Thread: The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for B

The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for Bill and Hillary


By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: August 14th, 2013
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An internal review of the Clinton Foundations' workings has proved troubling


Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation – that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

Over a year ago Bill Clinton met with some aides and lawyers to review the Foundation's progress and concluded that it was a mess. Well, many political start-ups can be, especially when their sole selling point is the big name of their founder (the queues are short at the Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center). But what complicated this review – what made its findings more politically devastating – is that the Clinton Foundation has become about more than just Bill. Now both daughter Chelsea and wife, and likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton have taken on major roles and, in the words of the NYT "efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs Clinton’s political future." Oh, they're entangled alright.

The NYT runs the scoop in its usual balanced, inoffensive way – but the problem jumps right off the page. The Clintons have never been able to separate the impulses to help others and to help themselves, turning noble philanthropic ventures into glitzy, costly promos for some future campaign (can you remember a time in human history when a Clinton wasn't running for office?). And their "Ain't I Great?!" ethos attracts the rich and powerful with such naked abandon that it ends up compromising whatever moral crusade they happen to have endorsed that month. That the Clinton Global Initiative is alleged to have bought Natalie Portman a first-class ticket for her and her dog to attend an event in 2009 is the tip of the iceberg. More troubling is that businessmen have been able to expand the profile of their companies by working generously alongside the Clinton Foundation. From the NYT:

Last year, Coca-Cola’s chief executive, Muhtar Kent, won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company’s partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa. (A Coca-Cola spokesman said that the company’s sponsorship of foundation initiatives long predated Teneo and that the firm plays no role in Coca-Cola’s foundation work.)

In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

This is typical Clinton stuff. The second thing I ever wrote for this website was about how corporations invest in politicians as a way of building their brand and raising their stock price. It can lead to some funny partnerships. This, from 2011:

Just this month, bedding manufacturer Serta announced that it will be sponsoring Bill Clinton’s keynote address to an industry conference in August. "To us,"’ said the head of the company, "Clinton represents leadership. This appearance shows Serta is a leader and is taking a leadership position. This singles us out." Some might say that it is beneath a former president to basically endorse Serta’s new "Perfect Sleeper" line, even with its "revolutionary gel foam mattress".

The cynical might infer from the NYT piece that the Clintons are willing to sell themselves, their image, and even their Foundation's reputation in exchange for money to finance their personal projects. In Bill's case, saving the world. In Hillary's case, maybe, running for president.

It's nothing new to report that there's an unhealthy relationship in America between money and politics, but it's there all the same. While the little people are getting hit with Obamacare, high taxes and joblessness, a class of businessmen enjoys ready access to politicians of both Left and Right that poses troubling questions for how the republic can continue to call itself a democracy so long as it functions as an aristocracy of the monied. Part of the reason why America's elites get away with it is becuase they employ such fantastic salesmen. For too long now, Bill Clinton has pitched himself, almost without question, as a homespun populist: the Boy from Hope. The reality is that this is a man who – in May 1993 – prevented other planes from landing at LAX for 90 minues while he got a haircut from a Beverley Hills hairdresser aboard Air Force One. The Clintons are populists in the same way that Barack Obama is a Nobel prize winner. Oh, wait…

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ti...l-and-hillary/

Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking at an American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco on Monday.

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and AMY CHOZICK
Published: August 13, 2013

Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name,Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.

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The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

And concern was rising inside and outside the organization about Douglas J. Band, a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm — which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser — while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation’s glitzy annual gathering of chief executives, heads of state, and celebrities.
The review set off more than a year of internal debate, and spurred an evolution in the organization that included Mr. Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, taking on a dominant new role as the family grappled with the question of whether the foundation — and its globe-spanning efforts to combat AIDS, obesity and poverty — would survive its founder.

Now those efforts are taking on new urgency. In the coming weeks, the foundation, long Mr. Clinton’s domain since its formation in 2001, will become the nerve center ofHillary Rodham Clinton’s increasingly busy public life.

This fall, Mrs. Clinton and her staff will move into offices at the foundation’s new headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, occupying two floors of the Time-Life Building. Amid speculation about her 2016 plans, Mrs. Clinton is adding major new initiatives on women, children and jobs to what has been renamed the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Worried that the foundation’s operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton’s nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London. And after years of relying on Bruce R. Lindsey, the former White House counsel whose friendship with Mr. Clinton stretches back decades, to run the organization while living part-time in Arkansas, the family has hired a New York-based chief executive with a background in management consulting.

“We’re trying to institutionalize the foundation so that it will be here long after the lives of any of us,” Mr. Lindsey said. “That’s our challenge and that is what we are trying to address.”

But the changing of the guard has aggravated long-simmering tensions within the former first family’s inner circle as the foundation tries to juggle the political and philanthropic ambitions of a former president, a potential future president, and their increasingly visible daughter.

And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.

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Last Thursday, Mr. Clinton arrived two hours late to an exuberant welcome at a health clinic about 60 miles north of Johannesburg. Children in zebra-striped loincloths sang as Mr. Clinton and Ms. Clinton made their entrance, and the former president enthusiastically explained how his foundation had helped the South African government negotiate large reductions in the price of drugs that halt the progress of HIV. Aaron Motsoaledi, South Africa’s minister of health, heaped praise on the effort. “Because of your help we are able to treat three and a half times more people than we used to,” he told the crowd.

The project is typical of the model pioneered by the Clinton Foundation, built around dozens of partnerships with private companies, governments, or other nonprofit groups. Instead of handing out grants, the foundation recruits donors and advises them on how best to deploy their money or resources, from helping Procter & Gamble donate advanced water-purification packets to developing countries to working with credit card companies to expand the volume of low-cost loans offered to poor inner city residents.

The foundation, which has 350 employees in 180 countries, remains largely powered by Mr. Clinton’s global celebrity and his ability to connect corporate executives, A-listers and government officials. On this month’s Africa trip, Mr. Clinton was accompanied by the actors Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg and the son of the New York City mayoral candidate John A. Catsimatidis, a longtime donor.

For most of the foundation’s existence, its leadership has been dominated by loyal veterans of the Clintons’ political lives. Ira C. Magaziner, who was a Rhodes scholar with Mr. Clinton and ran Mrs. Clinton’s failed attempt at a health care overhaul in the 1990s, is widely credited as the driving force behind the foundation’s largest project, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which, among other efforts, negotiates bulk purchasing agreements and price discounts on lifesaving medicines.

Mr. Band, who arrived at the White House in 1995 and worked his way up to become Mr. Clinton’s closest personal aide, standing behind the president on golf courses and the global stage, helped build the foundation’s fund-raising structure. He conceived of and for many years helped run the Clinton Global Initiative, the annual conference that draws hundreds of business leaders and heads of state to New York City where attendees are pushed to make specific philanthropic commitments.

Today, big-name companies vie to buy sponsorships at prices of $250,000 and up, money that has helped subsidize the foundation’s annual operating costs. Last year, the foundation and two subsidiaries had revenues of more than $214 million.

Yet the foundation’s expansion has also been accompanied by financial problems. In 2007 and 2008, the foundation also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign for donors amid a recession.

Millions of dollars in contributions intended to seed an endowment were diverted to other programs, creating tension between Mr. Magaziner and Mr. Band. The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years, according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.

Amid those shortfalls, the foundation has sometimes catered to donors and celebrities who gave money in ways that raised eyebrows in the low-key nonprofit world. In 2009, during a Clinton Global Initiative gathering at the University of Texas at Austin, the foundation purchased a first-class ticket for the actress Natalie Portman, a special guest, who brought her beloved Yorkie, according to two former foundation employees.

In interviews, foundation officials partly blamed the 2008 recession and difficulties in getting donors to provide operating support rather than restricted grants for specific programs for the deficits.

But others criticized Mr. Magaziner, who is widely seen within the foundation as impulsive and lacking organizational skills. On one occasion, Mr. Magaziner dispatched a team of employees to fly around the world for months gathering ideas for a climate change proposal that never got off the ground. Another time, he ignored a report — which was commissioned at significant expense from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company — on how the foundation could get involved in forestry initiatives.

Mr. Magaziner’s management style and difficulty keeping projects within budget were also raised in discussions that surrounded the 2011 Simpson Thacher review. (One person who attended a meeting with Mr. Magaziner recalled his lying on a conference room table in the middle of the meeting because of terrible back spasms, snapping at a staff member.)

Mr. Band repeatedly urged Mr. Clinton to fire Mr. Magaziner, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Clinton refused, confiding in aides that despite Mr. Magaziner’s managerial weaknesses, he was a visionary with good intentions. The former president, according to one person who knows them both, “thinks Ira is brilliant — and brilliant people get away with a lot in Clinton world.”

Indeed, by then, Mr. Magaziner had persuaded Mr. Clinton and the foundation to spin the health initiative off into a separate organization, with Mr. Magaziner as its chief executive and the Clinton Foundation appointing a majority of its board members. The financial problems continued. In 2010 and 2011, the first two years when the health initiative operated as a stand-alone organization, it ran annual shortfalls of more than $4 million. A new chief financial officer, hired in 2010, left eight months later.

A foundation official said the health initiative had only three chief financial officers in 10 years and that its financial problem was a common one in the nonprofit world: For all the grant money coming in — more than $160 million in 2011 — Mr. Magaziner had also had difficulty raising money for operating costs. But by the end of 2011, the health initiative had expanded its board, adding two seats. Chelsea Clinton took one.

Growing Ventures

As the foundation grew, so did the outside business ventures pursued by Mr. Clinton and several of his aides.

Read the rest of the article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/us...nted=1&_r=1&hp

Revealing: NYT Exposes Clinton Foundation for Shady Financial and Business Deals

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Cowboy Byte







The New York Times is back online, citing their temporary shutdown as “technical difficulties” as result of an “internal issue.”

Poor timing, as the left-leaning news source published a devastating report earlier this morning, detailing the shady deals and conflicts of interest surrounding the Clinton Foundation; an organization that has been ‘off limits’ to conservative critics, who feared criticism would be received poorly due to the noble, charitable efforts of the foundation.
The report, which came back on-line early Wednesday afternoon, reveals that the Clintons have used the charitable foundation to promote other goals, including Bill Clinton’s business ventures and Hillary Clinton’s political aspirations; this has led to some unsettling consequences.


Continue Reading on townhall.com

Revealing: NYT Exposes Clinton Foundation for Shady Financial and Business Deals

Kate Andrews | Aug 14, 2013






The New York Times is back online, citing their temporary shutdown as “technical difficulties” as result of an “internal issue.”

Poor timing, as the left-leaning news source published a devastating report earlier this morning, detailing the shady deals and conflicts of interest surrounding the Clinton Foundation; an organization that has been ‘off limits’ to conservative critics, who feared criticism would be received poorly due to the noble, charitable efforts of the foundation.
The report, which came back on-line early Wednesday afternoon, reveals that the Clintons have used the charitable foundation to promote other goals, including Bill Clinton’s business ventures and Hillary Clinton’s political aspirations; this has led to some unsettling consequences.
According to The Times, the foundation is in disarray:

“For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.”

The Times highlighted Douglas J. Band, “a onetime personal assistant to Mr. Clinton who had started a lucrative corporate consulting firm -- which Mr. Clinton joined as a paid adviser -- while overseeing the Clinton Global Initiative” as a prime example of an employee with conflicted interests. Band’s private firm, Teneo, charged its clients fees as high as $250,000 per month—clients that were also Clinton Foundation donors.

“Some Clinton aides and foundation employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and Teneo began.”

It also highlighted the rocky financial standing of the foundation, both during and after then-Senator Clinton’s bid for the presidency in 2008. It appears regular foundation donors were snagged by the Clinton campaign for donations, plunging the foundation into a multi-million dollar deficit.

“The foundation’s expansion has also been accompanied by financial problems. In 2007 and 2008, the foundation also found itself competing against Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign for donors…The foundation piled up a $40 million deficit during those two years, according to tax returns. Last year, it ran more than $8 million in the red.”

The report also solidified the Clinton’s reputation to cater to celebrity donors--usually by spending unjustifiable amounts of money on them--or to take large donations from corporate sponsors in return for prime time publicity—something the Foundation strictly prohibits. Examples from the report include:

“In 2009, during a Clinton Global Initiative gathering at the University of Texas at Austin, the foundation purchased a first-class ticket for the actress Natalie Portman, a special guest, who brought her beloved Yorkie, according to two former foundation employees.”
In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.”

The report will not come as a shock to all— the Better Business Bureau reviewed the Clinton Foundation in 2012 and found that it failed to meet the standards of an accountable charity on six counts, mostly due to lack of financial disclosure.
At the very least, The Times has highlighted, “just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future.”
But let’s go one step further. Hillary Clinton’s actions, even within the foundation, suggest that she is gearing up for another presidential run; this fall, she is moving her foundation staff into brand new offices in Midtown Manhattan, just down the street from the major news headquarters. Furthermore, Clinton’s “deputy chief of protocol at the State Department and a finance director of her presidential campaign, will oversee the endowment drive, which some of the Clintons’ donors already describe as a dry run for 2016.” (It is also expected that Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, will be uprooting from Washington D.C. to join Clinton's staff.)
Nothing the Clintons do is without strings; there is always some cover-up or shady deal linked to even their most charitable efforts. If the first Clinton Presidency, and now the Clinton Foundation, are any kind of indicator as to what a ‘Hillary Clinton Presidency’ would look like, you can be sure it will include scandals and pay offs, with very little accountability.


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kateand...ation-n1664254 http://cowboybyte.com/23791/revealin...usiness-deals/

Early attacks on Clinton part of new Republican playbook, Dems warn plan could backfire


by FoxNews.com | published on August 15, 2013
The all-out effort to knock back Hillary Clinton before a potential 2016 presidential run even materializes appears to be part of Republicans’ emerging playbook.

But while Republicans say they have to start early, considering her prominence and power in American politics, Democrats claim such a strategy has the potential to backfire.
“Obviously, Republicans fear her,” Democratic strategist Ben Tulchin told FoxNews.com. “I get that. But they have to be careful.”

With the next presidential election still more than three years away, Republicans and other Clinton critics have launched a salvo of pre-emptive strikes — from summoning her to Capitol Hill over the fatal Libya terror attacks to offering Americans a virtual opportunity to “slap Hillary” (as part of a crude online video game).
Yet Clinton is not an ordinary politician, with arguably no other presidential candidate able to match her in name recognition and political clout.
Read the full article: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...s-say-plan-is/

Read more at 1776 Coalition: http://www.1776coalition.com/rise-up...#ixzz2c3hMRQ00



Really it couldn't possibly be that people are tired of her and her hubby's antics and greed, never mind that when asked about the Benghazi murders her comment was "What difference does it make." She has plenty to answer for in that matter!!!!! Oh Please.... Is any one awake out there. The "repugnants" are using it, that is for sure. Why not, there is plenty for them to pick and choose on what to use against this administrations growing """""Scandals""" And anyone connected with this atrocious administration "" need not apply.""