Springtime for the Clintons
The Ukraine war is at the front of the news, and all of a sudden, to take the headline words of James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column, it’s springtime for the Clintons. Something is going on. Something stinks here. Something’s raining.
By Capital Thinking • Issue #1059 • View online
The Clinton Foundation gets back into business
According to The Hill:
The Clinton Foundation is reconvening its Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to address “steep” challenges it after previously ended in 2016, former President Clinton said in a statement on Friday.
The need for “cooperation and coordination has never been more urgent than it is now. The COVID-19 pandemic has ripped the cover off of longstanding inequities and vulnerabilities across our global community.
The existential threat of climate change grows every day,” Clinton wrote. “Democracy is under assault around the world, most glaringly in Ukraine where Russia has launched an unjustified and unprovoked invasion that has put millions of lives in grave danger.
The number of displaced people and refugees worldwide is higher than it has ever been — more than one in 95 of all people alive on the planet today has been forced to flee their home — and rising,” he continued.
The initiative is slated to run from Sept. 19 to 21 in New York City.
Freeman himself looks upon this with the skepticism it merits, citing a Bloomberg report by Jennifer Epstein:
Since the start of the pandemic the Federal Reserve has created nearly $5 trillion. As all that cash continues to slosh around the financial system, there’s no reason to think that some of it won’t end up in Clinton hands, especially given the clan’s documented zest for fundraising.
But for America will this new Clinton effort result in a loss of prestige worldwide?
Ms. Epstein reports:The Clinton Global Initiative hosted annual meetings from 2005 to 2016, with the final meeting held less than two months before Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.
During the 2016 campaign, the foundation faced scrutiny over whether its efforts to raise millions of dollars from governments and major companies benefited from her White House bid and her role as secretary of state in the Obama administration. Overall fundraising for the Clinton Foundation, which also includes the Clinton Development Initiative and the presidential center in Little Rock, Arkansas, has dropped since Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump.
It reported US$16.3 million in contributions in 2020, down from its 2016 peak of US$62.9 million, according to tax filings[.] …
In Friday’s letter, Clinton, 75, said its model of “cooperation and coordination has never been more urgent than it is now.”
The reality is, the Clinton Foundation and its Clinton Global Initiative, a Davos-style conference operation for the super-rich, have never been much more than an unpunished pay-to-play political operation, a flimflam racket, and a disguised vehicle for bribery.
Foundation donations went up when Hillary had access or something else to sell as a presidential candidate and secretary of state. Foundation donations went down when she fell out of power.
The correlation was as obvious as the sunrise and the daylight.
Issues & Insights had an excellent take last year on that quid pro quo arrangement for how this game was played:
You never know with the Clintons, except that it’s undoubtedly a dirty business that reeks of bribery.
One thing that should be going on now is watching just who’s donating to them and checking it against just what it is they expect to get.