The only reason this is an issue during this election is that nobody would pay Sanders anything significant to speak.
A former POTUS and the woman who has come closest to the office in history? That's a draw. It's worth paying for.
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.)