When Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash appeared last year, investigators confirmed many of its exposures of the Clinton Foundation. Of course, right-wing sites like Breitbart trumpeted these revelations in graphic detail:
But leading progressives also noted how damning the book’s revelations were, with praise coming from the likes of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia’s Earth Institute and the world’s foremost expert on developing and sustainable economies, and Nomi Prins, arguably the foremost expert on the U.S. banking system and who was the invited keynote speaker at the Fed, IMF, and World Bank joint conference a year ago on global financial instability. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, director of Harvard’s Center for Ethics, said that Clinton Cash clearly indicated a pattern of corruption by the Clintons: “In Clinton Cash, Schweizer charges Bill and Hillary Clinton with corruption. Not because there is evidence of any particular bribe. Instead, their corruption, Schweizer says, comes from a pattern of behavior: a constant (and, by the end of the book, practically grotesque) story of cash passing from people seeking the government’s favor to either Bill Clinton (and hence Hillary Clinton) or the Clinton Foundation. The rapaciousness alone is enough to give one pause . . . On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”
Again, that was last year. So what happened?
Nothing. After an initial flurry of interest by some in the mainstream media, the Clintons, aided and abetted by Wall Street, plutocrats, giant corporations, and the U.S. corporate media (80% of which is controlled by just six corporations, all owned by plutocrats), simply ignored or discounted the evidence of repeated corruption as HRC’s primary campaign geared up. I just read a rather typical online AP (Asinine Press) story by two reporters claiming that Clinton Cash has been “widely questioned” and that an AP “investigation” (no link provided) failed to find any quid pro quo evidence of bribery, thereby sweetly ignoring the pattern of huge donations to the Clinton Foundation, inanely fat speaking fees and other moolah for Bubba Clinton during Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of Misstate, and the eventual awarding of huge deals and contracts to those same benefactors of the Clintons. The AP knows that it is technically hard to “prove” in court any quid pro quo (especially against high-powered lawyers like the Clintons) unless you have the smoking gun. As Dr. Lessig and other intellectually honest folks recognize, however, the pattern with the Clintons is rather overwhelming. Clinton defenders remind me of those folks who deny that the marked increase in extreme weather events has any link to global warming because, despite the clear pattern, it’s usually impossible to prove outright that any one specific event is directly caused by global warming.
If you think the Clintons and Koch brothers are cool in their moneyed political shenanigans, perhaps you also think there’s no global warming and no consequent impact on weather patterns. Let’s see how that works out.
In the meantime, we will see if the Guccifers, Anonymous, WikiLeaks, and the FBI can make a difference in this climate of corruption and uncover any smoking gun sufficient to convince even the most benighted. Don’t count on it, although in dark, er, light of everything I still can’t help but wonder if Obama is getting ready to throw Hillary under the bus (see previous post). We seem far gone toward catastrophe in a nation where the two leading presidential candidates are Hillary Rotten Clinton and Donald Megalomaniac Blowhard Trump.
Oh yes, in case you’re wondering, Bubba Clinton was paid a total of $16.5 million by for-profit Laureate Education (Laureate International Universities) for being an “honorary chancellor.” Laureate students can take satisfaction in knowing where a chunk of their tuition money went. Laureate Education was certainly a “for profit” institution for Bubba Clinton. Being an honorary chancellor is nice work if you can get it, especially if you’re the “genius” who deregulated Wall Street and thereby set the foundation for what became the worst financial crisis in history (according to Bernanke’s testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission), gave us the new Jim Crow (see Dr. Michelle Alexander’s book on that subject), instituted the incarceration state and devastated poor families through welfare “reform,” and sold out to the corporatocracy (no qualms about corporate welfare), thereby insuring an obscenely lucrative post-presidency. Honorary indeed.
Plutocrats and corporations don’t bestow such largess on the Clintons and their “foundation” out of the goodness of their heart. These “donors,” “benefactors,” and “employers” know that they are buying powerful influence and that such influence will likely benefit them sooner or later. Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sucks didn’t pay the Goldman Girl $225,000 per speech because she is inconceivably brilliant and knowledgeable. She isn’t. As an attendee at the Phoenix Goldman speech in October 2013 said, Hillary’s talk was basically rah-rah for Goldman, as though she were a Goldman managing director.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/clinton-speeches-218969
Hillary isn’t refusing to release the transcripts of her Goldman Girl speeches out of modesty or shame, but out of fear of the political damage that would result from the public knowing what she said to a firm that was among those at the dark heart of the global financial crisis in 2008. By being willfully naive about such matters, Clinton defenders are unwittingly or wittingly complicit in the pattern of Clinton corruption, the influence peddling in our political system as a whole, and the destruction of what’s left of our democracy.
The even greater danger is Hillary Clinton’s dark allegiance with overweening corporate power generally and with neocon imperialist power. For the bigger picture of what is happening to us and what is likely to happen to us if we don’t change course, please consider three informative articles:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44929.htm
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44933.htm
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/17/the-state-departments-collective-madness/
