Hillary and Bill Clinton: Breaking Bad

(Update on 1/22/16) Together, Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill have earned in excess of $125 million in speech income since leaving the White House in 2001 — about $40 million of it in the last two years.

This morning Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a big supporter of Hillary Clinton, was interviewed on MSNBC and asked if it was a mistake for Clinton to be taking those speaking fees from the big banks. Shaheen's response was, "That was all in the past, just like Bernie's socialism was in the past."

Just by giving 12 speeches to Wall Street banks, private equity firms, and other financial corporations, Hillary Clinton made $2.9 million from 2013 to 2015. Clinton’s most lucrative year was 2013, right after stepping down as secretary of state. That year, she made $2.3 million for three speeches to Goldman Sachs and individual speeches to Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, Apollo Management Holdings, UBS, Bank of America, and Golden Tree Asset Managers. The following year, she picked up $485,000 for a speech to Deutsche Bank and an address to Ameriprise. Last year, she made $150,000 from a lecture before the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

But Hillary Clinton’s haul from Wall Street speeches pales in comparison to her husband’s Bill.

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Hillary Clinton is running for President to replace Obama when his 2nd term expires (She is basically just running for Obama's third term, although she denies this.)

She has secured the endorsement of Eric Holder, the nation's first black attorney general, for whom she worked with for four years in the Obama administration. The former attorney general (who wouldn't prosecute corrupt bankers) said Hillary Clinton is the candidate that we need in the White House to continue the progress of President Obama. Holder, a close confidant of President Obama, retired from the Justice Department in February 2015 and returned to corporate practice at the law firm of Covington & Burling. He is the latest official from the ranks of Washington DC's upper political echelons to endorse the former secretary of state.

Now (while running for President) Hillary is supposedly under investigation by the FBI — under that same Justice Department Eric Holder once headed. She is being investigated for using a private email server and for sending classified email that originated from her, but that she hadn't marked as "classified." Of course, no one but a crazy person would ever expect her to be charged with anything. After all, how would that make the bankers look?

In the video below Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley had a heated discussion about Wall Street at the fourth Democratic primary debate. (IMHO, this is the best 3 minutes of the debate.)

(* The video was edited from the original live-streamed debate at YouTube.)

This is the ad she referred to that American Crossroads produced (via Karl Rove) and this is how Hillary responded to it in an ABC News interview.

If you earned $600,000 selling meth, and were caught by the authorities, you'd go to prison. When the bankers were caught bilking the taxpayers out of billions of dollars, they only paid a small fine — then they looked for other ways to rip off the taxpayers. Meanwhile, their government accomplices just moved on to better-paying jobs in the private sector — or they ran for President.

Bernie Sanders and millions of his supporters would like to see a political revolution to change the way our corrupt politicians do business.

What was different in the last Democratic debate from the previous debates was Bernie Sanders's willingness to go on the offensive against Hillary Clinton on her most vulnerable area: her corrupt ties to the Wall Street plutocracy. Sanders mentioned that she has received generous speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. One NBC moderator of the debate had asked Sanders how his approach to bank regulation would differ from Clinton’s. He replied:

"Well, the first difference is, I don’t take money from big banks. I don’t get personal speaking fees from Goldman Sachs."

After Clinton claimed that she had the toughest, most comprehensive plan to regulate Wall Street, Martin O'Malloy (who made a great wing-man for Bernie) vigorously disagreed, and had said several times, "That's not true" — while most of us just thought she was a common pathological liar. (Those acting lessons she took didn't help her much.)

Then Sanders reminded Hillary that she had received over six hundred thousand dollars in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, just in one year alone. (For whatever sage advise she had to offer the bankers — but all that is still unclear, and we may never know what exactly Hillary had to say.)

The first time Sanders brought up the subject, Hillary had tried to deflect the accusation by accusing Bernie of being disloyal to President Obama, inferring that Bernie was also criticizing Obama because he too had accepted donations from Wall Street — and then reminded us that Obama had led the country out of the Great Recession.

Hillary accused Bernie of voting on banking regulation that allowed the economy to tank; but Bernie reminded us that anybody could check his own record on fighting Wall Street deregulation and Wall Street lobbyists.

If Hillary Clinton is nominated, the Republicans will have a lot more to throw at her in a general election than they would at Bernie Sanders. At the very most, all a Republican candidate could do during a general election debate is to call Bernie a "socialist" (which he wears as a badge of honor).

But with Hillary, the GOP will have a laundry list of scandals to draw from — dating back 40 years.

The top 1% that parties together, stays together.

Their daughters, Ivanka Trump and Chelsea Clinton, are also BFFs.