Hillary Helped UBS—and Then the Bank Funneled Millions to the Clintons

[Octafish]

86. Hillary Clinton’s Pay-for-Play Reality

Whatever one thinks about Hillary Clinton’s sincerity when she professes progressive values, the undeniable reality is that she has immersed herself for decades in the corrupting sludge of Official Washington and its sleazy pay-for-play schemes with Wall Street and other power centers

by JP Sottile
ConsortiumNews, Feb. 15, 2016

It was supposed to be a feel-good moment. The Chairman and CEO of the world’s most powerful financial institution dropped by CNBC’s Squawk Box to crow a bit about his recovery from cancer. But it didn’t quite go the way Lloyd Blankfein — or Hillary Clinton — might’ve wanted.

First, the recently-minted billionaire boss of Goldman Sachs compared his 600 hours of chemotherapy to dropping “napalm” on the Islamic State (“You get ISIS, but you also get some of the Kurds and Iraqis and everybody else”). Lloyd went on to tell Andrew Ross Sorkin that unlike another notable, newly-minted billionaire — fellow cancer survivor and comparably-connected JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — his brush with mortality didn’t really inspire circumspection about his life or about his crucial role in the profitable business of giving other people the business (“I must be so thick, I missed that whole thing”).

And then Lloyd revealed that Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one “feeling the Bern.” The remarkably unreflective Blankfein said the anti-Wall Street sentiment fueling Sen. Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign represented a “dangerous moment” for Wall Street and, by extension, for America. In that revealing moment of truth, Blankfein’s blurb not only encapsulated Wall Street’s growing discomfort with the surging candidacy of, as Blankfein put it, “another kid from Brooklyn,” but it also exposed Wall Street’s lingering detachment from the costly outcomes of its free-wheeling actions.

And it didn’t do Hillary any favors — which is something new for Goldman Sachs. Lloyd unintentionally poured gasoline into an already white-hot news cycle that’s raced out of Hillary’s control. And it further reinforced Bernie’s case that Hillary, the former Senator from Wall Street, is just too closely linked to the “rigged economy” to actually reform it.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Lloyd’s warning centered on his concerns about the post-election political landscape and his sense that the real danger is not people with pitchforks taking to the street. Rather, Lloyd is worried that Washington’s political machine could stall if all that public anger hampers politicians by turning a demonstrated willingness to “compromise” into a political liability. And when Wall Streeters talk about “compromise,” they are referring to their seemingly innate ability to manufacture bipartisan consent in spite of the often-bemoaned acrimony that locks up Republicans and Democrats.

For example, the two big post-Crash bailouts were built on exactly this type of compromise. And yes, there were two bailouts. There was the highly-visible, widely-reported $700+ billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). But there was also a host of “other,” often-secret bailouts and programs that may cost somewhere around $4 trillion to $7.7 trillion or, according to one accounting, as high as $16.8 trillion. Most Americans are unfamiliar with those side-deals built on Washington’s reliable willingness to compromise with Wall Street.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/12/hillary-clintons-pay-play-reality