Hillary Clinton Loves Bankers (Wink) She told her campaign funders what they wanted to hear.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-clinton-loves-bankers-wink-1476050928

Now we know why Hillary Clinton has never released the transcripts of her speeches to bankers. If the excerpts published by WikiLeaks last week are any guide, the texts might have cost her the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders. Even these excerpts explain why a majority of Americans don’t believe she’s honest or trustworthy.

The Clinton campaign says it doesn’t have the time to confirm the authenticity of the excerpts, which appear in emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. But they sure seem to be the real thing because Mrs. Clinton’s message sounds so synthetic.

She was making the rounds of the big-money speaking circuit after her stint as Secretary of State and before her anticipated run for President. The bankers were thus eager to please her with fat fees ($4.1 million in two years, according to disclosure reports), while Mrs. Clinton was eager to please the bankers with what they wanted to hear.

At a Goldman Sachs event in 2013, she said that “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.” You know, like her. In another speech at a Goldman event, she said, “you are the smartest people.” That must have made the masters of the universe feel better. She also lamented the “politicizing” of the 2008 financial crisis, as if she has had nothing to do with that. And she told a Deutsche Bank audience that financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself.” We’re willing to bet that Elizabeth Warren didn’t vet those remarks in advance. The Democratic presidential nominee also praised free trade to an audience hosted by a Brazilian bank, even as she has run as a protectionist in 2016.

Some voters may see these private remarks as a signal of what they hope will be her pragmatism, and had the transcripts appeared during the primaries they would have cost her progressive political support. But that doesn’t mean she believes what she told the bankers. Our guess is that Mrs. Clinton was conning the bankers whom she knew she would need for campaign checks in addition to those sweet $200,000 speaking fees. CONTINUE AT SITE

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