Hillary Made More In Twelve Speeches Than Most Americans Will Make In Three Lifetimes

By streiff | 7:18 PM on January 09, 2016

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For someone who is running on her ability to understand the problems of ordinary people, Hillary Clinton is a miserable failure. From the earliest days of her candidacy, her inability to relate to the non-grifting class in America has been remarked upon. Back in September, only 46% of all respondents in a Washington Post poll thought Hillary was able to understand their problems. By December, only 38% of Democrats in Iowa believed that:

None on this is good for any Demopcrat. It is especially bad for a Democrat who is disliked, distrusted and running for office in an age of immense economic insecurity. Clinton is virtually an wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the big banks. She knows it. And the progressives know it.

There is no easier way to showcase Hillary Clinton’s coziness with the financial industry than to look at her speeches from 2013:

Pretty impressive haul, hey?

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.

To put these numbers into perspective, compare them to lifetime earnings of the median American worker. In 2011, the Census Bureau estimated that, across all majors, a “bachelor’s degree holder can expect to earn about $2.4 million over his or her work life.” A Pew Research analysis published the same year estimated that a “typical high school graduate” can expect to make just $770,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.

Not to be outdone, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, her husband, Bill Clinton, made $17 million giving speeches to the financial industry.

Sanders is never going to have the guts to go after Clinton as a plutocrat because he is, first and foremost, a loyal Democrat soldier, and because he aspires to be a plutocrat himself. But some GOP candidate should start taking swings at her for her egregious vacuuming of cash from the very people who have benefited so much from the maladministration of Barack Obama.