The $675,000 Question: Who Will Hillary Be Working For?

Last updated on: February 6, 2016 at 9:53 am by Nancy Rockwell

The $675,000 Question: Who Will Hillary Be Working For? 2016-02-06T09:53:18-04:00 Nancy Rockwell

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Her answers to this question have been varied. Sometimes she says, Everyone. And often, Families. And at least once she said something like, The poor and the rich, the wage earners and the banks.

I don’t think any of her answers are lies. But I am sure that, if an organization paid me $675,000 to give a talk, I would be so thrilled that, without them asking me to do a thing, I would want to please them forever. From then on, I’d have an ear out for things that might please them, and I’d have their back on things that they would hate.

So I don’t think Hillary ever made a deal to trade Senate votes for money from Goldman Sachs, and I don’t think she ever would make such a deal about her future presidency. But I do think, in the Senate, Hillary, who voted for things for women and families, also voted for things Goldman Sachs and other big banks want, which are mostly limited regulation and large tax concessions for money sent overseas or invested in other countries.

I doubt there is an overt conflict of interest here, for one thing I think most folks at Goldman Sachs and other big banks want fairness bills for women and protection for kids and the environment, just like me. But what Bernie Sanders is saying is, we’ve all suffered from tax loopholes that benefit wealthy institutions and leave the rest of us footing a lot of bills their tax dollars would have paid for.

Things like: college tuition offsets, and single payer health care, and an end to old-age poverty through higher Social Security and better Medicare. Bernie keeps telling us this, and he isn’t whistling Dixie, he’s been in the Senate for years, arguing, voting, and seeing who votes for what, and whose pockets are filled by the big banks.

It’s no secret the Clintons have courted the rich. When they were in the White House, they used the Lincoln Bedroom as a perk, rewarding big donors with sleeping rights – at least, this was the widely spread rumor, and I never heard them deny it. Maybe it was none of our business, the White House was their home.

When they left, Hillary declared they were broke. Well, they did have a guaranteed income of over $400,000 a year, the retired President’s pension. But they didn’t own a home, and wanted to live among the rich.

Times have changed. Hillary has done well on the speaker circuit, and so has Bill. And Chelsea became a money wonk on Wall Street, and surely she has made wise decisions for them on financial planning.

None of this is wrong, and I do think they’ve earned their wealth. But Bernie is right to point up the fascination money holds, has always held, for the Clintons, and to ask who will be served with Hillary in the White House. He asks this, because he believes, as Elizabeth Warren says, the system is rigged against ordinary people and especially against the poor.

Anyone who saw The Big Short, a film that brilliantly unmasks the big bank housing mortgage scandal, knows how the system was rigged, from the bottom to the top. At the film’s end, the recurrence of the rigging is pointed out.

Hillary is reluctant to talk about changing this system in any detailed way. She is a brilliant woman, with the best detailed plans of any candidate out there, for how to fix the VA, how to fund college for kids, how to help single moms. But she doesn’t want to talk substantively about the banks, which are the economic machinery of this country.

Hillary slaps down the hope of a new, more just economy as pie in the sky. And maybe it is. But what kind of leader tells people not to hope? She spoke so movingly about developing a habit of gratitude as part of her faith. But Jesus didn’t come to tell us to be grateful, he came to raise in us the hope that all the world, including the money system, shall be changed.

Hillary’s wariness about that is off-putting. Because America has always been a place where people who had nothing could hope for better days and help to make them come. The battles with the rich have been continual, but there have been victories. Why can’t Hillary believe we can win again?

Money can’t buy you love, the old song says. But it does buy devotion and loyalty, and a lot of folks insist that these are part of love. And that’s the question, really: when it comes to money, to whom is Hillary devoted and to whom will she be loyal?
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Images: Hillary Clinton, campaigning in 2015. From her Wikipedia page.
The Big Short, film poster.

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