Not news: Hillary Clinton is corrupt, to the point where she shamelessly shakes down corporations for cash in advance of their lobbying her for all kinds of favors in the event she is ever in a position to grant them.
News: The liberal propaganda site Vox, which presumes to "explain the news to you," has a problem with this. At least writer Jonathan Allen does, and he surprisingly offers
one of the most damning works I've seen of just how dirty Hillary is. It starts with a recounting of the money she personally raked in from Corning after pushing through a trade deal the gigantic glass corporation favored. But that's just the start:
Corning's in good company in padding the Clinton family bank account after lobbying the State Department and donating to the foundation. Qualcomm and salesforce.com did that, too. Irwin Jacobs, a founder of Qualcomm, and Marc Benioff, a founder of salesforce.com, also cut $25,000 checks to the now-defunct Ready for Hillary SuperPAC. Hillary Clinton spoke to their companies on the same day, October 14, 2014. She collected more than half a million dollars from them that day, adding to the $225,500 salesforce.com had paid her to speak eight months earlier.
And Microsoft, the American Institute of Architects, AT&T, SAP America, Oracle and Telefonica all paid Bill Clinton six-figure sums to speak as Hillary Clinton laid the groundwork for her presidential campaign.
And that list, which includes Clinton Foundation donors, is hardly the end of it. There's a solid set of companies and associations that had nothing to do with the foundation but lobbied State while Clinton was there and then paid for her to speak to them. Xerox, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, in addition to Corning, all lobbied Clinton's department on trade matters and then invited her to earn an easy check.
By this point, most Clinton allies wish they had a button so they didn't have to go to the trouble of rolling their eyes at each new Clinton money story. The knee-jerk eye-roll response to the latest disclosure will be that there's nothing new to see here. But there's something very important to see that is different than the past stories. This time, it's about Hillary Clinton having her pockets lined by the very people who seek to influence her. Not in some metaphorical sense. She's literally being paid by them.
It's important to realize that the Clintons have two ways of shaking down their benefactors for money. One is to get them to donate to the Clinton
Slush Fund, er, oh, sorry,
Foundation. But the other is a lot more straightfoward and totally shameless: They pay Bill or Hillary upwards of half a million dollars to come and give a speech, and we're not talking about a Foundation donation here. We're talking about money paid directly and personally to the Clintons.
Once Hillary released her personal financial statement toward the end of last week, as is required of all announced presidential candidates, there was no hiding any of this. The Clintons have made more than $25 million since the beginning of last year, mostly by making speeches to corporations and organizations who hope to gain their favor in the event Hillary becomes president. And as we've said here before, we at HermanCain.com celebrate wealth, and we have no problem with the Clintons being wealthy. We do, however, have a problem with the Clintons selling influence in advance of Hillary's pursuit of the presidency - which is exactly what she and Bill have been doing.
This is where you could try to throw my usual supply-and-demand argument back in my face. If the market demands Clinton speeches such that it will pay this kind of money for them, why would I have a problem with that? Isn't that capitalism? Theoretically yes. If people just desperately wanted to hear them speak that badly, then they'd be perfectly right to charge that kind of money.
But I don't believe for a second that's what's going on here. Corporations, organizations and foreign governments who want to have influence in a Hillary Administration understand that these are the rules. Pay now if you want to play later. They don't want to hear Hillary speak. They want to bribe her, and this is how they make it look (but not very convincingly) like it's not a bribe.
But what does it mean that Vox has now jumped ship and is actually being honest about how rotten this really is? Conventional media wisdom continues to be that, in spite of all the scandals, Hillary is the inevitable Democrat nominee. And if the Voxers believe that, it would make no sense for them to come at her so hard with material they know a Republican nominee could dredge back up next year. (I suppose I could give Vox credit for simple journalistic integrity, but nothing in their short history suggests they have any.)
Here's what I think: The lefty media wants to keep up the charade, at least for now, that Hillary is undamaged by all this. But the more information that comes out, they more they realize they can't just ignore it without looking like the shills they actually are but don't want you to know they are. If the media ultimately abandons Hillary, it will be because she was so shameless and so sloppy in her corruption that she made it impossible for them to protect her without shattering the illusion of their own credibility in the process.
And the one master they serve even more devotedly than liberalism is themselves. But then, Hillary Clinton of all people should understand that.
