Given the fact that a snowball has a better chance in hell than the American public ever seeing a transcript of Hillary Clinton's various million-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs employees, K.J. Noh, Counterpunch's resident satirist in chief, unleashes his best guess at what was said.. and if not, what was implied…
did:
CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Lloyd [Blankfein], and thanks to everyone at Goldman Sachs for welcoming me today. I’m delighted to be back among friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, kindred spirits…
Let me jump right in. You know, over the past few months, there have been popular concerns about an economy that still isn’t delivering for the majority of Americans. It’s not “delivering” the way that they feel it should, that they feel entitled to. Most Americans that you speak to, speak a populist rhetoric that claims it is stacked for those at the top, that those of you here have it too good.
(Laughter)
But we know the hopes that the little people have for their future — things like school, job, food, clothing on their backs– all of those little things would not be possible without your leadership and innovation. Since the time of the Medicis, even before, and the financing of the first joint stock companies in the transatlantic slave trade, we know that finance and banking is what makes our capitalist economy not just grow but tick…
Previous generations of Americans built this economy and a middle class on a collective illusion: that they do productive work, this creates wealth, and that this builds the economy. We all know how misguided that is. We know that it’s really due to your investing, credit, and economic stewardship, that they have been able to work at all, that they are able to put food on their tables. It’s due to you and other banking, trading, investment houses that we have an economy that works at all. You are why we are a truly 21st century economic power.
(Applause)
For decades, people have argued that if we give more wealth to those at top by cutting taxes and letting you and other corporations write the own rules, it will trickle down, it will trickle down to everyone else. And it has! My speech here is an example!
(Cackles, Waves Check)
(Laughter).
Some will say that you are simply parasitic on those who labor at menial physical production—these are people who still subscribe to 18 Century notions of value production–and that you skim off profit without doing anything meaningful or of value. Those people are misguided: we know that if money never sleeps, that’s because you keep it awake! You have—if I may use a metaphor–injected money with caffeine, Adderal, crack, meth, with LSD so that it can dance the crazy dance and grow a crazy thousand psychedelic feet tall in a rainbow minute! Money was a lazy b*tch, until you put it to work! And look how it works! Look how it grows! Materializes out of nowhere!
(Waves check again, dances, cackles).
Some people have said that it was your irresponsible financial engineering, risk-taking, and profit-seeking, that led to the 2008 crash; that you shorted your own toxic mortgages in the most brazen securities fraud in financial history, dynamiting and imploding the global economy; and that the exorbitant bonuses paid from tax payer money, the financial bailouts, the non-prosecutions created moral hazard, rewarded avarice, incompetence, corruption and vice. You and I know it is nothing of the sort. As leaders, innovators, captains of finance, you will always be subject of the jealous resentment, the petty tantrums of the unwashed masses, the insolvent, the irresponsible, the invidious, the losers. They will envy you, your successes, they will despise you, but they secretly want to be like you!
(Laughter)
As you know, my husband tried very hard to change the culture of this misbegotten underclass, by kicking them off the government teat, by poisoning their milk with harsh, bitter regulation, and by disciplining them with the most arbitrary, racist, punitive, devastating criminal laws in US history, laws which Richard Nixon, the Southern strategists, the slave catchers, could only have dreamed of. He also passed NAFTA, which told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to discipline themselves as workers, and learn to be competitive in the global sweatshop, or face certain extinction. But they have not learned their lesson.
(Hissing)
The effects prove themself. Under President Clinton — I like the sound of that!— America saw the longest, most prodigious reaming of the undesirable classes in our history, putting them firmly in their places. And they loved it! He felt their pain! And relished it! Because he was inflicting it!
(Applause)
And I will too!
(Applause)
Books like “The Spirit Level” and organizations working for equality, certain politicians, spew a ridiculous myth of populism and the benefits of equality. But the fact is, we can’t create profitable businesses without exploitation, and we can’t grow the economy without speculation and inequality, and we certainly can’t boost our economy into the stratosphere without allowing you to exercise your amazing financial intelligence and acumen in fiscal number-crunching, speculation, numbers-running and fraud!
(Applause)
Let’s tell the truth: America is struggling—despite the endless fabrication about “the recovery”– because we are not yet running the way we should. Banks are still over regulated. It’s over-regulation that creates financial catastrophe! Despite your huge paychecks and squirreled away assets, I know that you are worried: worried that some “socialist” demagogue might come along and confiscate it all and put you all in jail. With president Obama, you were in good hands: he’s one of us. (Good thing you ponied up $981K for his campaign). He took good care of you, had your back, covered your financial rear. But populist sentiment is rising up again, more strongly than before, and the unwashed masses are full of resentment, anger, jealousy. They are angry that they don’t have jobs, that they are in debt, that they can’t scrape a living together, even though they are working, 2,3,4 jobs to put shelter over their heads. That their children are starving. That they cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel. They are angry about the 100 million people driven into the brink of starvation and the global food riots that they claim you caused with your commodity futures speculation. The $5 Trillion of value lost from the markets that they claim you collapsed. The millions who lost their homes and are now on the verge of homelessness. The trillions funneled to you in loans, write-offs, bribes to keep the system going. Even when I was working for Barry (Goldwater), I felt that same irrational resentment. Now it’s at an all time high. Irresponsible single mothers, uneducated immigrants, lead-drinking ghetto-strutters, homeless, crying, babies, starving senior citizens, obnoxious, entitled African Americans who object to having bullets pumped into their bodies by police: all these people are angry, entitled, and making noise, and they are endangering our democracy and economy, our greatness.
(Hissing)
I hear this everywhere I go. A single mother, with three children—wants to go to college, find enjoyable, well-paid work and also enjoy the emotional luxuries of motherhood—all at the same time. Everyone feels entitled to everything. She even wants housing. Now even I couldn’t do all these things, despite my incredible privilege and intelligence. But they want it all, now. Three children?
(Booing)
A grandmother, playing with children—it makes her happy like a cow, but she still feels entitled to be paid. Because she wants to feed her drug habit, she wants to sell them for more money….she wants it all!
(Booing)
A student, with an unmarketable degree in women’s studies, specializing in medieval feminist villanelles, wants debt forgiveness, and a high-paid job putting her non-existent skills analyzing romance language texts to use and profit in a rewarding cause. She also wants a pony, a sensitive but dominant lover, a villa on the Riviera, and World Peace!
(Cackles).
(Laughter)
Millions of working sad-sack Americans have similar fantasies. They want more money. More pay. Decent wages for hard work. They think it grows on trees. They think that money will grow and nuzzle up to them in their sleep, when they have no money-appeal. They think they can tax Other People’s Money to get what they want. They don’t realize Money has to be jacked up the ass, stuck in the veins with meth, dragged out and pimped to make more! You have figured out how to make your money work, turned it into a profit-generating prostitute! The future expected earnings of a profit-generating prostitute! That you’ve shorted! These people, idiots, all of them, they expect money to come to them! Without Scheming! Without reaming others! By working hard and being good! Like puppies and ponies! Like flowers after a downpour! Like the lilies of the valley! Like utopian visions of a drug-addled socialist!
Because what’s best for Wall Street is what’s best for the US. What’s best for Goldman Sachs is what’s best for the planet. I promise to take on this challenge against the clamoring, whining, agitating babies demanding for major changes in our economy and the global economy, demanding for equity and justice. These demands are stupid beyond belief.
As president, I will work with you to turn the tide of populism, to make these currents of change infeasible, impossible. We don’t hide from change; we subvert, hijack it, appropriate it.
Let me tell you straight: I want to be the presidency of, by, for Goldman Sachs, and I mean it. I’ll make sure to line my cabinet with your people, like everyone else. Lloyd, name your position!
(Wild Applause)
And I know it’s not always how we think about this, but another engine of strong growth should be the TPP and the TTIP, and the TISA.
(Applause)
I want you to hear this. Creating a global neo-liberal enclosure of the entire world economy that pretends to be about “free trade” won’t do much for the total economy—perhaps a tiny percentage point of growth—but I guarantee it will line your pockets like nothing else. Think trillions in your coffers. Quadrillions, once we force all the Asian-Pacific economies to suspend their financial uptightness restricting wild casino gambling! Financial liberalization forced on Asia will result in Quadrillions! Bazillions! And remember, the house—that’s us—we write the rules—never loses!
(Wild Applause)
You know, all this speculation adds up. And for you, it’s trillions every day. Now I am well aware that for far too long these practices have been challenged by socialistic demagogues.
Well, those days are over.
(Applause)
The current President Obama gave you and your colleagues 17 Trillion of free money, and endless zero-rate loans, but he still had to pretend to take you and your colleagues to the woodshed. Dodd-Frank. Sarbanes-Oxley. The return of Glass-Steagall. Other annoying, pesky legislation and regulations. Too many of you are bound and wrapped in red tape: shadow banking, money laundering, hedge funds, high-frequency trading, non- bank financing, interest rate manipulation, all done in the shadows, because of vicious, irrational regulations that marginalize and oppress you.
(Hissing)
I will appoint you to every regulatory position of power! Too big to fail is too big not to give control over the entire government!
(Applause)
That’s what I’ll do as president. I will seek out and welcome any good idea that is accompanied by a large check!
Brushes check suggestively against cheek)
(Laughter)
Thank you all. Thank you. I just want to leave you with one more thought. I want every banker, financier, trader, hedge fund manager to reach their God-given potential to rule the universe. Please join me in that mission — let’s do it together!
(Applause)
Is there anything he left out?
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