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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow the Clintons went from ‘dead broke’ to rich: Bill earned $104.9 million for speeches
Over seven frenetic days, Bill Clinton addressed corporate executives in Switzerland and Denmark, an investors group in Sweden and a cluster of business and political leaders in Austria. The former president wrapped up his European trip in the triumphant Spanish Hall at Prague Castle, where he shared his thoughts on energy to a Czech business summit.
His pay: $1.4 million.
That lucrative week in May 2012 offers a glimpse into the way Clinton has leveraged his global popularity into a personal fortune. Starting just two weeks after exiting the Oval Office, Clinton has delivered hundreds of paid speeches, lifting a family that was dead broke, as wife Hillary Rodham Clinton phrased it earlier this month, to a point of such extraordinary wealth that it is now seen as a potential political liability if she runs for president in 2016.
Bill Clinton has been paid $104.9 million for 542 speeches around the world between January 2001, when he left the White House, and January 2013, when Hillary stepped down as secretary of state, according to a Washington Post review of the familys federal financial disclosures.
Although slightly more than half of his appearances were in the United States, the majority of his speaking income, $56.3 million, came from foreign speeches, many of them in China, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom, the Post review found.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-clintons-went-from-dead-broke-to-rich-bill-earned-1049-million-for-speeches/2014/06/26/8fa0b372-fd3a-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html
onehandle
(51,122 posts)Shrub is painting in his gated community.
JNelson6563
(28,151 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)?????
ecstatic
(32,567 posts)time. IMO.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)And a 15-percent tax rate on capital gains has made it all that much sweeter.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)Those were also lucrative moves. But I agree 100%.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Should have written "a."
NAFTAs Impact on U.S. Workers
by Jeff Faux
Economic Policy Institute, December 9, 2013 at 4:00 pm
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.
By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.
Second, NAFTA strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits. As soon as NAFTA became law, corporate managers began telling their workers that their companies intended to move to Mexico unless the workers lowered the cost of their labor. In the midst of collective bargaining negotiations with unions, some companies would even start loading machinery into trucks that they said were bound for Mexico. The same threats were used to fight union organizing efforts. The message was: If you vote in a union, we will move south of the border. With NAFTA, corporations also could more easily blackmail local governments into giving them tax reductions and other subsidies.
Third, the destructive effect of NAFTA on the Mexican agricultural and small business sectors dislocated several million Mexican workers and their families, and was a major cause in the dramatic increase in undocumented workers flowing into the U.S. labor market. This put further downward pressure on U.S. wages, especially in the already lower paying market for less skilled labor.
Fourth, and ultimately most important, NAFTA was the template for rules of the emerging global economy, in which the benefits would flow to capital and the costs to labor. The U.S. governing classin alliance with the financial elites of its trading partnersapplied NAFTAs principles to the World Trade Organization, to the policies of the World Bank and IMF, and to the deal under which employers of Chinas huge supply of low-wage workers were allowed access to U.S. markets in exchange for allowing American multinational corporations the right to invest there.
CONTINUED...
http://www.epi.org/blog/naftas-impact-workers/
Absolutely great post and thread, Romulux.
They earned this $$$. That's what successful people do.
Metric System
(6,048 posts)OKNancy
(41,832 posts)It's payback for all the crap Clinton went through. Europeans and many others were dismayed by the impeachment, some were outraged.
And as others have said... he's a fantastic speaker. He is paid well because he is one of the best. Probably the best in the political world.
Johonny
(20,684 posts)empathy the one thing money can't buy.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)And despite all the sellouts of regular working people (um, NAFTA!) he engaged in along the way, too...
Johonny
(20,684 posts)William J. Jefferson thought that and he's in jail. Do you think people on the DU think he shouldn't be?
Do you think people on the DU think Clinton, Obama, heck FDR are saintly pure people whose decisions can't be questioned? Come one now, you've been on the DU too long to pretend to think that.
Romulox
(25,960 posts)And you seemed to offer an "it's our guy!" defense:
I apologize if I misread you.