In a cringe-worthy exchange, Anderson Cooper grilled Hillary Clinton in a televised town hall on Wednesday about the enormous sums she was paid by Goldman Sachs for speaking engagements. She, of course, denies being in Wall Street's pocket while making almost no excuse for taking the $675,000 for three paid speeches.

When Cooper asked her if accepting the money was mistake or bad error in judgment, Hillary replied, "Look I made speeches to lots of groups, I told them what I thought, I answered questions."

"But did you have to be paid $675,000?" asked Cooper.

Clinton, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, shrugged and said, "Well I don't know, ummm, that's what they offered."

She went further claiming that "every Secretary of State she knows" has done the came thing. When Cooper pointed out that they did that once they were out of office and not running for another one, Hillary chokes through the lamest response ever, telling him that she wasn't sure back then she was going to run. Then lightening struck a pig that was actually flying above her head.

Hillary continued by repeating her line that she can't be bought and isn't owned by Wall Street, but the 2005 pic below of her at the $2.4 billion Goldman Sachs headquarters groundbreaking says otherwise.

Speaking with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Bernie Sanders pointed out that Clinton is part of "establishment politics and establishment economics" noting that in the second half of 2015 her super PAC raised $25.3 million with $15 million of it coming from Wall Street.

"Financial institutions and their employees were Clinton’s biggest donors when she was in the Senate from 2001 to 2008," the BostonGlobe points out. "The top four banks were Citi, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley. Over her career, the campaign committees for those four banks and their employees deposited $3 million in Clinton’s various campaign accounts, according to the Center for Responsive Politics."

"I have demonstrated the ability to have the backbone to take on Wall Street in ways that Secretary Clinton never, ever has,” Sanders said during the last Democratic debate in December.

Pretty sure Hillary felt that burn.

............The lavish fee from Goldman for Hillary’s speeches was both a gratuity for past loyalty and a down payment on future services. Goldman’s ties to the Clintons date back at least to 1985, when Goldman executives began pumping money into the newly formed Democratic Leadership Council, a kind of proto-SuperPac for the advancement of neoliberalism. Behind its “third-way” politics smokescreen, the DLC was shaking down corporations and Wall Street financiers to fund the campaigns of business-friendly “New” Democrats such as Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

The DLC served as the political launching pad for the Clintons, boosting them out of the obscurity of the Arkansas dog-patch into the rarified orbit of the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the Wall Street money movers. By the time Bill rambled through his interminable keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta, the Clintons’ Faustian pact with Goldman had already been inked, their political souls cleansed of any vestiges of the primitive southern populism Clinton had exploited so effortlessly during his first term as governor.

In 1991, the Clintons traveled to Manhattan, where they tested the waters for Bill’s then rather improbable presidential bid. At a dinner meeting with Goldman’s co-chair Robert Rubin, Clinton made his case as a more pliant political vessel than George H.W. Bush, who many of the younger Wall Street raiders had soured on. Rubin emerged from the dinner so impressed that he agreed to serve as one of the campaign’s top economic advisors. More crucially, Rubin soon began orchestrating a riptide of Wall Street money into Clinton’s campaign war chest, not only from Goldman but also from other banking and investment titans, such as Lehman Brothers and Citibank, who were eager to see the loosening of federal financial regulations. With Rubin priming the pump, Clinton’s campaign coffers soon dwarfed his rivals and enabled him to survive the sex scandals that detonated on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.

After his election, Clinton swiftly returned the favor checking off one item after another on Rubin’s wish list, often at the expense of the few morsels he’d tossed to the progressive base of the party. In a rare fit of pique, Clinton erupted during one meeting of his National Economic Council, which Rubin chaired, in the first fraught year of his presidency by yelling: “You mean my entire agenda has been turned over to the smacking bond market?” Surely, Bill meant this as a rhetorical question.

When the time came to do the serious business of deregulating the financial sector, Rubin migrated from the shadows of the NEC to become Treasury Secretary, where he oversaw the implementation of NAFTA, the immiseration of the Mexican economy, imposed shock therapy on the struggling Russian economy, blocked the regulation of credit derivatives and gutted Glass-Steagall. When Rubin left the Treasury to cash in on his work at Citigroup, Clinton called him “the greatest secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Nine years later, following the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history, the global economy was in ruins, with Clinton, Rubin and Goldman Sachs’ fingerprints all over the carnage..............