Sanders’ damning silence on Clinton’s Wall Street speeches

WikiLeaks' release of transcripts of speeches by Hillary Clinton to Wall Street firms has thoroughly exposed the servility of the Democratic presidential candidate to the banks and big business, as well as her socially reactionary and militaristic agenda. As for the progressive, let alone socialist, pretensions of Bernie Sanders and his "political revolution," the publication of this material is, if anything, even more shattering.

As Sanders continues to hustle votes for the favored candidate of Wall Street, the military/intelligence complex, and much of the Republican Party establishment, while saying nothing about her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial malefactors, there is about him a palpable odor of dishonesty and cynicism.

Since the release of the Clinton transcripts last Friday, Sanders has given numerous stump speeches in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. His only acknowledgment of the transcripts was a two-sentence statement that was as pathetic as it was absurd: “The job of the progressive movement now is to look forward not backward. No matter what Secretary Clinton may have said years ago behind closed doors, what’s important today is that millions of people stand up and demand that the Democratic Party implement the most progressive platform in the history of the country.”

Leaving aside the bromide about the Democratic platform--a conventional, pro-war document that, as Sanders well knows, will be consigned to the dustbin well before a Clinton administration even takes office--it is instructive to compare this statement with what Sanders was saying during the Democratic primaries, when he was challenging the multi-millionaire ex-senator and secretary of state for the nomination.

At the Democratic debate on February 4, he called on Clinton to release the transcripts of three speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs in 2013, shortly after she left the State Department, for which she was paid a total of $675,000. This demand became a major part of his bid to present himself as the spokesman for working people against Wall Street and the “billionaire class.”

“There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system,” Sanders said. “And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.”

He then singled out Goldman Sachs: “Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans.” This, he continued, is what a “rigged economy is about.”

Now that he has joined the Clinton campaign, fulfilling the task assigned him by the ruling class of diverting mass anger over social inequality into the dead end of the Democratic Party, Sanders has changed his tune. Now, it seems, Clinton's groveling before what he himself called a criminal enterprise and menace to democracy is of no significance. She remains the supposed standard-bearer of Sanders' "political revolution."

Even a cursory look at what is actually in the transcripts of Clinton's speeches makes clear why both she and Sanders, and most of the corporate media, are so eager to bury them. They reveal an utterly corrupt politician who sees herself, and is seen by Wall Street and the corporate elite, as little more than a well-paid employee. Her positions, not only on the banks, but also on social policy, democratic rights and, above all, war, are uniformly right-wing.