Courtesy of Wikileaks – and, if the Obama White House is to be believed, Vladimir Putin – those Wall Street speeches that Hillary Clinton refused to make public during her bitter primary battle with Bernie Sanders have now been released to the world. Or at least some of their contents have.

And what do they show? Well, no surprise there. Hillary is, as many have long suspected, a bought and paid for shill of Wall Street whose real, private stance on key economic matters is starkly at variance with the one she presented to the Democratic base during the primaries.

Her speeches show that, like her husband’s two terms in Washington, a Hillary Clinton White House is likely to be every bit as Wall Street friendly.

Meanwhile Donald Trump’s ‘groping’ is the issue that leads the New York Times today, as it does with most of the mainstream media. On the Times‘ webpage, the Hillary story ranks third, below two Trump pieces. It will be interesting to see how the Wikileaks story is treated elsewhere.

For myself, I rather think we all owe Putin and Wikileaks a vote of thanks.

Here is the New York Times’ version of the Hillary story. Enjoy:

Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease With Wall Street

By AMY CHOZICK, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO

OCT. 7, 2016

In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had it become public.

Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

The passages were contained in an internal review of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches undertaken by her campaign, which was identifying potential land mines should the speeches become public. They offer a glimpse at one of the most sought-after troves of information in the 2016 presidential race — and an explanation, perhaps, for why Mrs. Clinton has steadfastly refused demands by Mr. Sanders and Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival, to release them.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would not confirm the authenticity of the documents. They were released on Friday night by WikiLeaks, the hacker collective founded by the activist Julian Assange, saying that they had come from the email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

In a statement, a Clinton spokesman, Glen Caplin, suggested that the leak could have been engineered by Russian officials determined to help Mr. Trump and noted that a Twitter message from WikiLeaks promoting the documents had incorrectly identified Mr. Podesta as a co-owner of his brother’s lobbying firm.

But Clinton officials did not deny that the email containing the excerpts was real.

The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.

But in the excerpts, Ms. Clinton demonstrates her long and warm ties to some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become “very onerous and unnecessary.”

In a separate speech to Goldman Sachs employees the same month, Mrs. Clinton said it was an “oversimplification” to blame the global financial crisis of 2008 on the U.S. banking system.

“It was conventional wisdom,” Mrs. Clinton said of the tendency to blame the banking system. “And I think that there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened.”

And she praised a deficit-reduction proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission that called for raising the Social Security retirement age, saying that the commission’s leaders “had put forth the right framework.”

Such comments could have proven devastating to Mrs. Clinton during the Democratic primary fight, when Mr. Sanders promoted himself as the enemy of Wall Street and of a rigged economic system.

Several of the most eye-popping passages ultimately express more nuanced explanations of her views. When Mrs. Clinton describes herself as “far removed” from average Americans and their finances, she had just finished describing her growing appreciation for how “anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” And she reminds the audience that her father “loved to complain about big business and big government.”

The Clintons have made more than $120 million in speeches to Wall Street and special interests since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001. Mrs. Clinton typically earned $225,000 for speeches, though she sometimes donated her fees to her family foundation.

“I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech,” Mr. Sanders said during the primary, “a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people.”

As her race against Mr. Sanders — who now campaigns for Mrs. Clinton — grew unexpectedly contentious and close, Mrs. Clinton sought to portray herself as deeply skeptical of Wall Street and eager to punish its wayward leaders.

“I believe strongly that we need to make sure that Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again,” Mrs. Clinton said in January. “No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail.”

As she sought to burnish her image as an advocate of working America, Mrs. Clinton declared her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Mr. Obama’s 12-nation trade pact, and distanced herself from Nafta, which her husband signed into law.

But in a 2013 speech to a Brazilian bank, Mrs. Clinton took a far different approach. “My dream,” she said, “is a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future.”

Some of her paid remarks embrace the view that the public can benefit when Wall Street partners with government. When it comes to writing effective financial regulations, Mrs. Clinton said, “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

Foreign hackers — authorized by Russian security agencies, according to national security officials — have successfully penetrated the operations of the Democratic Party and its candidates over the past year. They broke into the email servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing internal messages in which party leaders who were supposed to be neutral expressed their preference for Mrs. Clinton even as she was campaigning against Mr. Sanders. And Mr. Assange is an avowed critic of Mrs. Clinton who has made clear that he wishes to hurt her chances of winning the presidency.

Half of all registered voters said it bothered them “a lot” that Mrs. Clinton had given numerous paid speeches to Wall Street banks, according to a Bloomberg Politics poll in June.

Asked in an interview that month if the practice was self-defeating, given the anger over income inequality, Mrs. Clinton responded that her predecessors as secretary of state had given paid speeches, too.

“I actually think it makes sense,” she said. “Because a lot of people know you have a front-row seat in watching what’s going on in the world.”

A great piece in The Guardian opinion section by one of my favourite commentators on American politics, Thomas Frank. Enjoy:

Some of Clinton’s pledges sound great. Until you remember who’s president

Thomas Frank

The Democrats promise to take on a system rigged against middle America. So why the hell has Barack Obama done almost nothing about that for eight years?

Thursday 6 October 2016 12.00 BST Last modified on Thursday 6 October 2016 13.41 BST

The puzzle that is currently frustrating the pundit minds of America is this: why is Hillary Clinton not simply clobbering Donald Trump? How is this ranting, seething buffoon still competitive with her? Trump has now stumbled through a series of the kind of blunders that break ordinary political campaigns – the sort of deadly hypocrisies that always kill the demagogue in old movies – and yet this particular demagogue keeps on trucking. Why?

Let us answer that burning pundit question of today by jumping to what will undoubtedly be the next great object of pundit ardor: the legacy of President Barack Obama. Two months from now, when all the TV wise men are playing historian and giving their estimation on where Obama ranks in the pantheon of the greats, they will probably neglect to mention that his legacy helped to determine Hillary’s fortunes in this election cycle. As a beloved figure among Democrats, for example, Obama was instrumental in securing the nomination for her. As a president who has accomplished little since 2011, however, Obama has pretty much undermined Clinton’s ability to sell us on another centrist Democratic presidency. His legacy has diluted her promise.

Let me put this slightly differently. Hillary Clinton has lots of good policy ideas. She promises many fine things. That these things do not attract more voters to her side is (as many have noted) partially due to her wonkish way of presenting them. But it is even more because of the glaring contradiction between the nice things she says she will do and the failure of Obama to advance the ball very far on those same issues.

I was pleased to learn, for example, that this year’s Democratic platform includes strong language on antitrust enforcement, and that Hillary Clinton has hinted she intends to take the matter up as president. Hooray! Taking on too-powerful corporations would be healthy, I thought when I first learned that, and also enormously popular. But then it dawned on me: antitrust enforcement is largely up to the president and his picked advisers. If Democrats really think it is so damned important, why has Clinton’s old boss Barack Obama done so very, very little with it?

Or take this headline from just a few days ago: “Clinton promises to hold Wells Fargo accountable”. Go get ‘em, Hillary! To see a president get tough with elite bankers and with CEOs in general – that’s something we can all cheer for. But then that nagging voice piped up again: if Democrats think it is so critical to get tough with crooked banksters, why oh why didn’t Barack Obama take the many, many opportunities he had to do so back in the days when it would have really mattered?

Where this contradiction gets particularly toxic is on the issue of trade. This is the locomotive of dissatisfaction that Trump means to ride into the White House, and Clinton has tried desperately to neutralize the issue by announcing that she, too, opposes the hated TPP and that she, too, deplores the unfortunate effects certain trade deals have had. And then you open the newspaper and find that her presidential patron and protector, Barack Obama, is still pushing the TPP in order to secure his legacy.

The reform impulse just keeps short-circuiting every time the Democrats try to switch it on. They talk about healthcare – and immediately have to say things like this about Obamacare: “It’s a heck of a lot better than starting from scratch.” They talk about getting college tuition under control – and everyone remembers that the problem is decades old and that the Dems have done virtually nothing about it all those years. What was without a doubt the worst moment of them all came at the Democratic convention back in July, when Senator Elizabeth Warren pronounced on the current state of middle America as follows:

Look around. Americans bust their tails, some working two or three jobs, but wages stay flat. Meanwhile, the basic costs of making it from month to month keep going up. Housing, healthcare, child care – costs are out of sight. Young people are getting crushed by student loans. Working people are in debt. Seniors can’t stretch a social security check to cover the basics.

It was a powerful indictment of what Warren called a “rigged” system – except for one thing: that system is presided over by Barack Obama, a man that same Democratic convention was determined to apotheosize as one of the greatest politicians of all times.

It doesn’t really help matters to claim, as the most ardent Obama defenders do, that the president was powerless before Congress, and that it was therefore impossible for Obama to do anything differently than he did during his eight years. Such fanciful talk may help us to feel better about the current occupant of the Oval, but it also negates his would-be successor’s promises more effectively than any lesser argument you might make against them. It transforms a vote for Hillary from mildly distasteful to almost totally futile.

The immediate problem for Democrats this year is simple, really: it is hard to criticize power when your own leader is the most powerful person in the land.

The larger problem facing them is the terminal irrelevance of their great, overarching campaign theme. Remember the “man from Hope”? “Hope is on the way”? “Keep hope alive”? Well, this year “hope” is most assuredly dead. Thanks to Obama’s flagrant hope-dealing in the dark days of 2008 – followed up by his failure to reverse the disintegration of the middle class – this favorite Democratic cliché has finally become just that: an empty phrase. Today as the Democrats go into battle against Trump, they find that their rallying cry has lost its magic. Hillary is discovering how difficult it is to win an election without hope.

The end of the 1981 hunger strikes in late October that year, which had resulted in ten deaths but arguably led indirectly to the peace process, was comprehensively covered by The Irish Times, a newspaper for which I then worked.

The anniversary of the end of the protest takes place later this month.

Below are three articles worthy of note which appeared around that time, two by myself as stand-in Northern Editor and one by the paper’s then political correspondent Dick Walsh. The articles were reproduced in today’s edition as part of the paper’s commemoration of the protest.

I would like to draw readers’ attention to the final paragraph of the last of the three articles – which is by myself – and place it in the context of Richard O’Rawe’s assertion that a solution to the protest was on offer before the death of the fifth hunger striker, Joe McDonnell, was accepted by the prisoners’ leaders inside the jail but ultimately rejected as a result of outside pressure from Gerry Adams and others in his leadership circle.

O’Rawe’s suspicion is that the settlement was sabotaged so that Owen Carron could stand unopposed by the SDLP in the forthcoming Fermanagh-South Tyrone by-election – caused by Bobby Sands’ death – thereby increasing both the chance that he would win and that the Sinn Fein grassroots would be more amenable to accepting an electoral strategy. If the hunger strike had ended before the by-election, the SDLP would almost certainly have stood a candidate and split the Nationalist vote.

I interviewed Gerry Adams in the SF press centre on the Falls Road the day after the hunger strike ended and tape-recorded his answers. A few weeks later Adams’ prediction became reality when SF at its ard-fheis endorsed what would become known as ‘the armalite and ballot box strategy’.

This is the relevant paragraph: ‘Provisional Sinn Fein would continue to participate more directly in political activity, a process which, he (Adams) said, had been “accelerated dramatically” by the hunger-strikes. He said that the “wouldn’t be at all surprised” if the Provisionals decided to field candidates if the new Secretary of State, Mr Prior, launched an initiative involving elections.’

The rejection of the peace deal between the Colombia government and the FARC rebels in a popular referendum this weekend is a blow not just to those who wished to bring FARC in from the cold and to disciples of the Good Friday Agreement-way of ending conflicts but to Sinn Fein itself, which invested considerable resources in helping to negotiate the deal in Havana, Cuba.

Here are two articles, which are recommended to followers of this blog. One is The New York Times report of this weekend’s rejection of the deal by Colombia’s voters. The Times reports that voters narrowly rejected the deal because it was seen as leaning too heavily towards FARC, a sentiment many Unionist critics of the Good Friday deal shared vis-a-vis the IRA.

The other is this piece in An Phoblacht-Republican News which rejoiced at the signing of the agreement in August between FARC and the Colombian government following lengthy negotiations, and credited a number of SF activists for playing a constructive role in the talks, including former IRA GHQ member and Northern Minister, Conor Murphy, Assembly Member Jennifer McCann and Dail Foreign Affairs spokesman Sean Crowe.

Martin McGuinness had this to say about the deal: “(I am) overjoyed to hear Colombian peace talks in Havana have resulted in agreement to end war and conflict”.

SInn Fein, via the IRA, has allegedly had a longstanding relationship with FARC. In 2001 three prominent republicans, James Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McAuley were arrested at Bogota airport during what Colombian authorities would subsequently claim was a ‘drug-money-for-military-expertise’ deal in which the IRA was said to have tutored FARC rebels in the construction and use of home-made mortars in return for cash which FARC had earned through cocaine smuggling.

Here is the AP/RN article:

This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog but a British parliamentary inquiry has found that the invasion of Libya back in 2011 was based on what the inquiry members politely call ‘erroneous assumptions’, which is parliament-speak for saying that those behind the intervention either refused to see or lied about seeing what everyone else could see, which was that the threat to civilians which was the pretext for the invasion was over-stated and that the so-called rebels against Gaddafi’s tyranny included a disproportionate number of Islamic extremists.

The inquiry found that British prime minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the fiasco which has plunged Libya and much of North Africa into years of dangerous instability, death and destruction, but he was not alone.

Others with guilt and blood on their hands include French President Sarkozy and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton –‘We came, We saw, he died’ – (and not far behind her President Obama who was the first to raise the false spectre of Gaddafi slaughtering innocent civilians in Benghazi).

This, not the subsequent, later deaths of US diplomatic personnel in Benghazi, was Hillary Clinton’s real wrongdoing in Libya; the overthrow of Gaddafi and the subsequent rise of ISIS in Libya alongside the political instability which has destabilised the North African state were all made possible by the NATO-led assault on Libya.

So far Clinton’s role in this disaster has not figured in the US presidential campaign, thanks in no small way to the American media’s failure to put it under scrutiny.

Here is a summary of the Commons Select Committee report with links to the full report:

Libyan intervention based on erroneous assumptions; David Cameron ultimately responsible