Hillary Clinton Can Bring Crony Corporatist Skills to the White House

[anatta]

The NY Times posted a scathing article about the Clintons and their charitable foundation Wednesday, just before the online newspaper was hacked or crashed on its own.

The telegraph UK online began their commentary on the Times article by asking if Rush Limbaugh guest-edited for the Times when the article was approved. One has to wonder how it got past the censors.

Bubba’s Foundation, The Global Clinton Initiative, is, according to the NY Times, ‘a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.’
The Foundation serves to connect corporate executives, A-listers and government officials.

The Clintons have gotten rich while their Foundation runs in the red despite enormous amounts of money being funneled into it.
The Foundation has been used to support, promote, facilitate the Clintons’ personal and political ambitions.

The Times wrote that it was difficult ‘to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future…’

It’s a charity-crony organization. As the Times wrote,…’businessmen have been able to expand the profile of their companies by working generously alongside the Clinton Foundation.’

The Clintons sell their image and their Foundation for money to finance their personal projects.

The relationship between corporations and politicians in this country epitomizes cronyism. The Clintons embrace the concept. They are part of a small group of elites getting richer while the middle class dissipates. We have an aristocracy of the rich in this country. We are being sold out by profiteers.

The writer at the telegraph said that ‘Part of the reason why America’s elites get away with it is because they employ such fantastic salesmen. For too long now, Bill Clinton has pitched himself, almost without question, as a homespun populist: the Boy from Hope.
The reality is that this is a man who – in May 1993 – prevented other planes from landing at LAX for 90 minues while he got a haircut from a Beverley Hills hairdresser aboard Air Force One.
The Clintons are populists in the same way that Barack Obama is a Nobel prize winner. Oh, wait…‘

Hillary partnered with a bank that laundered hundreds of billions of dollars for Iran.

Hillary founded a “Vital Voices Global Partnership,’ a group which partnered with Standard Chartered Bank to promote women’s causes in Asia. Standard Chartered donated generously to the Clinton Global Initiative but they also laundered over $250 billion for Iran to help them circumvent sanctions meant to cripple their nuclear program. They admitted guilt and paid $667 million in fines.

The CEO of Asia Standard Bank serves on Hillary’s Vital Voices.

According to the New York State Department of Financial Services the ten years of illegal activity by Standard Chartered “left the US financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins, and corrupt regimes and deprived law enforcement investigators of crucial information used to track all manner of criminal activity.”

At the same time, Standard Chartered was funding programs related to the Clintons.

Standard Chartered is also a client of Teneo, a global consulting firm, which was founded by a former chief advisor to Bill Clinton, Doug Band.
Bubba served as an advisor to Teneo. Band also sat on the board of the Clinton Global Initiative and capitalized on it when selling his consulting services. Teneo charges enormous fees – as much as $250,000 a month.

Crony friends don’t come cheap.

Oh, well, what difference…at this point…does it make?

A firm led by Hillary’s brother, Anthony Rodham, is under investigation by the SEC along with an electric car company started by Virginia gubernatorial candidate and longtime Clinton friend and former DNC chair, Terry McAuliffe. The investigation centers on how they sought visas for foreign investors to McAuliffe’s company.

More great news – Chelsea Clinton hopes to follow in her parents’ footsteps. The royal family will continue on.

For her part, Hillary’s memoir about her time at the State Department is to be published by Simon & Schuster next summer. Maybe she’ll finally tell us what happened in Benghazi. I know, I know, that’s only a fantastical notion.
http://www.independentsentinel.com/clinton-can-bring-crony-corporatist-skills-to-the-white-house/

 

[anatta]

Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions

Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.

The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.

The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation — and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty — would survive its founder.

Now those efforts are taking on new urgency. In the coming weeks, the foundation, long Mr. Clinton’s domain since its formation in 2001, will become the nerve center of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s increasingly busy public life.

This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. Amid speculation about her 2016 plans, Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Worried that the foundation’s operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton’s nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London.
And after years of relying on Bruce R. Lindsey, the former White House counsel whose friendship with Mr. Clinton stretches back decades, to run the organization while living part-time in Arkansas, the family has hired a New York-based chief executive with a background in management consulting.

“We’re trying to institutionalize the foundation so that it will be here long after the lives of any of us,” Mr. Lindsey said. “That’s our challenge and that is what we are trying to address.”

But the changing of the guard has aggravated long-simmering tensions within the former first family’s inner circle as the foundation tries to juggle the political and philanthropic ambitions of a former president, a potential future president, and their increasingly visible daughter.

And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family.
Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/u...ion-over-finances-and-ambitions.html?hp&_r=2&

(much more)