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May 18, 2015 at 09:57 AM
(Bloomberg Politics) — This is an excerpt from Bloomberg’s daily Opening Line column.
“Hillary Clinton sold her soul when they accepted that money.”
The speaker here is a Sahrawi Arab from the disputed territory of Western Sahara named Mohamed Lahwaimed, quoted in a Politico story from last Friday.
While he’s referring to the $1 million(or more) in donations to the Clinton Foundation from a Moroccan mining company with ties to King Mohammed VI, he could be speaking as well to a lot of voters in the U.S. today.
Wonder if she’s listening.
“Let’s finally do something about the growing economic inequality that is tearing our country apart,” she said in 2007 during her campaign for the 2008 election, according to the New York Times.
“The top 1 percent of our households held 22 percent of our nation’s wealth.” We’re not sure of the time frame to which she’s referring, but it doesn’t matter. We get it already.
How difficult will it be to run a campaign on a platform of tackling wealth inequality, which she is reprising for this run (probably because she has to), when we have all just learned that she and her husband can pretty much just burp money?
A haul of $30 million or so from talking to Rotarians in the past 16 months, revealed in a financial disclosure filed to the Federal Elections Commission on Friday, has got to be some weight around her neck now.
As Jennifer Epstein and Richard Rubin reported over the weekend, that’s not even everything—notably, the almost $105 million Bill Clinton pulled down from 2001 to 2013.
The once-and-perhaps-future first couple’s net worth, Epstein and Rubin write, is somewhere between $11.3 million and $52.7 million (our range is narrower).
And, this excludes homes in New York and Washington, retirement savings accounts and other personal effects, as if those would tip the scale even more—from, say, astounding to astonishing.
The Clintons may have been “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001, but it doesn’t look like they stayed that way for very long.
