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lol.
The Next Election, Political News, and Other Forms of Comedy (US, UK, & Intl)
- Thread starter OfficePants
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https://theintercept.com/2016/08/08...and-russia-sympathies-has-long-history-in-us/
Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S.
Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S.
Scherensammler
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Scherensammler
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Kind of strange how everybody else around here (even in stiletto heels) seems to manage the "icy" stairs.
But then again, she's a senior citizen and deserves help.
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we have lunatics running the asylum.
Scherensammler
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This kind of explains why the world is fucked up...
And this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37016680
Republican security experts rail against Trump in open letter
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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/new-york-times-thomas-friedman-goes-to-the-wall-w433066
Thomas Friedman Goes to the Wall
Thomas Friedman, master of metaphor, has a new set of fixations: walls, webs and the tacking of that presidentially-contending center-left sailboat, Hillary Clinton.
In a pair of recent articles, "Web People Versus Wall People" and "How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out," the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times expresses deep concern that Clinton’s primary-season "lean" toward the politics of Bernie Sanders isn't fake enough.
It's been a whole week since the convention, and Hillary still hasn't yet gone back to being the unabashed friend to big banks and staunch advocate for free trade and deregulation she just spent all of last year pretending she was not. This hasFriedman freaked out.
He fears she is leaning in the direction of socialism, "the greatest system ever invented for making people equally poor," as opposed to staying true to the capitalist ethos of her husband, which would "grow our pie bigger and faster":
I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth...
Friedman is conceding that inequality and unfairness are legitimate concerns. He's just saying that now that the people most concerned about these issues have been beaten at the polls, we can safely go back to ignoring them and letting the beneficiaries of inequality worry about how and when to fix it.
This "let's grow our pie bigger and faster" column (does this make more or less sense than George Bush's famous "we should make the pie higher" idea?) comes on the heels of last week's "Webs and Walls" column on the same theme.
This remarkable article divided the world into two groups of people. Roughly speaking, Friedman is talking about people who embrace globalization ("Web people") versus people who reject it ("Wall people").
This is already a confusing metaphor because the campaigns of the two candidates Friedman identifies as riling up the "Wall" people, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, were heavily reliant on Internet media, i.e. the Web.
Meanwhile, Friedman’s definition of "web people" describes individuals who:
Instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics and the very planet.
That seems like a very specific and weird belief system, probably unique to writers for the New York Times named Thomas Friedman. Also, Friedman never explains what any of this has to do with "webs" – is it an Internet thing? Do they have webbed hands?
But whatever, we get it, sort of. "Web people" embrace the future and "open systems," i.e. free trade, bringing us closer to the heart of what Friedman is talking about.
Friedman is right that this election, like the Brexit vote, has really been a referendum on globalization. What's infuriating is the cartoonish way he defines the critics of globalization.
"Wall people" in his mind are either xenophobic Trumpites who don't want a flood of dirty, rapey immigrants entering their towns, or they're Sanders socialists who don't want to compete with foreign workers and insist on government handouts.
With regard to the latter, what troubles Friedman the most is the way Hillary is cozying up to her critics on the left:
She is opposing things she helped to negotiate, like the Pacific trade deal, and offering more benefits from government but refraining from telling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn't cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.
Yes, to get by these days, working hard isn't enough to keep a job. You need to be "constantly raising your game." Either that, or you need to marry a shopping mall heiress and write books fawning over Fortune 500 companies.
Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism.
But this issue is infinitely more complicated than that.
We never really had a referendum on globalization in America. It just sort of happened. People had jobs one day, then the next morning they were fired, replaced by 14-year-olds in Indonesia or sweatshop laborers in Bangladesh, working in unsafe hell-holes without overtime or health care, beaten when they don’t make quotas.
What exactly does "raising your game" mean in the context of that sort of competition?
Globalization in the snap of a finger essentially erased nearly two centuries of America's bloody labor history. It's as if the Thibodeaux Massacre, the hangings of the Molly McGuires, the Pullman Strike, the L.A. Times bombing, the Flint sit-in and thousands of other strikes and confrontations never took place.
"Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism."
In the new paradigm, all of those agonizing controversies and wars of political attrition, which collectively produced a vast set of rules and standards for dealing with workers, were simply wiped away.
Manufacturers just went abroad, to dictatorships and communist oligarchies, to make their products, forcing American workers to compete not just against foreign workers, but against their own history and legal systems.
People forget that when it comes to labor relations, America had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, in the direction of the civilized world. Attempts to ban child labor in this country failed repeatedly, and we didn't actually pass a federal child labor law that stuck until 1938. Airlines in America were still firing flight attendants for getting married through the mid-eighties.
Now all that work spent to get even past those most basic problems is at risk. In the global economy, employers can look at their business models as one giant arbitrage.
You do your banking in the laissez-faire havens of the Caribbean, build factories in slave-labor capitals like China or Indonesia, buy swaps in less-regulated financial atmospheres in London, sell your products in America and Europe, etc.
You also arrange your corporate structures so that you pay the smallest amount of tax possible, often by threatening to move until you receive subsidies and exemptions. This leads to bizarre situations like Boeing making $26 billion in U.S. profits over a five-year period and receiving a U.S. federal tax refund of $401 million over the same time.
This whole situation has raised profound questions that nobody has ever bothered to try to answer for ordinary voters, as in: What are nation-states for, in a global economy?
What's the point of all of our labor laws, or voting-rights laws, the first amendment and a host of other American legal traditions if large pluralities of American manufacturers do their business in countries like China, where human rights abuses are rampant, political freedom is nonexistent and speech is tightly controlled?
Friedman's description of "Wall People" is probably somewhat true when it comes to Trump voters, many of whom do just want to be physically walled off from a confusing, racially diverse world.
But to dismiss the rest of globalization's critics as communists who hate freedom and just want to curl up in the lap of government and hide from change is absurd and insulting.
Most educated people accept and embrace the idea of an increasingly integrated world. The problem is how to go forward into the future in a way that's fair and doesn't increase oppression, pollution, child labor, even slavery and indenture, to say nothing of the disenfranchisement of the ex-middle class in places like America.
These are very difficult questions. They're ones that probably won't have positive solutions without the determined leadership of the world's bigger democratic powers, like the U.S. and the E.U.
The problem is that the major parties in the United States in particular seem almost totally disinterested in addressing the inequities of globalism. That’s because conventional wisdom is still stuck in the Friedman stage of telling people that if they’re troubled by the global economy, they’re just afraid of the future.
Because the Murphy's Law tendency of American politics demands that we draw every conceivable wrong lesson from an event before accidentally stumbling in the direction of progress, the twin revolts in the 2016 presidential race will surely be misinterpreted for a good long while by the Friedmans of the world.
They won't see the anti-establishment backlash as a reason to re-examine the impact of globalism on ordinary people. Instead, as Friedman puts it, they'll see an opportunity to build a single ruling coalition of "center-left Web People" (what a creepy image!) who will dominate the next generation of American politics:
My hope is that, for the good of the country, Republican Web People will, over time, join the Democratic Party and tilt it into a compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st Century. That would be a party that is sensitive to the needs of working people ... but committed to capitalism, free markets and open trade as the vital engines of growth for a modern society.
Yes, let's be sensitive to the needs of working people, unless they have complaints about globalism, in which case we'll put our webbed hands over our ears and ignore them. Are you loving this political season yet?
Thomas Friedman Goes to the Wall
- by Matt Taibbi
- 6 min read
- original
Thomas Friedman, master of metaphor, has a new set of fixations: walls, webs and the tacking of that presidentially-contending center-left sailboat, Hillary Clinton.
In a pair of recent articles, "Web People Versus Wall People" and "How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out," the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times expresses deep concern that Clinton’s primary-season "lean" toward the politics of Bernie Sanders isn't fake enough.
It's been a whole week since the convention, and Hillary still hasn't yet gone back to being the unabashed friend to big banks and staunch advocate for free trade and deregulation she just spent all of last year pretending she was not. This hasFriedman freaked out.
He fears she is leaning in the direction of socialism, "the greatest system ever invented for making people equally poor," as opposed to staying true to the capitalist ethos of her husband, which would "grow our pie bigger and faster":
I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth...
Friedman is conceding that inequality and unfairness are legitimate concerns. He's just saying that now that the people most concerned about these issues have been beaten at the polls, we can safely go back to ignoring them and letting the beneficiaries of inequality worry about how and when to fix it.
This "let's grow our pie bigger and faster" column (does this make more or less sense than George Bush's famous "we should make the pie higher" idea?) comes on the heels of last week's "Webs and Walls" column on the same theme.
This remarkable article divided the world into two groups of people. Roughly speaking, Friedman is talking about people who embrace globalization ("Web people") versus people who reject it ("Wall people").
This is already a confusing metaphor because the campaigns of the two candidates Friedman identifies as riling up the "Wall" people, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, were heavily reliant on Internet media, i.e. the Web.
Meanwhile, Friedman’s definition of "web people" describes individuals who:
Instinctively understand that Democrats and Republicans both built their platforms largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal and the Cold War, but that today, a 21st-century party needs to build its platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change, which are the forces transforming the workplace, geopolitics and the very planet.
That seems like a very specific and weird belief system, probably unique to writers for the New York Times named Thomas Friedman. Also, Friedman never explains what any of this has to do with "webs" – is it an Internet thing? Do they have webbed hands?
But whatever, we get it, sort of. "Web people" embrace the future and "open systems," i.e. free trade, bringing us closer to the heart of what Friedman is talking about.
Friedman is right that this election, like the Brexit vote, has really been a referendum on globalization. What's infuriating is the cartoonish way he defines the critics of globalization.
"Wall people" in his mind are either xenophobic Trumpites who don't want a flood of dirty, rapey immigrants entering their towns, or they're Sanders socialists who don't want to compete with foreign workers and insist on government handouts.
With regard to the latter, what troubles Friedman the most is the way Hillary is cozying up to her critics on the left:
She is opposing things she helped to negotiate, like the Pacific trade deal, and offering more benefits from government but refraining from telling people the hardest truth: that to be in the middle class, just working hard and playing by the rules doesn't cut it anymore. To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner, constantly raising your game.
Yes, to get by these days, working hard isn't enough to keep a job. You need to be "constantly raising your game." Either that, or you need to marry a shopping mall heiress and write books fawning over Fortune 500 companies.
Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism.
But this issue is infinitely more complicated than that.
We never really had a referendum on globalization in America. It just sort of happened. People had jobs one day, then the next morning they were fired, replaced by 14-year-olds in Indonesia or sweatshop laborers in Bangladesh, working in unsafe hell-holes without overtime or health care, beaten when they don’t make quotas.
What exactly does "raising your game" mean in the context of that sort of competition?
Globalization in the snap of a finger essentially erased nearly two centuries of America's bloody labor history. It's as if the Thibodeaux Massacre, the hangings of the Molly McGuires, the Pullman Strike, the L.A. Times bombing, the Flint sit-in and thousands of other strikes and confrontations never took place.
"Friedman's glib definition of globalization goes virtually unchallenged in the pundit-o-sphere, which by and large agrees with him that critics of globalism are either racists or afraid of capitalism."
In the new paradigm, all of those agonizing controversies and wars of political attrition, which collectively produced a vast set of rules and standards for dealing with workers, were simply wiped away.
Manufacturers just went abroad, to dictatorships and communist oligarchies, to make their products, forcing American workers to compete not just against foreign workers, but against their own history and legal systems.
People forget that when it comes to labor relations, America had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, in the direction of the civilized world. Attempts to ban child labor in this country failed repeatedly, and we didn't actually pass a federal child labor law that stuck until 1938. Airlines in America were still firing flight attendants for getting married through the mid-eighties.
Now all that work spent to get even past those most basic problems is at risk. In the global economy, employers can look at their business models as one giant arbitrage.
You do your banking in the laissez-faire havens of the Caribbean, build factories in slave-labor capitals like China or Indonesia, buy swaps in less-regulated financial atmospheres in London, sell your products in America and Europe, etc.
You also arrange your corporate structures so that you pay the smallest amount of tax possible, often by threatening to move until you receive subsidies and exemptions. This leads to bizarre situations like Boeing making $26 billion in U.S. profits over a five-year period and receiving a U.S. federal tax refund of $401 million over the same time.
This whole situation has raised profound questions that nobody has ever bothered to try to answer for ordinary voters, as in: What are nation-states for, in a global economy?
What's the point of all of our labor laws, or voting-rights laws, the first amendment and a host of other American legal traditions if large pluralities of American manufacturers do their business in countries like China, where human rights abuses are rampant, political freedom is nonexistent and speech is tightly controlled?
Friedman's description of "Wall People" is probably somewhat true when it comes to Trump voters, many of whom do just want to be physically walled off from a confusing, racially diverse world.
But to dismiss the rest of globalization's critics as communists who hate freedom and just want to curl up in the lap of government and hide from change is absurd and insulting.
Most educated people accept and embrace the idea of an increasingly integrated world. The problem is how to go forward into the future in a way that's fair and doesn't increase oppression, pollution, child labor, even slavery and indenture, to say nothing of the disenfranchisement of the ex-middle class in places like America.
These are very difficult questions. They're ones that probably won't have positive solutions without the determined leadership of the world's bigger democratic powers, like the U.S. and the E.U.
The problem is that the major parties in the United States in particular seem almost totally disinterested in addressing the inequities of globalism. That’s because conventional wisdom is still stuck in the Friedman stage of telling people that if they’re troubled by the global economy, they’re just afraid of the future.
Because the Murphy's Law tendency of American politics demands that we draw every conceivable wrong lesson from an event before accidentally stumbling in the direction of progress, the twin revolts in the 2016 presidential race will surely be misinterpreted for a good long while by the Friedmans of the world.
They won't see the anti-establishment backlash as a reason to re-examine the impact of globalism on ordinary people. Instead, as Friedman puts it, they'll see an opportunity to build a single ruling coalition of "center-left Web People" (what a creepy image!) who will dominate the next generation of American politics:
My hope is that, for the good of the country, Republican Web People will, over time, join the Democratic Party and tilt it into a compassionate, center-left Web party for the 21st Century. That would be a party that is sensitive to the needs of working people ... but committed to capitalism, free markets and open trade as the vital engines of growth for a modern society.
Yes, let's be sensitive to the needs of working people, unless they have complaints about globalism, in which case we'll put our webbed hands over our ears and ignore them. Are you loving this political season yet?
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http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/08/media-builds-up-enemies-for-hillarys-wars.html
August 11, 2016
Media Builds Up Enemies For Hillary's Wars
Another example that so-called news in U.S. media is often more propaganda than valid information is this NYT piece on the "hack" of the Democratic National Committee:
WASHINGTON — A Russian cyberattack that targeted Democratic politicians was bigger than it first appeared and breached the private email accounts of more than 100 party officials and groups, officials with knowledge of the case said Wednesday.
...
A "Russian cyberattack"? How can the NYT claim such, in an opening paragraph, when even the Director of U.S. National Intelligence is unable to make such a judgement?
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaking about the hack of Democratic Party emails, said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to "make the call on attribution" as to who was responsible.
All the NYT lays out to backup its claim of a "Russian" hack is an anonymous Intelligence Committee staffer who claims U.S. intelligence agencies "have virtually no doubt" about it. If that were true why would the boss of these intelligence agencies publicly point out such doubts?
There is not even any evidence that the publishing of emails incriminating the DNC for manipulating the Democratic primaries were the result of any "hack". It might have well been an insider who copied the material and handed them to Wikileaks for publication. After the leak the DNC data analyst Seth Rich was mutilated and murdered near his home in Washington DC. The case was obviously no robbery. Julian Assange of Wikileaks pointed out that the circumstances of Rich's death are suspicious. I first attributed that claim to Assange's typical exaggerations, but the facts speak for themselves. The case indeed looks very much like a targeted killing. Who did it and and why?
The "Russia is guilty" claim for whatever happened, without any proof, is becoming a daily diet fed to the "western" public. A similar theme is the "barrel bombing" of (the always same) "hospitals" in Syria which is claimed whenever the Syrian government or its allies hit some al-Qaeda headquarter.
All this propaganda is in preparation of the rule of the "We came, we saw, he died. Hahaha ..." psychopathic queen of war Hillary Clinton.
As Marc Wheeler, aka emptywheel, reminds us:
6:13 AM - 10 Aug 2016 emptywheel @emptywheel
The actions to ensure we will escalate our wars are being taken as we speak. January will be too late to stop it.
August 11, 2016
Media Builds Up Enemies For Hillary's Wars
Another example that so-called news in U.S. media is often more propaganda than valid information is this NYT piece on the "hack" of the Democratic National Committee:
WASHINGTON — A Russian cyberattack that targeted Democratic politicians was bigger than it first appeared and breached the private email accounts of more than 100 party officials and groups, officials with knowledge of the case said Wednesday.
...
A "Russian cyberattack"? How can the NYT claim such, in an opening paragraph, when even the Director of U.S. National Intelligence is unable to make such a judgement?
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaking about the hack of Democratic Party emails, said on Thursday the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to "make the call on attribution" as to who was responsible.
All the NYT lays out to backup its claim of a "Russian" hack is an anonymous Intelligence Committee staffer who claims U.S. intelligence agencies "have virtually no doubt" about it. If that were true why would the boss of these intelligence agencies publicly point out such doubts?
There is not even any evidence that the publishing of emails incriminating the DNC for manipulating the Democratic primaries were the result of any "hack". It might have well been an insider who copied the material and handed them to Wikileaks for publication. After the leak the DNC data analyst Seth Rich was mutilated and murdered near his home in Washington DC. The case was obviously no robbery. Julian Assange of Wikileaks pointed out that the circumstances of Rich's death are suspicious. I first attributed that claim to Assange's typical exaggerations, but the facts speak for themselves. The case indeed looks very much like a targeted killing. Who did it and and why?
The "Russia is guilty" claim for whatever happened, without any proof, is becoming a daily diet fed to the "western" public. A similar theme is the "barrel bombing" of (the always same) "hospitals" in Syria which is claimed whenever the Syrian government or its allies hit some al-Qaeda headquarter.
All this propaganda is in preparation of the rule of the "We came, we saw, he died. Hahaha ..." psychopathic queen of war Hillary Clinton.
As Marc Wheeler, aka emptywheel, reminds us:
6:13 AM - 10 Aug 2016 emptywheel @emptywheel
The actions to ensure we will escalate our wars are being taken as we speak. January will be too late to stop it.
The Shooman
A Pretty Face
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Just a reminder guys. George said it best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigDHjEwPuE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigDHjEwPuE
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you might be interested in this thread
http://www.dressedwell.net/threads/the-elite-its-a-big-club-and-youre-not-in-it.1589/#post-74571
The Shooman
A Pretty Face
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Yeah,l was actually browsing through it last week.
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Rain Man
Well-Known Member
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- 708
I called this one a few weeks ago: Manafort is likely a Russian political operative.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
Not that we've ever -- ahem -- leveraged an insider in another country to shift their politics.
If a guy was really paranoid, he might think that the Russkies are working not to control the US but to destabilize it. They have to know that Herr Drumpfenfuhrer has no chance, but he could raise a waddling, racist, Rascal-bound movement of the People of Wal-Mart, all claiming that the election was rigged. Which, to be fair, it may be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html
Not that we've ever -- ahem -- leveraged an insider in another country to shift their politics.
If a guy was really paranoid, he might think that the Russkies are working not to control the US but to destabilize it. They have to know that Herr Drumpfenfuhrer has no chance, but he could raise a waddling, racist, Rascal-bound movement of the People of Wal-Mart, all claiming that the election was rigged. Which, to be fair, it may be.
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This is probably the biggest thing to come out of the Trump camp this whole cycle, though it may come to nothing because so many people, including a lot of our government, are totally clueless how Russia actually works. This is the first I've heard of Manafort being linked with Deripaska, which could be wildly entertaining if someone were to really dig into.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, mayor of NYC on 9/11, just literally said on TV that in the 8 years before Obama, there were no terrorist attacks in the US. I can't even.
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this is some shabby fucking reporting.
so we can't actually prove anything, just that he was there working for Yanukovich, which by the way we'd already known about:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/u...atedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article
now, while this guy might be a sleazy cocksucker, i don't see a particular difference between his outright working with scumbags for a dollar and Clinton's back room dealings with her foundation for a dollar.
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are you going to fill us in on how things go down? i'd like to know.
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Your grammar is stumping me.
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- 21,978
Was this posted in here before? I thought it was funny when I read a columnist quote it in this morning's paper.
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jive turkey.
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- 5,259
Trumputin 16' you dirty commies.
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Well, I'm not the old lady from Airplane, but I can read jive at a fourth grade level.
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- 22,325
Exactly. Clinton had government employees working on foundation shit
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Nations ought to accept your own chances.
Other nations may favour Sofia Vergara's promiscuity.
Other nations may favour Sofia Vergara's promiscuity.
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Wearing them today.
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"The Green Party's Jill Stein ($189,000) and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson ($15,000) have spent more on ads than the Trump campaign ($0) in this general election."
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Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton among military households by 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent, according to results from the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll.
- now if only everyone would enroll and volunteer in the military then Trump can seize the presidency. Ingenious!
- now if only everyone would enroll and volunteer in the military then Trump can seize the presidency. Ingenious!
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http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/201...american-voters-what-do-you-have-lose-n634816
"'Look at how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control. To those hurting, I say: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?' he read from a teleprompter at a Michigan rally.
'You're living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?' he added in the overwhelmingly white town of Diamondale."
Hey he can use that line with just about every demographic!
"'Look at how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control. To those hurting, I say: What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump?' he read from a teleprompter at a Michigan rally.
'You're living in poverty, your schools are no good. You have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed, what the hell do you have to lose?' he added in the overwhelmingly white town of Diamondale."
Hey he can use that line with just about every demographic!
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About the only time I like Matt Taibbi is when he goes after Thomas Friedman.
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it is quite enjoyable. he's been relatively tame with his screeds this year about politics.
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today's phrase of the day: influence peddling
http://bigstory.ap.org/82df550e1ec646098b434f7d5771f625
Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.
Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton's help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
The AP's findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP's calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.
Clinton's campaign said the AP analysis was flawed because it did not include in its calculations meetings with foreign diplomats or U.S. government officials, and the meetings AP examined covered only the first half of Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.
"It is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton's basis for meeting with these individuals," spokesman Brian Fallon said. He called it "a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation."
Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if Clinton is elected.
On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation's board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from U.S. citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S. companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities.
Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.
"There's a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems," said Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia University's graduate fundraising management program. "The point is, she can't just walk away from these 6,000 donors."
Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.
"If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she's tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done," said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Barack Obama's top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, Clinton should retain the Obama administration's current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules. Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to President George W. Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.
Fallon did not respond to the AP's questions about Clinton transition plans regarding ethics, but said in a statement the standard set by the Clinton Foundation's ethics restrictions was "unprecedented, even if it may never satisfy some critics."
GOP Vice Presidential candidate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said the AP analysis was evidence of "pay-to-play" politics at Clinton's State Department. He called for the foundation to be shut down and for an independent prosecutor to be appointed to investigate.
Some of Clinton's most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband's political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton's calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.
S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton's planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.
Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP's review showed.
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest "microcredit" for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank's nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation — a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution's annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department's foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton's tenure.
By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton's top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh's government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money — a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.
"Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way," he asked Verveer. Yunus sent "regards to H" and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.
Clinton ordered an aide: "Give to EAP rep," referring the problem to the agency's top east Asia expert.
Yunus continued writing to Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh's prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert "ASAP."
Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that "the situation does not allow me to leave the country." By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Yunus to step down from the bank's board. Yunus sent Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton wrote: "Sad indeed."
Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Clinton's arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank's effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that "we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank."
Grameen America's Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.
Earlier this month, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau acknowledged that agency officials are "regularly in touch with a range of outside individuals and organizations, including nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks and others." But Trudeau said the State Department was not aware of any actions that were influenced by the Clinton Foundation.
In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.
Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone's charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.
Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa, the State Department said at the time.
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton and a U.S.-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organizations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.
MAC AIDs officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.
When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Obama's transition team.
Now, Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation.
"The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favoritism," Lugar said.
http://bigstory.ap.org/82df550e1ec646098b434f7d5771f625
Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.
Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton's help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
The AP's findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP's calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.
Clinton's campaign said the AP analysis was flawed because it did not include in its calculations meetings with foreign diplomats or U.S. government officials, and the meetings AP examined covered only the first half of Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.
"It is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton's basis for meeting with these individuals," spokesman Brian Fallon said. He called it "a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation."
Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if Clinton is elected.
On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation's board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from U.S. citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S. companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities.
Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.
"There's a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems," said Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia University's graduate fundraising management program. "The point is, she can't just walk away from these 6,000 donors."
Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.
"If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she's tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done," said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Barack Obama's top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, Clinton should retain the Obama administration's current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules. Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to President George W. Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.
Fallon did not respond to the AP's questions about Clinton transition plans regarding ethics, but said in a statement the standard set by the Clinton Foundation's ethics restrictions was "unprecedented, even if it may never satisfy some critics."
GOP Vice Presidential candidate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said the AP analysis was evidence of "pay-to-play" politics at Clinton's State Department. He called for the foundation to be shut down and for an independent prosecutor to be appointed to investigate.
Some of Clinton's most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband's political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton's calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.
S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton's planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.
Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP's review showed.
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest "microcredit" for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank's nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation — a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution's annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department's foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton's tenure.
By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton's top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh's government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money — a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.
"Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way," he asked Verveer. Yunus sent "regards to H" and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.
Clinton ordered an aide: "Give to EAP rep," referring the problem to the agency's top east Asia expert.
Yunus continued writing to Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh's prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert "ASAP."
Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that "the situation does not allow me to leave the country." By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Yunus to step down from the bank's board. Yunus sent Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton wrote: "Sad indeed."
Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Clinton's arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank's effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that "we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank."
Grameen America's Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.
Earlier this month, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau acknowledged that agency officials are "regularly in touch with a range of outside individuals and organizations, including nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks and others." But Trudeau said the State Department was not aware of any actions that were influenced by the Clinton Foundation.
In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.
Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone's charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.
Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa, the State Department said at the time.
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton and a U.S.-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organizations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.
MAC AIDs officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.
When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Obama's transition team.
Now, Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation.
"The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favoritism," Lugar said.
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http://www.ibtimes.com/political-ca...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Clinton Foundation Investigation Update: Key Details About Financial And Political Dealings
BY DAVID SIROTA @DAVIDSIROTA ON 08/24/16 AT 9:10 AM
The release of documents shedding more light on connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department has touched off a new political firestorm only weeks before voters begin heading to the polls in the 2016 election.
Republican nominee Donald Trump — himself a foundation donor — has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the foundation, and Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has said the new disclosures are “evidence of the pay-to-play politics.” By contrast, the Clinton campaign has argued that there is no proof of any quid pro quo — a message echoed by her supporters in the pundit world.
As the rhetoric about the Clintons’ public and private financial dealings intensifies, here is a brief review of the major investigative reporting that has been done about the Clinton Foundation.
Arms exports: Last year, an International Business Times series documented the ways in which many major foreign governments that had donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up receiving a boost in arms export authorizations from the Clinton-led State Department.Federal law explicitly designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, and the State Department itself says it “is responsible for managing all government-to-government transfers of military equipment to other countries.” Early in her term, the State Department called one arms deal for a Clinton Foundation donor, Saudi Arabia, a “top priority” for Clinton.
Many of the donor countries that benefited were those that the State Department criticized on human rights grounds, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Some of the same countries received boosts in arms classified as “toxicological agents” as they worked to crush pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Donor access: The Associated Press on Tuesday reported that a review of calendar items shows “more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.” Those 85 donors — which did not include foreign government contributors — gave up to $156 million, according to the news service. The AP story followed the release of emails this week that appeared to show Clinton Foundation officials working with State Department officials to broker meetings between foundation donors and Hillary Clinton. It also followed an ABC News report on a Clinton Foundation donor being appointed by the State Department to an intelligence advisory panel “even though he had no obvious experience in the field.”
Business dealings: In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Clinton Foundation “set up a financial commitment that benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons.” The newspaper noted that former President Bill Clinton “personally endorsed the company, Energy Pioneer Solutions Inc., to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a federal grant that year” — and that the company ultimately received an $812,000 grant. While the Clinton Foundation openly works with corporations and governments on its philanthropic projects, the Journal notes that “under federal law, tax-exempt charitable organizations aren’t supposed to act in anyone’s private interest but instead in the public interest.”
Promoting corporate donors: In 2015, IBT reported that while Clinton Foundation donor Cisco faced criticism over its work with China’s autocratic government, Clinton’s State Department honored the company for “outstanding corporate citizenship, innovation and democratic principles.” Her department also delivered government contracts to the company. The Washington Post in 2014 reported that in 2010, Clinton pushed Russia to approve a $3.7 billion purchase from Boeing. Two months after the deal was solidified, reported the newspaper, Boeing announced a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton Foundation Key Financials | FindTheCompany
Uranium: In a 2015 investigative report, the New York Times reported that as Russia’s atomic energy agency assumed control of a multinational uranium mining conglomerate, “a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation” from investors with a stake in the deal. The sale of the company “gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States.” The paper noted that the Clinton-led State Department was one of the U.S. agencies that signed off on the transaction.
Oil: A 2016 IBT report found that the State Department approved a permit for a major U.S.-Canadian oil pipeline that environmental groups have criticized. In the lead up to the approval, federal records showed that Chevron and ConocoPhilips lobbied the State Department on the issue of “oil sands,” as did a trade association linked to ExxonMobil. That trio of oil conglomerates have delivered between between $2.5 million and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Lobbying: A 2015 analysis by Vox found that “at least 181 companies, individuals, and foreign governments that have given to the Clinton Foundation also lobbied the State Departmentwhen Hillary Clinton ran the place.” IBT reported that Bill Clinton was paid more than $2.5 million by firms that were lobbying Hillary Clinton’s department.
Colombia: A 2015 IBT investigative report found that as a Clinton Foundation-linked project accepted contributions from a Colombian oil firm and its founder, Hillary Clinton did not respond to calls for her State Department to use its power to combat alleged labor abuses at the company. Clinton also switched her position to support the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, actively pushing Congress to ratify a pact she had previously pledged to oppose.
Banking: In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that in “an unusual intervention” by a top U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Clinton announced a legal settlement that allowed the Swiss financial behemoth UBS to turn over far fewer tax documents than were sought by the IRS in its probe of the bank. “From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased,” reported the Journal. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014... The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million.”
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During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has said that “when Wall Street executives commit criminal wrongdoing, they deserve to face criminal prosecution.” An IBTanalysis found that the Clinton Foundation has accepted $5 million worth of donations from at least nine financial institutions that reached settlement agreements with the Justice Department that required them to pay big fines but let them avoid prosecution.
The Clinton Foundation Income Breakdown | FindTheCompany
Coal: The Intercept reported this week that in an email exchange, a Clinton Foundation donor hired as a political consultant for Peabody Energy made an effort to secure a meeting between Hillary Clinton and executives at the coal company. The correspondence was initiated by Joyce Aboussie — who gave the Clinton Foundation between $100,000 and $250,000 and worked for the lobbying firm of former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. In the email, Aboussie said “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s.”
Morocco: In May of 2015, Politico, ABC News and Yahoo reported that Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company OCP donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation for a conference in Marrakech. The Politico story said “Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Morocco’s government was pivotal” in brokering the meeting and noted that “not long after stepping down in 2013, Clinton joined her family foundation’s board, and that same year OCP donated between $1 million and $5 million to the philanthropy.” Politico also noted that prior to the donations, “as protests raged on Moroccan streets, Hillary Clinton in a joint 2011 appearance with Morocco’s foreign minister praised the king for introducing constitutional reforms and said his country was ‘well-positioned to lead in this area because it is on the road to achieving democratic change.’” Additionally, Politico reported, in 2012 “even as the State Department continued to include Morocco in human rights reports and to flag concerns about government corruption, Clinton launched an ongoing U.S.-Morocco strategic dialogue, praising the country as “a leader and a model.”
Algeria: A 2015 Washington Post investigation found that the Clinton Foundation accepted $500,000 from the Algerian government at a time when that country “was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues.” The Post reported that Clinton Foundation “officials acknowledged they should have sought approval in 2010 from the State Department ethics office, as required by the agreement for new government donors, before accepting” the money, which was earmarked for Haiti earthquake relief.
Clinton Foundation Investigation Update: Key Details About Financial And Political Dealings
BY DAVID SIROTA @DAVIDSIROTA ON 08/24/16 AT 9:10 AM
The release of documents shedding more light on connections between the Clinton Foundation and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department has touched off a new political firestorm only weeks before voters begin heading to the polls in the 2016 election.
Republican nominee Donald Trump — himself a foundation donor — has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the foundation, and Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has said the new disclosures are “evidence of the pay-to-play politics.” By contrast, the Clinton campaign has argued that there is no proof of any quid pro quo — a message echoed by her supporters in the pundit world.
As the rhetoric about the Clintons’ public and private financial dealings intensifies, here is a brief review of the major investigative reporting that has been done about the Clinton Foundation.
Arms exports: Last year, an International Business Times series documented the ways in which many major foreign governments that had donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up receiving a boost in arms export authorizations from the Clinton-led State Department.Federal law explicitly designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, and the State Department itself says it “is responsible for managing all government-to-government transfers of military equipment to other countries.” Early in her term, the State Department called one arms deal for a Clinton Foundation donor, Saudi Arabia, a “top priority” for Clinton.
Many of the donor countries that benefited were those that the State Department criticized on human rights grounds, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Some of the same countries received boosts in arms classified as “toxicological agents” as they worked to crush pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring uprisings.
Donor access: The Associated Press on Tuesday reported that a review of calendar items shows “more than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.” Those 85 donors — which did not include foreign government contributors — gave up to $156 million, according to the news service. The AP story followed the release of emails this week that appeared to show Clinton Foundation officials working with State Department officials to broker meetings between foundation donors and Hillary Clinton. It also followed an ABC News report on a Clinton Foundation donor being appointed by the State Department to an intelligence advisory panel “even though he had no obvious experience in the field.”
Business dealings: In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Clinton Foundation “set up a financial commitment that benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons.” The newspaper noted that former President Bill Clinton “personally endorsed the company, Energy Pioneer Solutions Inc., to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a federal grant that year” — and that the company ultimately received an $812,000 grant. While the Clinton Foundation openly works with corporations and governments on its philanthropic projects, the Journal notes that “under federal law, tax-exempt charitable organizations aren’t supposed to act in anyone’s private interest but instead in the public interest.”
Promoting corporate donors: In 2015, IBT reported that while Clinton Foundation donor Cisco faced criticism over its work with China’s autocratic government, Clinton’s State Department honored the company for “outstanding corporate citizenship, innovation and democratic principles.” Her department also delivered government contracts to the company. The Washington Post in 2014 reported that in 2010, Clinton pushed Russia to approve a $3.7 billion purchase from Boeing. Two months after the deal was solidified, reported the newspaper, Boeing announced a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
The Clinton Foundation Key Financials | FindTheCompany
Uranium: In a 2015 investigative report, the New York Times reported that as Russia’s atomic energy agency assumed control of a multinational uranium mining conglomerate, “a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation” from investors with a stake in the deal. The sale of the company “gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States.” The paper noted that the Clinton-led State Department was one of the U.S. agencies that signed off on the transaction.
Oil: A 2016 IBT report found that the State Department approved a permit for a major U.S.-Canadian oil pipeline that environmental groups have criticized. In the lead up to the approval, federal records showed that Chevron and ConocoPhilips lobbied the State Department on the issue of “oil sands,” as did a trade association linked to ExxonMobil. That trio of oil conglomerates have delivered between between $2.5 million and $3 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Lobbying: A 2015 analysis by Vox found that “at least 181 companies, individuals, and foreign governments that have given to the Clinton Foundation also lobbied the State Departmentwhen Hillary Clinton ran the place.” IBT reported that Bill Clinton was paid more than $2.5 million by firms that were lobbying Hillary Clinton’s department.
Colombia: A 2015 IBT investigative report found that as a Clinton Foundation-linked project accepted contributions from a Colombian oil firm and its founder, Hillary Clinton did not respond to calls for her State Department to use its power to combat alleged labor abuses at the company. Clinton also switched her position to support the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, actively pushing Congress to ratify a pact she had previously pledged to oppose.
Banking: In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that in “an unusual intervention” by a top U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Clinton announced a legal settlement that allowed the Swiss financial behemoth UBS to turn over far fewer tax documents than were sought by the IRS in its probe of the bank. “From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased,” reported the Journal. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014... The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million.”
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During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has said that “when Wall Street executives commit criminal wrongdoing, they deserve to face criminal prosecution.” An IBTanalysis found that the Clinton Foundation has accepted $5 million worth of donations from at least nine financial institutions that reached settlement agreements with the Justice Department that required them to pay big fines but let them avoid prosecution.
The Clinton Foundation Income Breakdown | FindTheCompany
Coal: The Intercept reported this week that in an email exchange, a Clinton Foundation donor hired as a political consultant for Peabody Energy made an effort to secure a meeting between Hillary Clinton and executives at the coal company. The correspondence was initiated by Joyce Aboussie — who gave the Clinton Foundation between $100,000 and $250,000 and worked for the lobbying firm of former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. In the email, Aboussie said “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s.”
Morocco: In May of 2015, Politico, ABC News and Yahoo reported that Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company OCP donated $1 million to the Clinton Foundation for a conference in Marrakech. The Politico story said “Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Morocco’s government was pivotal” in brokering the meeting and noted that “not long after stepping down in 2013, Clinton joined her family foundation’s board, and that same year OCP donated between $1 million and $5 million to the philanthropy.” Politico also noted that prior to the donations, “as protests raged on Moroccan streets, Hillary Clinton in a joint 2011 appearance with Morocco’s foreign minister praised the king for introducing constitutional reforms and said his country was ‘well-positioned to lead in this area because it is on the road to achieving democratic change.’” Additionally, Politico reported, in 2012 “even as the State Department continued to include Morocco in human rights reports and to flag concerns about government corruption, Clinton launched an ongoing U.S.-Morocco strategic dialogue, praising the country as “a leader and a model.”
Algeria: A 2015 Washington Post investigation found that the Clinton Foundation accepted $500,000 from the Algerian government at a time when that country “was spending heavily to lobby the State Department on human rights issues.” The Post reported that Clinton Foundation “officials acknowledged they should have sought approval in 2010 from the State Department ethics office, as required by the agreement for new government donors, before accepting” the money, which was earmarked for Haiti earthquake relief.
Rain Man
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 708
Somebody explain to me why the Clinton Foundation is a deal-breaking conflict of interest but Halliburton wasn't.
Take your time; I'll wait.
Take your time; I'll wait.
- Messages
- 1,290
Your handle is remarkably apt.
- A much more direct connection - it's called the CLINTON Foundation, for fuck's sake.
- Halliburton was a very successful corporation pre-Bush, very successful afterwards, whereas the Clinton foundation would have been sunk by the Haiti scandal if not for the continued largesse of Ms. Clinton
- One labels themselves an arms dealer and is scrutinized in the press, the other drapes themselves in the guise of charity, despite very little to show for it.
- Messages
- 12,494
It's all the same. The fact that anyone is surprised and/or cares amazes me.