The real scandal is not that the former president and first lady are so wealthy, but how they got that wealthy.
June 30, 2014
Photo Credit: JStone / Shutterstock.com
NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 24:
Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton and Bill Clinton attend the Clinton
Global Initiative Annual Meeting at The Shertaon New York Hotel on
September 24, 2013 in New York City.
“Is Hillary our Mitt Romney?”
asked
MSNBC’s Krystal Ball in a recent segment of her TV show. Ball’s
statement came on the heels of several comments by Clinton that made her
seem completely out of touch with ordinary Americans — that she is not “
truly well off,” that she and her husband were compelled to give speeches for six figures apiece because they were “
dead broke” upon leaving the White House.
Indeed, considering that Bill and Hillary Clinton
have made more than $100 million
since leaving the White House in 2000, it’s not surprising that many
Americans see the former first couple as hopelessly detached from the
problems of ordinary Americans despite presenting themselves as going
through the very same struggles as other Americans.
“We had no money when we got there [to the White House],”
explained Hillary Clinton in comments to ABC’s Diane Sawyer.
“And we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for
houses, for Chelsea’s education. It was not easy. Bill has worked really
hard. And it’s been amazing to me. He’s worked very hard.”
Yet
many Americans have also worked very hard, and they have not amassed the
same kind of wealth as the Clintons, with multiple homes and over $100
million of earned income in the past decade. But underneath the social
distance their wealth creates, there is a much deeper and more troubling
truth. The real scandal is not that the Clintons are so wealthy but how
they got that wealth.
Poor rascal
In
2009, Bill Clinton addressed the Campus Progress National Summit, a
gathering of progressive students in Washington, D.C. “I never made any
money until I left the White House,”
he told the students.
“I had the lowest net worth, adjusted for inflation, of any president
elected in the last 100 years, including President [Barack] Obama. I was
one poor rascal when I took office. But after I got out, I made a lot
of money.”
Clinton didn’t just make “a lot of money” when he left the White House. Together,
the Clintonspulled in $111 million from 2000 to 2007 — far more than what most people would consider a lot.
Thanks
to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which compiles personal
financial disclosures from federal public officials, and the ethics laws
governing the U.S. Senate, we know a little bit about how the Clintons
made their money. Federal disclosure laws require not only officeholders
to disclose their finances but also their spouses, since spousal income
is shared. Thus Hillary Clinton’s disclosures both as a U.S. senator
and as secretary of state are a window into this shared fortune, one
that was gleaned from the very same interest groups and corporations
over which the Clintons had authority.
In 1999, Bill Clinton made
repealing the Depression-era Glass-SteagallAct — which separated commercial and investment banking — a priority. He commanded a
bipartisan push
in repealing the law, which was primarily advocated for by Wall Street
lobbyists. Not long after his pen hit the paper to repeal the law,
Citigroup, a top beneficiary of the repeal,
recruited Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to join as an executive at the firm. Rubin went on to be one of Citigroup’s
highest-paid officials, pulling in $115 million in pay from 1999 and 2008.
While
Rubin was made rich from Wall Street deregulation, his boss went on the
lecture circuit. In February of 2001, Clinton had been out of the White
House for less than a month when he gave his first paid speech, to none
other than Morgan Stanley — another beneficiary of and
advocate for Clinton’s Wall Street deregulation — for
$125,000.
His next address in Manhattan was at Credit Suisse First Boston, which
gave him an additional $125,000. His paid speaking arrangements took him
around the world, from Canada to Hong Kong, speaking to a variety of
interest groups with major public policy interests, including the
American Israel Chamber of Commerce and the investment banking giant
CLSA. Clinton had also made passing the
North American Free Trade Agreement a priority during his presidency, so it is no surprise that
major Canadian firms such as the Jim Pattison Group ($150,000) were happy to pay to hear a few remarks from him as well.
The
Wall Street payments were significant in that they represented a form
of gratitude not only for Bill Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street.
That year Hillary Clinton, now a senator from New York,
voted for a bankruptcy bill that made it much harder for people to qualify for Chapter 7 bankruptcy; the bill was
backed primarily by banks and credit card issuers.
Bill
Clinton in his spree of speeches repeatedly returned to two of the
banking giants at the heart of political power in Washington: Citigroup
and Goldman Sachs.
In 2004
he took home a quarter-million dollars for a Citigroup address in
Paris; Goldman Sachs gave him $125,000 for a New York City address. That
address must have been a real hit for the former president, because
Goldman
invited him back for a series of lectures the next year, at Kiawah Island, South Carolina ($125,000); Paris ($250,000); and Greensboro, Georgia ($150,000).
The next year,
Citigroup Venture Capital invited him for a $150,000 speech, and the
Mortgage Bankers Association — representing the folks at the very heart
of the financial crisis — gave him $150,000 for a speech in Chicago.
Goldman
and Citigroup repeatedly paid Clinton for the next few years, and a
number of other major corporate interest groups — such as the
National Retail Federation ($150,000) and
Merrill Lynch ($175,000) — also joined in the fun.
After Hillary Clinton lost her presidential bid and was appointed to the State Department, she and her husband had brought in
more than $100 million
from books and speeches. By any measure, they had far more wealth than
they needed to pay debts and to take care of their daughter’s future —
the reasons Hillary Clinton cited to Diane Sawyer.
Friends and enemies
In June of 2010,
months after the Affordable Care Act was signed into law and the
regulatory battle over the health overhaul was set into motion, the
former president
took $175,000 from the main health insurance lobbying organization, America’s Health Insurance Plans. A year after Hillary Clinton
called Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his family “friends” of her family, Bill Clinton was paid $250,000 to speak to the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt,
which was closely tied to the Mubarak regime. As Hillary Clinton grappled with foreign policy issues in Pakistan, Turkey and the Middle East, Bill Clinton
took home $175,000 from the Middle East Institute, a think tank that does work in those areas. In 2011 she
filmed a video congratulating Kuwait on its independence; a few months later, he
was paid a $175,000 honorarium from the Kuwait America Foundation.
Shortly
after stepping down from her post, the she then embarked on her own
spree of paid speeches, which don’t have to be disclosed because neither
Clinton is a public official anymore. But from voluntarily disclosures
and press reports, we know that she gave at least two paid speeches to
Goldman Sachs
for $200,000each. Although she has not disclosed her full remarks at these events, a number of attendees
talked to Politico
about her tone and content. “Clinton offered a message that the
collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by
several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within
both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish,” read the
article. We won’t know the full extent of payments for speeches unless
Clinton chooses to release them or she officially declares for president
and has to release her personal financial documents since 2013.
Common people
What
has been laid out here is only a small sample of the vortex of wealth
that Hillary and Bill Clinton have received from corporations,
foundations, foreign organizations and others with an interest in U.S.
public policy. No one with any knowledge of politics believes these
payments to be disinterested or impartial; they are part of a larger
political system that rewards politicians for fealty and obedience. The
Clintons were simply following a path laid by other politicos, such as
former U.S. Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana,
who raked in millions of dollars as a drug lobbyist
after crafting an industry-friendly Medicare overhaul, and former
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who has leveraged his experience in
government to
enrich himself influence-peddling for a variety of corporate clients without ever having to officially register as a lobbyist.
Given
their immense wealth and how they got it — politicized kickbacks from
the most powerful political forces in Washington, on Wall Street and
around the globe — the Clintons would do well to admit that they are
unusually wealthy and stop trying to pass themselves off as ordinary
folks. If they don’t, their fate may very well resemble Romney’s, as
mounting public anger over growing income and wealth inequality could
prevent them from returning to the White House in 2016.
Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet staff writer. Follow @zaidjilani on Twitter.
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