Seventeen months. One hundred and four speeches. US$25.3 million. That’s what Hillary and Bill Clinton reported to the US Federal Electoral Commission. Hillary is vying to be the Democratic presidential nominee for the 2016 election.

Candidates are required to disclose their finances from January 2014 to May 2015. In that time, the Clintons made speeches to everyone from Deutsche Bank to eBay to the International Dairy-Deli-Bakery Association. The average payout per speech? Almost US$250,000. Hillary also ticked the box marked “over $5,000,000” for the money made from her memoir, Hard Choices, which chronicles her time as secretary of state.

No choice seems simpler than picking up a quarter million to churn out corporate-politico doublespeak for 25 minutes. In February, she made the inaugural address for and was interviewed at the Watermark Conference in Silicon Valley. Some $10,000 fell into her pocket as she pontificated for 60 seconds about iPhones vs. Androids.

Then she got down to the real nitty-gritty: “I’d like to bring people from right, left, red, blue, get them into a nice warm, purple space where everybody is talking and where we’re actually trying to solve problems.” Translation? “We want to be even more like the Republicans.”

Biotechnology Industry Organization paid her $335,000 in June 2014. “I don’t want to see biotech companies or pharma companies moving out of our country”, she said, “simply because of some perceived tax disadvantage and potential tax advantage somewhere else”. You can smell the next corporate tax cut from a mile away. Her April 2014 talk for the Scrap Metal Recycling Expo (yes, really) was interrupted when someone threw a shoe at her. That was the closest thing approaching value for money.

The Clintons are notoriously secretive about the total value of their assets. The Washington Post last year reported that between 2001 and 2012 their income was at least US$136.5 million.

Cynthia McFadden of NBC’s Today Show asked Bill if he would continue to give paid speeches during Hillary’s campaign. He replied: “Oh yeah, I gotta pay our bills.” It’s a farce of capitalist democracy that while Hillary brands herself as the “champion of everyday Americans”, her husband “pays the bills” $250,000 at a time.

You don’t have to look far to find people who can make useful arguments about how to improve the lives of working people in the US. Take Asean Johnson, a 9-year-old who spoke in 2013 to a huge crowd protesting against the closures of public schools in Chicago.

“Ninety percent of school closings are African American”, he said. “This is racism right here. You should be investing in these schools, not closing them. You should be supporting these schools, not closing them. We shall not be moved today. We’re going to city hall; we are informing Rahm Emanuel [the Democratic Party mayor]: ‘We are not toys. We are not going down without a fight.’”

If the system prized speaking the truth instead of talking shit, children like Asean could buy the Clintons with chump change.