How to explain away collecting $675,000 for giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs
By Bob Johnson
Friday Jan 22, 2016 · 2:47 PM EST

As has been well documented, Hillary and Bill Clinton have become wealthy by giving speeches to deep pocket corporate interests over the years, especially to the Wall Street behemoths.

Yesterday, The New York Times reported on how Hillary’s paid speech-making has given Bernie Sanders an effective line of attack on the campaign trail, highlighting her close ties to an industry she claims she will regulate with a heavy hand. All of this in a year when voters are expressing anger at our lopsided economy:

Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches to Wall Street Animate Her Opponents
...For a fee of $275,000, she had agreed to appear before the clients of GoldenTree Asset Management, the capstone of a lucrative speechmaking sprint through Wall Street that earned her more than $2 million in less than seven months.

The Clintons have, indeed, made themselves very, very wealthy on the high-end rubber chicken circuit:

Together, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have earned in excess of $125 million in speech income since leaving the White House in 2001, one-fifth of it in the last two years.
…
Goldman Sachs alone paid Mrs. Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in three different states, a fact Mr. Sanders has highlighted repeatedly.

How effective have Sanders observations on Clinton’s speaking fees been on the campaign trail?

In Iowa on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders went even further, seeming to mock her sizable speaking fees as borderline bribes from a powerful industry. “You got to be really, really, really good to get $250,000 for a speech,” he said.
The attacks have become one of Mr. Sanders’s biggest applause lines in Iowa, where the median household earns about $52,229 a year.

Even Clinton allies admit the big numbers she has collected present a problem...

How a super PAC plans to coordinate directly with Hillary Clinton’s campaign
By Matea Gold May 12, 2015



Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to work in tight conjunction with an independent rapid-response group financed by unlimited donations, another novel form of political outsourcing that has emerged as a dominant practice in the 2016 presidential race.

On Tuesday, Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton rapid-response operation, announced it was splitting off from its parent American Bridge and will work in coordination with the Clinton campaign as a stand-alone super PAC. The group’s move was first reported by the New York Times.

That befuddled many campaign finance experts, who noted that super PACs, by definition, are political committees that solely do independent expenditures, which cannot be coordinated with a candidate or political party. Several said the relationship between the campaign and the super PAC would test the legal limits.

But Correct the Record believes it can avoid the coordination ban by relying on a 2006 Federal Election Commission regulation that declared that content posted online for free, such as blogs, is off limits from regulation. The “Internet exemption” said that such free postings do not constitute campaign expenditures, allowing independent groups to consult with candidates about the content they post on their sites. By adopting the measure, the FEC limited its online jurisdiction to regulating paid political ads.

The rules “totally exempt individuals who engage in political activity on the Internet from the restrictions of the campaign finance laws....

Hillary Clinton plans to coordinate directly with super PAC
By REENA FLORES CBS NEWS May 13, 2015, 10:00 AM

Hillary Clinton's campaign intends to coordinate directly with a newly formed super PAC able to receive unlimited donations, according to a Washington Post report.

The Democratic presidential candidate's campaign will work in conjunction with Correct the Record, an independent rapid-response team, previously a part of super PAC American Bridge, which conducts opposition research on Republican presidential candidates and possible GOP presidential candidates. The New York Times first reported Tuesday that Correct the Record would split from its parent organization to support the Clinton campaign.

Though Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules prohibit direct coordination between super PACs and declared candidates, Correct the Record believes it will be able to coordinate with Clinton without violating campaign finance regulations.

The FEC restricts paid internet political advertisements, making them subject to campaign spending limits and disclosure requirements. However, a 2006 FEC rule exempts "public communications" -- like unpaid posts on websites or blogs -- from such regulations. The rules were initially implemented as a safeguard against regulating the free speech of bloggers and other internet communications...

A big-shot venture capitalist says we need inequality. What do economists say?
By Jim Tankersley January 14



SAN FRANCISCO – There is an apartment for rent in a renovated former warehouse here, across the street from the Caltrain commuter rail station. It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and nearly 700 square feet of space. It comes furnished. It is, the online advertisement proclaims, a "perfect place" for someone, like so many young startup employees today, who works in Silicon Valley but lives in the city. It could be yours for $8,525 a month.

Rents get more bearable in farther flung parts of the city, and in bedroom communities down the Peninsula, but only slightly. A deluge of cash has soaked the engineers and executives of the Bay Area, pushing up home prices and leaving San Francisco with levels of income inequality typically seen in developing nations.

Paul Graham, a venture capitalist and one of the founders of the startup incubator Y Combinator, would have you believe this rising inequality is a good thing. Or, at very worst, the inevitable consequence of a good thing. "You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from getting rich," he wrote in an essay that went viral online last week, "and you can't do that without preventing them from starting startups."

Graham's piece happened to light up the Internet just as thousands of economists descended on San Francisco for the annual conference of the American Economic Association. The drizzly three days of the gathering featured what appears to have been the largest focus on inequality in the organization's history. The 70 inequality-themed papers presented here wove a nest of new research demonstrating how and why inequality has increased, and what side effects appear to have accompanied it.

Taken together, they make the case that Graham -- and others who wave off inequality as inconsequential -- has misread what's happened in the American economy. They suggest that everyone should worry about the drivers and consequences of inequality -- even venture capitalists....

More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/14/what-silicon-valley-doesnt-understand-about-inequality/

A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam
By Jeff Guo January 15

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UH-1D helicopters airlift members of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment from the Filhol Rubber Plantation area to a new staging area, during Operation "Wahiawa" on 16 May,1966. (AFP PHOTO/NATIONAL ARCHIVES)


The Vietnam lottery was one of the largest accidental experiments in American history. Fates of millions of young men rested on a game of random chance. Whose draft number would be called? Who would have to serve?

By comparing those called up by the draft to those who weren’t, economists have been able to measure the impact of the Vietnam war on veterans. The results are depressing. A decade after their military service, white veterans of the draft were earning about 15 percent less than their peers who didn't serve, according to studies from MIT economist Josh Angrist.

Now, new research suggests that the draft did more than dim the prospects of that earlier generation: The children of men with unlucky draft numbers are also worse off today. They earn less and are less likely to have jobs, according to a draft of a report from Sarena F. Goodman, an economist with the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Adam Isen, an economist at the Treasury Department. (A copy was released by the Fed in December, but research does not reflect the opinions of the government.)

The researchers have not nailed down how, exactly, any of this is happening, nor why the disadvantage appears to be over twice as potent for sons than for daughters. But the work is valuable for showing how the circumstances of one’s parents can have lasting repercussions. This is one way that inequality persists through the generations.

“I think it is a very important illustration of the importance of family background in determining people’s life outcomes,”...

Poll shows support for solar power, belief in climate change
By Scott Stafford
01/16/2016

BOSTON — The majority of those responding to a recent poll believe that climate change is happening and that solar power is the most popular form of renewable energy to fight the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The poll of Massachusetts voters, conducted by NPR affiliate radio station WBUR, was conducted by The MASS Inc Polling Group between Nov. 30 and Dec. 2, 2015, and surveyed 504 registered Massachusetts voters. It came at a time that the state Legislature seemed deadlocked on advancing legislation to lift the net metering caps that are limiting solar development.

According to the results, when asked the question, "In thinking about future energy needs, which of these energy sources do you think we should rely on more and which should we rely on less here in Massachusetts," solar energy led the field with 84 percent, wind power was next with 77 percent. Hydro power was third at 62 percent.

The lower half of the field was made up of natural gas (50 percent), nuclear power (24 percent), oil (14 percent) and coal (10 percent).

Respondents also favored paying $10 per month more on energy (with 58 percent in favor and 32 percent against) if it helped to significantly reduce greenhouse gases...