For Hillary lovers

[boutons_deux]

Clinton blasts Wall Street, but still draws millions in contributions

Even as Hillary Clinton has stepped up her rhetorical assault on Wall Street, her campaign and allied super PACs have continued to rake in millions from the financial sector, a sign of her deep and lasting relationships with banking and investment ans.

Through the end of December, donors at hedge funds, banks, insurance companies and other financial-services firms had given at least $21.4 million to support Clinton’s 2016 presidential run — more than one of every 10 dollars of the $157.8 million contributed to back her bid, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings by The Washington Post.

The contributions helped Clinton reach a fundraising milestone: By the end of 2015, she had brought in more money from the financial sector during her four federal campaigns than her husband did during his quarter-century political career.

In all, donors from Wall Street and other financial-services firms have given $44.1 million to support Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and allied super PACs, compared with $39.7 million in backing that former president Bill Clinton received from the industry, according to campaign-finance records dating back to 1974 that have been compiled by The Post.

Nearly half of the financial-sector donations made to support Hillary Clinton’s current presidential run have come from just two wealthy financiers: billionaire investor George Soros, who gave $7 million last year to the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action; and hedge-fund manager S. Donald Sussman, who gave the group $2.5 million.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-blasts-wall-street-but-still-draws-millions-in-contributions/2016/02/04/05e1be00-c9c2-11e5-ae11-57b6aeab993f_story.html

[boutons_deux]

Surely Hillary Clinton Knows Why Wall Street Pays Her

Hillary Clinton is an exceptionally skillful politician. Collectively, she and her husband Bill have parlayed their political experience into at least $125 million in speaking fees alone. According to Bloomberg, Hillary was paid $12 million in the 16 months after leaving her role as US secretary of state. Knowing she'd likely run for president, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley (and other big Wall Street corporations) gladly paid her $2.9 million in speaking fees alone. The same Wall Street corporations then gave her campaign super PACs millions more. Coincidence?

Clinton is surely aware that Wall Street won't give politicians millions without expecting something big in return. In a Des Moines Register interview, she justified her $250,000-per-event Wall Street speaking fees, saying, "What they were interested in were my views on what was going on in the world ... there's a lot of interest in getting advice and views about what you think is happening in the world." Does she honestly expect the American people to believe Wall Street pays her $250,000 for a one-hour talk because they want her views on the world? She most surely knows that Wall Street wants her political influence.

In that same interview (as if to say, "Bernie does it too"), Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders for his 2000 vote for deregulating swaps and derivatives (the Commodity Futures Modernization Act), which was one of the main causes of the economic collapse in 2008.

Of course, she didn't mention that Sanders forcefully spoke out against the bill, and Sanders, like the rest of Congress, was essentially blackmailed into voting for it.

She didn't mention the bill was inserted at the last minute in omnibus legislation needed to keep the government going.

She didn't mention only four members of Congress dared to vote against it.

She didn't mention the bill came from a deal between her husband and the Senate Banking Committee chairman, Phil Gramm.

Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, ensuring Hillary would collect millions from Wall Street for her Senate campaign (and she did).

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...iberate-deceit

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Clinton’s Mixed Record on Wall Street Belies Her Tough ‘Cut it Out’ Talk

As a U.S. senator during the crisis years, Clinton’s legislative proposals to reform banking and housing finance didn’t gain traction.

In examination of her remarks to Wall Street in December 2007 and Clinton’s actions as a senator — a period when she had the best opportunity to translate her words into deeds — presents a more mixed picture of her record on the banking industry.Clinton steered a middle ground in a 28-minute address to business executives gathered at an office of the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York’s Times Square on Dec. 5, 2007. In the event, she presented a detailed analysis of the burgeoning dangers in the housing market and its threat to the economy. (ProPublica obtained a video of the speech, which hasn’t previously been posted.)

Clinton gave a shout-out to her “wonderful donors” in the audience, and asked the bankers to voluntarily suspend foreclosures and freeze interest rates on adjustable subprime mortgages. She praised Wall Street for its role in creating the nation’s wealth, then added that “too many American families are not sharing” in that prosperity.

She said the brewing economic troubles weren’t mainly the fault of banks, “not by a long shot,” but added they needed to shoulder responsibility for their role. While there was plenty of blame to go around for the spate of reckless lending, and while Wall Street may not have created the foreclosure crisis, it “certainly had a hand in making it worse” and “needs to help us solve it.”

Finally, Clinton said, if the banks didn’t take the voluntary steps she proposed, “I will consider legislation to address the problem.”

The lenders did not adopt Clinton’s proposals. During 2007 and 2008, when the housing market collapsed and while she was also running for president, the Democrats controlled the Senate. Of the 140 bills Clinton introduced during that period, five were related to housing finance or foreclosures, according to congressional records. Only one of those five secured any co-sponsors. No Senate committee took action on any of them and they died without any further discussion.

When a broad housing bill finally became law in 2008, Clinton was not among the more than dozen senators credited by party leaders as playing a key role.

Clinton also introduced a bill in 2008 to curb compensation of corporate executives. It too died without any co-sponsors.

In dealing with Wall Street, Clinton faced the same challenge as any lawmaker representing New York, where the financial industry includes not only cons uents but campaign donors. Wall Street executives were the largest donors to both her 2006 Senate re-election bid and her 2008 presidential race; employees of just eight banking firms gave $2.67 million to those campaigns, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit research group.

Clinton in 2007 publicly decried a tax break for hedge-fund and private-equity executives — and continues to do so in her current campaign. But she didn’t sign on as a supporter of a Senate bill that would have curbed the break.

As a senator, Clinton also had a brush with the shadow-banking world that she now describes as a continuing threat to the financial system. When AIG, the giant insurance company and poster child for lightly regulated finance, began to implode in September 2008, Clinton reached out to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was involved in talks to rescue the firm with government funds. Her little-noticed overture came on behalf of some wealthy investors who stood to lose millions and had hired two longtime associates of the Clintons to represent them.

( as Cousin Vinnie would say, "Wait, there's more") ...

http://www.propublica.org/article/hi...ent=1454618923

[boutons_deux]

Lament of the Plutocrats


Why Wall Street is fed up with the White House—and Republicans too.

Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish.

Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it.

What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop.

And indeed Goldman’s Tim O’Neill, who heads the bank’s asset management business, introduced Clinton by saying how courageous she was for speaking at the bank. (Brave, perhaps, but also well-compensated: Clinton’s minimum fee for paid remarks is $200,000).

Certainly, Clinton offered the money men—and, yes, they are mostly men—at Goldman’s HQ a bit of a morale boost. “It was like, ‘Here’s someone who doesn’t want to vilify us but wants to get business back in the game,’” said an attendee. “Like, maybe here’s someone who can lead us out of the wilderness.”

Clinton’s remarks were hardly a sweeping absolution for the sins of Wall Street, whose leaders she courted assiduously for financial support over a decade, as a senator and a presidential candidate in 2008. But they did register as

a repudiation of some of the angry anti-Wall Street rhetoric emanating from liberals rallying behind the likes of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

And perhaps even more than that, Clinton’s presence offered a glimpse to a future in which Wall Street might repair its frayed political relationships.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...tocrats-101047

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Clinton: “Name one time I changed due to Wall Street money.” Elizabeth Warren: OK, allow me.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a mixed reception for her performance during the debates. Some respected her aggressive debate tactics, whereas others pointed to her touting an endorsement from Henry Kissinger as a sign that she is not, and never has been, a true progressive — a term which became the unlikely center of discussion and heated argument.

However, there was one moment in which Clinton made a challenge to her detractors. She rallied against her label of “establishment,” claiming that the le is misused on her, and further claimed that her ties to Wall Street are a non-issue, alleging that she has never changed a vote as a result of campaign contributions or other financial influence. “Name one time I changed due to Wall Street money,” she challenged.

Unfortunately for her, there is already a record of quite possibly the most well-respected progressive detailing exactly that scenario.
Back in 2004, Elizabeth Warren sat with Bill Moyers to discuss a bankruptcy regulation bill that was first championed, then opposed by Clinton after she spoke with lobbyists. (This video recaps Clinton’s debate remarks. To start with the Warren interview, skip to 1:04.)


Essentially, the credit companies wanted to restrict the ability of American citizens to claim bankruptcy, thereby allowing the credit companies to continue reaping profits from the financially des ute, many of whom would have had no recourse should the bill have passed.

Elizabeth Warren explains how as First Lady, Clinton sat with Warren and afterwards labored to have her husband, President Bill Clinton, veto the bill. President Clinton did so, and Hillary Clinton claimed credit for this action in her autobiography.

Then, a few years later when Hillary Clinton had just become a senator, the bankruptcy bill returned, causing Warren to opine that the bill was “like a vampire — it will not die.” This time, however, Hillary Clinton voted in favor of what was essentially the exact same bill she had lobbied against.

Warren contrasted Clinton’s time as First Lady with her newfound role as a senator, saying “As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different.”

Warren summed up the situation succinctly at the end: “She has taken money from [the credit companies], and more to the point, she worries about them as a cons uency.”

Furthermore, judging from a new Quinnipiac poll that shows her national lead dropping to just 2%, it seems as though Clinton’s performance at the debate was not as rousing as she would have hoped.

Interestingly, Elizabeth Warren recently defended Bernie Sanders against accusations by Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Warren’s own policies also match up with the Vermont senator’s, causing many to call for Warren to join Sanders as a Vice Presidential candidate if he wins the nomination.

Senator Warren has not yet officially endorsed a candidate in the Democratic primary contest.

http://usuncut.com/politics/elizabet...llary-clinton/

[boutons_deux]

 Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote

From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.

 It is absolutely true that black communities back then were in a state of crisis, and that many black activists and politicians were desperate to get violent offenders off the streets. What is often missed, however, is that most of those black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness.

They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare.

In the end, they wound up with police and prisons.

She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win.

When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.

But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.

Hillary believes that she can win this game in 2016 because this time she’s got us, the black vote, in her back pocket—her lucky card.
She may be surprised to discover that the younger generation no longer wants to play her game. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all continue to play along and pretend that we don’t know how it will turn out in the end.

Hopefully, one day, we’ll muster the courage to join together in a revolutionary movement with people of all colors who believe that basic human rights and economic, racial, and gender justice are not unreasonable, pie-in-the-sky goals.

After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up, stretch its limbs, and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to reshuffle this deck.

http://www.thenation.com/article/hil...peoples-votes/

[boutons_deux]

The Clintons Have Lost the Working Class

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjam...-working-class

[boutons_deux]

Here Comes Another Superdelegate Crisis

Your least favorite thing about the 2008 Democratic primary is back!

Sanders won 15 delegates with his 20-point victory Tuesday while Clinton won nine.

But Clinton came into the contest with the support of six superdelegates, who are state party insiders given the freedom to support any candidate they choose.

Ah, yes, welcome back, Democratic superdelegates! Time to make some space for you and all your bad memories.

So, here's basically the back-of-the-cereal-box story of how the Democratic primary works.

To be the nominee in 2016, you have to amass a total of 2,382 delegates during the primary season. Most of this haul will come from successfully competing in the states' various primaries and caucuses. Some states -- like these early ones we've seen -- apportion the delegates according to the vote. In these instances, the losers take home some consolation delegates to add to their pile. In many of the later states, however, the delegates are awarded on a winner-take-all basis. So as the primary process proceeds, the stakes tend to accelerate.

(I'm really underplaying the complexity of the process here. If you want to get deeper into the weeds, head out to The Green Papers and start undertaking your graduate-level study of this process.)

Now set all of the primary process aside and focus on another source from which the candidates can add to their delegate totals: the superdelegates.

Democratic Party superdelegates are basically elected officials, Democratic National Committee members and a posse of party swells that are now considered distinguished Democratic Party pooh-bahs, and they all get a vote in this process.

There are, right now, 712 of them. Many are, as of this moment, tentatively committed to a candidate. The Associated Press' reporting calculates that

Clinton currently has 361 superdelegates committed to her as of Jan. 30, and Sanders has ... eight.

So, Clinton has a massive advantage here.

But this advantage comes with problems. Many superdelegates prefer to fly under the radar, properly recognizing that

it would be a really bad look if a bunch of affluent party elites became the means by which a primary was decided.

Some of these superdelegates, of course, are influential Democratic legislators whose endorsements are sought by the candidates. When Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), for example, backed Sanders, this was an important moment of the so-called "invisible primary," in which an influential liberal congressman signalled his choice to other liberals. Grijalva is a superdelegate as well, though, so count him among Sanders' eight in the tally.

But the ideal situation for many superdelegates is for them to merely use their vote as a ceremonial affirmation of the voters' consensus. That's why hundreds of them are currently biding their time, not picking anyone. Many superdelegates are in it for the perks -- a hotel room at the convention, a place amid the pageantry on the floor -- and would rather not see their potentially decisive power being used to decide a nominee.

This sentiment was well expressed by Missouri Democratic Sen. (and superdelegate) Claire McCaskill back in April of 2008:

"The majority of superdelegates I’ve talked to are committed, but it is a matter of timing,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “They’re just preferring to make their decision public after the primaries are over. ... They would like someone else to act for them before they talk about it in the cold light of day.”

And back in the spring of 2008, the way the race had shaped up had placed a lot of undue attention on the superdelegates and their role in the process. There came a moment in the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when Clinton's mathematical path to notching the nomination didn't make sense unless a lot of superdelegates started breaking her way.

And it wasn't just the raw arithmetic that mattered. She needed momentum as well, because she was locked in a situation where she had to start winning primaries by decisive margins that hadn't yet manifested themselves. Getting party elites to come out for her -- against the run of play -- was necessary to add a dose of energy to facilitate this outcome.

So Clinton got to the point where she had to start publicly and flamboyantly courting the superdelegates. (Obama, rest assured, was doing the same in a more publicly restrained way.) And many of those superdelegates properly recognized that their lives might get dicey if, after the voters demonstrated a clear desire to nominate their party's first black candidate, some affluent Beltway toff threw the election in a different direction. (Around the same time, the Clinton campaign was also seeking to have the full delegate slate from a pair of states fully credentialed after the party punished them for various primary calendar shenanigans, a much better case for a nominal leader of the "party of the little guy" to be making.)

In short, there was a time where the word "superdelegate" connoted a deep, deep dysfunction within the Democratic Party and an intergalactic electoral controversy. Given the fact that the 2008 cycle exposed that the superdelegates could, in the wrong situation, prove to be an undemocratic passel of votes that could supersede the will of primary voters, it shouldn't be a surprise that the Democratic Partypondered doing away with them altogether. So in August of 2010, the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee met to ponder the matter.
As Newsweek's Colin Woodard reported at the time, here's how that went:

But the rules committee took a dim view of this proposal. While endorsing recommendations to dilute the superdelegates’ influence (mostly by increasing the number of ordinary delegates), it quietly nixed the redefinition of their voting powers at it July 10 meeting. How quietly? Enough that even some members of the change commission hadn’t yet heard about it when NEWSWEEK spoke to them last week.

The end result of all of this was that the influence of superdelegates in the process was slightly reduced, by limiting their overall proportion in the total number of delegates available to all candidates to 15 percent (down from 20 percent).

Why not more? Let's have a beneficiary of nepotism explain it to Newsweek,because that's almost too perfect:

“People ask: isn’t it enough for folks to have floor privileges and a hotel room and not have an actual vote?” says rules-committee co-chair James Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “The answer is: what you’re doing is creating two classes of delegates, people with the vote and people without the vote. Clearly, the people at the grassroots level should be the predominant voice. But if you don’t give elected officials a real voice, they are basically second-class citizens.”

Sure. Wouldn't want a group of privileged elites to feel like they're second class to primary voters. That almost makes too much sense.

Now it's 2016, and the situation has changed considerably. This time, Clinton enjoys a substantial lead over Sanders in the race to win superdelegates. This is, on one important level, very understandable: Sanders is not a Democrat. He's an independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats, but he doesn't play a huge role in building the party and, in fact, his whole campaign is predicated on tearing out the existing party apparatus and replacing it with something new.

So, all things being equal, his claim on the superdelegates is very tenuous. But when you start blowing out Clinton in primaries, guess what? All things cease being equal in a hurry. NBC News' First Read Team does a fine job distilling the situation at hand:

Overall, according to the AP's count, Clinton has endorsements from more than 360 Democratic superdelegates, versus eight for Sanders. According to our back-of-envelope math, that means that Sanders must win 54% of the remaining delegates to get to the magic number of 2,382 delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination, while Clinton needs to win just 46%. That is a HUGE advantage, especially when you consider that the 2008 Democratic delegate race between Barack Obama and Clinton was essentially a 52%-48% affair.

It is a "huge advantage" ... on paper. But if we think this through to the end, what happens if Sanders wins a majority of the remaining delegates that are at stake in contests where Democrats actually vote, and

misses the nomination because Clinton closed and surmounted the gap through the votes wrangled from party elites?

It probably leaves everyone involved in a crisis, with a sizable portion of the electorate left feeling disaffected by the primary process. In this hypothetical cir stance,

how does Clinton win those voters back to her side for the general election?

It may not happen that way, of course. As previously mentioned, many superdelegates are happy to simply affirm the consensus and move on with their lives.

As the First Read Team notes, "If Sanders does win a majority of the bound delegates, there will be ENORMOUS pressure on the supers to back him. And that pressure could likely lead to many elected supers -- perhaps worried about a future Dem primary -- to suddenly get cold feet on Clinton and simply promise to support the Dem who wins their district or state."

That is, indeed, the likely outcome. Still, this is a sleeping dog that Clinton ought to leave snoozing for the foreseeable future. But that's not what's happening. As ABC News' Rick Klein reports, "Clinton campaign aides are touting" her currently substantial superdelegate lead "at least implicitly, in arguing to supporters and donors that the delegate math is overwhelmingly in her favor."

Klein continues:

That, though, makes a few dangerous assumptions.

First, it presumes that if superdelegates matter, they would openly deny the nomination to someone who won more delegates via actual voting. (Remember 2008, anyone?)

Second, and more urgently, it presumes that Sanders supporters won’t wake up to this possibility and use it as motivation.

A line about how the establishment is trying to subvert the judgment of the people could slip rather easily into a Sanders stump speech.

But the bigger problem for Clinton is simply the fact that this isn't how this primary was supposed to go! It was never, ever supposed to come down to knotty delegate math and enumerating the vote splits on a state-by-state spreadsheet -- let alone give rise to a situation where she'd be dependent on a superdelegate bailout. And yet, after two contests -- both of which offered Sanders some bank-shot advantages that don't exist elsewhere -- Clinton's team is revealing a deep concern for the road ahead.

Nevertheless, pointing to the way those Democratic Party elites who enjoy voting privileges favor her over Sanders is not a move her campaign advisers should even be countenancing at this point. The basic argument of her candidacy is that the ins utions that govern our lives do not need to be torn down, root and branch.

Clinton's case is that competent management of existing ins utions will help level the playing field.

For this reason, she shouldn't be telling voters that the system isn't really rigged against them while simultaneously telling her donors, "Don't worry, the Democratic primary is rigged in my favor."

But for whatever reason, that's where we are right now, and once again, superdelegates are stuck in the spotlight. The Democrats should have just scuttled the superdelegates when they had the opportunity. Alas!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...0c3c550508660?

[spankadelphia]

It is a well do ented phenomena that Hillary is intensely unlikable to the point that the more face time she gets on TV, the worse she does in the polls.

[hater]

It is a well do ented phenomena that Hillary is intensely unlikable to the point that the more face time she gets on TV, the worse she does in the polls.

I agree with this.

[boutons_deux]

New York Times Post-Debate Coverage Goes Full-Infomercial for Clinton

Three glowing stories about Hillary's debate performance are perfectly aligned with the paper's editorial stance.

Let’s begin with the headlines of its top three debate stories:

Hillary Clinton Is Calm, Cool and Effective

In Democratic Debate, Hillary Clinton Paints Bernie Sanders’s Plans as Unrealistic

Who Won the Debate? Critics Say Hillary Clinton Shone

Headlines are in and of themselves important because, according to one 2014 survey, 60% of Americans get their news from only headlines. A quick glance at the Times debate section and the consensus is clear: Clinton was the runaway victor.

Now let’s examine the text. Clinton-beat reporter Jonathan Martin’s piece led like a David Brock press release:

Facing off against Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday night, Hillary Clinton did not comport herself like someone who had just suffered a landslide loss in New Hampshire. She did not raise her voice or express anger. She did not demonize Mr. Sanders or suggest he would be a dangerous choice for Democrats. She remained calm as he pungently sought to highlight their differences.
Instead, she behaved like someone heading into Nevada and South Carolina with every reason to be confident and little to fear but her own missteps.

Okay, that’s all very subjective. Punchy, good for a counter-narrative, but still just a guy’s opinion who happens to work for the New York Times.

The text of the second story is pretty down-the-middle reporting, but the framing is entirely Clinton-centric, which isn’t a major journalistic crime, but is worth noting in the context of the Times' other coverage.

The third story is by far the goofiest, settling on a “critics” consensus based on eight cherry-picked tweets.

In the aftermath, many commentators and critics felt that Mr. Sanders held his own on domestic affairs, but that Mrs. Clinton outshined him on foreign policy and scored some points by cornering him as a single-issue candidate.

“Many commentators”. “Many” is what’s known as a weasel word. Weasel words, according to Merriam-Webster, are used to “create an impression that a specific and/or meaningful statement has been made, when only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated”

http://www.alternet.org/media/new-yo...ercial-clinton

so the establishment paper endorses, promotes, infomercials for the establishment candidate


S

[CosmicCowboy]

best sound bite of the night (from Bernie)

*Hillary* "When I'm in the White House blabbety blabbety blab"

Ms. Clinton, you aren't in the White House yet.

[boutons_deux]

"When I'm President ..." is said by nearly all of them

[CosmicCowboy]

"When I'm President ..." is said by nearly all of them

C'mon admit it Boo...you are in to that Bernie Bukkake...

[rmt]

I liked, "'One of us ran against Barack Obama, I was not that candidate' when she claimed Bernie was calling Obama weak, etc.

[boutons_deux]

C'mon admit it Boo...you are in to that Bernie Bukkake...

Nothing to admit, parasite, I'm clearly a Bernie supporter.

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial ins utions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the iden ies of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports.

“If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons.

“Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a ulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report.

“The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million.

And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.”

Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.

But even that wouldn’t make accepting the $1.5 million excusable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...g-fees/400067/

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Clinton Says She'll End Private Prisons, Stop Accepting Their Money

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pledged Thursday to ban the use of private prison companies if elected president, and in the meantime will stop accepting campaign contributions from those corporations and the lobbyists who work for them.

All previous donations will be given to charity, the former secretary of state's campaign said.

"Hillary Clinton has said we must end the era of mass incarceration, and as president, she will end private prisons and private immigrant detention centers," campaign spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement Thursday night. "She believes that we should not contract out this core responsibility of the federal government, and when we’re dealing with a mass incarceration crisis, we don’t need private industry incentives that may contribute -- or have the appearance of contributing -- to over-incarceration."

Hinojosa said the policy against accepting contributions tied to private prison companies "is only one of many ways that she believes we need to rebalance our criminal justice and immigration systems."

Lobbying firms that work for two major private prison giants, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, gave $133,246 to the Ready for Hillary PAC,according to Vice. Those companies operate a number of criminal and immigrant detention facilities, some of which have been plagued by allegations of abuse and poor treatment of detainees.

Her campaign and PAC are not the only ones to take money with private prison connections. VICE reported that the PAC and campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had received $133,450 from private prison companies and their lobbying groups, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and his PAC had received $21,700 from lobbying groups that work for GEO and CCA.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0ec0a389418ec

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Clinton Says She's Unaware Of Receiving $150,000 In Oil & Gas Contributions

"Have I? OK, well, I'll check on that."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0b958f655fc87

yep, it's just so hard to keep track of the $10Ms from BigCrop, BigCarbon, BigFinance. there SO MUCH OF IT!

and of course, they give in full expectation that they will receive in returns $100Bs more. The ROI on purchases of politicians can be in 100%s.

[boutons_deux]

Hillary Clinton’s Ties to Henry Kissinger Come Back to Haunt Her



When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she relied on Henry A. Kissinger’s counsel. He would send her “astute observations about foreign leaders” and “written reports on his travels.” She would joke with him that smartphones would have made his covert Cold War trip to Beijing impossible.

The two diplomats had a cordial, warm and respectful relationship, based on writings about their interactions during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.

“Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in The Washington Post, in a positive review of his book “World Order.”

The friendship came back to haunt her in the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday night, when Senator Bernie Sanders pointedly questioned Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy judgment, saying President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary of state had enabled genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot.

“I’m proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Mr. Sanders said.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/firs...imes&smtyp=cur

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Top 10 Most Inhuman Henry Kissinger Quotes

1. Soviet Jews: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” (link)

2. Bombing Cambodia: “[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies or anything that moves.” (link)

3. Bombing Vietnam: "It's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs ... I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month ... each plane can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could carry." (link)

4. Khmer Rouge: “How many people did (Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary) kill? Tens of thousands? You should tell the Cambodians (i.e., Khmer Rouge) that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before.” (Nov. 26, 1975 meeting with Thai foreign minister)

5. Dan Ellsberg: “Because that son-of-a- —First of all, I would expect—I know him well—I am sure he has some more information---I would bet that he has more information that he’s saving for the trial. Examples of American war crimes that triggered him into it…It’s the way he’d operate….Because he is a de able bas .” (Oval Office tape, July 27, 1971)

6. Robert McNamara: “Boohoo, boohoo … He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty. ” (Pretending to cry, rubbing his eyes.)

7. Assassination: “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” (Statement at a National Security Council meeting, 1975)

8. Chile: “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” (link)

9. Illegality-Uncons utionality: “The illegal we do immediately. The uncons utional takes a little longer.” (from March 10, 1975 meeting with Turkish foreign minister Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey)

10. On His Own Character: “Americans like the cowboy … who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else … This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.” (November 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci)

http://www.alternet.org/world/top-10...ssinger-quotes

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Henry Kissinger’s War Crimes Are Central to the Divide Between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders

Kissinger is an amazing and appropriate lens through which to see what’s at stake in the choice between Clinton and Sanders. But that only works, of course, if you understand who Kissinger is — which surely many of today’s voters don’t.

But Kissinger is reviled by many left-leaning observers of foreign policy. They consider him an amoral egotist who enabled dictators, extended the Vietnam War, laid the path to the Khmer Rouge killing fields, stage-managed a genocide in East Timor, overthrew the democratically elected left-wing government in Chile, and encouraged Nixon to wiretap his political adversaries.

SANDERS: I find — I mean, it’s just a very different, you know, historical perspective here. Kissinger was one of those people during the Vietnam era who talked about the domino theory. Not everybody remembers that. You do. I do. The domino theory, you know, if Vietnam goes, China, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. That’s what he talked about, the great threat of China.
And then, after the war, this is the guy who, in fact, yes, you’re right, he opened up relations with China, and now pushed various type of trade agreements, resulting in American workers losing their jobs as corporations moved to China. The terrible, authoritarian, Communist dictatorship he warned us about, now he’s urging companies to shut down and move to China. Not my kind of guy.

Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He

(1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years;

(2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos;

(3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists;

(4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh;

(5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House;

(6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan;

(7) began the U.S.’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran;

(8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead;

(9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and

(10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level. Read all about it inKissinger’s Shadow!
A full tally hasn’t been done, but a back-of-the-envelope count would attribute 3, maybe 4 million deaths to Kissinger’s actions, but that number probably undercounts his victims in southern Africa.

Pull but one string from the current tangle of today’s multiple foreign policy crises, and odds are it will lead back to something Kissinger did between 1968 and 1977.

Over-reliance on Saudi oil? That’s Kissinger.

Blowback from the instrumental use of radical Islam to destabilize Soviet allies? Again, Kissinger.

An unstable arms race in the Middle East? Check, Kissinger.

Sunni-Shia rivalry? Yup, Kissinger.

The impasse in Israel-Palestine? Kissinger. Radicalization of Iran? “ An act of folly” was how veteran diplomat George Ball described Kissinger’s relationship to the Shah.

Militarization of the Persian Gulf? Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger.

The late essayist Christopher Hitchins examined Kissinger’s war crimes in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. He listed the key elements of his case:

1. The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina.

2. Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh.

3. The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior cons utional officer in a democratic nation — Chile — with which the United States was not at war.

4. Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus.

5. The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor

6. Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C.

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/12/...ernie-sanders/

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Hillary Is a High-Ranking Member of the DC Power Elite — and That's Why She Can't Comprehend Bernie’s Revolution

The American Dream is sliding off the cliff and Hillary is still talking about women’s empowerment — a cry that was fresh 40 years ago.

Last year, the Clintons couldn’t believe their good fortune. They were going to face a “democratic socialist” from the marginal state of Vermont and cruise to victory. It would be a romp, with Hillary winning the primaries and then going full mainstream against a reactionary, out of touch Republican opponent on the way to the White House.

As many commentators are saying now, a serious miscalculation was at the heart of Hillary’s plan. Clinton, Cruz, Bush, Rubio and others are all part of the wealthy elite. Although Trump is as well, he is channeling the anger of the working class American. Bernie Sanders also gets it. He knows what happened to the American dream.

Hillary Clinton thinks, in her gut, that America is a prosperous country, and that the policies that led to our prosperity should simply be continued, that they work. But this hasn’t been true since the 1970’s, back when America was the world’s economic powerhouse, with a manufacturing base that was the envy of the world, highly paid unionized workers and a booming housing market.

The American dream started coming off the rails with the election of Ronald Reagan who, as David Stockman noted in his book, The Triumph of Politics, was duped into giving away the store to the military industrial complex.

Defense spending soared into the stratosphere, and the “deep state” — which is what writer Mike Lofgren calls the alliance between the defense industry, politicians and Wall Street — began playing a larger and larger role in government.

9/11 sealed the deal, as the national security establishment — what Stockman calls “the war party” — consolidated its power and influence, setting the stage for the global surveillance state.

The deep state has another aspect: It bleeds the American taxpayer, taking money to be “the world’s policeman” and enriching contractors, politicians, Wall Street and the arms industry, while the people get little in return (unless they happen to be working for those same companies.) All of the candidates for president are clients of the deep state and deeply beholden to it — except for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Going hand in hand with the deep state, what Bill Clinton and George Bush enabled was the “financialization” of everything.

Regulations on banks came off, credit card interest rates were free to soar, and the American public was sold on investing in an ever-expanding housing market.

Private prisons multiplied, payday loan companies and fraudulent colleges like the University of Phoenix sprang up.

Vulture capitalism spread its wings.

This whole infrastructure of greed is deeply tied into the political establishment, which is why even today,

Hillary won’t attack the pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, the prison industry, big oil, the pay day loan industry and the rest, head-on.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillary-high-ranking-member-dc-power-elite-and-thats-why-she-cant-comprehend-bernies

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Key Members of Hillary Clinton Team Lobbied Against Bills She Now Touts as National Accomplishments

As she campaigns for the presidency, Hillary Clinton is heralding the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, yet she has infused her staff with former lobbyists and consultants who did all they could to block the two reforms.

The Intercept has published a report saying that Clinton’s team of strategists and fundraisers includes a number of former consultants and lobbyists for businesses that worked against Obama’s proposal for health care reform.

According to the website, one of Clinton’s biggest fundraisers,

Heather Podesta, worked with several health insurance companies to spend $86 million in TV and radio ads opposing Obamacare.

The Intercept reports:

Consultants associated with the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying firm that has been retained by business interests to defeat a variety of progressive reforms, are playing a major role in the Clinton campaign.

Charles Baker III, the co-founder of Dewey, is a senior strategist and the campaign’s chief administrative officer.

Michael Whouley, another Dewey co-founder, played an early role in advising Clinton’s plan for the current campaign by convening some of the very first strategy sessions.

Senior Dewey officials Jill Alper and Minyon Moore are also close advisers and fundraisers for Clinton, while at least four other Clinton officials have worked at Dewey within the last four years. In addition, disclosures show that Clinton’s Super PACs Priorities USA Action and Correct the Record have also paid Dewey Square Group for a variety of services in this election.

Dewey, for instance, worked on behalf of the health insurance industry during the health reform debate, specifically to block the changes to Medicare Advantage that were critical for financing the Affordable Care Act. Medicare Advantage, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to use plans administered by private insurers, had long served as a cash cow for the health insurance industry. By one estimate, insurance companies over-billed the government by nearly $70 billion in improper payments over just a five year period.

Dewey, which had been tapped by health insurers to block cuts from the program starting in 2007, continued during the Obama era to lobby to protect Medicare Advantage, even as such reforms became a major part of how Democrats and the Obama administration sought to finance the Affordable Care Act.

One of the more deceptive components of the Dewey lobbying strategy was uncovered when an editor at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Eagle-Tribune realized that the firm had worked quietly to place letters to the editor against cuts to Medicare Advantage under the names of elderly Massachusetts residents without their knowledge or consent.

Dewey received $772,110 in 2009 from the National Restaurant Association, which has lobbied against raising the minimum wage.

Members of Clinton’s staff also lobbied against the Dodd-Frank Act, aimed at Wall Street corruption. That legislation was inspired by the financial crisis of 2008 that wiped out the savings of many Americans.

In December, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Clinton wrote: “People’s savings are being restored. And we have tough new rules on the books, including the Dodd-Frank Act, that protect consumers and curb recklessness on Wall Street.”

Yet The Intercept found that Clinton’s chief pollster and strategist, Joel Benenson of the Benenson Strategy Group, lobbied on behalf of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and worked for many years to weaken a wide variety of Dodd-Frank reforms.

Another campaign adviser, Steve Elmendorf, was at one time retained by Goldman Sachs and tapped by Citigroup to help push through a bill that would have allowed banks to avoid financial regulations by moving certain operations overseas.

And Jeff Berman, who is leading Clinton’s delegate strategy, previously worked for TransCanada as a lobbyist for the Keystone XL project. The oil pipeline’s extension was eventually blocked when Obama rejected it late last year.


Hillary Clinton’s embrace of Washington lobbyists offers a frightening picture of what her administration might look like if she is elected.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartothegrou..._touts_as_nati

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iow, Hillary's

"everything is great (I'm a millionaire of many$10Ms and a moderate Repug), just needs incremental changes"

means NOTHING will change.

Hillary and her staff will make Obama putting an investment banker as his chief of staff, and a corporate defense lawyer as head of DoJ look, like a hippy.