I still wish we had a Constitutional amendment that restricted federal employees and appointed / elected officials for a period of 5 years from working from any firm they had contact(1) with in their duties. It should also govern donations to charities run by said people. That and getting rid of every corporate deduction in the tax code would clear quite a bit of corruption out of the system.

I doubt we'll ever get either. A simple tax system means one of the chief ways politicians reward donors goes away, and the speech / job thing is just plain too lucrative.

1) the exact wording is more for lawyers than me

So if we pass enough rules the will of the voters should eventually take precedence?

I wonder what incremental changes we could make to get people to go vote their interest and to more carefully examine how elected officials make use of the vast power handed to them.

> So if we pass enough rules the will of the voters should eventually take precedence?

Its a bit more about removing some of the incentives for "bad" behavior. These two are the most problematic to being fair and honest in government.

> Clinton has said she can be trusted to spurn her donors on critical issues, noting that President Barack Obama was tough on Wall Street

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

These are companies that have a responsibility to shareholders to spend funds to benefit the firm.

Obviously they feel the quarter million is well spent, as a bribe to influence government actions.

Anyone who thinks the bribes don't have the possibility to change a politician's actions is quite gullible.

Can we all stop pretending they paid for her speeches?

Are you implying someone else paid for her speeches instead, or that she gave the speeches for free?

I think GP is implying that it isn't really speeches that they were paying for.

More on HRC:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=wK2K5v5bm0Q

Speech money is bribe money, plain and simple. These firms don't have any interest in hearing her speech.

> These firms don't have any interest in hearing her speech.

Of course they do. Having Hillary Clinton speak helps to cement and perpetuate a firm's status and influence in its industry.

Imagine your employer were to host such a speech. Who would they invite? Business partners, clients, investors...

Every firm has government interests. Its naive to think that $225k has any meaningful sway

While 225k might be chump change to the corporations; it's naive to think that $225k doesn't have any meaningful sway with the Clintons. Especially given this statement Clinton made regarding the speaking fees:

> "You have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt," Clinton said. "We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea's education.

Why $225k is too much? Bill Clinton and Al Gore take similar money. Well known political activists take between $50k and $20k per speech. Actors are charging millions for 20 minute episode. That money seems fair for such prominent speaker.

Conflict of interest? Public servants and private entertainers are different things.

Actors are paid millions to star in movies that are seen by millions of people. More importantly, actors don't run your country or pass laws which affect you personally. If you don't like an actor, it's easy to not watch his movie. If you don't like a politician, you're stuck with her if she gets elected.

Why do people like you always rush to defend obvious bribery anyway?

Companies are investing into diversity, for example Intel will invest $300M over a few years. Hiring prominent feminist seems like a good way to do that.

Also such event often makes profit on donations.

> "Hiring prominent feminist seems like a good way to do that."

Then you should be looking to vote for Bernie Sanders.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/09/i-am-a-...

In all cased you are buying access. Imagine how much free time the Clintons would have to meet with the average American if they did not do such engagements. Access is influence.

The problems isn't the amounts being paid for speeches. Companies are free to pay whatever they want for speeches.

The problem is the inherent conflict of interest that politicians receiving so much money from private interests creates.

We have an opportunity to elect the first women as President of the United States I hope we aren't going to pick on small things and ignore that opportunity. Unless she is proven to be any different than any previous President your choices are elect the first women as President or Trump. You decide.

The first women president is likely to be remembered for quite a while to come. Do you really want that person to be Hilary Clinton?

Let me put it to you another way... If Bernie had been elected, it's highly likely the vice president would have been Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren would then have a great platform if she wanted to run for president. Wouldn't you prefer Elizabeth Warren was the first female president over Hilary Clinton?

Hey, India took this opportunity in the 70s, to not much avail. It didn't change the status of women and Indira Gandhi was a corrupt autocrat. A Clinton presidency is not a feminist milestone any more than the Queen's 90th birthday was.

Because voting for someone based on their gender is a good thing?

I am not looking forward to a choice between a corporate shill and a racist fool.

Can't say any of this is surprising...or even interesting. Big shock: companies that have enough money to pay a quarter of a million dollars to have Hillary Clinton speak also have lobbied the government. I think its pretty comical that people seriously think that these companies are buying real favors from the Secretary of State for only $225,000. Hillary doesn't need the money that badly, and if she really were selling favors, you can bet they'd be more than $225,000!

That said, this is a lesson in why public officials should be concerned about the appearance of impropriety, and not just substantive impropriety. The former can still do a lot of damage (both to yourself, and to faith in government) whether you've done anything else wrong or not. It doesn't look good to public officials to be giving paid speeches while they are still in office.

Sure, HRC wouldn't cross the street for $200k. However, she and Bill have given speeches like that on a regular basis for years, to the same groups of people. Their campaigns and charitable organizations have been funded by those people too. You don't think that eventually, the cumulative tens of millions of dollars might have an effect on their thinking and decisions?

> You don't think that eventually, the cumulative tens of millions of dollars might have an effect on their thinking and decisions?

And I'm sure all these donors' interests are aligned, right?

And, to be a little less flippant, I do think that the company a person keeps affects a person's thinking. So if a company can buy their way into Hillary Clinton's circle, I accept that they have managed to buy some amount of influence. But I think this influence is negligible compared to Clinton's formal advisers and organic professional network. You also have to remember that most of these companies have far more effective ways of influencing government than paying for some lousy speeches, none of which is Clinton's doing.

> And I'm sure all these donors' interests are aligned, right?

Eh? I think they're broadly aligned. They're aligned when it comes to how corporations and executives should be treated by the courts and regulatory agencies. They're aligned on the extent and structure of free trade pacts. They're aligned on corporate taxation. They're aligned with Bill Clinton's claim that the only thing wrong with the American economy is a "skills gap."

Sure there's going to be disagreement (often severe) on particular points here and there but the broad thrust the economic "Washington Consensus" that Bill Clinton championed is a point of alignment among Clinton's donor class.

The total between them is $153 million.

It's absurd to the point of being disingenuous that you ignore the mountains of systemic corruption and sweet heart laws and legal protections and lack of prosecutions these firms which pay politicians receive.

Probably because nobody to my knowledge has made any cogent attempt to link these speeches to any "sweet heart laws" or other special legal protections. For that matter, I'm not aware of any specific accusation that Clinton drove the creation of any such protection for a U.S. company as secretary of state, whether related to her speeches or not.

The only case I know of is the State Department's opposition to a minimum-wage increase in Haiti. And this, while I find it objectionable, was clearly done to further U.S. interests as a whole, not to favor one U.S. industry or interest group over another. It's mercantilist, but its not corrupt.

If there are indeed "mountains" of such examples, I expect that HN community should be able to come up with at least a few good examples, no? (But note: legitimate policy choices with which you happen to disagree are not necessarily evidence of corruption.)

Now you're just plain lying.

Clinton has been strongly against re-instating the Glass-Steagal Act which would have prevented the 2008 disaster. She does this because she's sold out to Wall Street, since obviously they don't want that law back on the books either.

> which would have prevented the 2008 disaster.

Probably not. The biggest players in the collapse, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and AIG, were not commercial banks that would have been restrained under Glass-Steagal. In fact, much of the financial structure that eventually collapsed in 2008 began to accumulate well before GLBA in 1999.

And, again, I think you're overlooking the fact that there are non-corrupt reasons to be against bringing back Glass-Steagal. More importantly, you're ignoring the fact that Clinton does support Dodd-Frank, as well as improvements to Dodd-Frank that would be better suited to address the causes of the 2008 collapse than just reinstating Glass-Steagal.

So, she supports fairly robust new bank regulations--she just doesn't support your favorite, so you say she's corrupt (and tell me I'm 'lying' by suggesting otherwise--civil!).

http://theweek.com/articles/583243/what-hillary-gets-right-a... https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2015/10/0...

You actually posted a link from Hillary's own website as supporting evidence? Do you work for her campaign?

Your first link is good though, but it also supports reinstating Glass-Steagal (did you read it?). It just makes the case that G-S wouldn't have stopped the 2008 disaster, but that its repeal was part of the same bunch of deregulation that happened at that time period, by the same players. It closes with a call to reinstate G-S, along with other legislation more focused on the actual causes of the 2008 crash, but it does say G-S is a good idea and that the financial system needs as many fail-safes of that kind as it can get.

So, going by your first link and ignoring your second one because it's obviously going to be horribly biased, I don't see any non-corrupt reasons to be against bringing back G-S, but you do make a good case that G-S wouldn't have avoided the 2008 problem. However, again going by your first link, it does point out that Citigroup and Bank of America were also greatly involved in the 2008 housing crash and they would have been restrained from that by G-S, so I do think it's fair to say that G-S would have helped, though it would not have prevented the crash.

I posted the link from Clinton's website to demonstrate that she supports policies that regulate Wall Street. What better source is there? If you're going to accuse Clinton of being bought and paid for by Wall Street execs, you might consider actually reading her proposals to regulate Wall Street first.

As for the article, yes I did read it. And yes, it supports reinstating Glass Steagal but also says "Clinton's plan is the most substantive response to the Great Recession as it actually happened." If that's true (or even close to true), why is it of such overriding significance whether Clinton also supports Glass Steagal, specifically? She doesn't want to reinstate it because she think's it is unnecessary and she has a different proposal that she thinks is better.

>I think you're overlooking the fact that there are non-corrupt reasons to be against bringing back Glass-Steagal.

I'd love to hear your attempt at these.

Would have prevented something is a big assumption, especially when at the time prior to 2008 you had a party in power that wants to away with regulation and maximize military spending on our credit card which compounded issues already going on.

I have no doubt the Clintons have been careful about hiding any evidence of their corruption. They ran their own private email servers and make sure to create 'legitimate' reasons for all of their policy decisions. As it is they refuse to acknowledge any of this as a conflict of interest and refuse to take steps to reduce the conflicts of interest.

They're not buying favors. They're buying access just like any lobbyist. The relevant thing to understand about HRC is that she's been heavily in the access selling business for about 25 years now.

Think about how much that would warp your worldview if a large bulk of the people you meet day-in and day-out for decades paid six figure sums to talk to you?

There's a lot right here, but I think you've got one crucial detail wrong. The recipients of Clinton's speeches hardly constitute the "large bulk" of the people she deals with every day. I think the more accurate phrase would be "tiny fraction" in the context of the rest of the Obama administration, professional advisers, staff, people met at official State Department functions, etc.

Surprised the Bernie bots are still kicking, this seems like more about nothing than something.

Where's the evidence of any such said corruption?

Just because they received money for speeches doesn't make them corrupt, and if you believe it does well then prove it with evidence you can back up but don't put out false claims. Yes she has gotten a good deal of money from speeches but it isn't the only politician out there (present or past) doing them for large amounts of money.

It's one thing to say you're influenced by lobbyist groups donating to your campaign and whole other to say the speeches are used to influence your policies, they're two separate things.

And even while HRC has gotten a decent amount of donations given to her campaign it's a very small piece of the pie that is shelled out by Corporations and Lobbyist groups, look at the other side for example, do you think they aren't COMPLETELY influenced by lobbyist groups? They practically own the Republican party.

Anyways as I said, more about nothing than something.