A voter's guide to Hillary Clinton's bloody policies in Latin America
Mark Crispin Miller
http://www.thenation.com/article/a-voters-guide-to-hillary-clintons-policies-in-latin-america/
A Voter's Guide to Hillary Clinton's Policies in Latin America
Support for coup regimes, militarization and privatization, trade deals that wreak economic havoc—they reveal the failure of Clintonism.
Members of the State Coordinator of Teachers of Guerrero (CETEG) run
away from tear gas during a protest to mark the seven months of the
Ayotzinapa students' disappearance in Chilpancingo, Mexico, on
April 26, 2015. (Reuters / Emiliano Torres)
There's been too little discussion of Latin American through the Democratic primary, including at last night's debate, which didn't touch on it. One candidate, Bernie Sanders, doesn't have much of a track record to examine, although his broad rejection of neoliberalism and interventionism bode well for turning a page on US policy in the region. The other, Hillary Clinton, has accumulated a deep record, both before and during her tenure as secretary of state, which is worth examining in depth. So, in the interest of helping New Yorkers decide as they head to the polls on Tuesday, here's a brief guide:
Honduras: By now, Clinton's involvement in helping to institutionalize the 2009 coup against a reforming president who had the support of all of the country's most courageous and bravest people—land reformers, gay activists, unionists, feminists, environmentalists, and so on—is well known. "Women's rights are human rights," Clinton famously declared. But in Honduras, she worked to legitimize the overthrow of a government that was trying to make the morning-after pill available and advance the rights of members of the LGBT community. In so doing, Clinton helped install a regime that has been killing women and men at an impressive clip. Death squads have returned to the country.
Just last week, in her interview with the New York Daily News, Clinton revised her story regarding her actions in Honduras yet again (after having cut the most damning paragraphs from her book Hard Choices). Then she said, "We need to do more of a Colombian Plan for Central America."
Colombia: The idea that Hillary Clinton wants to do to Central America what her husband did to Colombia is troubling.Here's what Plan Colombia did to that country: In 2000, just before leaving the White House, Bill Clinton ratcheted up military aid. Plan Colombia, as the assistance program was called, provided billions of dollars to what was the most repressive government in the hemisphere. The effect was to speed the paramilitarization of society, with government—and military—allied death squads penetrating the intelligence services, judiciary, municipal government, legislature, and executive branch. Washington money effectively subsidized the narco-right's enormous land grab. According to the US government's own figures, "in rural areas, less than 1% of the population owns more than half Colombia's best land." "Torture, massacres, 'disappearances,' and killing of non-combatants" became routinized, with trade unionists, peasants, and Afro-Colombians the main victims. The CIA's own World Factbook says that a staggering 6.3 million Colombians have been internally displaced (IDP) since 1985, with "about 300,000 new IDPs each year since 2000"—that is, the year Bill Clinton enacted Plan Colombia. Added up, that's 2.4 million people during Clinton's eight-year presidency.
After Plan Colombia came the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Hillary Clinton opposed the treaty when she was running against Barack Obama in 2008, but then supported it as secretary of state. Yet, even as she campaigned against it, Bill Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches in Latin America, where he advocated for the agreement. Mark Penn, Hillary's chief adviser in her 2008 campaign, was likewise meeting with Colombian officials to tell them not to worry, that were Clinton to become president, she'd reverse her opposition. When asked about such conflicts, Clinton laughed, and laughed. "Oh my," she said, before asking the reporter, "How many angels dance on the head of a pin?" Thus concerns about corruption are as quaint as medieval Catholic scholasticism. If those angels were made up of Colombian trade unionists executed between when the trade treaty went into effect and early 2015, the answer is 105—along with many hundreds more Afro-Colombian, peasant, and environmental activists.
In the Brooklyn debate, Bernie Sanders didn't give a specific answer when asked for an example of when Clinton changed her policy as a result of financial contributions. Let's then go to David Sirota, Andrew Perez, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing about the fossil-fuel interests behind Clinton and Colombian free trade:
At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia's human rights record [despite having evidence to the contrary], 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.
Also see Ken Silverstein's reporting on Colombia and the Clintons. Really, who could blame Wolf Blitzer for not asking any questions about these conflicts of interest. Where would he start?
Haiti: Haiti may be the nation most vulnerable to the psychopathologies of Clintonian political economy and philanthropy. There's too much to say about the Clintons' grip on Haiti, so I'll just point readers to the best of the reporting. Here's Ted Hamm, "How Hillary Helped Ruin Haiti"; Jonathan Katz's "The Clintons' Haiti Screw Up" and "The King and Queen of Haiti"; The New York Times on the topic; and Isabel Macdonald and Isabeau Doucet, in The Nation, on those formaldehyde-laced trailer homes the Clinton Foundation sent to Haiti after the earthquake. And here's Bill Clinton himself, apologizing for forcing Jean-Bertrand Aristide to implement neoliberal economic policies that destroyed Haiti's ability to produce its own rice: "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else."
Panama: As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama—an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama Papers even more pervasive. But as soon as she became secretary of state, Clinton successfully pushed for the treaty, despite being warned that it would make it easier for the rich to hide their money, as Clark Mindock and David Sirota write.
Mexico: As secretary of state, Clinton continued to administer the punishing security and economic policies put into place by her husband and his successor, George W. Bush, policies that have turned Mexico into a country of mass clandestine graves. Clinton's own contribution to Mexico's misery was to push for the privatization of its national petroleum industry. As Steve Horn has written in detail on DeSmog blog, not only did the Clinton State Department help open up of Mexico's oil sector to foreign capital, a number of Clinton's close aids then moved into the private sector to profit from that opening. It was FDR who forced US oil interests to accept Mexico's nationalization in the 1930s, so here we have a case of Hillary Clinton quite literally rolling back the New Deal.
El Salvador: In 2012, Hillary Clinton's State Department, acting through its ambassador, Mari Carmen Aponte, threatened to withhold critical development aid unless El Salvador passed a major privatization law. (Hilary Goodfriend provides the details here.) It wouldn't be the only time that Ambassador Aponte, a political ally of the Clintons, menaced Salvador's leftist FMLN government. Recently, she warned Salvadorans about the need to buy corporate manufactured GMO seeds, insisting that the FMLN's seed-cooperative program violates the terms of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).Paraguay: Honduras wasn't the only Latin American country to suffer a "constitutional coup" (the overthrow of an elected leader through formally legal mechanisms) under Clinton's State Department watch. In Paraguay, a leftist former Catholic priest, Fernando Lugo, was removed from office at the behest of his agroindustry opponents. Nearly all other Latin American nations called it a coup. But not Clinton's State Department, which quickly recognized the new government.
Beyond any one country or policy, these policies fed off of each other. Bill Clinton's multibillion-dollar aid program to one of the worst human-rights violators in the world, Plan Colombia—which Hillary Clinton now recommends for Central America (though it's hard to see how the United States could militarize the region any more)—had the effect of diversifying the violence and corruption endemic to the cocaine trade, with Central American and Mexican cartels and military factions taking over export of the drug to the United States. This, along with the collapse of Mexico's and Central America's agricultural sector caused by NAFTA and CAFTA, kicked off the cycle of criminal and gang violence that today engulfs the region. This violence, in turn, has been accelerated by the further privatization of the economy (of the kind that Clinton's ambassador forced on El Salvador) and the rapid spread of mining, hydroelectric, biofuel, and petroleum operations (of the kind that took over Honduras after the 2009 coup and that donates to the Clinton Foundation), which wreak havoc on local ecosystems, poisoning land and water. The violence has also been accelerated by the opening of national markets to US agroindustry, which destroys local economies. The ensuing displacement either creates assorted criminal threats that justify harsher counterinsurgency measures or provokes protest, which is dealt with by new-style death squads—of the kind that killed Berta Cáceres and hundreds of others in Honduras (and Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador).
The militarization of the border—which began with Clinton, as per Rahm Emanuel's recommendation that he build on the success of his 1994 crime bill—worked symbiotically with Clinton's NAFTA, and later CAFTA, to create a three-tiered, nested market: free and common for capital; protected for US agriculture; divided and garrisoned for labor. Mexico can stay competitive with the United States only by keeping its hourly pay brutally low. Wages are worse in Central America. In the United States, the wage system has collapsed; think of that rising suicide rate among the white working class that made headlines a few months ago as a NAFTA bump.
And Clinton recommends more of the same as a solution to these problems. "We need to do more of a Colombian plan for Central America." There's no violence caused by over-militarization that more militarization can't solve. There's no poverty caused by "free trade" that more "free trade" can't solve.
Clinton's record in Latin America reveals the failure not just of Clintonism as it is applied to a specific region. It rather reveals the failure of Clintonism.
[Greg Grandin is a Professor of History at New York University and is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize, Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala. Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman will be published in late August.]
***
The Clinton Foundation
Harpers
November 17, 2015
https://harpers.org/blog/2015/11/shaky-foundations/
Shaky Foundations
The Clintons' so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends.
by Ken Silverstein
After endless delays and excuses, the Clinton Foundation released its 2014 tax return as well as amended returns for the previous four years and an audit of its finances. That fulfilled a pledge made last April by Clinton Foundation acting CEO, Maura Pally, who acknowledged that the foundation had previously made a few unfortunate accounting "mistakes."
Journalists are going to be scouring through this new financial information and pumping out "balanced" stories that evade what is already evident, namely that the Clintons have used their foundation for crass profiteering and influence peddling.
If the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies do their jobs, the foundation will be closed and its current and past trustees, who include Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, will be indicted. That's because their so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich Clinton family friends.
It is beyond dispute that former President Clinton has been directly involved in helping foundation donors and his personal cronies get rich. Even worse, it is beyond dispute that these very same donors and the Clintons' political allies have won the focused attention of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. Democrats and Clinton apologists will write these accusations off as conspiracy mongering and right-wing propaganda, but it's an open secret to anyone remotely familiar with accounting and regulatory requirements for charities that the financial records are deliberately misleading. And not coincidentally, those records were long filed by a Little Rock–based accounting firm called BKD, a regional auditor with little international experience.
It's odd that a small Arkansas-headquartered firm would handle the books for a giant entity like the Clinton Foundation, and even odder given that BKD has been implicated in a variety of misconduct. For example, last year the Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned BKD for "violating auditor independence rules when they prepared the financial statements of brokerage firms that were their audit clients."
It brings to mind Bernie Madoff, who also used a small accounting shop when he was running his notorious Ponzi scheme. And it's worth emphasizing here that smaller firms are typically far less likely to challenge major clients, and the Clinton Foundation was one of BKD's major sources of revenue.
The new audit that was released yesterday was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a major accounting firm. I've been told by multiple sources with knowledge of the review that PwC was under tremendous outside pressure to turn in a truthful audit as opposed to the shoddy work performed by BKD. "The audit is the key, it's far more important than the amended tax returns," Charles Ortel, an independent financial expert, told me. "PwC is a top firm and they will not be able to claim they didn't know that the past audits were fraudulent because they have been informed of problems. If they certify that the Clinton Foundation is clean, when it is apparent it is not, PwC is done. It may go the way of Arthur Andersen." Ortel, a former managing director of Dillon, Read & Co., who helped expose massive financial fraud by GE, GM, and AIG before the 2008 global financial meltdown, was referring to the accounting firm that missed massive fraud by Enron and subsequently collapsed.
A Canadian charity called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership—which is run by one of Bill Clinton's close friends, Frank Giustra—has been moving significant sums of money into the Clinton Foundation's flagship in New York. There's no way for the public to know precisely how much total money the CGEP has taken in over the years—or how much it has forwarded on to the Clinton Foundation—because, unlike in the United States, under Canadian non-profit law charities don't need to report donors to tax authorities. Earlier this year, after being severely criticized by the Canadian press, the CGEP released the names of twenty-four of its donors, but more than 1,000 are still unknown. (CGEP wrote in an email that "going forward [it] will publicly disclose all future donors.")
The Clinton Foundation's list of donors on its website puts the CGEP in the top category of $25 million-plus, however a financial-industry source who has seen the relevant records estimated that the figure is at least $33 million. According to Ortel that number is certainly understated. "There are no effective controls over the Clinton Foundation or the Giustra entity," he told me. "No independent party has had access to the bank account records, including wire transfer records. There are no independent directors ensuring compliance with the law. Only a fool would have any confidence in their numbers; it's like Al Capone forming a foundation."
One money-laundering expert and former intelligence officer based in the Middle East who had access to the foundation's confidential banking information told me that members of royal families in Middle Eastern countries, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have donated money to the CGEP that has then been sluiced through to the Clinton Foundation. He added that the CGEP has also received money from corrupt officials in South Africa during the regime of Jacob Zuma and from senior officials in Equatorial Guinea, one of the most brutal and crooked dictatorships in the world. "Equatorial Guinea doesn't give to the Clinton Foundation in New York because it's too embarrassing," he said. "They give the money anonymously in Canada and that buys them political protection in the United States. The Clinton Foundation is a professionally structured money-laundering operation."
In an email, a CGEP spokesperson wrote that the organization "has never received funding from any members of any royal family from any countries around the world." Similarly, on its website the CGEP claims that it doesn't take money from foreign governments. However, my source in the Middle East said, "in countries like Equatorial Guinea and Kuwait, there is no difference between government money and private money. You can call it private money but it's stolen from the government and when these individuals donate they gain protection for their governments."
"I can't say for certain that it's illegal because I don't have access to all the financial information but at best they are skating along the edge," the source added. "They get away with it because the major media outlets are too lazy to look into it but the [Congressional] Benghazi Committee has access to the key information, and so do government agencies like the IRS, the SEC and the FEC. If you put together the information that all of these agencies have it's obvious that the foundation is a fraud."
The Clinton Foundation declined to comment for this story.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have in tandem made enormous sums of money since Bill left the White House. According to the Washington Post, they netted at least $136.5 million between 2001 and 2012. "All the Benghazi committee has to do is match up Hillary's travel as secretary of state with Bill's speaking arrangements," my source in the Middle East said. "Bill heads out to foreign countries and he gets paid huge amounts of money for a thirty-minute speech and then she heads out for an official visit as a favor. She racked up more miles than any secretary of state [other than Condoleezza Rice] and that's one of the reasons why. How can they get away with that? The committee is either corrupt or incompetent, or both."
There are other signs that the Clintons and their foundation may have violated federal, state, and international law. Under Treasury Department money-laundering rules, the Clinton Foundation is required to disclose every financial account it holds abroad. It has failed to disclose an account linked to the CGEP on its past eight tax returns.
I have been told by a source with firsthand knowledge that the Treasury Department, the IRS, the FBI, and Canadian tax authorities were informed of this and other transgressions many months ago but thus far have done nothing.
So why hasn't the Obama administration's Justice Department looked into the foundation? One can only speculate, but you have to wonder if it isn't because it would be too embarrassing to Obama's former secretary of state and to the president himself. For example, Obama donated part of the money he received for winning the Nobel Peace Prize to the Clinton Foundation's scandal-plagued earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. And the domestic partner of Cheryl Mills—Hillary's former chief of staff who shared now-classified information with the Clinton Foundation and currently sits on its board of directors—was involved in Haiti relief?
Surely, any competent government investigators with subpoena power should be able to quickly figure this all out.
Since it was founded by Bill Clinton in 2001, the Clinton Foundation has been very opaque in its accounting practices. It was only in 2008, in the face of mounting public criticism, that it started disclosing its donors.
Its biggest donors include some truly wonderful people and countries. There are, to name a few, the torture-happy, terror-exporting government of Saudi Arabia; a foundation controlled by Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch accused of bribery and corruption; and Frank Giustra, a penny-stock artist who became filthy rich with the generous assistance of Bill Clinton. In 2008, a former Kazakh official told reporters that Giustra, who established the CGEP with Clinton, donated millions to the foundation after Clinton helped him purchase uranium deposits in Kazakhstan. (At the time, Giustra denied this claim, pointing out that he had been engaged in mining deals in Kazakhstan since the 1990s.)
The Clinton Foundation has received more than $1 billion over the years to purchase HIV/AIDS drugs for poor people in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. However, a unit set up to receive the money—the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, Inc., which was run by Ira Magaziner, a Clinton administration veteran with close ties to Hillary—clearly spent far, far less than it took in. In fact, the unit's accounting practices were so shoddy that its license was revoked by the state of Massachusetts, where it was headquartered.
One foundation deal, which involved Magaziner, is the mysterious "Procurement Consortium" that was announced in 2006. The consortium works with more than seventy world governments to coordinate their health care purchases from international vendors, supposedly at attractive prices. Data gleaned from these discussions can be enormously valuable, particularly to startup firms in the health-care industry. Magaziner is heavily involved in the health-care industry and previously, as reported by the New York Times, he was the "chief architect of the Clinton Administration's ill-fated health plan."
A number of other Clinton cronies have been on the Clinton Foundation's payroll. Take two: Doug Band, a Clinton administration veteran who subsequently became a founding partner of a bipartisan clusterfuck called Teneo Holdings, and Huma Abedin, an employee of the Foundation and of Teneo during 2013. (Disclosure: Abedin is married to former New York congressman Anthony Weiner. Sydney Elaine Leathers, one of the women who exposed Weiner's sexting scandal, is a personal friend of mine.)
There's also Sidney Blumenthal, another Clinton administration veteran and long-time Clinton family hatchet man. (Perhaps I'm biased but my view is that allowing Blumenthal to operate in the political environment is like letting Typhoid Mary loose in an orphanage.) Blumenthal was paid as a consultant at least $120,000 annually by the Clinton Foundation and has also been lavishly subsidized by Media Matters and American Bridge, two groups that are pushing Hillary's 2016 campaign.
Now let's return to the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, the Clinton Foundation's dirty slush fund. On its website, the CGEP says it was established so that "Mr. Giustra and other Canadian residents could receive a charitable tax credit in support of Mr. Giustra's vision of working toward innovative solutions to poverty alleviation on a global scale." As examples, it notes that in Colombia the good people at CGEP have provided "4.3 million meals to 4,000 underserved children" and "skills training and various construction certifications to 5,424 marginalized individuals." It's enough to bring tears to your eyes, but if you stop to think about it, providing "various construction certifications" and food to a few thousand "underserved" kids in a country like Colombia probably doesn't cost a lot of money.
The CGEP has released the names of only a fraction of its donors and partners. But consider a few members of its rogues' gallery:
• Ian Telfer, a friend of Giustra's who formerly chaired a company called Uranium One. While Hillary was the secretary of state, the State Department cleared the sale, for good reasons or bad, of Uranium One to a state-run company in Russia.
• Sergey Kurzin, who worked with Giustra on a mining deal in Kazakhstan.
• Eric Nonacs, of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, who at one point was simultaneously employed by Endeavor Financial, the company Giustra set up to run his Kazakh deal, and the Clinton Foundation. (Nonacs was the foundation's highest paid employee in 2005.)
• Lukas Lundin, a mining magnate who runs his family-founded Lundin Group from Vancouver. Giustra and Lundin are good pals and they do business the same way, namely, as the old saying goes, by investing when there is still blood on the ground. In the case of Gisutra and Lundin, they typically jet off to poor countries where corruption thrives, and buy assets up for suspiciously cheap prices. Then, after failing to deliver on public promises to invest a lot of their money and provide social projects for the poor, they make a killing by flipping the assets or they monetize their gains by setting up shell companies that go public on the stock market in Vancouver, which is notoriously lax on regulation.
So why haven't the Clintons gotten caught? My intelligence source summed up the situation perfectly in explaining why the Benghazi Committee has not thus far bagged them. "The Democrats are stupid but they have ruthless leadership. The Republicans are even dumber. Donald Trump is an idiot but he's right about one thing: We are led by stupid people. These are some of the dumbest motherfuckers I have ever seen."
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