Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Gets It Right About the Clinton Foundation (in my opinion)
Back when I worked for the claims department of a major insurance company, I got stuff. Some of the stuff consisted of tickets to Broadway shows and sporting events, and sometimes I got bottles of booze, Canadian Club being a popular choice for some reason. These items were tendered to me by auto appraisers, repair shops and other firms, large and small, that wanted the business my company could offer. Corrupt souls that they were, they offered these items as bribes. Pristine young man that I was, I accepted them as gifts. I was, in my own modest way, Hillary Clinton before her time.
The pattern established by the vaunted Cohen of Claims is similar to the one later copied by Clinton of Chappaqua. You may note that when it came to these matters — these matters being the acceptance of ethically dubious gifts — Hillary Clinton was lots of quid and little quo. The mountains of money that came into the Clinton Foundation, some of it offered by otherwise heartless men, apparently got the donors nothing. They came from parts of the world where a man’s bribe is his word, and yet money offered in New York to the foundation did not open a door in Washington at the State Department.
— Clinton Foundation alchemy — turning bribes into gifts, Richard Cohen, Washington Post, today
Cohen’s column today triggers memories for me. My father, too, turned bribes into gifts.
As a journalist for a major local newspaper, he and his colleagues were inundated with gifts of the sort that Cohen was as an auto insurance claims adjuster. Free passes to movies, to the annual auto show (fun), boat show (also fun), flower show (pretty), big-deal movie premiers (very occasionally; this was not NYC), and the latest hit play touring after (or before) its Broadway run. Glamorous cocktail parties called “press parties”. (Clothes, especially ones for fancy gatherings, were expensive, and my mother would always have two “dressy” dresses, both of them that “went with” black heels (also expensive back then) that she would alternate, depending on who she thought would be attending the particular event or gathering.
During the winter holiday season, the doorbell was ringing often. There were bottles of French designer perfumes and colognes for my mother, bottles of high-priced alcohol (my mother would just call them “bottles,” as in, “It’s a ‘bottle,’ from so-and-so,” usually said with a sigh; “so-and-so” being a “press agent,” these days known as people in “public relations”). Our living room was filled with poinsettia plants; we were Jewish, but enjoyed the colorful displays. The tops of my parents’ bedroom dressers looked like a perfume counter at Saks; almost all the bottles remained in their unopened boxes, for years. The basement had a mini upscale liquor section, the bottles unopened, also for years. And years.
One night when I was 10, my father came home gingerly carrying a lovely roughly-200-year-old Japanese woodcut that he’d been sent by the someone at the public relations office at the local art museum. The museum was having a special exhibit of antique Japanese art, and my father’s newspaper had run a lengthy picture-filled article about it in the Arts section before the exhibit opened. The exhibit was one of the most successful in memory, and my father had played a role in the article’s prominence and length in the Arts section. The museum’s PR person sent my father the woodcut, along with a note of appreciation, attributing the popularity of the exhibit largely to that article. The paper’s art editor, George, himself an artist and art collector, and a close friend of my father’s, had chosen the pictures for the article, and wrote the article. My father asked him if he could place a value on the woodcut. He did, and my father paid the museum for it.
My father not long before had asked him if he could find an affordable large painting for the main wall, behind the couch, in our living room, and George suggested instead that my parents by a set of Japanese woodcuts from the same era that would look nice with the museum woodcut that would be on another wall. George found a set of four that told a story, and framed them in narrow, plain wood frames that he covered with rice paper he died a light blue, with natural-colored rice paper matting. They were beautiful, and, I’m quite sure, the most valuable things my parents ever had in their home.
That was my father’s foray into quid pro quo—an antique Japanese woodcut he received as a gift and then paid for. My father, George, and a few others at the paper had received free passes for two to the exhibit before it opened, along with a lengthy press release about the upcoming exhibit.
In an addendum to this recent post of mine here at AB, I wrote:
For me this general election campaign has been an exercise in frustration and dismay at the failure of Clinton and her campaign to apprise the public of critically important things about Trump that they don’t already know. Like Trump’s monetary motive for his coziness with Putin, and his methods of financing his real estate empire that included bank fraud and partnerships with corrupt foreigners. Things that make the Clintons’ self-dealing and misrepresentations to the public look utterly inconsequential by comparison.
And like what billionaire is backing Trump financially and calling the campaign shots, and would be calling the shots in a Trump administration. And what those shots would be.
Whatever favors Clinton did as Secretary of State for Clinton Foundation donors, they were trivial in that they had nothing to do with making or changing government policy, it appears. And the Clintons’ rapacious money mongering didn’t defraud banks or individuals. And while it served their personal financial interests well, their foundation did have the effect of actually doing some real good on fairly widespread scale. The Clintons, in other words, aren’t sociopaths. Trump is.
Finally—finally—now, Clinton is angry enough about Trump’s statements about Clinton Foundation/State Department connection that she’s willing to depart from her campaign’s strategy of telling the public what they already know about Trump, but nothing else, because informing voters about the stuff they don’t know would require a slightly complex discussion. Telling people what they already know is quick and easy and soundbite-y. So it’s what her highly paid consultants and top campaign staff advise.
But in a stark, sudden and surprising departure, Clinton is about to begin educating the public about something somewhat complex, something that requires that she tell them things about Trump that they don’t already know. She’s about to explain the alt-right, apparently in some actual depth, and illustrate that Trump is the alt-right’s candidate because he himself is alt-right.
So is his billionaire. The public has no idea he has one, much less what the billionaire’s specific agenda is. And if Clinton finally is ready to tell the public that, yes, Trump has his very own billionaire supporting his campaign with many millions of dollars, she will get some help from John McCain, who obviously reads Angry Bear even if Clinton and her campaign folks don’t. Although, of course, it’s more accurate to describe the relationship as one in which the billionaire has his very own presidential nominee.
And a few days earlier, in a post titled “Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel vs. Robert Mercer and Rebeka Mercer (i.e., the meaning of TRUE CHANGE)”, I wrote:
Amid the widespread media focus last on the Trump campaign’s shakeup that ended Paul Manafort’s reign there (such as it was) and brought in Breitbart alum Steve Bannon as campaign CEO (interesting title, but whatever) and elevated Trump pollster Kellyann Conway to campaign manager, a critical aspect of this, though reported in-depth by the New York Times and a couple of other major news outlets, has, clearly, not made it mainstream: that Trump’s actual current puppeteers are the father-daughter duo of Robert Mercer and Rebeka Mercer. And who they are.
So let me introduce them to y’all, by borrowing heavily from an in-depth article by Nicholas Confessore titled “How One Family’s Deep Pockets Helped Reshape Donald Trump’s Campaign,” published in last Friday’s New York Times:
What followed that colon detailed enough about Robert and Rebeka Mercer to disabuse the reader of any conception that a Trump administration would be pro-blue-collar worker and, to borrow from Bernie Sanders, anti-the-billionaire class. A purpose of the post was to express dismay that neither the Clinton campaign, nor the DNC, nor most of the mainstream news media had deigned to try to educate the public about who is financially propping up the Trump campaign, and what they hope to accomplish in a Trump administration.
Another purpose was to try in my tiny-readership way to illustrate the absurdity of Trump’s claimed equivalency of his billionaires’ financial backing of his candidacy and the fundraising assistance to Clinton from Hollywood multimillionaire progressives like Timberlane and Biel and other extremely wealthy people whose financial interests are counter to their support of Clinton and of progressive down-ballot candidates, especially for the Senate and House.
This media focus on Clinton Foundation donors, while certainly legitimate, seems to hold a monopoly on news media dissection of presidential-campaign financial backing. Why?
Seriously. Why?
Cohen writes in that column:
“The fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,” said Josh Schwerin, a Clinton campaign spokesman. Apparently, this is true, and it no doubt breaks the hearts of Republicans everywhere who think that Clinton is both a crook and a fool. She is possibly only a bit of the former and certainly none of the latter.
Let us take the case of Casey Wasserman. He runs the Wasserman Media Group, a sports marketing and talent-management agency. According to The Post, Wasserman’s charitable foundation contributed between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and his investment company also hired Bill Clinton as a consultant, paying him $3.13 million in fees in 2009 and 2010. For this, aside from a warm feeling, it seems Wasserman got nothing. When he tried to get the State Department to approve a visa for a British soccer star with a criminal record, he got nowhere — so much quid, so little quo.
As Cohen of Claims, I followed the same M.O. Not only did I treat every bribe as a gift, but also I never demanded anything from anyone and went out of my way to award my business on the basis of competence alone. In fact, on the rare occasion that someone complained that I was not sending enough business their way and wondered if a little cash would help their cause, I cut them off completely. I insisted on good work, promptly done. I could not be bought.
My father could not be bought, either; he was not bought. Which is not to say that none of his colleagues, or his counterparts at the other local newspapers, were, but it is to say that most were not and that the ones who were were bought cheaply and that the quo, while important to the one who offered and gave the quid, surely was pretty trivial to the larger public.
It also is not to say that $3.13 million in, um, consulting fees directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to their foundation, in the space of two years—those two years being the depths of the financial crisis and recession—is trivial. It’s not. Nor did it go to a good cause, as donations to the Foundation at least did. Cohen writes:
But just as I knew that the gifts I got were intended as bribes, and just as only I knew that the bribes were buying nothing, so did Hillary Clinton know that the huge amounts of money raised by the Clinton Foundation were coming from donors who thought they were buying something — access, a favor down the line, even a choice seat at some glitzy Clinton event with the requisite selfie to be sent to clients, spouses and interested others. And just as I never spelled out my rules — never said that the gift/bribe would buy nothing — I, like the Clintons, understood what might be the expectations of the donors. Some of them, probably, felt more strongly about taking a picture with Bill Clinton than about AIDS in Haiti.
The same pattern repeats itself over and over. Gilbert Chagoury, a Nigerian billionaire of huge philanthropic endeavors — he is a benefactor of the Louvre in Paris, for instance — donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. Yet, when he contacted the foundation for help in meeting with a State Department official regarding Lebanon, where he has business and political interests, he got nowhere. Still, like the occasional tycoon from anywhere, he might have expected otherwise.
There is precious little that’s charitable about the world of charity. Raising money, like sausage-making, ain’t pretty to see, and it would be just criminally naive to rely on the big hearts of big donors. Much is bartered — access, recognition, social standing, proximity to the star at a dinner, a call afterward and, unspoken, the promise of influence if influence is needed. The Clintons knew exactly what was happening — a kind of alchemy in which potential bribes were turned into innocent gifts, leaving everyone with clean hands and, inevitably, the noxious odor of scandal.
What matters at this juncture, in this particular presidential campaign, isn’t what the Foundation or even the Clintons personally received, but instead what, if anything, they gave in return, and what, if anything, Hillary Clinton as president would actually give as quo. And what Trump as president would, and to whom, and to what extent. And what the quo’s importance to the public would be.
I’ll quote myself here:
Whatever favors Clinton did as Secretary of State for Clinton Foundation donors, they were trivial in that they had nothing to do with making or changing government policy, it appears. And the Clintons’ rapacious money mongering didn’t defraud banks or individuals. And while it served their personal financial interests well, their foundation did have the effect of actually doing some real good on fairly widespread scale. The Clintons, in other words, aren’t sociopaths. Trump is.
Please, no false equivalencies on this. Okay?
Neither of my two recent posts from which I quote received any attention. I hope this one does.
____
UPDATE: Reader Zachary Smith and I just exchanged these comments in the Comments thread:
Zachary Smith / August 30, 2016 2:24 p.m.
As part of the murder process of Muammar Gaddafi, he was sodomized with a bayonet. Out of respect for any children reading this blog, I’m not going to spell that out any further. What was Hillary’s RECORDED reaction?
“We came, we saw, he died,” followed by a laugh and gleeful hand clap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
Under my definiton of “sociopath”, Hillary Clinton qualifies on that one alone. Of course there are others….
*** My father, too, turned bribes into gifts. ***
I know some saintly people myself, and have no difficulty accepting this claim at face value. Stretching the analogy to the Clinton Foundation is, in my opinion, a stretch too far. If Hillary was as pure as the driven snow, why did she work so hard to ensure her communications were beyond the reach of the Freedom Of Information Act? Why has the State department refused to release her meeting schedules until after the election?
Finally, using Richard Cohen as an source for anything is beyond the pale. This shill for Israel was all-in for the destruction of Iraq. He was a big fan of the destruction of Libya. He’s a huge booster for the destruction of Syria. And he most definitely wants somebody in the White House who will finish off Iran.
That person is Hillary Clinton.
____
Me / August 30, 2016 3:04 pm
Well, first of all, my father was never a movie critic, a theater critic, never covered the auto industry or the pleasure boating industry, or, really, anything else that could have involved him in a quo on anything like a regular basis, so maybe that wasn’t a good line for me to use and maybe this wasn’t a good analogy after all. I was never really sure what these folks were after from my father, but that was the era of “press parties” and free passes to this and that, and there certainly were a lot of those. (Maybe these still are; I have no idea what the ethical aesthetic for journalists is these days.)
Still, not a truly apt analogy, as you’ve now illustrated, even though Cohen’s trip down memory lane did evoke incidents from my childhood.
But the point of my post is that the heavy media focus on Clinton’s conflict-of-interest-type transgressions, and the near-total lack of it regarding Trump, the Russian connection being the lone exception, is inappropriately asymmetrical, and does the voting public a major disservice.
As for Libya, you may well not know that the civil war there was quite well underway when this country intervened in order to fend off the imminent slaughter by Gaddafi of about a quarter-million people trapped with no defenses in a particular Libyan city. It was intended as, and was, a humanitarian intervention. And it was considered so throughout much of the Middle East. The problem came afterward, after Gaddafi’s fall, when this country did nothing to assist the rebels, and they were overtaken by ISIS.
As for Syria, here too I’m not sure why you think this country caused its civil war, but it did not.
I’ve hardly made a secret here at AB of my near-virulent distaste for Hillary Clinton and, these days, Bill Clinton. I’m, suffice it to say, not a shill for her. I really, really dislike her personality. But she’s running against Robert-and-Rebeka-Mercer-and-Paul-Ryan’s-legislative-agenda (believe me, and I don’t mean in the Trump sense). I’m sorry that that’s the case. But it is the case.
And about my father, he wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t that far from one, in my opinion and that of almost everyone who knew him. He was a very good person.
R.I.P., Daddy.
Update added 8/30 at 3:24 p.m.
____
SECOND UPDATE: I’m adding this exchange of comments between reader Nihil Obstet and me because my response to him clarifies a key point about my post that, judging from the Comments thread, some readers did not understand:
Nihil Obstet /August 30, 2016 4:08 pm
The problem with corruption in Washington these days is that they don’t know it’s corruption — it’s the atmosphere they breathe, the ocean they swim in.
People who want something from you give you gifts? Well, the gift-giving has nothing to do with what they want you to do. They just like you. And you aren’t at all influenced by the gifts and their presumed affection. Unlike the rest of humanity, you aren’t at all affected by your perception of others’ valuing of you. Really?
In a criminal trial, potential jurors who know anyone who will be involved in the trial are dismissed. Silly courts? I don’t think so. That level of ignorance between the governed and their representatives is neither possible nor desirable, but its requirement where government will act is, I think, an accurate indication of the probability of conscious or unconscious influence of relationships.
If gift giving to those in power isn’t corrupt or corrupting, what’s the problem with Citizens United again?
In short, this pabulum about the real purity of backscratching is the crony justification of corruption. It’s not corruption. It’s just the way nice honest grownup people with favors to give live.
____
Me / August 30, 2016 5:55 pm
The thing here is that when there has been no action by the recipient of the gift, there is no backscratching. That’s Cohen’s point, and mine.
The problem with Citizens United is that extremely wealthy individuals, and corporations, are funding candidates who as elected officials will be making policy decisions that serve the financial interests of the people who funded those elected officials’ campaigns.
With Clinton, these people were doing what they were doing because she was Secretary of State and they wanted certain things from her as Secretary of State. If she didn’t oblige them, then the issue is one of access–they were able to get through to Abedin or whoever to request these things. That’s not pretty, but it’s not the same as actually getting what they’d requested.
There are big problems, of course, with potential conflict of interest concerning these past Foundation donors and consultant payments to Bill Clinton and speech payments to him and her. Big problems. But my post, and Cohen’s column, addressed only the issue of quid pro quos when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Judging from the comments, I think several readers of my post missed that fact.
And here’s another comment of mine in the thread, this in response to a comment by Mike Kimel:
“It won’t affect my judgment” is different than “It can’t affect my judgment, because I have no judgment to exercise on this.” Which was true for my father and most of his colleagues.
But it also is different than “It didn’t affect my judgment, as you can see. I didn’t do what the gift-giver wanted, and in fact did nothing.” Which is what Cohen did as a claims adjuster. And, with the exception of trivialities, appears to be what happened at State.
If there eventually is evidence of instances in which something really did happen, that would be a big, big problem. But Trump is a walking conflict-of-interest machine, and his funders/puppeteers are far, far worse than Clinton’s, in almost every respect, not least on climate-change matters.
What this election has done is expose the awfulness of the Democratic Party’s nomination process. Every single day, when I click on the internet, I think, yet again, what a tragedy it is that Clinton so wrapped up the Party before the election season even begun that no progressive other than Bernie challenged her. Not Sherrod Brown, not Elizabeth Warren. No one but Bernie, whom the political news media insisted month after month could never actually win the general election, if nominated.
It makes me sick. and I think this will be the last Dem presidential primary season in which that will happen. But we’re faced with a contest between Trump and Clinton. We each have to choose whom we will support.
Hope this clarifies my post. Especially since it’s my final comment about it. I think.
Added 8/30 at 6:22 p.m.
As part of the murder process of Muammar Gaddafi, he was sodomized with a bayonet. Out of respect for any children reading this blog, I’m not going to spell that out any further. What was Hillary’s RECORDED reaction?
“We came, we saw, he died,” followed by a laugh and gleeful hand clap.
Under my definiton of “sociopath”, Hillary Clinton qualifies on that one alone. Of course there are others….
*** My father, too, turned bribes into gifts. ***
I know some saintly people myself, and have no difficulty accepting this claim at face value. Stretching the analogy to the Clinton Foundation is, in my opinion, a stretch too far. If Hillary was as pure as the driven snow, why did she work so hard to ensure her communications were beyond the reach of the Freedom Of Information Act? Why has the State department refused to release her meeting schedules until after the election?
Finally, using Richard Cohen as an source for anything is beyond the pale. This shill for Israel was all-in for the destruction of Iraq. He was a big fan of the destruction of Libya. He’s a huge booster for the destruction of Syria. And he most definitely wants somebody in the White House who will finish off Iran.
That person is Hillary Clinton.
Well, first of all, my father was never a movie critic, a theater critic, never covered the auto industry or the pleasure boating industry, or, really, anything else that could have involved him in a quo on anything like a regular basis, so maybe that wasn’t a good line for me to use and maybe this wasn’t a good analogy after all. I was never really sure what these folks were after from my father, but that was the era of “press parties” and free passes to this and that, and there certainly were a lot of those. (Maybe these still are; I have no idea what the ethical esthetic for journalists is these days.)
Still, not a truly apt analogy, as you’ve now illustrated, even though Cohen’s trip down memory lane did evoke incidents from my childhood.
But the point of my post is that the heavy media focus on Clinton’s conflict-of-interest-type transgressions, and the near-total lack of it regarding Trump, the Russian connection being the lone exception, is inappropriately asymmetrical, and does the voting public a major disservice.
As for Libya, you may well not know that the civil war there was quite well underway when this country intervened in order to fend off the imminent slaughter by Gaddafi of about a quarter-million people trapped with no defenses in a particular Libyan city. It was intended as, and was, a humanitarian intervention. And it was considered so throughout much of the Middle East. The problem came afterward, after Gaddafi’s fall, when this country did nothing to assist the rebels, and they were overtaken by ISIS.
As for Syria, here too I’m not sure why you think this country caused its civil war, but it did not.
I’ve hardly made a secret here at AB of my near-virulent distaste for Hillary Clinton and, these days, Bill Clinton. I’m, suffice it to say, not a shill for her. I really, really dislike her personality. But she’s running against Robert-and-Rebeka-Mercer-and-Paul-Ryan’s-legislative-agenda (believe me, and I don’ mean in the Trump sense). I’m sorry that that’s the case. But it is the case.
And about my father, he wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t that far from one, in my opinion and that of almost everyone who knew him. He was a very good person.
R.I.P., Daddy.
The Holy Grail of some wealthy folks, including presumably Rebekah Mercer, is repeal of the estate tax. The estate tax rate was 55% from 1983 until 2001. Under the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax declined for ten years and went away in the final year. The reason the Bush tax cuts expired in 10 years was because they didn’t have enough votes in the Senate for a clean bill, but used reconciliation to pass it through. The Republicans thought that they would continue to control the federal government for decades, so they would fix it later on. Of course, Iraq happened and the Republicans lost the House in 2006, the Senate and Presidency in 2008. The tax cuts expired, Obama cut a deal, and now the estate tax sits at 40%.
The Republicans control the House and Senate again, so with a Republican president they will once again repeal the estate tax.
The “death tax” meme was created by an advertising agency working for 14 of the richest families in the US, including the Mars candy heirs. In fact, the estate tax hits about two or three thousand estates each year. But for billionaires like Robert and Rebekah Mercer, it will
Yeah. Although I expect that the Dems will win control of the Senate. And the House margin will be much smaller, and things like killing the estate tax are very ripe for Dems to make a big issue out of, maybe scaring some Republicans even in some seemingly safe seats.
Right after making my previous post I went to the Naked Capitalism site for their 2:00 PM edition of Water Cooler links. The person there clearly isn’t a great fan of the Clinton Foundation, and here are three of his links.
https://medium.com/@ASterling/charity-watch-and-clinton-foundation-c1dc646e1fa5#.mk4t7w6ap
http://blogrev.org/stories/ext/the-shelters-that-clinton-built-the-nation
The glitz–the outlandish, glitzy travel by Bill Clinton; the obsession with celebrities–yeah, this isn’t normal for a major charitable organization.
Look, the real purpose of the Foundation was to serve the Clinton’s interests, especially Bill’s, although of course he and Hillary presumably share financial assets, and it’s not like Hillary didn’t want the two mega-houses they purchased upon leaving the WH. Etc.
But I think that if the Foundation was JUST a shell game, JUST an ongoing photo op, JUST a cash cow for this family, there would have been some real exposes about it over the years, by non-rightwing journalists. The Clintons aren’t exactly beloved by progressives, journalists and others.
I don’t know what else to say. We have this really unfortunate choice. That’s just the way it is. I do think Clinton has the potential to be a progressive president on domestic economic issues, climate change issues, court nominees, labor issues and the like, because she finally recognizes that that’s the way the wind is blowing.
And Trump would do horrific harm.
continued from earlier post.
mean billions in profit.
I’m not too keen about the Clinton emails or foundation stuff, but it’s clear to me that my own financial interests are much better served by a Democrat in the White House. We now have a chance for a non right wing Supreme Court, the first time since 1973.
Uptown Sinclair described this sort of delusion (“it won’t affect my judgement”) much better than I could a long time ago. And I suspect most of us agreed something wasn’t right when Scalia was doing it. BS remains BS when it’s being said by someone with whom you identify. And you overlook corruption, particularly from those on your side, at your peril.
I just updated my post to add my comments exchange with Zachary Smith. Here’s part of what I responded to him:
“Well, first of all, my father was never a movie critic, a theater critic, never covered the auto industry or the pleasure boating industry, or, really, anything else that could have involved him in a quo on anything like a regular basis, so maybe that wasn’t a good line for me to use and maybe this wasn’t a good analogy after all. I was never really sure what these folks were after from my father, but that was the era of “press parties” and free passes to this and that, and there certainly were a lot of those. (Maybe these still are; I have no idea what the ethical aesthetic for journalists is these days.)
“Still, not a truly apt analogy, as you’ve now illustrated, even though Cohen’s trip down memory lane did evoke incidents from my childhood.
“But the point of my post is that the heavy media focus on Clinton’s conflict-of-interest-type transgressions, and the near-total lack of it regarding Trump, the Russian connection being the lone exception, is inappropriately asymmetrical, and does the voting public a major disservice.”
“It won’t affect my judgment” is different than “It can’t affect my judgment, because I have no judgment to exercise on this.” Which was true for my father and most of his colleagues.
But it also is different than “It didn’t affect my judgment, as you can see. I didn’t do what the gift-giver wanted, and in fact did nothing.” Which is what Cohen did as a claims adjuster. And, with the exception of trivialities, appears to be what happened at State.
If there eventually is evidence of instances in which something really did happen, that would be a big, big problem. But Trump is a walking conflict-of-interest machine, and his funders/puppeteers are far, far worse than Clinton’s, in almost every respect, not least on climate-change matters.
What this election has done is expose the awfulness of the Democratic Party’s nomination process. Every single day, when I click on the internet, I think, yet again, what a tragedy it is that Clinton so wrapped up the Party before the election season even begun that no progressive other than Bernie challenged her. Not Sherrod Brown, not Elizabeth Warren. No one but Bernie, whom the political news media insisted month after month could never actually win the general election, if nominated.
It makes me sick. and I think this will be the last Dem presidential primary season in which that will happen. But we’re faced with a contest between Trump and Clinton. We each have to choose whom we will support.
Regarding Humanitarian Interventions: a recent piece at Consortium News.
The scheme has been nearly perfected these days. Cause a disturbance within a nation, then declare Something Must Be Done.
Excuse me, but what disturbance did this country cause in Syria and Libya–y’know, one that wasn’t already quite disturbed, as in civil war–other than the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Which, yes Clinton voted for.
She not only voted for it, but as Maureen Dowd reminded me recently (actually, I don’t remember having been aware of it at the time of that vote or even during the 2008 primary campaign, she walked up to the podium to register her vote and prefaced the vote with a statement that Hussein had supported the al Qaeda terrorists, implying that he had played a role in 9/11, which of course Clinton knew was outright false.
That, in my opinion, is typical of her. It wasn’t enough for her to just say Hussein might have weapons of mass destruction, or might be about to get them, or the like, and that therefore she was voting for the invasion. Uh-uh, not, she had to adopt Bush’s false insinuations that Hussein was involved in 9/11.
I can’t stand her. I hope she just stops doing that kind of thing. But there are about 20 reasons why I’ll vote for her against Trump, and would be voting for her against, Cruz, Jeb Bush, Rubio, etc., etc. I just wish she were not my party’s nominee. But she is.
Every time I click on something at NC I regret it.
Old news about the failed effort in Haiti. Amazingly, the entire world effort in Haiti was an incredible failure due to the simple fact that Haiti was an incredible failure before the hurricane.
But the hit piece on the Foundation by that Casil is a little much for me. I’d like to read and understand it, but it seems a whole lot of it is tremendously slanted, and the beginning of it is just horrible:
“Intricate Family Connections Bind Several of America’s Worst Charities”
Course, the title and story form that headline has absolutely nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation. Nice, unbiased way to start a story.
Then it goes into detail, but somehow I miss where her expertise in this area is from. Is she David Cay Johnston in disguise? Hey, she could know all she professes to know, but when she starts with that horribly biased opening, she has to show me some bona fides.
The problem with corruption in Washington these days is that they don’t know it’s corruption — it’s the atmosphere they breathe, the ocean they swim in.
People who want something from you give you gifts? Well, the gift-giving has nothing to do with what they want you to do. They just like you. And you aren’t at all influenced by the gifts and their presumed affection. Unlike the rest of humanity, you aren’t at all affected by your perception of others’ valuing of you. Really?
In a criminal trial, potential jurors who know anyone who will be involved in the trial are dismissed. Silly courts? I don’t think so. That level of ignorance between the governed and their representatives is neither possible nor desirable, but its requirement where government will act is, I think, an accurate indication of the probability of conscious or unconscious influence of relationships.
If gift giving to those in power isn’t corrupt or corrupting, what’s the problem with Citizens United again?
In short, this pabulum about the real purity of backscratching is the crony justification of corruption. It’s not corruption. It’s just the way nice honest grownup people with favors to give live.
The thing here is that when there has been no action by the recipient of the gift, there is no backscratching. That’s Cohen’s point, and mine.
The problem with Citizens United is that extremely wealthy individuals, and corporations, are funding candidates who as elected officials will be making policy decisions that serve the financial interests of the people who funded those elected officials’ campaigns.
With Clinton, these people were doing what they were doing because she was Secretary of State and they wanted certain things from her as Secretary of State. If she didn’t oblige them, then the issue is one of access–they were able to get through to Abedin or whoever to request these things. That’s not pretty, but it’s not the same as actually getting what they’d requested.
There are big problems, of course, with potential conflict of interest concerning these past Foundation donors and consultant payments to Bill Clinton and speech payments to him and her. Big problems. But my post, and Cohen’s column, addressed only the issue of quid pro quos when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Judging from the comments, I think several readers of my post missed that fact.
I have only read one of Zachary Smith’s links, the Countyerpunch one by Eric Daitser. But, while I agree that HRC is too hawkish, this piece is seriously flawed, quite aside from moslly consisting of a lot of ugly name calling.
So, supposedly the big Saudi Boeing purchase in 2011 is the super proof of the Clinton Foundation corruption. Sorry, Eric and Zachary, the US has been selling major arms to the Saudis for decades, going back to the handshake between FDR and the late King Abdulaziz, known to most Americans as “Ibn Saud.,” in 1945. They now have the third largest military budget in the world (after the US and China, ahead of even Russia and UK and France). This is just same old same old, not, “Wow, we never sold those bad guys anything and here they come giving money to the Clinton Foundation, and, wow, big contracts!” Sorry, no. Just same old same old, even if not a good thing (and US and KSA have recently been experiencing some tensions and differences, supposedly, at least partly over KSA’s Yemen war, which is clearly a bad news mistake).
We are told that Libya policy was run by the Sauidis, Qataris, and UAE, the latter actually supplying a few planes in the war there. But it was driven far more by Britain, France, and Abu Moussa of Egypt, who was then Director of the Arab League, who was the person who really convinced HRC to convince Obama to go to the UN Security Council, which he was not keen on doing, with the US ending up with its “leading from behind” policy, much criticized by right wingers, although Lindsey Graham once managed to criticize the policy both for doing anything and also not for going in whole hog with “boots on the ground.” As it is Egypt long ruled the former Cyrenaica, the eastern party of Libya of which Benghazi was the capital, and was the center of the initial revolt against Qaddafi, and was the city he was threatening to bomb, with Abu Moussa also having ambitions to run for President of Egypt, which he tried to do but utterly failed. Basically Daitser is just full of it on what was going on with the Libya policy, just full of it.
Then we have his smear on Abedin. I shall just note that it is a total lie to say the journal edited by her mother is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is drivel spread by the Trumpistas. The journal is known for publishing works by and about a wide variety of Muslims representing a wide variety of views. Again, Daitser if just full of it.
Finally we have him dismissing the whole Putin business. It may be “absurd” to claim that Trump is simply a creation or puppet of Putin. But it is not true that “every billionaire” got in on the Russian fiascos of the 1990s or more recently. And what is certainly not true is that large numbers of them are in serious hock to the tune of many millioins of dollars to corrupt Russian oligarchs, with even Donald’s son Eric basically admitting this back aound 2009 (with him also owing many millions as well to the Bank of China). We continue to have the spectacle of Trump refusing to publicly release any of his tax returns, and while they may embarrass him by his lack of charitable giving, which we already know he does not do, or that he pays zero or barely any taxes, which we already know is the case due to his being a big real estate developer, and even that he might be embarrassed by not really being worth as much as he claims (this one I do think he takes seriously), there are many serious people who think that the really serious thing he is hiding is exactly all those links and how much he owes to those corrupt Russian oligarchs, not to mention the Chinese. This is not just some bs hooey as Daitser very stupidly and offensively claims. Trump must be demanded to release his tax returns, and that is that, and anybody dismissing the Putin connection while not noting this has zero credibility.
I do not know about the other links, but this one is a piece of worthless and stupid garbage.
Beautiful, Barkley. Thanks for this.
And I have to say, this attack on Abedin is, in my opinion, outrageous.
Clinton’s apparent inability to function without Abedin–and her utter (apparently psychological) dependence on other such longtime aides as well–Cheryl Mills is one, but there are four or five others, too–is one of my longtime pet peeves about her. It strikes me as really weird, like some sort of permanent palace guard around the monarch. Definitely not a plus, in my opinion.
But this rightwing obsession with Abedin is loopy. Definitely angering.
Beverly,
I don’t know if relying on the same people over time is bad or loopy or what. I know that old friends are the best friends, so this does not bother me so much.
I will add, which is almost never pointed out, that while the Clintons really are money grubbers (see them stealing White House silverware and HRC unbelievably stupidly giving all those Goldman Sachs talks for money she did not need and for which she should have known she would be criticized while running, which Bernie certainly did plenty, although somehow Trump has so far laid off that), the Clintons have in fact publicly released 33 years of their tax returns right up to the latest ones. They may be money grubbers, but it is pretty much all out there to see.
And as for Trump’s excuse for not doing so, it is utter garbage. He is not doing so, he says, because he is being audited, which apparently happens every year, which he says is “unfair,” although the IRS says they only audit when they suspect something illegal is afoot. In any case, it is perfectly legal to publicly release one’s returns even when they are being audited, and Richard Nixon of all people did so. Trump is definitely hiding something, whether it is just that he is not as rich as he claims, or more likely to cover up his very smelly Russian connections (and he has made amazing statements about Putin and Russian policy; I mean, the Estonians sent troops to Afghanistan and are paying what they are supposed to for NATO, but he says they have not done enough to warrant protection from Russia).
What bothers me–what strikes me as weird–is the extent to which she relies on Abedin, especially, but also Mills and a few others. They’re like human security blanket, without which she can’t function, it appears.
And: Oooooh, yeah, Trump’s hiding not just something but a lot of things. Believe me.
Alright, so much for Naked Capitalism. The hit piece on the Clinton Foundation was a hit piece. It channels Carly Fiorina and Charles Krauthammer.
The author has posted a bunch of snapshots of the 2014 990 of the CF.
Strangely enough, she failed to post a snapshot of the one page of that 990 that is relevant, Page 10 (Statement of Functional Expenses).
” We spoke by phone with Sandra Minuitti at Charity Navigator, and she told us Charity Navigator decided not to rate the Clinton Foundation because the foundation spun off some entities (chiefly the Health Access Initiative) and then later brought some, like the Clinton Global Initiative, back into the fold. Charity Navigator looks at a charity’s performance over time, she said, and those spin-offs could result in a skewed picture using its analysis model. If the foundation maintains its current structure for several years, she said, Charity Navigator will be able to rate it again.
The decision to withhold a rating had nothing to do with concerns about the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work. Further, Minuitti said citing only the 6 percent of the budget spent on grants as the sum total spent on charity by the foundation — as Willis and Fiorina did — is inaccurate.
She referred us to page 10 of the 2013 990 form for the Clinton Foundation.”
Here is the link to the 2103 990. Different year, but it shows how the author linked at NC accomplished her hit piece.
http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2013/311/580/2013-311580204-0b0083da-9.pdf
Just as an aside, I have always thought Lambert Stretcher over at Naked Capitalism is a RW fifth column member.
In looking for info on those links I noticed a couple more things, and many that were of the same “type” when I got banned. (My fault, I accused someone of lying who was, in fact, lying, and Yves took steps)
I never thanked her for that.
Bev,
So how weird did Harry Hopkins closeness to FDR strike you?
How is it weird that people rely on people they consider intelligent and loyal?
Well, you do have a point about FDR–Hopkins, especially, but two or three others, too.
But Hopkins wasn’t tied to his apron strings, seemingly almost literally. He didn’t always travel with FDR, for example.
Regarding Trump and Putin, C & R reposted an article from Newsweek. It sure makes one think.
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/08/heres-how-vladimir-putin-using-donald
Yes, that’s half of exactly what Trump’s up to–breaking completely with the Republican Party on Russia-related foreign policy and some other aspects of foreign policy. But he’s sure not against invading Iran in order to take its oil fields.
The other half of what he’s up to is the exact opposite: The Mercers and their Heritage Foundation puppets will ensure Paul Ryan fiscal policy on steroids and a Mercer-approved federal bench.
To Beverly Mann August 30, 2016 4:00 pm
There are lots of stories about how Syria was destabilized. Here is one of the more recent ones.
http://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/syria-crisis/1135-day-before-deraa.html
Libya:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2015/04/blast-from-the-past-expanding-on-operation-mermaid-dawn-in-libya.html
Need I mention Clinton’s girl Victoria Nuland in the Ukraine? When the government there began wavering and maybe heading towards a better Russian economic offer, a coup involving mysterious snipers and Victoria handing out cookies to the newly minted rebels happened. Of course the coup was pre-planned – that was when the Russians released the audio tapes of Nuland and a buddy discussing who would take over the new government. “Yats is the guy!” and “F*** the EU”, Nuland declared. Later that airliner got shot down. Kerry immediately announced that the US had the goods on the bad guys, but to this day the evidence he claims to have had hasn’t been released. Funny how that works – the local Russian-speaking rebels had zero motive to murder all those passengers, and the Nazi government of Ukraine had tons of incentive. Since Ukraine was a local hot-spot and the US had satellites watching the place like a hawk, Obama & Co. have plenty of evidence all right. It just isn’t the right sort to cause the economic sanctions on Russia. Whoever slaughtered all those people ought to be brought to justice, no matter who they are. But like with the non-prosecution of torturers, that’s not the kind of thing Obama does.
Bev, it wasn’t just Harry Hopkins with FDR; it was also his secretary.
On the Clinton Foundation issues, the Factcheck piece cited above illustrates the problem with refuting the charges. One has to get deeper into the weeds than the average American voter is willing to do to understand the reality. It’s much easier to just remember only 6% being “given” to charity. P.T. Barnum was right then and is still right.
Yeah, did you read that article a couple of days ago in, I think, the NYT, about Missy LeHand’s real role? It does confirm what I think a lot of people suspected at the time, and in my opinion it was a really good thing. Go, Missy! She was mucho liberal.
I didn’t read the 6% article, and my impression is that pretty much anything involving nonprofits can be manipulated, in reality by the nonprofit itself or by critics using statistics. But my general take from what I’ve red about the foundation is that on balance it did do some real good for the people it was supposed to benefit, but that it also was largely a glitzy promotion of the Clintons and made a lot of their grand lifestyle possible. But it just strikes me from what’s come out about quid pro quos is that there wasn’t much to it–but that there could be, if she becomes president.
It presents some pretty odd problems with our party’s nominee–problems that we shouldn’t have to deal with and that, of course, are the sort of problems we wouldn’t have to deal with if our nominee were Warren, or Brown, or Bernie.
@Beverly Mann
” But my post, and Cohen’s column, addressed only the issue of quid pro quos when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
Judging from the comments, I think several readers of my post missed that fact.”
I don’t think it’s missing the fact — I think it’s disagreeing with it as a meaningful difference. I don’t want to get into an “Is, too” “Is not” kind of discussion, but I repeat, “The problem with corruption in Washington these days is that they don’t know it’s corruption.” So getting little inconsequential favors like access and an ear and thanks isn’t backscratching. Just all us members of the same class thinking about our interests together. And the rest of us outside that class just don’t have the finely honed ability to make crucial distinctions between the levels of favors delivered and the kinds of benefits received.
Ah. Now your point is clear, and I couldn’t agree more.
To Beverly Mann August 30, 2016 4:12 pm
You wrote “I do think Clinton has the potential to be a progressive president on domestic economic issues, climate change issues, court nominees, labor issues and the like, because she finally recognizes that that’s the way the wind is blowing.”
I want to focus on the “climate change” issue. I have not seen the slightest bit of evidence Hillary Clinton either understands or cares about Climate Change. It’s more like you say – she flaps around like a flag as the wind changes. The TPP treaty will virtually guarantee the Earth dies. Big corporations will gain that kind of power. President Hillary will most assuredly ‘tweak’, then ram through the TPP.
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2016/07/29/mukhopadhyay-tpp-deal-accelerate-climate-change/87735120/
Hillary has done another flip-flop for tactical purposes with the Keystone pipeline.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/14/hillary-clinton/clinton-says-her-keystone-xl-position-isnt-flip-fl/
Does this matter? Michael Mann says that it’s “game over” if Keystone and its cousins continue to progress.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/06/keystone-xl-pipeline-vote-senate
Hillary takes scads of money from Big Energy. Why on earth should anybody pay more attention to her words than what she actually does?
Trump is an ignoramus. He is quite comfortable pandering to his base of similar science-stunted people. The man is 70 freaking years old, and keeping up on Environmental news wasn’t anything he did or was interested in doing.
On the other hand, Hillary is a whole year-and-a-half younger than Trump, and she displays no evidence of being a bit less ignorant than Trump on the subject. Only more ‘politically correct’.
Years ago I posted on a now-defunct blog that I’d support Bush the Dumber as President For Life, and his tequila twins in the same role after his death – if he would propose a serious course of action to address Global Warming. That’s how concerned I was about it then, and things are worse now. Much worse.
I’m recently reading that 80-100 feet of ocean rise is already locked in – even supposing that all CO2 releases were stopped tomorrow. Why is nobody talking about the massive surges of internal refugees from the eastern and southern coasts of this country? Why is nobody talking about the deaths of billions in Southeast Asia?
The ONLY thing which really happening is the sudden interest in travel to Mars. Yes, it sounds like I’ve gone batty, but follow the news. The Earth is coming up on an unprecedented disaster, and a relative handful of people will attempt leave the old hellhole. Don’t even imagine it’ll be anybody with a net worth of less than a hundred million dollars. Except for the few people needed in the servant classes, of course.
Clinton has not been in the forefront on climate change, but Obama really has been, for the most part, in his second term, and Clinton promises to build on that rather than disassemble it as the Mercers and their ilk will be sure to have Trump do, and in fact as he has promised repeatedly to do.
There’s just no comparison on this. Really. There just isn’t.
*** Obama really has been, for the most part, in his second term ***
Obama can give a hell of a speech – if a teleprompter is around. But would you kindly tell me what you understand he has actually DONE on the subject? It’s something I appear to have missed.
Beverly Mann: “And while it served their personal financial interests well, their foundation did have the effect of actually doing some real good on fairly widespread scale.”
As a lawyer, I would think you would be a little more careful in your use of the term “personal financial interests.”
No member of the Clinton family has ever received a dime of compensation from the Clinton Foundation, so I would be a misnomer to say that they personally benefited financially from donations to the charity.
Just the opposite, the Clintons have instead donated from one to three million dollars a year from their personal income to the charity. They aren’t taking money from the charity. The are spending money donating to the charity.
And in passing, you might note that the Wasserman’s gave their $10 million donation to the Clinton Foundation two years after Hillary left office. They must be the dumbest bribers ever by failing to notice that the target of their bribes was no longer in office. (I await your apology for slandering both the Wassermans and the Clintons but I doubt it will be forthcoming.)
Um, excuse me, but the “it” in that sentence refers not to the Foundation but to the subject of the preceding sentence: “And the Clintons’ rapacious money mongering didn’t defraud banks or individuals.”
The paragraph reads:
“Whatever favors Clinton did as Secretary of State for Clinton Foundation donors, they were trivial in that they had nothing to do with making or changing government policy, it appears. And the Clintons’ rapacious money mongering didn’t defraud banks or individuals. And while it served their personal financial interests well, their foundation did have the effect of actually doing some real good on fairly widespread scale. The Clintons, in other words, aren’t sociopaths. Trump is.”
You would think I would think you would be a careful in your use of the term “personal financial interests.” And you would be right.
I, for my part, would think that you, as a Clinton campaign worker, would be a little more careful in your reading comprehension.
So stick your pomposity down your throat. And do try reading more slowly.
I too find Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism very strange, he is trying everything he can to defeat Hillary Clinton. Very few links in Naked Capitalism on the Koch’s, Mercer’s, Sheldon Adelson. But tons of anti Hillary links every day.
Jim,
It has always been that way.
Personally, I believe the Green Lanterns have been, and are, the greatest threat to the progressive movement in the US. They simply refuse to understand how legislation is made; cannot fiugre out that every Dem voter in the country is not as progressive in all issues as they are; and have a problem with basic math.
Their constant negatives absolutely destroy the progressive movement, especially in the midterms.
Strether takes it to ludicrous levels.
Meanwhile, I love this thought:
“a glitzy promotion of the Clintons and made a lot of their grand lifestyle”
Yep, if I had millions in the bank my first thought would be to go to Zambia and talk about clean water and drink a glass of water.
Can’t get any grander than a glass of water from a plastic cup in the middle of nowhere.
They probably wouldn’t have spent much time with, say, Bono were it not for the Foundation. And five-star hotels in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe soliciting for donations and other fun places around the globe, meeting with CEOs of mega-corporations and such, didn’t make great photo ops. But Zambia took care of it, just fine.
Look, in my opinion the world is better for the existence of the Foundation, on balance. But this was not purely, nor likely even mostly, an altruistic endeavor.
Zachary,
With every post you are putting up here on this thread you are losing more credibility. Do you actually know anything at all that is true?
Regarding Obama, in his first two years he proposed and worked very hard to get the House of Representatives to pass a cap and trade bill for CO2. It was very flawed in many ways, just like Obamacare, and he had to allow a bunch of loopholes and deals with special interests to get it through the House as plenty of Dems were in the pockets of special interests and held it up. But, flawed as it was, he did manage to get it through the House, but when it got to the Senate if was filibustered by the Republicans and died. So, he tried, but failed.
He has also provided a lot of funding for alternative energy sources, with wind and solar increasing substantially during his term. He has been heavily criticized by the Republicans for this, you know, can’t mess with the free market and all that even though fossil fuel firms have been getting subsidies of all kinds up the wazoo for years.
And then finally we have his successful participation in the Paris agreement, which is nearly totally global, with only a few fossil fuel producing countries staying out. Copenhagen failed, despite hard efforts on his part there, but for Paris he laid a more careful groundwork, and this provides a real foundation for moving forward, even if as it stands it is inadequate. But it is better than nothing, and, of course, his efforts on this have been roundly denounced by you know who, the usual suspects on the right who say that global warming is a hoax.
Do you really want to keep with your totally stupid and ignorant line that Obama has done nothing? Just how stupid and ignorant are you? Do you have your head stuck in a toilet somewhere when important things are being reported on that you claim to know about?
I’ve been thinking about Jesse Unruh, the noted California politician, who said:
“If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here.”
I think we can let Hilary Clinton off the hook as far as screwing their women.
To Barkley Rosser August 30, 2016 9:22 pm
It’s odd that Climate Hero Obama’s efforts were so puny that they didn’t make any of the climate blogs I read. What I heard instead was Obama’s lunatic projects like “clean coal”.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/07/05/mississippi-clean-coal-plant-touted-by-obama-admin-plagued-with-inefficiency-secrets/
Stupidity beyond belief with his touting of “New Nuclear Power”.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-03/new-nuclear-power-seen-as-big-winner-in-obama-s-power-plan
Obama’s “energy czar” has been parading around declaring that fracking is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s not true, but it’s something the rightwingnuts love to hear.
http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/24/obama-energy-czar-actually-fracking-is-pretty-good-for-the-environment/
As for the non-funny joke of the Paris Climate affair, here is what a actual climate scientist had to say about it.
*** “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just ——– for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” ***
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud
Obama is very good at running his mouth. And for protecting bankers and torturers from prosecution. That’s ALL he’s good for.
Bev,
So you think that the Clinton’s lifestyle would not have been almost exactly as glamorous(your word, not mine) without their Foundation?
This is classic Clinton Derangement Syndrome. It is a charity. Is it the greatest charity in the history of the world? No. It it there just for their egos and lifestyles? No.
This is the same kind of hit piece(in nicer terms) you have been posting for months and months.
Proof? Mention of the primary.
Sanders did not lose the primary because it was rigged. He lost because more people voted for Clinton than him. The DNC has almost no control over the primary system. Curiously enough, they do have more control over caucuses than elections(not much), and yet Sanders won 86% of those.
Sanders lost the election because in his entire political life he never once did anything for a Democrat. End of story.
Do yourself a favor. Pull up the names of the Progressive caucus. Google their campaigns and Hillary Clinton. See if you can find one that did not benefit from her support, financially and in time spend.
Sanders lost this election in 2006.
Personally, I wish he had woken up and smelled the roses a decade ago, but he didn’t.
I wonder if that was caused by his reliance on his bff, Weaver. Who btw, was a cancer during the campaign, and from all accounts is now a cancer on Sanders drive to elect progressive candidates.
Kind of “weird” he is always around Sanders, huh?
I wonder if Bernie Sanders ever regrets not becoming a Democrat at some point in his congressional career. I get that he was first elected mayor running against the Democratic machine in Vermont, but in his years in the House and Senate he could have joined the party.
The fact that only one sitting Senator, Merkley from Oregon, endorsed him is pretty telling.
I was also struck by how he “resigned” from the party during the Democratic convention. He couldn’t even wait until after the election.
Sanders is a touchy subject with me. The man was offered a spot on the Green party ticket, and obviously didn’t take it. Considering the public disgust with the two slimeballs we’re stuck with now, I believe he’d have had a real shot at the presidency. Despite my rating him as a C- at best, I’d have voted for the man. It’s my opinion he’d have gotten a whole lot of Trump’s base too. The poorer members of the GOP know they’re getting the shaft, and I suspect a great many of them would have defected too.
There was a theory early-on that Sanders never was really serious, but instead was running as a “sheepdog” to lead the dirty hippy lefties to Clinton. That theory looks more plausible now than it did earlier.
The Clintons are not the “sisters of Mercy”. Their donor [quid pro quo] get cluster bombs* to kill Shi’a with.
It is called “baqsheer” phonetic for bribing in the GCC. It is illegal for US to do it. Rumored some of US’ competitors could do it.
They are not Nuns nor are they leaving any scraps on the floor.
*Donors also got Libya busted up for AQ and US bombing Shi’a in Syria.
Bev,
“As for Syria, here too I’m not sure why you think this country caused its civil war, but it did not.”
Of course the root cause is Baathists aligned with non Sunnis running a sector of land lusted after by the Saudis and GCC.
That the US supported the Sunnis (since the Iranians ousted CIA puppets) against the Baathists did not start the civil war, it merely keeps it growing in lust for death and destruction.
While that Sep 2012 skirmish in Benghazi included CIA ground troops otherwise there securing the sea lanes supporting Syrian Al Qaeda with Qaddafi’s arms, less stingers.
EM,
“Sanders did not lose the primary because it was rigged. He lost because more people voted for Clinton than him.”
What matter is who counted the votes! Crooked DNC!
Ilsm,
Stop showing your insanity. The DNC does not count votes.
You rank right up there with ZS and his totally inane and baseless thought process that Sanders might have been President if he had run as the Green Party candidate.
Low level personnel in the US government are expected to reject gifts, or if culturally they cannot, then they turn them over to their agency, unless it is something like a coffee or a sandwich.
There is an expectation that people are going to not just not actually corrupt their job by doing favors for people who give them gifts or do them favors, but that they will avoid the appearance of corruption that is generated by accepting gifts.
The supreme court doesn’t agree with that anymore. Anyone can accept any kind of bribe as long as they don’t let it influence their actions. You can’t see the desk for the treasure that’s being dumped onto political tables to fund campaigns and line their personal pockets.
This is a foreign practice, one that is corrupt and should be rooted out nationally. Accepting gifts creates a corrupting environment, no matter what the recipient does, because EVERYONE understands that the gift is intended to influence policy or gain access so that the person can influence policy. The person giving the gift knows it, or they wouldn’t give it, the person receiving the gift knows it, but “deep down in their honest hearts” they’re not going to allow it to influence their work and decisions?
No of course not. Buying access is the same as putting a stack of cash into someone’s pocket to get them to vote one way or another on a bill of interest.
Does the Clinton foundation do good work? Sure. Does it get money because of the Clintons involvement in raising money? Undoubtedly, without their participation it can’t raise anywhere near that amount of money, and the reason is that their high public profile means that people believe that by giving to them they can influence policy, even if those people are not in office (through backchannels and whispers and introductions). Does every person donating to the Clinton foundation want to influence policy, or are they primarily motivated by wanting to fund it’s good works? This is impossible to tell. Even someone as prominent and perhaps morally blameless Elie Wiesel isn’t there to eat cookies and have tea and talk about the weather if he’s in Hillary Clinton’s office. That is not what he is there for. That kind of meeting is not purely a social call, it’s an effort to influence policy, whether it is related to statements on the Armenian genocide or the Sudan or god knows what.
Is he a person that she should meet with, whether he gives a donation to her foundation or not? Maybe that is her job. Probably most of these meetings are that way. That’s why public officials are expected to put investments and charities into trusts and blinds and under separate management when they’re in office, to help establish the boundary between their public responsibilities and their private interests including their charitable interests.
It doesn’t matter to me whether she did anything that she shouldn’t have done, legally. The letter of the law is insufficient to dictate the actions of moral people. Is it disqualifying? She’s already been disqualified in my mind, this is just another thing.
Is it disturbing and annoying to me to see the double standard where promoters are willing to weasel and explain away whatever the Clintons have done that for any person on the other side of the aisle would be moral issues that disqualify them from office?
Yeah it’s pretty annoying.
JG,
I am missing the part where the Clintons received cash from their Foundation.
EM,
I am insane!
You could however make the statement: Hillary got no cash from the foundation, nor Chelsea, and prove it.
It is sometime easier to argue that something does not exist.
Unless ad hominem and burden of proof negation is all you got.
Sorry, Zac, while I do not agree with every enviro policy of Obama’s (francking has been showing up to have a lot of problems), I am not going to respond blow by blow to all your comments. However, your head is still basically stuck pretty far down the toilet, especially regarding the Paris Agreement, which is a serious breakthrough.
I mean, you would prefer a Copenhagen outcome with nothing? Really? As it is they got 1.5C as the limit (not 2C as you misreported), but all that is pretty much baked in. Not going to keep it from hitting that anyway. Now it is a matter of getting some coordinated effort to keep it from going much higher, and that effort was near zero coming out of Copenhagen.
Indeed, the sign of you being out of it is citing Janes Hansen, who has basically gone off the deep end in the eyes of most climatologists as a climatologist, although he served a good public purpose back in 1988 and for some years after. However, I am more bothered by his deciding he is an economist and deciding that the only acceptable policy is a carbon tax. In principle cap and trade and carbon tax can achieve the same result. Paris allows both, but tends to favor cap and trade because that is what Kyoto favored and most European countries are doing it. Pushing carbon tax as the only solution would have been utterly diplomatically unacceptable, quite aside from being blunderlingly stupid and narrow-minded. Hansen should STFU on economic policy and stick to climatology, although, as I noted, most climatologists do not take him seriously any more, which may be why he has decided to shoot off his mouth ignorantly about economic policy..
Anyway, while he has not been perfect, your original claim was that Obama did nothing, which was total crap, which is where you have your head, down in the toilet with total crap. He has done a lot.
*** I mean, you would prefer a Copenhagen outcome with nothing? Really? ****
I would prefer nothing to a big deal which promises something but delivers — nothing.
Regarding Hansen, he is clearly wrong in believing nuclear power is the answer. He is also clearly right about a carbon tax. The cap/trade stuff is legalistic BS which won’t do the job.
If the world is not going to die, we must go “cold turkey” on all fossil fuels very, very soon. Any necessary gasoline and such must be manufactured from scratch using energy from renewables.
Zac,
Carbon tax does not imply “going cold turkey on fossil fuels.” Again you show you know very little. You want to go cold turkey on fossil fuels? Then you must simply ban them, and if you are going to go all that way then you had better have some nuclear power plants available to help replace them. Germany has created a major hassle for the rest of Europe by shutting down its nuclear power plants, with the price of electricity going up all over the continent as well as Germany increasing its use of coal.
And Paris does not lead to doing nothing. That is just dumb rhetoric from Hansen, even if it does not do as much as we all would like.
Oh, and as for cap and trade, it has worked for SO2 in the US. It is not just legalistic BS. You are just a stupid and ignorant fool who does not know what you are talking about.
“Do you really want to keep with your totally stupid and ignorant line that Obama has done nothing? Just how stupid and ignorant are you? Do you have your head stuck in a toilet somewhere when important things are being reported on that you claim to know about?”
“However, your head is still basically stuck pretty far down the toilet”
“You are just a stupid and ignorant fool who does not know what you are talking about.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At some point I thought this person might start acting like a grown-up. I was clearly wroing about that, and I’m done with him.
“Settle for the crooked, Wall St, war monger because real change is too hard and the other guy is insane, supported by racists and don’t think Russia should praise American exceptionalism.”
Obama might as well have voted with Hillary for AUMF forever, he is running it.
Poor Zac, one more thing that you are wrong about. The question remains, is there anything you are right about, anything?
Is today April fools? The washington post ???
Look at the way it covers Uber, a subject it should not even be allowed to write about given Jeff Bezos investment in the company. Every story is 100% propaganda barely disguised as journalism.
The Post’s reporting about Bernie Sanders was also embarrassingly slanted.
The Post is a fucking joke its not news it functions as the mouthpiece of its owner first and foremost and the establishment in general .
All this anti-Russian warmongering from esteemed commenters here is suspect. And should be taken with a grain of salt.
The USA neoliberal elite considers Russia to be an obstacle in the creation of the USA led global neoliberal empire (with EU and Japan as major vassals),
So Carthago delenda est is the official policy. With heavy brainwashing from MSM to justify such a course as well as the demonization of Putin.
The USA actions in Ukraine speak for themselves. Any reasonable researcher after this “color revolution” should print his/her anti-Russian comments, shred them and eat with borsch. Because the fingerprints of the USA neoliberal imperial policy were everywhere and can’t be ignored. And Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton appointee. Not that Russia in this case was flawless, but just the fact that opposition decided not to wait till the elections was the direct result of the orders from Washington.
That means that as bad as Trump is, he is a safer bet than Hillary, because the latter is a neocon warmonger, which can get us in the hot war with Russia. And this is the most principal, cardinal issue of the November elections.
All other issues like climate change record (although nuclear winter will definitely reverse global warming), Supreme Court appointments, etc. are of secondary importance.
As John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
Thoughtful suggestions . I loved the details . Does someone know if I would be able to find a blank IRS 990 example to complete ?