Hillary’s Champagne Socialism - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Hillary’s Champagne Socialism
by

One of the images that emerges from Hillary’s hacked emails is that of comically greedy boomers scurrying to scoop up every last dollar before her campaign of class warfare began. Hillary was furious that her aides didn’t want Bill Clinton to give a six-figure speech to Morgan Stanley a few days after the start of her campaign. Hillary pouted over the matter while Huma Abedin concocted a lie: “I will have to tell her that WJC chose to cancel it, not that we asked.” Hillary finally relented, but she needed, according to Abedin, a “cooling down period” to absorb the shock of Clinton Inc. losing such easy dough.

The champagne socialism of Hillary — inveighing against an economy of “exclusion” while elbowing her way to ill-gotten wealth — is beyond farce. She is the Alinskyite radical who complains about rising college tuition fees while taking money away from students by charging their schools $225,000 for speeches. That was too much even for Colin Powell, who still wants to “send her a bill” for his lost gigs at schools she overcharged.

Throughout the campaign, she has attacked Trump for mistreating lowly contractors. “I take this personally,” she said, comparing her father to those contractors. Never mind that her father was a prosperous businessman who sent her to Wellesley. There at hardscrabble Wellesley, she wrote her senior thesis on the “have nots” and the political liberation Alinskyism offered them.

Columnist Joe Klein has called the Clintons the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of the Baby Boomer generation. But the “vast wealth” into which the Buchanans escaped after smashing things up looks minor compared to the wealth of the Clintons. Wealthier than the Buchanans and more crooked than Jay Gatsby, a couple like the Clintons might have inspired Fitzgerald to write a separate novel about two con artists who desert Arkansas for New York and become multimillionaires by setting up a charitable foundation.

This week Hillary grandly invited the FBI to examine the emails of “one of her staffers,” a slight that bodes ill for Huma, who may feel a bit like Daisy Buchanan’s roadkill. Hillary encouraged Huma to marry Anthony Weiner and Bill officiated at their wedding. But now Huma is on her own. Perhaps Hillary is also miffed by the WikiLeaks disclosures in which her loyal courtier appears a little less loyal. Huma called Hillary’s shakedown of Morocco’s king for a $12 million donation “a mess” of her own making.

The Clinton Foundation seemed to exist not to eliminate the poverty of developing countries but to increase it by fleecing its leaders. Hillary convinced Morocco’s king to cough up the money on the explicit promise that she would turn up at an event in Morocco. Wrote Huma: “This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months.”

Hillary broke her promise. She ended up sending Bill and Chelsea in her place. But the whole arrangement made it clear that she had no problem pressuring tinpot leaders into buying meetings from her. When not railing against the Republicans for a “war on women,” Hillary was scouting out locations for the next Clinton Global Initiative meeting in countries that don’t let women drive.

In the 1990s, the Clintons popularized the “Renaissance Weekend,” an event that served as a magnet for champagne socialists who wanted to talk about the poor while staying as far away from them as possible and networking to get richer. The Clinton Global Initiative was a Renaissance Weekend for the thugs and frauds of the international elite. They could powwow about the poor, then the Clintons could line their pockets with money from the poor’s oppressors. It was the perfect racket for the Clintons, for whom greed and “idealism” had long ago merged into one.

Bill Clinton’s first speech after leaving the White House was to Morgan Stanley, which so outraged its clients (who were mad about Clinton’s pardoning of Marc Rich) that the company’s chairman had to apologize and say it had “clearly made a mistake.” By 2015, it was Hillary’s aides who didn’t want Bill to speak to Morgan Stanley. But what hadn’t changed was the avarice of the Clintons, whose rhetorical antipathy for the rich was only eclipsed by their ravenous desire to join them.

George Neumayr
Follow Their Stories:
View More
George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
Sign up to receive our latest updates! Register


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: . You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Be a Free Market Loving Patriot. Subscribe Today!