Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

there are people who put the stock in all at one time while making risotto?

― *-* (jim in vancouver)

no, there are people who make rice with gravy and falsely allege it to be risotto.

okay that's just wrong

IDK if I ever posted about it here or anywhere, but I said early on I thought the speech transcripts were a waste of time issue. To me the real concern is in plain sight, i.e. that the presumptive democratic nominee for president and her husband earned millions of dollars directly from wall street and a handful of other industries for "speeches" and it's pretty obvious that at least part of the point is to buy influence. All perfectly legal of course within the system we have. Still not a good thing.

her speaking fee is about the same as Jerry Seinfeld's and she donated a large portion of her financial gains from speaking to charity

it's not like she charged some groups $200K and Deutsche Bank or someone got charged $1M is it?

huh, jerry seinfeld gives speeches to big banks?

https://media.giphy.com/media/l41lIkTqv4NTHPktO/giphy.gif

Idk how this can be any state actor other than Ecuador.

Lol, wikileaks has just confirmed it.

huh, jerry seinfeld gives speeches to big banks?

― k3vin k., Monday, October 17, 2016 2:23 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe not seinfeld, but goldman sachs has had Deepak Chopra and Yao Ming

can't believe this corruption in the nba and spirituality

http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/talks-at-gs/speaker-list.html

Laura Bush!

idk if people get that the larger the corporate entity, the more internal speakers they're going to have, some for the company at large and some for smaller groups. part of it is strategic, part of it is just making employees think that they're in a creative, innovative workplace and providing "inspiration"

there are people who put the stock in all at one time while making risotto?

― *-* (jim in vancouver), Monday, October 17, 2016 2:56 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol right? this is like the first rule of making risotto

― k3vin k., Monday, October 17, 2016 2:03 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you guys are so wrong

huh, jerry seinfeld gives speeches to big banks?

― k3vin k., Monday, October 17, 2016 2:23 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe not seinfeld, but goldman sachs has had Deepak Chopra and Yao Ming

can't believe this corruption in the nba and spirituality

― mh 😏, Monday, October 17, 2016 3:52 PM (four minutes ago)

huh, wonder what the difference could be between a politician and an NBA player cozying up to wall street

CEO of the NAACP on the list is interesting

There's also a difference between paying $30k to a retired athlete and $250k to a presumptive nominee whose entire living is corporate speeches.

How about the proposal to put fake anti-wall-street rhetoric in the Deutsche Bank speech in order to then leak it and throw people off the scent.

can u link this? it's v hard to google.

does it come from here? https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8086

bc afaict this is dan schwerin recommended they leak an actual (not fake) speech she gave to deutsch bank bc it's more antagonistic towards wall st than some of the others. calling it a fake speech they wanted to leak is a mischaracterization.

no I meant the rhetoric was fake tbc, not the speech.

I wrote her a long riff > about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, > precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever > asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those > fat cats. It's definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it > now, but it's much more than most people would assume she was saying in > paid speeches.

Remind me never to have y'all over for risotto.

ah ok i misunderstood. it's not v hilarious imo. he wrote a pointed speech for her that she actually delivered and that they decided to not leak. it's like theoretically hilarious i guess that he had her delivery a speech to bankers that maybe wasn't what they signed her up for and they had to sit through it and they didn't ever end up using it for anything. still not sure this constitutes interesting or significant.

I think what I find more funny (maybe not "hilarious") is the amount of anxious calibrating that goes/went on behind closed doors to make Clinton appear to be things that she transparently wasn't, sometimes in multiple, contradictory ways, and how much effort went into this for how little effect. I mean only Clinton's most hardcore supporters insist she is anything other than centrist and no one on the left thinks she's much better than a status quo option in the face of a monster. But they try really, really hard to make her seem otherwise, without producing much result.

she's, as self-described, a liberal centrist. wall st would prefer jeb or romney to her, but they'd prefer her to sanders (not even getting into all the ppl they'd prefer to a existential system threat like trump). it doesn't seem they tried very hard to make her seem different here tho - they wrote her a speech that they never leaked with the idea that maybe at some pt they could use it to deflect negative attention on her wall st speeches. it seems like v little work and zero payoff bc they did nothing with it.

like i think you have a very superficial understanding of her ideology if you think she's just rah-rah pro wall st. she doesn't think banks are the source of all evil, or that making money is inherently evil, but she is clearly still in favor of raising tax cuts on the wealthy and expanding social programming (though like obama she's probably willing to negotiate things like chained CPI to get other things she might want). there are obv graduations here.

also this characterization was silly when bernie said it and continue to believe it's silly: "the presumptive democratic nominee for president and her husband earned millions of dollars directly from wall street and a handful of other industries for "speeches" and it's pretty obvious that at least part of the point is to buy influence." i think "let's pay hillary now for a speech so that she gives us more favorable legislation in the future" was not on the agenda of people who hired her. there's plenty to critique about how wealth associates with power and the most powerful ppl have an easy pipeline to bring cash in for practically nothing. but there were no stipulations from goldman sachs that she reject regulation A if she delivers this speech. nb that doesn't preclude that she might just feel gratitude for getting paid and that could influence her politics but still it's not "pretty obvious that at least part of the point is to buy influence."

imo it'd be pretty funny if she took some speaking money and then completely jacked up the banks in some ironic "got mine, fuck you" play

lol that logic can be used to argue that campaign donations literally don't matter at all, that lobbying doesn't matter. Since there's pretty much never an explicit stipulation that "x donation means you have to sign y bill."

yes that logic can be abused on both sides. she was paid for doing a particular job. is every time you're paid to do something actually a bribe? generally we look for evidence before making that assertion. saying a campaign donation != influence is much different than saying that getting paid to do a job != influence.

like if you didn't know that political and entertainment figures routinely get paid large sums of money to give speeches to organizations it might seem like a barely disguised bribe. but in the context of a speaking market where giving speeches for money is routine (and i'm sure you've seen the many many organizations she has been paid to give speeches to - many of which saying it was a bribe is pretty nonsensical) you need some exceptional reason to believe that in this case it's different.

imo it'd be pretty funny if she took some speaking money and then completely jacked up the banks in some ironic "got mine, fuck you" play

― mh 😏, Monday, October 17, 2016 5:21 PM (eleven minutes ago)

hahaha that's our notorious H.R.C.!

diehard clinton supporters think there is nothing wrong with literally anything she does, clinton skeptics feel otherwise, thank god for this objective flow of information from wikileaks

(not necessarily grouping mh in with the former btw, just commenting on how predictable the reaction to most of this has been.)

and putin, he deserves props too

I was about to group myself in there, don't worry

compared to the level of outrage she engenders i think she does nothing wrong. obv she does plenty wrong but like getting paid to give a speech to a bank, or pretty much everything i've seen in the wikileaks emails, all seems v nitpicky to me.

Let's have a look at Kerry's or Powell's or Rice's emails. I'm reasonably certain this is all common nothingness.

there are people who put the stock in all at one time while making risotto?

― *-* (jim in vancouver), Monday, October 17, 2016 2:56 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol right? this is like the first rule of making risotto

― k3vin k., Monday, October 17, 2016 2:03 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you guys are so wrong

― jason waterfalls (gbx), Monday, October 17, 2016 12:57 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no no no. it's very easy. fry sofrito, add rice and fry for a bit, add wine, gradually add stock, stir a bunch. there's no other option.

the only reason to do it gradually is to get the right amount of liquid in there, there is no other benefit afaik

#risottogate

get one pressure cooker

Wikileaks can't be called "objective flow of information ". Aside from the fact that the leaks themselves are a partisan act in support of the white nationalist candidate, WL has promoted individual emails in a grossly misleading out of context way ("taco bowls", implying Hillary used an ear piece in the debate to cheat, intentionally fanned the flames of the "murdered DNC staffer killed by Hillary" conspiracy). Their approach with these particular leaks has been a pretty bottom of the barrel exercise.

I think founder's syndrome did WikiLeaks wrong - that seems almost unnecessary to state - but they also got overtaken by simpler means of dumping exposed junk, like pastebin, and didn't do the things that would have separated them from other dump sites, like avoiding exposing irrelevant personal information. Assange's own priorities have superseded the stated goals of the institution. If you actually had something important to leak, would you go to them, when so many other outlets have their own SecureDrop systems and a less tarnished reputation?

re hillary's speeches i posted this in july

the point of bringing up the speaking fees is not to imply that she is literally taking bribes from goldman sachs but to imply that her beliefs are so amenable to the executives of goldman sachs that they will happily pay hundreds of thousands of dollars just to listen to them

obv the argument against that is she's a politician she works constituencies she doesn't have to believe the stuff she says to goldman sachs or act exclusively on it and anyway i thought you said she was lyin hillary

i don't think she's lyin hillary particularly tho and i think she prob believes in and is proud, in a modest private way, of the content of her speeches, which are prob m/l the pragmatic technocratic Democratic globally-investing equivalent of mitt's 47% "gaffe" and public knowledge of which prob would not partic help her, or the project of dgaf-gonna-go-ahead-and-call-it-neoliberalism, in her+its present fight v fascism

nevertheless i am sure that a lot of people think she is literally taking bribes

become clear to me that the last allowance there is an understatement; that is obv how trump is using the speeches even tho i don't think bernie used them that way until the slightly nasty end. and other posters have been otm that ideology aside the hillary you see in them is closer to how one imagines the private thinking person to be and thus almost automatically more likable than the public, terrorized one onscreen. nor do they really contain the kind of outright dismissal i expected.

they still mildly depress me in the same way obama's turning in holy awe to the same old priests in 2008 depresses me -- but then that was real policy and this is someone working a room. i do think the "complicated lives" line -- as a symbol of the kind of flattery i meant by "her beliefs are so amenable" -- would be more of an albatross for her if trump weren't trump, if only because everyone at every publication for or against would be nonstop thinkpiecing about it.

Ok, here's something that I think actually matters:

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/18/hillary-superpac-coordination/

as noted above, the emails are still being sifted through, so it's premature to say "nothing to see here" and I think doing so evinces wishful thinking.

Have you read though the emails? It's a whole bunch of nothing, and at at least one point actually misleading. The first memo is uploaded by the journalist himself, without any other sourcing.

It's not a coincidence that these documents are 'still being sifted through', it's part of the strategy of wikileaks to maximize the impact on Hillary's campaign and staffers, rather than working with a news institution to get the biggest news stories out of it. And that strategy exactly encourages speculation 'perhaps there's something more to it.' That would probably also have left out most of the completely pointless documents in the dump, which would undermine the more important part of Assanges program: Harassing and stressing out people working for an opponent he hates. It's really so insane that Assange still is lumped into with the anti-surveillance tactics of Snowden, because he is exactly doing the opposite. He is using foreign spy services to surveil political opponents, to try and undermine their organizations. And the Intercept is ok with it. It's opposite world. It reminded me of the stress some climate activist people I knew described over alleged police infiltration up to the climate meeting in Copenhagen some years back. It's the harassment left in action.

I'm no big fan of Assange either but the Russian intrigue angle on this is much thinner so far than anything you are dismissing in the emails. And I'm not really sure what your point is on strategy, as it seems to me the dump is actually blunting the impact by burying anything potentially interesting.

as for the story itself, I think the charitable way to read it would be to say that it just shows what a farce the Citizens United decision actually was, because she's certainly not the only one whose campaign is coordinating with PACs.

what exactly is 'thin' about the russian intrigue

in 20 years that's going to be the only detail about this story that anyone remembers

what is the evidence other than the "scope and sensitivity of the efforts"?

don't believe the obama admin would be willing to make the claims purely for political reasons and putin barely even denies it