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Comment by ksar | Hacker News Reader

There are prevailing market rates for high profile appearances. There is an associated economic rationale: celebrities who show up at the club, earn those places more money.

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.

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> There are prevailing market rates for high profile appearances.

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.

It doesn't matter if they keep the money, donate it to their self run slush fund[1], or launder it through the Democratic Party[2]. The ethics issue is taking money from people who you're supposed to be regulating and misrepresenting your allegiances to voters.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Foundation

[2]: http://www.mahablog.com/2016/02/23/elaborating-on-the-dnc-cl...

> It doesn't matter if they keep the money

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.

Both of them are currently private citizens. They have no ethical obligation to do anything with their income.

Regardless of politics, all private citizens have ethical obligations regarding what they do with their money. That's the nature of ethics.

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.

Right now not. But it's definitely a warning sign if somebody who is running for president is indebted to banks.

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

So the money was a loan? Are you implying the banks can withdraw the money if they're unhappy with performance?

    > They are also greedy. After the first 100 million

You know, I think you should be giving everything over your first $15,000 to charity too. It's cool for me to tell you how to spend your money, right?

The bankers are not stupid. They don't give a lot of money for nothing. They expect that the Clintons will open doors for them. The Clintons know that too so if they want to keep the money rolling they better be useful for the banks.

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

Your explicit assumption there is that having the former president of the US give a speech at your Xmas dinner doesn't carry the speaking fee in terms of:

- 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 think the bankers hope for some more direct benefits but I really don't know. It certainly would be interesting to find out if they pay the same money for other celebrities. One theory could be that by paying lots of money to former politicians they send a signal to active politicians that there is a lot of money to be made later if they play nice now. This seems to work for a lot of regulatory agencies where people switch to highly paid jobs in industry later (see SEC for example or Eric Holder could be an example too).

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.

This is an interesting article, and I've no particular reason to doubt City AM (a well-known but very localized UK publication) as a source:

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.

    > You can't really prove it, but you can reason that
    > this is to the detriment of the public at large

I'm glad that high-profile politicians know they have a guaranteed income from speaking engagements so that they don't feel any need to make more nefarious pension arrangements.

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