That approach, which Mrs. Clinton called “economic statecraft,” emerged in discussions with Robert Hormats, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations and became an undersecretary of state. “One of the very first items was, how do we strengthen the role of the State Department in economic policy?” he says.
Early in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, according to Mr. Hormats, Microsoft’s then Chief Research Officer Craig Mundie asked the State Department to send a ranking official to a fourth annual meeting of U.S. software executives and Chinese government officials about piracy and Internet freedom. Mr. Hormats joined the December 2009 meeting in Beijing.
Mr. Hormats says there was no relation between Microsoft’s donations and the State Department’s participation in the China conference.
Before every overseas trip, says Mr. Hormats, the former undersecretary of state, he helped prepare a list of U.S. corporate interests for Mrs. Clinton to advocate while abroad.
– From the Wall Street Journal article: Hillary Clinton’s Complex Corporate Ties
If you can’t beat em, mock em. That’s essentially my motto going into the imperial spectacle known as the 2016 American Presidential election. With another Bush and another Clinton likely on the ballot, there’s basically only one candidate running, and I plan on proving this in no uncertain terms over the next couple of years.
Recently, I started a series known as “Jeb Bush Exposed” (read part 1 and part 2), so it’s only fair that I create a similar category for Hilary. Going forward, I plan on naming all future exposes on these two cronies in that manner, so all the stories are easily accessible as we head into next year’s charade.
Hilary Clinton’s biggest weakness is that she doesn’t actually stand for anything other than money and power. Glenn Greenwald pointed this out perfectly in last year’s post: Glenn Greenwald on Hilary Clinton: “Soulless, Principle-Free, Power Hungry…” Here’s an excerpt:
Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.
In light of Hilary not harboring any genuine principles, she needs to fall back on the tainted and phony Democratic brand of “standing up for the little guy.” The only problem is that Hilary Clinton might be the most connected human being alive in America to large mega-corporations.
As you will see from the following Wall Street Journal article, she spent much of her time as Secretary of State lobbying overseas for the economic interests of behemoth corporations from ExxonMobil to Boeing; and from GE to Wal-Mart. All of this masterminded by former Goldman Sachs chairman, Robert Hormats. Coincidentally, these corporations turned around and gave very generously to the Clinton Global Initiative.
From the WSJ:
Among recent secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton was one of the most aggressive global cheerleaders for American companies, pushing governments to sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants such as General Electric Co. , Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Boeing Co.
At the same time, those companies were among the many that gave to the Clinton family’s global foundation set up by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during her tenure donated a total of more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of public and foundation disclosures.
As Mrs. Clinton prepares to embark on a race for the presidency, she has a web of connections to big corporations unique in American politics—ties forged both as secretary of state and by her family’s charitable interests. Those relationships are emerging as an issue for Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential campaign as income disparity and other populist themes gain early attention.
Mrs. Clinton’s connections to the companies don’t end there. As secretary of state, she created 15 public-private partnerships coordinated by the State Department, and at least 25 companies contributed to those partnerships. She also sought corporate donations for another charity she co-founded, a nonprofit women’s group called Vital Voices.
The foundation resumed soliciting foreign governments after Mrs. Clinton left the State Department. The official name of the foundation was changed to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Mrs. Clinton became a director. All told, the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates have collected donations and pledges from all sources of more than $1.6 billion, according to their tax returns. On Thursday, the foundation said that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president, it would consider whether to continue accepting foreign-government contributions as part of an internal policy review.
Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian says the group’s work helps millions around the world and its donors have a history of supporting such work. “So when companies get involved with the Clinton Foundation it’s for only one reason, because they know our work matters,” he says.
That approach, which Mrs. Clinton called “economic statecraft,” emerged in discussions with Robert Hormats, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker who has worked in Democratic and Republican administrations and became an undersecretary of state. “One of the very first items was, how do we strengthen the role of the State Department in economic policy?” he says.
Naturally, a Goldman guy is closely involved.
Early in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure, according to Mr. Hormats, Microsoft’s then Chief Research Officer Craig Mundie asked the State Department to send a ranking official to a fourth annual meeting of U.S. software executives and Chinese government officials about piracy and Internet freedom. Mr. Hormats joined the December 2009 meeting in Beijing.
Mr. Hormats says there was no relation between Microsoft’s donations and the State Department’s participation in the China conference.
Of course not. Move along serfs.
In 2012, the Clinton Foundation approached GE about working together to expand a health-access initiative the company had launched four years earlier, says a GE spokeswoman.
That same year, Mrs. Clinton lobbied for GE to be selected by the Algerian government to build power plants in that country. She went to Algiers that October and met with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. “I saw an opportunity for advancing prosperity in Algeria and seizing an opportunity for American business,” she explained in her book.
A month after Mrs. Clinton’s trip, the Clinton Foundation announced the health-initiative partnership with GE, the company’s first involvement with the foundation. GE eventually contributed between $500,000 and $1 million to the partnership.
The following September, GE won the contracts with the Algerian government, saying they marked “some of its largest power agreements in company history.”
Ben Schreiber of the environmental group Friends of the Earth says: “We’ve long been concerned about the ties that Hillary Clinton has to the oil-and-gas industry.”
Both Exxon and Chevron are supporters of the Clinton Foundation. Chevron donated $250,000 in 2013. A Chevron spokesman said the Clinton charity “is one of many programs and partnerships that the company has had or maintains across a number of issue areas and topics pertinent to our business.”In October 2009, Mrs. Clinton went to bat for aerospace giant
Boeing, which was seeking to sell jets to Russia, by flying to Moscow to visit the Boeing Design Center. “I made the case that Boeing’s jets set the global gold standard, and, after I left, our embassy kept at it,” she wrote in her book.
About seven months later, in June 2010, Russia agreed to purchase 50 Boeing 737s for $3.7 billion, choosing Boeing over Europe’s Airbus Group NV.
Two months later, Boeing made its first donation to the Clinton Foundation—$900,000 to help rebuild Haiti’s public-education system. Overall, Boeing has contributed around $1.1 million to the Clinton Foundation since 2010.
Before every overseas trip, says Mr. Hormats, the former undersecretary of state, he helped prepare a list of U.S. corporate interests for Mrs. Clinton to advocate while abroad.
During Mrs. Clinton’s three trips to India, she urged the government tokill a ban on stores that sell multiple brands, a law aimed at department stores or big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Just keep all that in mind when she absurdly and inevitably attempts to play the populist card.
For related articles, see:
The Most Horrifying Music Video You’ll Ever See – A Country Song Dedicated to Hilary Clinton
This is Why Rand Paul is Hilary Clinton’s Worst Nightmare
Glenn Greenwald on Hilary Clinton: “Soulless, Principle-Free, Power Hungry…”
How the Washington D.C. Money Machine Stopped a Documentary on Hilary Clinton
Jeb Bush to Present the “Liberty Medal” to Hillary Clinton
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
Clinton Exposed.
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Hillary is aging so poorly Bill won’t even hit it anymore.
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I give up, the Clinton Machine has a block on all pictures of Hillary. You gotta handed it to the Clinton’s, they know how to play the game and do it well
Did Hitlery lobby for corporations as SOS?
Does a cat have an ass? Does the Pope shit in the woods? Are bears Catholic?
She’s a Clinton…..it’s what they do……….like the sun will come up tomorrow.
Your new POTUS 2016.
She’s just another puppet on a string. Perhaps a more distasteful one, but a puppet, none the less.
She merely fronts for the corporate and big money interests who really call the shots at stratospheric levels.
It’s part of the game with bigger and bigger sharks swimming among quite numerous but smaller and smaller bait.
It will not fold up and collapse well at all.
If you wish to read one good “think book” this year, read “The Meaning of Human Existence” by E. O. Wilson. A huge and broad undertaking at which he does a pretty good job.
MA
The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has quietly dropped its ban on foreign contributions and is accepting donations from the governments of “the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.” The Journal’s conclusion: Since 2001 “the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments.”
Needless to say, the gargantuan troll-like conflict of interest that arises as soon as the foundation of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States begins accepting money from overseas is apparent to every sentient being on the planet except members of the Clinton family and the growing number of advisers, consultants, strategists, pollsters, groupies, allies, and hangers-on whose livelihood depends on that family’s political success. “These contributions,” the foundation said in a statement to the Journal, “are helping improve the lives of millions of people across the world, for which we are grateful…”
…In its 14 years of existence the Clinton Foundation has raised a sum approaching $2 billion. A McClatchy analysis found that 40 percent of contributions in the last decade have come from foreign sources. “It’s a massive sum of money—though no one has done a story yet on how overseas programs they fund have worked,” Maggie Haberman of the New York Times noted on Twitter. Gee I wonder why. It’s almost as though the political press is morally and intellectually disarmed whenever it hears words like “global dialogue” and “wellness” and “economic development” and “women and girls,” as if the gritty, cynical, I’ve-seen-it-all correspondents for our major newspapers and networks turn to bubbling bittersweet goo as soon as some Clinton flack tells them, “We are working with global partners to build an evidence-based case for the full participation of women and girls in the 21st century,” and their eyes fall on a picture of a cute, vibrant, and diverse group of young women surrounding the aging potentate and her daughter and former NBC News special correspondent. What it would take the Post or the Times to dispatch a reporter to Ishmaelia or wherever to examine, in skeptical detail, just where the Clinton money is going, to report on the precise state of the President Peter Mutharika Water Reclamation Plant and Convention Center, is beyond me. Certainly the reports from Haiti are not encouraging. Even the Journal is not clear when the Clinton Foundation dropped its ban on foreign money, a mystery the Foundation itself does not seem to be in any hurry to solve.
Watch the music video. It will ruin your day for a moment then make you laugh
“Watch the music video. It will ruin your day for a moment then make you laugh.” — Hollow man
Not much to laugh about, actually.
As if country music wasn’t bad enough …. now you REALLY have cuntry music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rfU3hI8ML30
ballotpedia.org lists the latest top possible 2016 United States presidential candidates, according to media attention and public comments made about the presidential election. (Listed alphabetically)
DEMS
Joe Biden
Hillary Clinton
Andrew Cuomo
Kirsten Gillibrand
Amy Klobuchar
Martin O’Malley
Bernie Sanders
Brian Schweitzer
Mark Warner
Elizabeth Warren
Jim Webb
REPUBS
Jeb Bush
Ben Carson
Chris Christie
Ted Cruz
Nikki Haley
Mike Huckabee
Bobby Jindal
John Kasich
Peter King
Rand Paul
Mike Pence
Rick Perry
Marco Rubio
Brian Sandoval
Rick Santorum
Scott Walker
Scary fucking list — other than Rand Paul and Amy Klobuchar (cuz I don’t know who the fuck she is)
The USA!USA!USA tradition WILL continue … the next piece of shit will be worse than the previous piece of shit … hard as that might be to believe.
Shit. Amy is from Minnesota … folks who elect professional wrastlers and ass-clown comedians.
Nothing good (politics) comes from Minnesota.
Scratch her off the list.
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Jeb Bush Believes Unconstitutional NSA Spying Is “Hugely Important”
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
In some ways I’m actually looking forward to the imperial spectacle that will be the Jeb Bush vs. Hillary Clinton Presidential contest in 2016. Just like an alcoholic or drug addict is often unable to shake the cycle of addiction until hitting rock bottom, so too it seems the American peasantry must hit political rock bottom before becoming fed up enough to do something about it; and I can’t imagine a more odious, absurd scenario than being forced to chose between another Bush and another Clinton.
I’ve given Hillary a lot of grief here at Liberty Blitzkrieg, primarily because she’s an oligarch coddling embarrassment (links at the end). Jeb Bush hasn’t received the same treatment as of yet, but I’m going to do my best to make up for lost time.
Just yesterday, I highlighted his unsurprising neocon foreign policy chops in the piece, Jeb Bush Exposed Part 1 – His Top Advisors Will Be the Architects of His Brother’s Iraq War. Specifically, we learned that:
According to Reuters’ Steve Holland, Bush has tapped a “diverse” roster of former George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush officials to advise his burgeoning campaign on foreign policy, including key architects of the 2002 invasion of Iraq.
The list of advisers provided to Reuters by a campaign aid includes Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, as well as former George W. Bush Homeland Security Secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, and Bush adviser Meghan O’Sullivan.
Imperial war monger: Check. What about his view on let’s say the 4th Amendment of the Constitution? He doesn’t seem to want to be bothered with such trivialities. The Wall Street Journal reports that:
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016, said Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program that collects bulk telephone records was “hugely important,” throwing his support behind the practice as Congress debates whether to reauthorize or limit it.
At an event on foreign policy hosted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Mr. Bush, a Republican, said, “For the life of me, I don’t understand the debate” over the metadata program.
The program’s many supporters say it helps the U.S. government prevent terrorist attacks. But its critics believe it exists with little oversight and few boundaries and could allow the government to spy on U.S. citizens.
Interesting, how did the Wall Street Journal fail to mention that former NSA chief Keith Alexander admitted that the spying hasn’t achieved much of anything. In the 2013 article, NSA Chief Admits “Only One or Perhaps Two” Terror Plots Stopped by Spy Program, we learned that:
The Obama administration’s credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as the chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism successes of the government’s warrantless bulk collection of all Americans’ phone records.
Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.
As we know, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Back to the WSJ.
Mr. Bush’s comments are significant, as the legal authority that allows the program to exist is set to expire in June. Congress is weighing whether to rework the program in a way that would strip the NSA of some of its powers.
Mr. Bush’s support for the metadata program puts him in sharp contrast with another likely GOP White House candidate, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Mr. Bush – as he made evident during his comments in Chicago – supports more government spending on the military and a broader military influence.
Reason accurately covered Jeb’s absurd position in its piece:, Jeb Bush: “I don’t understand the debate” Over the NSA’s Bulk Phone Records Collection Program. Here are some excerpts:
Does Jeb Bush truly not understand that some people—indeed, quite a lot of people—might find a vast, secret, program to spy on millions of citizens to be a little bit creepy? That many in the public might understandably find this to be a potential government overreach, or an abuse of federal power?
Perhaps he really doesn’t. If so, that should disqualify him from the GOP’s presidential nomination before his run even officially starts. But I doubt that he is truly as flummoxed by concerns about the program as his dismissive remark suggests.
Instead, I suspect he knows all too well what the program entails, what its critics argue, and why it has remained a topic of controversy for so long. But Jeb Bush does not want to defend the particulars of the initiative so much as he wants to publicly stand by his brother’s administration and then settle the issue by declaring that it is not one. Despite his declaration yesterday that he is his “own man,” and not his brother or father, he would not even broach the possibility that his brother’s program might be deserving of any critique.
Put another way: Jeb Bush claims he doesn’t understand the debate because he doesn’t want there to be a debate. But there is one, and if he is to run for president, he will have to take part in it.
BINGO. It’s like a Jedi mind trick. “These are not the drones you’re looking for…there is no debate, what debate, move along peasants…”
If our choices are between a clinton or a bush, I give the fuck up. I will no longer join the fools game of voting.
I will read, I will continue to donate, but I will no longer participate in voting, what will be the point in a pointless rigged system.
(which reminds me of my goal to donate once a month)
Jeb Bush is disqualified due to his actions in the Terri Schiavo matter while gov of Florida. What he did was unconstitutional. Hitlary on the other hand is disqualified due to her total bungling of the Benghazi killings. Looks to me like the only real choice is Rand Paul, but I have a real problem with how he panders to the Bible thumpers (sorry BB).
Klobuchar – isn’t that the name of the scary old broad in Young Frankenstein.