How UCLA Tried to Negotiate a Lower Speaking Fee, but Hillary Clinton Refused and Demanded $300,000

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Before Hillary Clinton spoke at the University of California at Los Angeles in March, her representatives had a few specifications to negotiate with school officials.

And of course, there was the matter of Clinton’s $300,000 speaking fee. When officials asked for a price reduction on behalf of the public university, Clinton’s representatives didn’t budge, saying $300,000 was already the “special university rate”…

Disclosure documents filed by Hillary Clinton last week revealed that the couple have earned about $25 million for delivering 104 paid speeches since January 2014.

In some cases, organizations that had once paid Bill Clinton to speak now paid even more to lure his wife.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization paid Bill Clinton $175,000 in 2010. Four years later, the group paid $335,000 — nearly twice as much — to hear from Hillary Clinton. Likewise, the Advanced Medical Technology Association paid Bill Clinton $160,000 to speak in 2009 and paid Hillary Clinton $265,000 to speak in 2014.

– From CBS News and the Washington Post

Hillary Clinton is not only incredibly corrupt, she’s a fraud and a phony of gigantic proportions. One could say she truly sold out to corporate interests back in the mid-1970s, something I highlighted in the post, This is How Hillary Does Business – An Oil Company, Human Rights Abuses in Colombia and the Clinton Foundation. Here’s an excerpt and a little walk down Clinton memory lane:

After Bill was elected governor of Arkansas in 1976, Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm, the first woman partner in an outfit almost as old as the Republic. It was all corporate business, and the firm’s prime clients were the state’s business heavyweights Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, Jackson Stevens Investments, Worthen Bank and the timber company Weyerhaeuser, the state’s largest landowner.

Two early cases (of a total of five that Hillary actually tried) charted her course. The first concerned the successful effort of Acorn a public interest group doing community organizing to force the utilities to lower electric rates on residential consumers and raise on industrial users. Hillary represented the utilities in a challenge to this progressive law, the classic right-wing claim, arguing that the measure represented an unconstitutional “taking” of property rights. She carried the day for the utilities.

The second case found Hillary representing the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas in a lawsuit filed by a disabled former employee who had been denied full retirement benefits by the company. In earlier years, Hillary had worked at the Children’s Defense Fund on behalf of abused employees and disabled children. Only months earlier, while still a member of the Washington, D.C., public interest community, she had publicly ripped Joseph Califano for becoming the Coca Cola company’s public counsel. “You sold us out, you, you sold us out!” she screamed publicly at Califano. Working now for Coca Cola, Hillary prevailed.

Hillary’s greed, cronyism and phoniness is so incredibly shameless, genuine progressives such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders can’t help but call her out despite the fact that, other than Rand Paul, pretty much every other Republican running for President is an overt fascist. That’s how bad Hillary really is.

Although her entire career in politics has consisted of pandering to financial oligarchs and other powerful interests, she continues to successfully dazzle the ignorant with empty, disingenuous class warfare rhetoric. Nevertheless, when it comes to the choice between her getting paid and the public interest, guess what she chooses every time?

We learned from CBS News late last year that:

Before Hillary Clinton spoke at the University of California at Los Angeles in March, her representatives had a few specifications to negotiate with school officials.

A team at the Harry Walker Agency, a speaker’s bureau handling Clinton’s appearance, requested snacks in the green room (“diet ginger ale, crudité, hummus, and sliced fruit,” they wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Post.) They described her preferred onstage refreshments (water, both hot and room temperature, and lemon wedges). They specified the type of chair Clinton should be sitting in during part of her appearance, and the type of pillows to be placed on that chair (long and rectangular, with an additional pillow backstage for added support, if needed.) They even requested that a medal being presented to Clinton be given in a box instead of being draped around her neck.

And of course, there was the matter of Clinton’s $300,000 speaking fee. When officials asked for a price reduction on behalf of the public university, Clinton’s representatives didn’t budge, saying $300,000 was already the “special university rate.”

The emails exchanged between school officials and Clinton’s team, obtained by the Post under a Freedom of Information Act request, shed new light on the intense choreography behind Clinton’s lucrative turn on the speaking circuit.

This summer, students at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas protested a $225,000 speech planned for October, citing the rising cost of tuition and asking Clinton to return the money to the school. The speech, which focused in part on the rising cost of higher education, ultimately went forward as planned.

With millions of college students saddled with impossible to pay back student debt, Hillary Clinton was more concerned with earning $300,000 for one speech than giving a public institution a break.

This is the same public school system headed by former Gestapo chief, Janet Napolitano, who raised tuition last year to give raises to school administrators. As highlighted in the post, Video of the Day: Ferraris, Maseratis & More – How the Children of Chinese Oligarchs Live it Up in SoCal:

A University of California regents committee approved a 28 percent tuition increase amid protests by as many as 400 people who stormed metal barricades and broke glass at a meeting in San Francisco.

Napolitano’s tuition proposal comes two months after the regents approved pay increase of as much as 20 percent for four chancellors and increased the base salary for a new chancellor by 23 percent from his predecessor, said Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who is an ex-officio member of the board.

Apparently, the school system also need to raise tuition to make sure Hillary’s pockets were padded. Populism this is not. Cronyism it is. Despite what she says, Hillary is the consummate political oligarch, and her preferred socio-economic system is serfdom.

Of course, it’s not just public universities that Hillary likes to shake down. She is famous for making tons of money speaking in front of the TBTF Wall Street bailout babies; however, as every good corrupt politician knows, you must diversify your cronyism.

According to an excellent article from the Washington Post, the Clintons have earned $25 million from speeches since January 2014. Of that total, Hillary “earned” $11.7 million, $3.2 million of which came from tech companies.

From the Washington Post:

In one of her last gigs on the paid lecture circuit, Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed an eBay summit aimed at promoting women in the workplace, delivering a 20-minute talk that garnered her a $315,000 payday from the company.

Less than two months later, Clinton was feted at the San Francisco Bay-area home of eBay chief executive John Donahoe and his wife, Eileen, for one of the first fundraisers supporting Clinton’s newly announced presidential campaign.

The two events spotlight the unusually close financial ties between Clinton and a broad array of industries that have issues before the government and paid millions of dollars to her and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the months preceding the launch of her presidential campaign.

Disclosure documents filed by Hillary Clinton last week revealed that the couple have earned about $25 million for delivering 104 paid speeches since January 2014.

Out of the $11.7 million that Hillary Clinton has made delivering 51 speeches since January 2014, $3.2 million came from the technology industry, the analysis found.

While it is common for former presidents to receive top dollar as paid speakers, Hillary Clinton is unique as a prospective candidate who received large personal payouts from corporations, trade groups and other major interests mere months before launching a White House bid. In some cases, those speeches gave Clinton a chance to begin sounding out themes of her coming campaign and even discuss policy issues that a future Clinton administration might face.

In some cases, organizations that had once paid Bill Clinton to speak now paid even more to lure his wife.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization paid Bill Clinton $175,000 in 2010. Four years later, the group paid $335,000 — nearly twice as much — to hear from Hillary Clinton. Likewise, the Advanced Medical Technology Association paid Bill Clinton $160,000 to speak in 2009 and paid Hillary Clinton $265,000 to speak in 2014.

Makes sense, after all, Hillary is known for being a much more effective and charismatic speaker than Bill.

She spoke of the need to “rebalance” privacy and security when it comes to government surveillance, an issue viewed as both a business and philosophical matter among tech leaders. And she expressed interest in an idea proposed by Chambers and other chief executives to allow companies to bring profits invested overseas back to the United States at a reduced tax rate.

“It doesn’t do our economy any good to have this money parked somewhere else in the world,” Clinton said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Unsurprisingly, Hillary is more than “ready” to take a page straight out of the George W. Bush economic playbook.

So are you ready?

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