quantum jump like that should be done cautiously?
If one is for fracking as a temporary bridge, because natural gas is cleaner than coal and releases less CO2 if your regulate methane leakage and protect ground water, as well as sending less money to regimes which spread Wahhabism with the money, then of course, you're really just a neo-liberal owned by the Kochs. But is it realistic to ban fracking and coal and switch totally to renewables without a transition? You can't just be against something without a viable alternative.
I agree with pretty much everything Sanders wants to do, but I want a realistic vision of how to accomplish it and a reasonable time span. I don't like the way anyone who wants to advocate an iterative, incremental approach is shouted down as an establishment sell out. There's too much guilt-by-association going on, and not enough realistic discussion of the nuanced policy choices we face.
A number of years ago my Dad was involved with a healthcare non-profit organization that paid Bill Clinton $125,000 for a speech (I don't remember the exact figure). They had him speak at a big theater, where a couple thousand people paid $100+. Then they had him as the featured guest at a dinner, which cost donors thousands of dollars to attend. They also had him tour their organization with the media. So all told, the organization raised a few hundred thousand dollars and got a lot of publicity.
Private sector companies - some big financial company or the National Association of Whatever - can get similar value from a Clinton speech. Maybe they can get money directly by selling tickets to a dinner with Clinton and having having him be the keynote speaker at their paid conference, or maybe they can use it as a reward/incentive for their clients (with the most important clients getting the most access to Clinton).
[Edit: I looked up Clinton's fee, it was $125,000)
Hillary constantly uses her experience as First Lady as political experience, and basically touts it as equivalent to VP or more. Similarly, if Hillary wins, Bill isn't going to just sit around the WH and screw interns (though he'll probably do that too), he's going to be using it as a political office, just like she did, and he'll use his position as her husband to influence her. So these people paying "speaking fees" are really just practicing legalized bribery.
I'm sorry, but I read TFA and I'm not sure what you could be referring to... is it illegal in most EU countries for an event organizer to pay an honorarium to their invited speakers? Or to pay for speech in general? Consider that many make an honest and honorable living in this way... For example, Stephen King has earned tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars for his speech.
You rarely see an EU politician charged, let alone gaoled, especially those so high in the establishment hierarchy so I'm not overly convinced.
He was eventually dealt with legally, but only for his dealings with underage prostitutes.
A former POTUS and the woman who has come closest to the office in history? That's a draw. It's worth paying for.
edit: I worked for a sometimes controversial lobbying organization who hired H. Clinton to speak, and they 1) knew exactly what they were buying, and 2) weren't interested at all in the content of the actual speech.
> The groups who pay for these speeches are not selling tickets to them and pocketing the difference.
It seems that in some cases they are doing exactly that, if you count private fundraisers (not Clinton's own campaign fundraisers):
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hillary-clinton-what-225000-and-p...
In other cases, attending the speech is presumably a perk of being in a high position at the companies in question, and like any other perk it can be priced despite individuals not directly paying for it.
(I suspect that a significant part of the demand is neither bribery nor related to the content of the speeches, but based on the attendee's desire to feel prestigious by being at an exclusive event. To this extent, it makes sense to hide the cost for the individual attendees behind indirections such as perks or fundraising for charity, because a more direct quid pro quo would cheapen the prestige by assigning it explicit monetary value. This is not to say that influence is not also a factor, which it surely is.)