Simon
Head
On January
17, in the final Democratic debate before the primary season begins,
Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her close financial ties
to Wall Street, something he had avoided in his campaigning up to
that moment: “I don’t take money from big banks….You’ve
received over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one
year,” he said. Sanders’s criticisms coincided with recent
reports that the FBI might be expanding its inquiry into Hillary
Clinton’s emails to include her ties to big donors while serving as
secretary of state. But a larger question concerns how Hillary and
Bill Clinton have built their powerful donor machine, and what its
existence might mean for Hillary Clinton’s future conduct as
American president. The following investigation, drawing on many
different sources, is intended to give a full sense of the facts
about Clinton and not to endorse a particular candidate in the coming
election.
It’s an
axiom of Washington politics in the age of Citizens United and Super
PACs that corporations and the very rich can channel almost unlimited
amounts of money to candidates for high office to pave the way for
later favors. According to the public service website Open Secrets,
in the 2016 campaign, as of October, in addition to direct campaign
contributions, Jeb Bush had at his disposal $103 million in “outside
money”—groups such as PACs and Super PACs and so called “dark
money” organizations that work on behalf of a particular candidate.
Ted Cruz had $38 million in such funds, Marco Rubio $17 million, and
Chris Christie $14 million.
Yet few have
been as adept at exploiting this big-money politics as Bill and
Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 campaign, as of October, Hillary Clinton
had raised $20 million in “outside” money, on top of $77 million
in direct campaign contributions—the highest in direct
contributions of any candidate at the time. But she and her husband
have other links to big donors, and they go back much further than
the current election cycle. What stands out about what I will call
the Clinton System is the scale and complexity of the connections
involved, the length of time they have been in operation, the
presence of former president Bill Clinton alongside Hillary as an
equal partner in the enterprise, and the sheer magnitude of the funds
involved.
Read
the rest of the report:
Comments
Post a Comment