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Gary Edwards

Dear Lou Dobbs, Who Owns the Federal Reserve? - 0 views

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    This is the March of 2008 repub of the infamous Dear Lou letter, written by Jesse Richard. Tracks exactly with the March 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns and the subsequent Federal Reserve - US Treasury bailout. IMHO, the Bear Stearns bailout and conversion was a test run to determine how the public and Congress would react. The key factor was the massive conversion of private Bankster debt to public (taxpayer) debt. Another way of saying this: socialize the losses and privatize the profits. The go between in this mechanism is the secret connection between the Federal Reserve cartel of private Banksters, and the US Treasury. Congress, through war and social programs, racks up enormous debt. Currently about $4 Billion of debt per day. This is the amount of spending beyond taxes and other revenue sources. To fund this debt, the Treasury sells bonds, most of which are currently being purchased by Banksters and Financial interests closely associated with a cascading network of interconnected Federal Reserve shareholders. Foreign sovereign bond purchasers like China and Japan mostly dropped out of participation in the Treasury auctions in 2008, as they started dumping US Treasury holdings. Today, the circle of USA debt works like this; the Federal Reserve provides member Banksters and International Bankster associates with Trillions of dollars of near interest free money ($16.1 Trillion in 2009-2010). The Banksters then purchase the US treasury bonds at whatever the auction interest rate turns out to be. In essence, we are loaning ourselves the money to pay off our government debt, with interest. Exactly as Mr Richard claims in his infamous letter. excerpt: Let me ask you a simple question: what country in its right mind would create a system that would force it to lend itself money and have to repay the money WITH INTEREST? What country would charge itself interest? What nation would put itself out of business by making it bankrupt because
Paul Merrell

5 Biggest Revelations from Latest Podesta Emails - 0 views

  • Wikileaks’ releases of the now infamous “Podesta Emails” have become such a regular occurrence, it’s becoming difficult to keep up. 11 “batches” have been released so far, bringing the total to 17,510 with an estimated 32,000 left to go before the US election takes place on November 8th. Though True Activist covered many of the earlier leaks, including the transcripts of Clinton’s private speeches and Clinton’s admission that the Saudis are funding ISIS, many other potentially damning revelations have since come to light. Here are the top 5 newest revelations from the last 3 email releases (#9 to 11).
  • 4. Wall Street Handpicked Obama’s Entire 2008 Cabinet Though most of the leaks thus far have been focused largely on Clinton and her campaign, some of the released emails have shed light on corruption within the Obama administration. In 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, an executive from CitiGroup emailed John Podesta one month before Podesta was named chairman of Obama’s 2008 transition team. CitiGroup, at the time, was the largest company and bank in the world by assets. The email from CitiGroup executive Michael Froman is titled “Lists.” The lists within, naming prospective candidates for cabinet positions, matches Obama’s 2008 Cabinet almost exactly. They also suggest choosing candidates of various ethnic minorities as a political tactic (see #3 above). The email proposed: Robert Gates as secretary of Defense; Eric Holder as attorney general; Janet Napolitano as secretary of Homeland Security; Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff; Susan Rice as United Nations ambassador; Arne Duncan as secretary of Education; Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services; Peter Orszag as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki as secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Melody Barnes as chief of the Domestic Policy Council. Froman offered Podesta with three possibilities for the position of Secretary of the Treasury: Robert Rubin and his close disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama ultimately chose Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson and then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, were those chiefly responsible for organizing the Wall Street bailout.
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    Citibank chose Obama's 2008 cabinet. Why am I not surprised?
Paul Merrell

The Dynastic Hillary Bandwagon » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

  • by RALPH NADER The Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 bandwagon has started very early and with a purpose. The idea is to get large numbers of endorsers, so that no Democratic Primary competitors dare make a move. These supporters include Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), financier George Soros and Ready for Hillary, a super PAC mobilizing with great specificity (already in Iowa). Given this early bird launch, it is important to raise the pressing question: Does the future of our country benefit from Hillary, another Clinton, another politician almost indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s militaristic, corporatist policies garnished by big money donors from Wall Street and other plutocratic canyons? There is no doubt the Clintons are syrupy political charmers, beguiling many naïve Democrats who have long been vulnerable to a practiced set of comforting words or phrases camouflaging contrary deeds.
  • Many Wall Streeters like Hillary Clinton. Expecting their ample contributions, and socializing with their business barons, it is not surprising that Hillary Clinton avoids going after the crooked casino capitalism that collapsed the economy, drained investors, pensions, jobs and taxpayer bailouts. Hillary Clinton is a far cry from the stalwart Senator Elizabeth Warren on this towering pattern of unaccountable corporate abuse.
  • A Clinton Coronation two years or more before the 2016 elections will stifle any broader choice of competitive primary candidates and more important a more progressive agenda supported by a majority of the American people.
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  • Maybe the sugarcoating is starting to wear. Columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times (Hillary in 2016? Not so Fast), reports her polls are starting to slump. Apparently, as Bruni suggests, she’s being seen as part of the old Washington crowd that voters are souring on. As I wrote to Hillary Clinton in early summer 2008, when calls were made by Obama partisans for her to drop out, no one should be told not to run. That’s everyone’s First Amendment right. However, not voting for her is the prudent decision.
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    Nice rundown by Ralph Nader of Hillary Clinton's many sins against the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party base. On the Clinton dynasty issue, Nader might have noted that daughter Chelsea married a former Goldman Sachs bankster in 2010, now a partner in a hedge fund. Chelsea for President in Auction 2020?
Paul Merrell

John Podesta Was Warned in 2008 to Start Encrypting Sensitive Emails - 0 views

  • John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman whose hacked emails have exposed countless Democratic secrets to the world, was warned in 2008 to start protecting sensitive documents “by at least encrypting them.” The warning came in an unencrypted email chain forwarded by Denis McDonough, then a top Obama campaign aide and currently the White House chief of staff, to Podesta, who at the time was running Obama’s transition team. McDonough initially sent the warning to Obama economic adviser Daniel Tarullo in an email on November 3, 2008, the day before President Obama’s election victory, presumably in response to a detailed November 2 memo Tarullo sent around about the upcoming G-20 meeting President Bush had called to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. McDonough wrote: I was struck by the memo partly because it was first I had heard of it but much more because it was a sensitive doc bumping around on public email addresses. There is a very real threat to the security of our documents (particularly sensitive ones like the one you worked up), and we need to protect them by at least encrypting them.
Paul Merrell

Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

  • Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016
  • The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
  • Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.
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  • Many on the Federal CIO Council could use some motivation, including the beleaguered State Department CIO, Steven Taylor. In office since April 3, 2013, Mr. Taylor is in charge of the Department's information resources and IT initiatives and services. He "is directly responsible for the Information Resource Management (IRM) Bureau's budget of $750 million, and oversees State's total IT/ knowledge management budget of approximately one billion dollars." Prior to his current position, Taylor served as Acting CIO from August 1, 2012, as the Department's Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) and Chief Technology Officer of Operations from June 2011, and was the Program Director for the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Toolset (SMART). While Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that because she sent her official e-mail to "government officials on their State or other .gov accounts ... the emails were immediately captured and preserved," a recent State Department Office of Inspector General report contradicts claims that DOS' e-mail archiving system, ironically named SMART, did so.
  • The report found that State Department "employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'" In 2011, while Taylor was State's Chief Technology Officer of Operations, State Department employees only created 61,156 record e-mails out of more than a billion e-mails sent. In other words, roughly .006% of DOS e-mails were captured electronically. And in 2013, while Taylor was State's CIO, a paltry seven e-mails were preserved from the Office of the Secretary, compared to the 4,922 preserved by the Lagos Consulate in Nigeria. Even though the report notes that its assessments "do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the State Department has not provided any estimation of the number of Clinton's e-mails that were preserved by recipients through the Department's anachronistic "print and file" system, or any other procedure.
  • The unfortunate silver lining of Hillary Clinton inappropriately appropriating public records as her own is that she likely preserved her records much more comprehensively than her State Department colleagues, most of whose e-mails have probably been lost under Taylor's IT leadership. 2008 reports by CREW, right, and the GAO, left, highlighted problems preserving e-mails. Click to enlarge. The bigger issue is that Federal IT gurus have known about this problem for years, and the State Department is not alone in not having done anything to fix it. A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard "print and file" approach by pointing out:
  • 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).
  • Troublingly, current Office of Management and Budget guidance does not require federal agencies to manage "all email records in an electronic format" until December 31, 2016. The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of "best practice" is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President's own Blackberry messages. The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the "ARMS" system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing its systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or misfiled.
  • s a result of two decades of the Archive's White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House. Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include: 2013 - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (for his "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?") 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failing to update FOIA regulations to comply with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics)
  • Rogue Band of Federal E-mail Users and Abusers Compounds Systemic Problems Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other federal officials who skirt or even violate federal laws designed to preserve electronic federal records compound e-mail management problems. Top government officials who use personal e-mail for official business include: Clinton; former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration; chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Rafael Moure-Eraso; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told ABC's This Week "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files." Others who did not properly save electronic federal records include Environmental Protection Agency former administrator Lisa Jackson who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; current EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama's political opponents "went missing or became destroyed."
  • "agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy;" yet GAO concluded even the "print and file" system was failing to capture historic records "for about half of the senior officials."
  • The destruction of other federal records was even more blatant. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency's defunct torture program ordered the destruction of key videos documenting it in 2005, claiming that "the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain;" Admiral William McRaven, ordered the immediate destruction of any emails about Operation Neptune Spear, including any photos of the death of Osama bin Laden ("destroy them immediately"), telling subordinates that any photos should have already been turned over to the CIA — presumably so they could be placed in operational files out of reach of the FOIA. These rogues make it harder — if not impossible — for agencies to streamline their records management, and for FOIA requesters and others to obtain official records, especially those not exchanged with other government employees. The US National Archives currently trusts agencies to determine and preserve e-mails which agencies have "deemed appropriate for preservation" on their own, often by employing a "print and file" physical archiving process for digital records. Any future reforms to e-mail management must address the problems of outdated preservation technology, Federal Records Act violators, and the scary fact that only one per cent of government e-mail addresses are saved digitally by the National Archive's recently-initiated "Capstone" program.
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    Complete with photos, names, titles, of the 41 federal department and independent agency CIOs. The March 2015 Insopector General report linked from the article belies Hillary Clinton's claim that all emails she sent to State Department staff had been preserved by the Department.   
Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks Cables Portray Saudi Arabia As A Cash Machine For Terrorists - 0 views

  • Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them. The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities. One cable details how the Pakistani militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks, used a Saudi-based front company to fund its activities in 2005. Meanwhile officials with the LeT’s charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, travelled to Saudi Arabia seeking donations for new schools at vastly inflated costs – then siphoned off the excess money to fund militant operations. Militants seeking donations often come during the hajj pilgrimage – “a major security loophole since pilgrims often travel with large amounts of cash and the Saudis cannot refuse them entry into Saudi Arabia”. Even a small donation can go far: LeT operates on a budget of just $5.25m (£3.25m) a year, according to American estimates.
  • Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the “ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority”. Washington is critical of the Saudi refusal to ban three charities classified as terrorist entities in the US. “Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas,” she said. There has been some progress. This year US officials reported that al-Qaida’s fundraising ability had “deteriorated substantially” since a government crackdown. As a result Bin Laden’s group was “in its weakest state since 9/11” in Saudi Arabia. Any criticisms are generally offered in private. The cables show that when it comes to powerful oil-rich allies US diplomats save their concerns for closed-door talks, in stark contrast to the often pointed criticism meted out to allies inPakistan and Afghanistan. Instead, officials at the Riyadh embassy worry about protecting Saudi oilfields from al-Qaida attacks. The other major headache for the US in the Gulf region is the United Arab Emirates. The Afghan Taliban and their militant partners the Haqqani network earn “significant funds” through UAE-based businesses, according to one report. The Taliban extort money from the large Pashtun community in the UAE, which is home to 1 million Pakistanis and 150,000 Afghans. They also fundraise by kidnapping Pashtun businessmen based in Dubai or their relatives.
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  • “Some Afghan businessmen in the UAE have resorted to purchasing tickets on the day of travel to limit the chance of being kidnapped themselves upon arrival in either Afghanistan or Pakistan,” the report says. Last January US intelligence sources said two senior Taliban fundraisers hadregularly travelled to the UAE, where the Taliban and Haqqani networkslaundered money through local front companies. One report singled out a Kabul-based “Haqqani facilitator”, Haji Khalil Zadran, as a key figure. But, Clinton complained, it was hard to be sure: the UAE’s weak financial regulation and porous borders left US investigators with “limited information” on the identity of Taliban and LeT facilitators. The lack of border controls was “exploited by Taliban couriers and Afghan drug lords camouflaged among traders, businessmen and migrant workers”, she said. In an effort to stem the flow of funds American and UAE officials are increasinglyco-operating to catch the “cash couriers” – smugglers who fly giant sums of money into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • In common with its neighbours Kuwait is described as a “source of funds and a key transit point” for al-Qaida and other militant groups. While the government has acted against attacks on its own soil, it is “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait”. Kuwait has refused to ban the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a charity the US designated a terrorist entity in June 2008 for providing aid to al-Qaida and affiliated groups, including LeT. There is little information about militant fundraising in the fourth Gulf country singled out, Qatar, other than to say its “overall level of CT co-operation with the US is considered the worst in the region”. The funding quagmire extends to Pakistan itself, where the US cables detail sharp criticism of the government’s ambivalence towards funding of militant groups that enjoy covert military support. The cables show how before the Mumbai attacks in 2008, Pakistani and Chinese diplomats manoeuvred hard to block UN sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa. But in August 2009, nine months after sanctions were finally imposed, US diplomats wrote: “We continue to see reporting indicating that JUD is still operating in multiple locations in Pakistan and that the group continues to openly raise funds”. JUD denies it is the charity wing of LeT.
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    Question for Hillary: Since you have known at least since December, 2009 that these Arab nations are funding al Qaida and its offshoot organizations, if elected will you impose strong sanctions on them to halt their funding of terrorism?
Paul Merrell

Bernie Sanders Introduces a Bill to Break Up the Big Banks | The Nation - 0 views

  • Senator Bernie Sanders announced legislation Wednesday that would break up the country’s largest financial institutions. It’s the third time he’s introduced such a measure, but this time around he wields the large microphone of a presidential candidate. The bill, titled the “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act,” will also be introduced in the House by Representatives Brad Sherman and Alan Grayson. If passed, it would require regulators at the Financial Stability Oversight Council to come up with a list of too-big-to-fail institutions whose failure would threaten the economy. One year later, those banks would be broken up by the secretary of the Treasury. Sure to be included on that list, based on the standards outlined in the legislation, would be JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.
  • It also unavoidably poses a test for Hillary Clinton, the other declared Democratic candidate. Much of the Draft Warren movement launched by progressive activists focused on the Massachusetts senator’s advocacy for combating the financial sector’s power generally, and breaking up the big banks in particular—and Clinton’s perceived weakness on that front.
  • Another likely Democratic candidate, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, wrote an op-ed in The Des Moines Register in March that also called for the biggest financial institutions to be broken up. Elsewhere, Senators Sherrod Brown and David Vitter have introduced similar legislation in the past, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Tom Hoenig also favors break-ups. Sanders and Sherman cited the danger posed to the economy by big banks, many of which are dramatically larger than they were before the 2008 financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase, for example, has increased its assets by $1.1 trillion since 2007. “In 2008 we learned that if Wall Street calls and says ‘bail us out or we’re going to take the economy down with us,’ that even if there is no statutory provision for bailouts, which there really isn’t today, Congress will pass as we did in 2008 a bill mandating the bailout,” said Sherman. “So ‘too big to fail’ means you will be bailed. That isn’t capitalism. That is socialism for the wealthy.”
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  • Sanders noted the large fines and settlement paid by big financial institutions since 2009, totaling $176 billion, and referenced former attorney general Eric Holder’s frank admission in 2013 that some banks are “too big to jail.” (Holder later walked back that comment, though no high-level executives have gone to prison for anything related to the financial crisis.)
  • The duo also described their belief that big Wall Street banks are crushing smaller and medium-sized banks. Sherman cited research from the International Monetary Fund that when big banks have implicit taxpayer backing, their access to capital is so much easier that it amounts to an extra $83 billion annually—something he argued was an unfair advantage over smaller banks that would be allowed to fail. The Independent Community Bankers of America, which represents 6,000 smaller banks, has endorsed the Sanders-Sherman legislation. Beyond just small banks, Sanders argued that enormous financial institutions harm the broader economy because those smaller banks are key sources of capital for small businesses. “Wall Street cannot be an island unto itself separate from the productive economy,” he said.
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    Sanders pushing Hillary to commit to doing something about the banks. Fat chance. But maybe he can show who she really is.
Paul Merrell

As Colombian Oil Money Flowed To Clintons, State Department Took No Action To Prevent L... - 0 views

  • For union organizers in Colombia, the dangers of their trade were intensifying. When workers at the country’s largest independent oil company staged a strike in 2011, the Colombian military rounded them up at gunpoint and threatened violence if they failed to disband, according to human rights organizations. Similar intimidation tactics against the workers, say labor leaders, amounted to an everyday feature of life. For the United States, these were precisely the sorts of discomfiting accounts that were supposed to be prevented in Colombia under a labor agreement that accompanied a recently signed free trade pact liberalizing the exchange of goods between the countries. From Washington to Bogota, leaders had promoted the pact as a win for all -- a deal that would at once boost trade while strengthening the rights of embattled Colombian labor organizers. That formulation had previously drawn skepticism from many prominent Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton. Yet as union leaders and human rights activists conveyed these harrowing reports of violence to then-Secretary of State Clinton in late 2011, urging her to pressure the Colombian government to protect labor organizers, she responded first with silence, these organizers say. The State Department publicly praised Colombia’s progress on human rights, thereby permitting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to flow to the same Colombian military that labor activists say helped intimidate workers.
  • At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation -- supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself -- Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.” The change of heart by Clinton and other Democratic leaders enabled congressional passage of a Colombia trade deal that experts say delivered big benefits to foreign investors like Giustra.
  • The Clinton Foundation, Giustra and the State Department did not respond to International Business Times' requests for comment. Pacific Rubiales has denied that it has engaged in any violence toward union organizers. As Hillary Clinton readies a national apparatus for her likely presidential campaign -- one that will surely depend upon the support of American labor unions -- her family’s relationship with Giustra and Pacific Rubiales, her reversal on the Colombia trade pact and her subsequent move to bless Colombia’s human rights record complicate her efforts to present herself as a champion of worker rights.  These issues were amplified this week when the AFL-CIO cited persistent violence against Colombian union organizers in its push to block a new 12-nation trade deal that Clinton has championed.
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    Bribery? We ain't talking about campaign donations here.
Paul Merrell

Lincoln Chafee Says He'll Push Hillary Clinton on Privacy, Hound Her on Iraq - US News - 0 views

  • Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor and senator, says the Democratic Party needs a presidential candidate who will champion Americans’ constitutional rights and scorn unnecessary wars – and that he may be the right person for the job. Chafee unexpectedly launched a presidential exploratory committee Thursday and tells U.S. News he intends to make civil liberties a major part of his likely campaign, with an anti-mass surveillance message similar to those trumpeted by Republican candidates Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. The National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of phone records violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, Chafee says, offering a sharp contrast to the difficult-to-discern and vague positions of other prospective Democratic candidates. “The words of the Fourth Amendment are very clear: You need a warrant. That’s strict language, and ‘no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,’” he says. “It’s not complicated.”
  • If he jumps into the race, Chafee says he will seek to pressure front-runner Hillary Clinton – expected to announce her candidacy on Sunday – to bend toward pro-civil liberties positions, though he says he wants to be fair and credits Clinton for previously opposing immunity for companies who allegedly complied with government surveillance. Chafee, from a prominent political family, was a liberal Republican in the U.S. Senate from 1999 to 2007. He was elected Rhode Island governor in 2010 as an independent and became a Democrat in 2013. He did not seek a second term and left office in January. As a senator, Chafee voted for the USA Patriot Act in 2001 (as did Clinton) and to renew expiring provisions of the act in 2006. He says he, like Patriot Act author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., was shocked to learn from whistleblower Edward Snowden that the executive branch interpreted the law as allowing the bulk collection of U.S. phone records. “I don't believe it granted any power to tap phones or any other surveillance without a warrant. That’s a definite stretch,” he says.
  • Chafee says he plans to announce a position on pardoning Snowden in the near future and says he’s also considering his position on marijuana legalization. Most Americans favor legalization, polls show, but few mainstream politicians do. “That’s another issue that will evolve during the campaign,” he says.
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  • One issue about which Chafee has firmly made up his mind is the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He voted against the invasion in 2002, while Clinton voted in favor – a move she later described as a mistake. Her vote helped Barack Obama rally progressives to his side and against Clinton in 2008, and Chafee says it still should make her an unacceptable pick. “It’s not a dead issue because we live with the effects of that vote today," he says. "The turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa is all because of that mistake we made in authorizing President Bush in 2002 to invade Iraq. Even though it was a long time ago, we live with the damage today.”
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    Hillary: wrong on war in Iraq. Wrong on war in Libya. Appointed neocons in the State Department who brought us war in Ukraine. Too trigger happy to be trusted to lead the nation. 
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Laura Gottesdiener, Security vs. Securities | TomDispatch - 0 views

  • I live in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood. I can more or less roll out of bed into the House of Representatives or the Senate; the majestic Library of Congress doubles as my local branch. (If you visit, spend a sunset on the steps of the library's Jefferson Building. Trust me.) You can't miss my place, three stories of brick painted Big Bird yellow. It's a charming little corner of the city. Each fall, the trees outside my window shake their leaves and carpet the street in gold. Nora Ephron, if she were alive, might've shot a scene for her latest movie in one of the lush green parks that bookend my block. The neighborhood wasn't always so nice. A few years back, during a reporting trip to China, I met an American consultant who had known Capitol Hill in a darker era. "I was driving up the street one time," he told me, "and walking in the opposite direction was this huge guy carrying an assault rifle. Broad daylight, no one even noticed. That's what kind of neighborhood it was." Nowadays, row houses around me sell for $1 million or more. I rent.
  • Washington's a fun place to live if you're young and employed. But as a recent Washington Post story pointed out, the nation's capital is slowly pricing out even its yuppies who, in their late-twenties and early-thirties, want to start families but can't afford it. "I hate to say it, but the facts show that the D.C. market is for people who are single and relatively affluent," a real estate researcher told the Post. The District's housing boom just won't stop; off go those new and expecting parents to the suburbs. And we're talking about the lucky ones. Elsewhere in the country, vulnerability in the housing market isn't a trend story; it's the norm. The Cedillo family, as Laura Gottesdiener writes today, went looking for their version of the American housing dream and thought they found it in Chandler, Arizona. They didn't know that the house they chose to rent rested on a shaky foundation -- not physically but financially. It had been one of thousands snapped up and rented out by massive investment firms making a killing in the wake of the housing collapse. As Gottesdiener -- who has put the new rental empires of private equity firms on the map for TomDispatch -- shows, the goal of such companies is to squeeze every dime of profit from their properties, from homes like the Cedillos', and that can lead to tragedy.
  • Drowning in Profits A Private Equity Firm, a Missing Pool Fence, and the Price of a Child’s Death By Laura Gottesdiener
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  • Security is a slippery idea these days -- especially when it comes to homes and neighborhoods. Perhaps the most controversial development in America’s housing “recovery” is the role played by large private equity firms. In recent years, they have bought up more than 200,000 mostly foreclosed houses nationwide and turned them into rental empires. In the finance and real estate worlds, this development has won praise for helping to raise home values and creating a new financial product known as a “rental-backed security.” Many economists and housing advocates, however, have blasted this new model as a way for Wall Street to capitalize on an economic crisis by essentially pushing families out of their homes, then turning around and renting those houses back to them. Caught in the crosshairs are tens of thousands of families now living in these private equity-owned homes.
  • The same month that the family rented the house at 1471 West Camino Court, Progress Residential purchased more homes in Maricopa Country than any other institutional buyer. Nationally, Blackstone, a private equity giant, has been the leading purchaser of single-family homes, spending upwards of $8 billion between 2012 and 2014 to purchase 43,000 homes in about a dozen cities. However, in May 2013, according to Michael Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, Progress Residential bought nearly 200 houses, surpassing Blackstone's buying rate that month in the Phoenix area. The condition and code compliance of these houses varies and is rarely known at the time of the purchase. Mike Anderson, who works for a bidding service contracted by Progress Residential and other private equity giants to buy houses at auctions, was sometimes asked to go out and look at the homes. But with the staggering buying rate -- up to 15 houses a day at the peak -- he couldn’t keep up. “There’d be too many, you couldn’t go out and look at them,” he said. “It’s just a gamble. You never know what you’ve got into.”
  • Global private equity firms have not been, historically, in the business of dealing with pool fences and the other hassles of maintaining single-family houses. But following the housing market collapse, the idea of buying a ton of these foreclosed properties suddenly made sense, at least to investors. Such private-equity purchases were to make money in three ways: buying cheap and waiting for the houses to gain value as the market bounced back; renting them out and collecting monthly rental payments; and promoting a financial product known as “rental-backed securities,” similar to the infamous mortgage-backed securities that triggered the housing meltdown of 2007-2008. Even though the buying of the private equity firms has finally slowed, economists (including those at the Federal Reserve) have expressed concern about the possibility that someday those rental-backed securities could even destabilize -- translation: crash -- the broader market.
  • ince Wall Street was overwhelmingly responsible for the original collapse of the housing market, many have characterized these new purchases as a land grab. In many ways, Progress CEO Donald Mullen is the poster-child for this argument. An investment banker who enjoyed a brief flurry of fame after losing a bidding war to Alec Baldwin at an art auction, he was the leader of a team at Goldman Sachs that orchestrated an infamous bet against the housing market. Known as “the big short,” it allowed that company to make “some serious money“ when the economy melted down, according to Mullen’s own emails. (They were released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2010.) As Kevin Roose of New York magazine has written, “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Paul Merrell

Jail the Bankers? Obama Has Been Their Staunchest Defender | Black Agenda Report - 0 views

  • The Obama administration is in a makeover frenzy, cosmetically cleaning up its corporatist act for the sake of the lame duck president’s legacy and endangered Democrats in Congress. Evils must be reapportioned in the public mind, so that the balance between lesser and greater abominations is perceived to tilt in the Democrats’ favor – a tough trick, given the beating the party’s base constituencies have taken since 2008 at the hands of the duopoly Dem-Rep tag-team. Historical revisionism is, thus, the order of the day.
  •  
    Righteous rant on Obama's makeover for Auction 2014. 
Paul Merrell

Clinton Foundation's Deep Financial Ties to Ukrainian Oligarch Revealed | Global Research - 0 views

  • Fortunately, I did decide to take a look and pretty soon my jaw absolutely hit the floor. Although the Wall Street Journal didn’t play up the connection, I was stunned to see that of all the oligarchs connected to foreign governments who donated to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State, Ukraine was at the very top. I thought this to be strange, but as I read on I just couldn’t believe how connected the main donor was to the current regime in power. Considering this is the main geopolitical hotspot on earth right now, many, many questions need to be asked.
  • Let’s also recall some of the more shady aspects of the new government in Ukraine by taking a look back at the post, Made in the USA – How the Ukrainian Government is Giving Away Citizenships so Foreigners Can Run the Country [17]. Here are a few excerpts:
  • Claims that the new government in Ukraine is nothing more than a Western puppet Parliament have been swirling around consistently since February. Nevertheless, I think it’s very significant that the takeover is now overt, undeniable and completely out in the open. Nothing proves this fact more clearly than the recent and sudden granting of citizenship to three foreigners so that they can take top posts in the government. At the top of the list is American, Natalie Jaresko, who runs private equity fund Horizon Capital. She will now be Ukraine’s Finance Minister, and I highly doubt she will be forced to pay the IRS Expatriation Tax [18] (one set of laws for the rich and powerful, another set of laws for the peasants). For Economy Minister, a Lithuanian investment banker, Aivaras Abromavicius, will take the reins. Health Minister will be Alexander Kvitashvili of Georgia. Now read the following from the WSJ [14]:
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  • The Clinton Foundation swore off donations from foreign governments when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. That didn’t stop the foundation from raising millions of dollars from foreigners with connections to their home governments, a review of foundation disclosures shows. Some donors have direct ties to foreign governments. One is a member of the Saudi royal family. Another is a Ukrainian oligarch and former parliamentarian. Others are individuals with close connections to foreign governments that stem from their business activities. Their professed policy interests range from human rights to U.S.-Cuba relations. All told, more than a dozen foreign individuals and their foundations and companies were large donors to the Clinton Foundation in the years after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, collectively giving between $34 million and $68 million, foundation records show. Some donors also provided funding directly to charitable projects sponsored by the foundation, valued by the organization at $60 million.
  • Former President Bill Clinton promised the Obama administration the foundation wouldn’t accept most foreign-government donations while his wife was secretary of state. The agreement didn’t place limits on donations from foreign individuals or corporations. Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union. In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. During Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department, Mr. Schoen, the pollster, registered as a lobbyist for Mr. Pinchuk, federal records show. Mr. Schoen said he and Mr. Pinchuk met several times with Clinton aides including Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American and then a State Department ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. The purpose, Mr. Schoen said, was to encourage the U.S. to pressure Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych to free his jailed predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko.
  • Mr. Schoen said his lobbying was unrelated to the donations. “We were not seeking to use any leverage or any connections or anything of the sort relating to the foundation,” he said. Please Schoen, don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
Paul Merrell

Is Hillary Double-Talking on Trade Deals? - Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • Did perennial Clinton rainmaker and current Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe let the cat out of the bag? The “cat” is the widely-held suspicion that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton isn’t really opposed to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The “bag” is the campaign narrative that frames her election year reversal on the controversial trade accord as the outcome of an honest re-examination of a deal that she once hailed as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” Just to add to the confusion, Hillary Clinton failed to declare her opposition to the TPP in her historic acceptance speech. Instead, she asked assembled Democrats to join her if they “believe that we should say ‘no’ to unfair trade deals” and “stand up to China.”
  • It was an understandable omission given the grievances of Bernie loyalists poised to pounce on her every misstep. By avoiding the minefield completely she disappointed union leaders and deferred the issue until she debates Donald Trump. Until then, she — and notable surrogates like economist Joseph Stiglitz — will try to convince a trade-weary public that she’s truly committed to renegotiating the increasingly unpopular deal. She’ll also be beating-back the ghost of trade deals past. United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams claims Hillary assured him during the primary that she’s also committed to reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Like the TPP, she was for it before she was against it. And like Hillary’s campaign promise to tweak NAFTA, McAuliffe suggested in an interview with Politico that – if she wins the White House – Clinton would make a few tweaks in the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal and then support it. These caveats fit into a long pattern of trade policy triangulation that raises the question: Is this policy reversal truly a switch or just another bait and switch? There is good reason for the buyer to beware.
Paul Merrell

Presidential poll: Donald Trump pulls ahead of Hillary Clinton - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton start the race to November 8 on essentially even ground, with Trump edging Clinton by a scant two points among likely voters, and the contest sparking sharp divisions along demographic lines in a new CNN/ORC Poll.Trump tops Clinton 45% to 43% in the new survey, with Libertarian Gary Johnson standing at 7% among likely voters in this poll and the Green Party's Jill Stein at just 2%.
  • The topsy-turvy campaign for the presidency has seen both Clinton and Trump holding a significant lead at some point in the last two months, though Clinton has topped Trump more often than not. Most recently, Clinton's convention propelled her to an 8-point lead among registered voters in an early-August CNN/ORC Poll. Clinton's lead has largely evaporated despite a challenging month for Trump, which saw an overhaul of his campaign staff, announcements of support for Clinton from several high-profile Republicans and criticism of his campaign strategy. But most voters say they still expect to see Clinton prevail in November, and 59% think she will be the one to get to 270 electoral votes vs. 34% who think Trump has the better shot at winning.
  • Neither major third party candidate appears to be making the gains necessary to reach the 15% threshold set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, with just three weeks to go before the first debate on September 26.The new poll finds the two major party candidates provoke large gaps by gender, age, race, education and partisanship. Among those likely to turn out in the fall, both candidates have secured about the same share of their own partisans (92% of Democrats back Clinton, 90% of Republicans are behind Trump) but independents give Trump an edge, 49% say they'd vote for him while just 29% of independent voters back Clinton. Another 16% back Johnson, 6% Stein.
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  • Women break for Clinton (53% to 38%) while men shift Trump's way (54% to 32%). Among women, those who are unmarried make up the core of her support, 73% of unmarried women back Clinton compared with just 36% of married women. Among men, no such marriage gap emerges, as both unmarried and married men favor Trump.Younger voters are in Clinton's corner (54% to 29% among those under age 45) while the older ones are more apt to back Trump (54% to 39% among those age 45 or older). Whites mostly support Trump (55% to 34%), while non-whites favor Clinton by a nearly 4-to-1 margin (71% to 18%). Most college grads back Clinton while those without degrees mostly support Trump, and that divide deepens among white voters. Whites who do not hold college degrees support Trump by an almost 3-to-1 margin (68% to 24%) while whites who do have college degrees split 49% for Clinton to 36% for Trump and 11% for Johnson.
  • Support for Johnson seems to be concentrated among groups where Clinton could stand to benefit from consolidating voters. Although direct comparison between the poll's two-way, head-to-head matchup and its four-way matchup doesn't suggest that Johnson is pulling disproportionately from either candidate, his supporters come mostly among groups where a strong third-party bid could harm Clinton's standing: Younger voters (particularly younger men), whites with college degrees, and independents, notably.
  • The poll follows several national polls in August suggesting that the margin between the two candidates had tightened following the conventions. A CNN Poll of Polls analysis released Friday showed that Clinton's lead had been cut in half when compared with the height of her convention bounce.Speaking to reporters aboard her campaign plane Tuesday, Clinton shrugged off a question about the CNN/ORC survey."I really pay no attention to polls. When they are good for me -- and there have been a lot of them that have been good for me recently -- I don't pay attention," Clinton said. "When they are not so good, I don't pay attention. We are on a course that we are sticking with."While enthusiasm for the campaign has continued to inch up, it remains well off the mark compared with this point in other recent presidential election years. In the new poll, 46% say they are extremely or very enthusiastic, compared with 57% at this point in 2012, 60% in early September of 2008 and 64% in September 2004.Further, nearly half of voters say they are less enthusiastic about voting in this election than they have been in previous years, while just 42% say they're more excited about this year's contest. Although this question hasn't been asked in every presidential election year, in CNN/ORC and CNN/USA Today/Gallup results dating back to 2000, this poll marks the first time that a significantly larger share of voters say they are less enthusiastic about this year's election. The lack of enthusiasm spikes among Clinton supporters. A majority of Clinton's supporters say they're less excited about voting this year than usual (55%) while most of Trump's backers say they're more excited this time around (56%).
Paul Merrell

Hillary Still Doesn't Get It on Iraq | The Nation - 0 views

  • The unfortunate re-eruption of warfare in Iraq will lead to many more questions for Hillary Clinton about her past support for the war—a rather unfortunate thing from her point of view, given the issue was a key reason for her 2008 Democratic presidential primary loss.
  • One of the central animating concerns of the anti-war movement—from the Cindy Sheehan encampment to a young Senator named Barack Obama’s describing soldiers from Illinois who had been badly maimed by battle—was for the thousands of US troops dying, and the thousands more being injured, in what was ultimately a needless war. When George W. Bush would bash war opponents as people who didn’t “support the troops,” the anti-war refrain was: that’s exactly what we’re doing. Hillary perhaps does not accept that argument—or if she does, it’s hard to tell. When Terry Gross went after Clinton last week on NPR on gay marriage, she was trying to get at a basic question: Did Hillary always support gay marriage but withhold her public support for political reasons? What about all the people being denied rights, how might they have been helped sooner if she spoke out? Here, Hillary seems to be pre-answering that same question as it applies to Iraq, and giving a pretty terrible answer for why she didn’t speak her mind on the war.
  • UPDATE: There is now video of Hillary’s full response to this question, which are hardly exculpatory. Transcript of the response where it begins in earnest (at 1:01) below the video.
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  • CLINTON: I kept trying to say “Well if we knew then what we know now it would not have ever come for a vote,” all of which was true, but just sort of avoided the fact of my saying “You know I just got it wrong, plain and simple. I made a mistake.” I thought a lot about that, because people said well—“You’re not saying you made a mistake for political reasons.” Well in fact, in the Democratic Party at that time, the smart political decision, as so many of my colleagues did, was to come out and say “Terrible mistake, shouldn’t have done it,” and you know blame the Bush administration. I had this sense that I had voted for it, and we had all these young men and women over there, and it was a terrible battle environment. I knew some of the young people who were there and I was very close to one Marine lieutenant who lead a mixed platoon of Americans and Iraqis in the first battle for Fallujah. So I felt like I couldn’t break faith with them. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to anybody else but me, but that’s how I felt about it. So I kept temporizing and I kept avoiding saying it because I didn’t want there to be any feeling that I was backing off or undercutting my support for this very difficult mission in Iraq.
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    Further proof that Hillary is unfit to become Commander in Chief. In her own words, she says that she concealed her opposition to the Iraq War because she wanted to support the troops! In other words, the troops are over there fighting and dying but to come out and say that the war should end and they should be brought home would somehow be a failure to support the troops. No, Hillary, "that doesn't make sense to anybody else but" you. Kill some more troops for your political cowardice? 
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Nomi Prins, Hillary, Bill, and the Big Six Banks | TomDispatch - 0 views

  • The past, especially the political past, doesn’t just provide clues to the present. In the realm of the presidency and Wall Street, it provides an ongoing pathway for political-financial relationships and policies that remain a threat to the American economy going forward. When Hillary Clinton video-announced her bid for the Oval Office, she claimed she wanted to be a “champion” for the American people. Since then, she has attempted to recast herself as a populist and distance herself from some of the policies of her husband. But Bill Clinton did not become president without sharing the friendships, associations, and ideologies of the elite banking sect, nor will Hillary Clinton.  Such relationships run too deep and are too longstanding.
  • To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.  In return, today’s titans of finance and their hordes of lobbyists, more than half of whom held prior positions in the government, exact certain requirements from Washington. They need to know that a safety net or bailout will always be available in times of emergency and that the regulatory road will be open to whatever practices they deem most profitable. 
  • Whatever her populist pitch may be in the 2016 campaign -- and she will have one -- note that, in all these years, Hillary Clinton has not publicly condemned Wall Street or any individual Wall Street leader.  Though she may, in the heat of that campaign, raise the bad-apples or bad-situation explanation for Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, rest assured that she will not point fingers at her friends. She will not chastise the people that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones that have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move. She is an undeniable component of the Clinton political-financial legacy that came to national fruition more than 23 years ago, which is why looking back at the history of the first Clinton presidency is likely to tell you so much about the shape and character of the possible second one.
Paul Merrell

Clinton can't separate herself from foreign-policy buffoons Saban and Adelson - Mondoweiss - 0 views

  • Are Adelson and Saban people that presidents should be looking to for Middle East policy advice? Apparently Hillary Clinton thinks so. It’s not a matter of necessity. As Bruck details in her profile of Saban, Obama kept Saban at a distance. He did not rely on Adelson money or on Saban money for his elections. Hillary Clinton is choosing to dance to a different tune. All of this brings into question Hillary Clinton’s judgement when it comes to the Middle East. As we know, she voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the 2008 campaign she refused to acknowledge the vote as a mistake; now she does.  However, this letter to Saban leaves one to wonder whether her judgment has improved.
  • Beinart thinks Clinton’s implicit support of the occupation and the fight against BDS is counterproductive and bad for Israel. Signing up with Saban and Adelson, says Beinart, “is disastrous” because Adelson and Saban are shutting out the very voices and constituencies with whom BDS enjoys credibility.  The Adelson/Saban approach, worries Beinart, will be counter-productive and will ultimately make the BDS movement more potent.  If Hillary Clinton were serious about fighting BDS, says Beinart, Saban would be the last person she’d ask. She’d be looking for ways to impose a two state solution from the outside.
  • The only way to prevent this Israeli unilateralism is through solutions “imposed from the outside.” …. How can direct negotiations possibly succeed when Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly and repeatedly said that he doesn’t support a Palestinian state anytime soon, and doesn’t support one near the 1967 lines ever? The only way to make direct negotiations meaningful is to force Netanyahu, or some Israeli successor, back into the paradigm outlined by Bill Clinton and the Arab Peace Initiative [in the Oslo process] …. Unless that framework is “imposed from the outside,” people morally opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will see no hope for ending it without BDS. And they will gradually embrace the movement, even though it goes beyond the two-state solution to question the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state within any borders. The Obama administration, by signaling that it may support such a UN framework this fall, is pursuing the best alternative to BDS that exists today. If Hillary helps torpedo that UN initiative, Haim Saban should look forward to more letters from her about BDS in the future. Because the Democratic presidential frontrunner will have done her part to help it grow.
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  • Over the course of his Presidency Obama has successfully gotten Iran to halt its pursuit of a nuclear weapon and he has made efforts to normalize relations and bring Iran back into the international community. This effort has been shrilly opposed by Israel. Hillary Clinton has at times opposed the Obama administration’s approach on Iran. How would she balance her unceasing commitment to Israeli neoconservatives with America’s policy interests in the region as president? There are more questions than answers. In Syria as with Iraq, it’s clear Hillary’s instincts have been considerably more hawkish than Obama’s. Hawkish instincts proved a disaster in the wake of September 9, 2001. The fact that Clinton is unable to distance herself from Saban and Adelson, buffoons who don’t know what they’re talking about on BDS, leaves room for worry about how Hillary Clinton’s hawkish instincts would serve the country if she were president for the next four or eight years.
Paul Merrell

Exclusive: Dozens of Clinton emails were classified from the start, U.S. rules suggest ... - 0 views

  • For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.But the details included in those "Classified" stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton's emails from her time as the nation's most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department's own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.
  • This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters."It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations."If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke."
  • Although it appears to be true for Clinton to say none of her emails included classification markings, a point she and her staff have emphasized, the government's standard nondisclosure agreement warns people authorized to handle classified information that it may not be marked that way and that it may come in oral form.The State Department disputed Reuters' analysis but declined requests to explain how it was incorrect.
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  • Clinton and her senior staff routinely sent foreign government information among themselves on unsecured networks several times a month, if the State Department's markings are correct. Within the 30 email threads reviewed by Reuters, Clinton herself sent at least 17 emails that contained this sort of information. In at least one case it was to a friend, Sidney Blumenthal, not in government. The information appears to include privately shared comments by a prime minister, several foreign ministers and a foreign spy chief, unredacted bits of the emails show. Typically, Clinton and her staff first learned the information in private meetings, telephone calls or, less often, in email exchanges with the foreign officials.
  • The findings of the Reuters review are separate from the recent analysis by the inspector general for U.S. intelligence agencies, who said last month that his office found four emails that contained classified government secrets at the time they were sent in a sample of 40 emails not yet made public.The State Department has said it does not know whether the inspector general is correct.
  • The Reuters review also found that the declassification dates the department has been marking on these emails suggest the department might believe the information was classified all along. Gerlach said this was incorrect.
  • A series of presidential executive orders has governed how officials should handle the ceaseless incoming stream of raw, usually unmarked information they acquire in their work. Since at least 2003, they have emphasized that information shared by a foreign government with an expectation or agreement of confidentiality is the only kind that is "presumed" classified.The State Department's own regulations, as laid out in the Foreign Affairs Manual, have been unequivocal since at least 1999: all department employees "must ... safeguard foreign government and NATO RESTRICTED information as U.S. Government Confidential" or higher, according to the version in force in 2009, when these particular emails were sent.
  • A spokeswoman for one of the foreign governments whose information appears in Clinton's emails said, on condition of anonymity to protect diplomatic relations, that the information was shared confidentially in 2009 with Clinton and her senior staff.If so, it appears this information should have been classified at the time and not handled on a private unsecured email network, according to government regulations.The foreign government expects all private exchanges with U.S. officials to be treated that way, the spokeswoman for the foreign government said.Leonard, the former ISOO director, said this sort of information was improperly shared by officials through insecure channels more frequently than the public may realize, although more typically within the unsecured .gov email network than on private email accounts.With few exceptions, officials are forbidden from sending classified information even via the .gov email network and must use a dedicated secure network instead. The difference in Clinton's case, Leonard said, is that so-called "spillages" of classified information within the .gov network are easier to track and contain.
Paul Merrell

Clinton Ex-Aide Likely to Invoke 5th Amendment Over Questions on Email Server - First D... - 0 views

  • A former aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton who helped set up the server that housed Mrs. Clinton’s private email account plans to invoke his Fifth Amendment right in response to congressional questions about the email practices, according to two people who have been briefed on the matter. The former aide, Bryan Pagliano, was subpoenaed to testify before a House committee, but a lawyer for Mr. Pagliano has told the panel that his client will assert his right to remain silent and decline to answer their questions. The subpoena was issued by the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. As part of its inquiry, the panel is examining Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email account while she was secretary of state, which shielded her correspondences from congressional inquiries. Mr. Pagliano was the information technology director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and then worked at the State Department as an adviser and special projects manager for its chief technology officer, according to his LinkedIn page. He left the State Department in February 2013, the same month Mrs. Clinton stepped down as secretary of state.
  • Clinton campaign aide said that Mr. Pagliano’s decision was “both understandable and disappointing to us, because we believe he has every reason to be transparent about his I.T. assistance.” “We had hoped Bryan would also agree to answer any questions from the committee and had recently encouraged him to grant the committee’s request for an interview,” the aide said.
  • Even if Mr. Pagliano does not back down, the panel will probably still call him to testify and force him to invoke the Fifth Amendment in person.
Paul Merrell

Sanders Gains on Clinton in New Iowa Poll | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • Bernie Sanders is gaining momentum in the states that will set the early tone for the 2016 presidential election. A new poll shows Vermont’s independent senator with the support of 30 percent of likely Iowa caucus participants, up 25 points since January, while support for Hillary Clinton, the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, has dropped by a third since its high point in May. Clinton is now the first choice of 37 percent, according to the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll. Sanders’ Iowa surge comes on the heels of two consecutive polls in New Hampshire that show him with a seven-point lead over Clinton. The Iowa caucuses kick off the United States’ 2016 election season Feb. 1; New Hampshire holds the nation’s first primary on Feb. 9. For Clinton, the former Secretary of State, the latest survey marks the first time her support in polls has dropped below 50 percent and has campaign watchers recalling Clinton’s Iowa loss in 2008. Clinton, then a U.S. Senator from New York, entered the primaries as the strong favorite, only to place third in the Iowa caucus and eventually lose the nomination to Barack Obama.
  • The survey results also offer some insights into the reasons for Sanders’ appeal; those polled said they are actively drawn to Sanders and are not simply part of a backlash against Clinton. When asked why they back the Vermont senator, 96 percent said their support was mostly founded in an affinity with the candidate and his ideas. Only 2 percent said their choice of Sanders was primarily based on a dislike for Clinton. Sanders also enjoys more intense support than his main rival, the poll showed. It found that 39 percent of likely caucus goers felt very favorably about Sanders; for Clinton, only 27 percent held a very favorable opinion. The proportion of people who viewed Clinton negatively, 19 percent, was more than double that of Sanders, but researchers noted that Clinton’s negatives are far better than they were in the fall of 2007, when 30 percent of likely caucus participants held a poor impression of her.
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