Hillary Clinton’s money from dictatorships

This video from the USA says about itself:

Saudi Arabia and UAE fund Hillary Clinton’s Foundation

23 February 2015

Hillary Clinton is apparently planning to run for President of the United States. And some think it’s inappropriate the Clinton Foundation accepts funding from other countries while she’s mulling a possible campaign. The Clinton Foundation has defended its practice of accepting money from overseas governments like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Germany, and Canada. They stopped receiving foreign support while Clinton was Secretary of State, but once she left in 2013 the foundation dropped the ban. But CF still receives money as Hillary is almost certain to run for President. Cenk Uygur, political commentator and Host of the Young Turks Channel is In the Now.

By Tom Hall in the USA:

Clinton Foundation raked in cash from right-wing regimes, corporations

28 February 2015

Several press reports last week highlight details of the major donors to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, including right-wing Persian Gulf monarchies, big defense contractors, and an array of corporations and governments seeking influence with the US political establishment—and potentially in the next White House.

Founded in 2001 after the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president, the Foundation has raised and distributed huge amounts of money, reaching nearly $2 billion. After a brief drop in fundraising coinciding with Hillary Clinton’s term as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, when most foreign donations were discouraged because of conflict-of-interest concerns, donations jumped $100 million in 2013, reaching $262 million.

The list of the Foundation’s largest donors, available on the Foundation’s website, is a virtual who’s who of the super-rich and major corporations. The largest donors, having given over $25 million since 2001, include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, well known for its leading role in the dismantling of public education, Chicago multimillionaire and top Democratic Party donor Fred Eychaner, and, strangely, the Dutch national lottery.

Major corporations appear in spades in the list of 168 individuals and organizations that have given more than $1 million. Defense contractors such as Boeing and Booz Allen Hamilton, both gave between $1 and $5 million, joined by Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and the American Federation of Teachers.

The reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies have poured tens of millions into the Clinton Foundation, including Saudi Arabia ($10 to $25 million), Kuwait ($5 to $10 million), Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates ($1 to $5 million). In addition, several groups and individuals close to the Saudi government have also made tens of millions in contributions.

The Clinton Foundation made an agreement with the Obama administration not to accept new donations from foreign sources during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, a policy which has now expired. However, tens of millions of overseas dollars continued to flow into the Foundation through an exemption which allowed existing donors to continue making contributions at a similar level.

Claims by Clinton Foundation donors that they were genuinely interested in charity are belied by the circumstances of many of the donations. For example, the Wall Street Journal cited an incident in 2009 in which Hillary Clinton convinced Russia to purchase 50 Boeing 737s; seven months later, Boeing made its first-ever donation to the Clinton Foundation, $900,000 to help “rebuild” Haiti’s school system. Perhaps admitting more than she intended, a Boeing spokeswoman said in a written statement, “Secretary Clinton did nothing for Boeing that former US presidents and cabinet secretaries haven’t done for decades.”

In another case, the Foundation received a $500,000 donation from the government of Algeria for its pro-market “relief” effort in Haiti. The Washington Post notes that the donation, which violated the Foundation’s earlier agreement with the Obama administration, came in the midst of a particularly heavy lobbying push from Algeria in Washington in the aftermath of a report by Clinton’s State Department condemning Algeria’s human rights record. The donation was more than the Algerian government spent on lobbying for the entire year.

Two years later, Secretary of State Clinton lobbied successfully on behalf of GE in its bids to construct power plants in Algeria, described by the company as “some of its largest power agreements in company history.” A month later, GE donated from $500,000 to $1 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The focus in the media, especially from Journal and other ultra-right outlets, has been on the fact that foreign countries, companies and individuals comprise a third of the foundation’s major donors, implying that they are purchasing political influence through the Clintons. While there is a degree of truth to this, this is also a two-way street, as the Clinton Foundation is fully integrated into the political apparatus as an instrument of American imperialist foreign policy.

Instructive in this regard is their role in the “rebuilding” of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, in which some 300,000 died. The Clinton Foundation played a major role, with Bill Clinton himself co-chairing the panel that distributed all international aid to Haiti. The entire aid effort was used to ram through pro-market restructuring, while American and then UN “peacekeepers” patrolled the country to prevent any opposition from the population. The Obama administration made no objection to the Algerian donation to the Clinton Foundation for the simple reason that it was entirely in line with American foreign policy in Haiti.

The Clinton Foundation’s version of “charity” also involves imperialist intrigue. This included secret maneuvers last year against Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapakse, which ultimately led to his electoral defeat last month. The country’s former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, who joined the Clinton Foundation in 2005, played the major role in backroom deals that led to Maithripala Sirisena’s sudden departure from the government and announcement that he would be the “common opposition candidate.” Earlier this month Kumaratunga admitted that unnamed “foreign governments” had urged her to maneuver against Rajapakse.

HILLARY CLINTON USED PERSONAL EMAIL FOR STATE DEPARTMENT PURPOSES “Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.” Twitter had a field day with the news. [NYT]

CLINTON FOUNDATION FAILED TO DISCLOSE DONORS Starting in 2010, the Clinton Foundation stopped disclosing its donor list, despite a promise to President Obama otherwise. And while the foundation vowed not to seek donations from foreign governments while Hillary was Secretary of State, the group accepted money from individuals with strong foreign ties. [Reuters]

CLINTON FOUNDATION TO KEEP ACCEPTING FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONATIONS But only from six countries. [Reuters]

CLINTON FOUNDATION ACKNOWLEDGES ‘MISTAKES’ “With scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s financial practices threatening to create political problems for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, the organization on Sunday took the unusual step of acknowledging ‘mistakes’ but insisted that it is committed to transparency regarding its donors and operations around the world.” [WaPo]

THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FOUND $26 MILLION IN DONATIONS IT PREVIOUSLY HAD NOT DISCLOSED Whoops. [WaPo]

Hillary Clinton Taps Former Monsanto Lobbyist to Help Run 2016 Campaign for President: here.

US financial disclosures: Hillary and Bill Clinton earn more than $25m in a single year while Obamas have just $1,000 in savings: here.

Hillary Clinton has launched her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination with a flurry of populist demagogy, claiming to fight for the interests of “ordinary Americans.” But financial disclosure forms filed May 15 with federal election officials show that the Clinton family is anything but ordinary. Bill and Hillary Clinton took in at least $30 million during 2014 and the first four months of 2015, according to the campaign filing, placing the Clintons in the upper stratosphere of American families, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent of the population: here.

Hillary Clinton “depends heavily on the elite financial sector and big corporate interests to pay for her campaign”: here.

In his book The Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian revolution against France, C.L.R. James remarked that “a great empire and honest minds go ill together.” To match dishonest minds with empire in today’s Haiti, one need look no further than French President François Hollande and the representatives of Washington and Wall Street, Bill and Hillary Clinton: here.

A LOOK AT HILLARY’S BENGHAZI EMAILS “The roughly 300 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account that were turned over last month to a House committee investigating the attack showed the secretary and her aides closely monitoring the fallout from the tragedy, which threatened to damage her image and reflect poorly on the State Department.” [NYT]

Hillary the Hawk means even more war for the Middle East: here.

Announcing her latest campaign for the presidency, Hillary Clinton declared she was entering the race to be the champion for “everyday Americans.” As a lawmaker and diplomat, however, Clinton has long championed military campaigns that have killed scores of “everyday” people abroad, from Iraq to Yemen. As commander-in-chief, there’s no reason to believe she’d be any less a hawk than she was as the senator who backed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, or the Secretary of State who encouraged Barack Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. If her nomination is as sure a thing as people say, then antiwar organizing needs to start right away: here.