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27 Mar, 2016 18:35

Clooneys mocked for hosting $353k-per-couple Hillary Clinton fundraiser

Clooneys mocked for hosting $353k-per-couple Hillary Clinton fundraiser

Hollywood star and activist George Clooney is under fire for being out of touch with his fellow Americans - and perhaps his own values - by hosting a $353,000-per-couple fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Along with his wife, human rights and former Julian Assange lawyer Amal Clooney, they reserved two seats at the head table of the April 15 dinner organized by venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar for those with six figures laying around.

What? Don’t have the equivalent of ten years' salary at the average wage?

Not to worry.

The group will host a similar event for the Hillary Victory Fund SuperPAC on April 16 for the low-low price of $33,400 per person, which is roughly equal to one year of full-time work under California's proposed $15 minimum wage.

READ MORE: 'Fight for $15' movement wins major battle in California with minimum wage agreement 

In an email to supporters, the campaign manager for Democratic rival Bernie Sanders criticized the fundraiser’s top tier price of admission as an “obscene amount of money.”

READ MORE: Big wins for Bernie Sanders in Washington, Hawaii, Alaska caucuses

“In the movie Oceans 11, a gang of lovable thieves successfully heist $150 million from a vault in the basement of the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said. “Fueled primarily from high-dollar donations, Hillary Clinton has raised more than that in this campaign, and is now enlisting the support of George Clooney (Danny Ocean) to pad that total at a dinner event that will cost people up to $353,400 to attend.”

READ MORE: Loose lugs lose elections: Are the wheels falling off Hillary Clinton’s campaign car?

The Clintons and the Clooneys will sure have a lot to talk about during the dinner.

Amal previously worked in The Hague defending war criminals including Libya's ex-intelligence chief Abdullah al Senussi, while recent Wikileaks revelations of Clinton's emails in relation to NATO's bombing of the north African nation have some calling for an investigation into her involvement.

READ MORE: 'NATO turned Libya into a destroyed state, not a failed state'

Amal also represented Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, which Clinton blamed for launching “an attack on the international community.”

If they want to get in the wayback machine, they could reminisce about Amal's early career as a corporate lawyer for Enron, the company which made millions of deregulation laws passed by Bill Clinton.

One might think George would have some conflicts with Clinton's time as Secretary of State, given his desire to "end war in Africa".

Under President Obama, she helped the US militarize a number of countries in Africa, extending its secret and deadly drone program to Cameroon and Somalia along with “a proxy war in Mali, shadowy ops in Chad, and anti-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Guinea,” according to American journalist Nick Turse in his book Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.

READ MORE: Paved with good intentions: When showbiz & charity become political instruments

Contrast that with George Clooney’s new project Sentry which supposedly "aims to trace the flow of money into African conflicts and identify the people profiting from violence", according to Time.com.

Good thing for them Sentry was set up by the Center for American Progress, a think tank created by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, so it remains to be seen just how deep their investigations will go.

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