Please read my latest, Oh look, the guy behind the Clinton uranium deal was also the guy behind the Clinton FTA deal.
Colombia: Hillary changed her mind on FTA over $50 million, oops, $130 million
LANGUAGE WARNING
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Frank Guistra, a mining magnate — that means oil — who gave the Clinton Foundation up to fifty fucking million fucking dollars.
Make that $130 million, Ace,
Oh. I guess I lowballed it.
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.
Just how much money are we talking about?
In a Wall Street Journal story from 2008, Giustra is described as a “friend and traveling companion” of former President Clinton who donated more than $130 million to Clinton’s philanthropies.
This is not the first time the Clintons were dealing from both sides of the deck. As you may recall,
Mark Penn, her campaign strategist was also working for the Colombian government towards pushing the agreement.
Penn was fired by the Colombians on Saturday and lost his job as Hillary’s campaign strategist on Sunday, but will remain as pollster and adviser to the Hillary campaign, whatever that means.
Frank Giustra now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation,
Just the other day Bill was saying his foundation
is, by a good long stretch, the most transparent of all the presidential foundations and more transparent than a lot of other major foundations in the country.”
It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is:
Since it’s Throwback Thursday, coinciding with the Summit of the Americas, a quick glance back to 2012, when Hillary tied one on and led the conga line at the Summit,
Is Hillary Clinton becoming an embarrassment as Secretary of State?
The crashed plane Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
An Argentine turboprop airplane crashed and burned shortly after taking off, killing all 10 people aboard,
Witnesses at the airport said that a few minutes after takeoff they heard a significant explosion followed by a huge fireball.
The passengers were members of the Argentine company La Rural which is an associate in a project to exploit a Convention Center under construction in the Atlantic resort of Punta del Este and had flown to Uruguay for a business conference with their Uruguayan partners and the local government.
La Rural is a leading company in Argentina and Latin America in the fairs, congress and events industry.
ARGENTINA
Exactly two months after his murder, Argentine Government Accuses Nisman of Embezzlement
Dead Argentine prosecutor was zeroing in on a terror threat to the entire Western Hemisphere
Investigan un supuesto refugio de jerarcas nazis en Argentina
BRAZIL
POLL NUMBERS!!! Dilma’s drop
COLOMBIA
Drug Gang Led by Female Trafficker from Mexico Nabbed in Colombia
CUBA
[pdf file] An Illusory Opening to Cuba:
Why Florida Shouldn’t Walk Through the Breach
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Where “Cold War Charm” is the half-century long misery endured by the inmates of the island-prison: Cuba’s Cold War charm has D.R. wary about losing U.S. tourists to next-door neighbor
Populist Playbook: The Slow Death of Democracy in Correa’s Ecuador
HAITI
Clinton Foundation’s chickens coming home to roost in Haiti?
HILLARY CLINTON’S BROTHER DEFENDS HAITI GOLD MINE DEAL: ‘I RAISE MONEY FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE’
HONDURAS
Are Special Economic Zones the answer? How ZEDEs Can Make Honduras Prosperous
Next-Generation Zones for an Anti-Poverty Success Story
JAMAICA
US Say Courts Crippling Ja Narcotics Fight
NICARAGUA
Wang Jing: The man behind the Nicaragua canal project
PARAGUAY
Paraguay and Latin America are officially the happiest nations in the world, in a Bobby McFerrin sort of way?
PUERTO RICO
Puerto Rico’s Catholic Church Calls for Referendum on Gay Marriage
SOUTH AMERICA
The Islamization of South America
URUGUAY
After years in Guantanamo, ex-detainees find little solace in Uruguay Apparently they don’t have Uruguayan passports yet.
VENEZUELA
#MADURO ¡GOLPISTA! ¡GOLPISTA! ¡GOLPISTA! pic.twitter.com/KXhrTB9I17
— Swing Traders COL (@swingtraderscol) March 21, 2015
Enabling Maduro’s Tyranny in Venezuela
US Sanctions Give Perfect Excuse for Crackdown on Dissent. I disagree – the crackdown has been going on, well before any sanctions.
Maduro’s English in action,
Bill & Hillary: Noxious here, noxious in Haiti
The Clinton’s noxious legacy lives not only in America, but also in Haiti:
The Clinton Foundation and Haiti Contracts
After the earthquake in 2010, the Clintons’ outsize influence in the small nation increased. (emphasis added)
The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 million and $5 million. Those relationships are worth learning more about.
OAS has been in the news because it is caught up in a corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras. In November Brazilian police arrested three top OAS executives for their alleged roles in a bribery scheme involving inflated contracts and kickbacks. OAS denies the allegations. Closer to home the 2013 OAS donation to the Clinton Foundation deserves attention because of the power that Bill Clinton has in Haiti, where OAS has been awarded IDB contracts.
Development banks are the butt of jokes among economists because while they claim to fight poverty they are mostly good at empire building. The same might be said of the Clintons in Haiti. A few months after Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, Bill Clinton was named the U.N. special envoy to Haiti. That gave the Clintons a lot of power over U.S. foreign-aid decisions in the small country.
They accumulated more influence after the 2010 earthquake, when Bill was named co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.
Being on the right side of Bill matters if you want to benefit from U.S. foreign aid destined for Haiti.
Last January, – missing, to the tune of $10billion.
The Presidents’ Day Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean
ARGENTINA
Prosecutor Pollicita charges President CFK in AMIA cover-up case
Alberto Nisman’s Death Just The Latest Example Of Large-Scale Corruption, Argentines Say
BOLIVIA
From Stratfor: U.S., Bolivia: The Pieces Are in Place for Improved Relations
Uribe meets with US Congressmen to seek support for Colombia opposition
Colombia proposes world’s largest eco-corridor with Brazil, Venezuela
CUBA
Former Obama Official on Cuba Talks: “We didn’t want anything in return”
Dissident savagely attacked by Castro thugs
Turkey’s Erdogan wants to build a mosque in Cuba. It’s based on a historical fallacy.
ECUADOR
The President Of Ecuador Just Went Off On John Oliver In Hilarious Rant
IMMIGRATION
OBAMA’S AMNESTY: IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT
JAMAICA
In historic move, Jamaica extradites fraud suspect
LATIN AMERICA
What’s Putin’s Game in the Western Hemisphere?
The Russians are coming—again.
NICARAGUA
Skeptical Panama takes heed of planned Nicaraguan canal
PANAMA
Ohio? Panama Canal expansion shipping jobs to Ohio
Appalachian Ohio could benefit most, in part because the Ohio River could receive goods from the canal after they’ve made their way to the United States via the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River or the East Coast and the Port of Virginia.
PERU
Argentina oil company leaves Peru town after protests
PUERTO RICO
Puerto Rico bankruptcy bill to get House hearing: source
URUGUAY
Uruguay: Árabes, persas y espías, último capítulo de la gestión Almagro
You think? Uruguay Undecided on Accepting More Syrian Refugees
Escándalo en el HSBC revela cuenta en Suiza de Hugo Chávez con 12 mil millones de dólares
The week’s posts and podcast:
Smart diplomacy: “We didn’t want anything in return” from Cuba
Argentina: Gitmo alumnus “ready to fight”
Latin America: Worldwide Threat Assessment
Ecuador: John Oliver goofs on Correa
Argentina: Why we’ll probably never learn the truth about the #Nisman murder
Venezuela: Persecuting the retailers
At Da Tech Guy Blog:
Argentina: A case of “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown?” UPDATE
Haiti: Bill Clinton brags while the people suffer
Mary O’Grady looks at how Bill Clinton Spins His Haiti Intervention
Amid a probe of Aristide, the former president offers a new version of events. (emphasis added)
Speaking after his wife addressed the Iowa crowd, Mr. Clinton explained his 1994 Haiti intervention: “The military dictator down there was putting tires around people’s necks and setting them afire, in an affectionate policy called necklacing,” he recalled satirically. “I was told that nobody gave a rip about Haiti.” But “we did it and no shot was fired. Nobody got hurt.”
That’s some tale. But as any Haitian knows, it was Mr. Aristide who championed Haitian “necklacing,” aka “Père Lebrun” after a domestic tire merchant. Governing a democracy with a national assembly was more difficult than he had anticipated and he urged his followers to give Père Lebrun to his opponents, as an Oct. 1993 Congressional Research Service report documented.
On Sept. 29, 1991, the military stepped in and kicked him out. It employed its own paramilitary, which also practiced repression—but guns, not necklacing, were its weapon of choice.
Mr. Aristide fled to Washington, where President George H.W. Bush released Haiti’s international telephone and airline revenues to him as the government-in-exile. There was never any accounting for those funds but they reportedly topped $50 million. Mr. Aristide lived the high life in Georgetown and mounted an aggressive and costly lobbying campaign for U.S. military intervention to restore his presidency.
Once Mr. Clinton put Mr. Aristide back in the palace in Port-au-Prince, his supporters picked up where they had left off. Opponents were hacked with machetes, set on fire and gunned down. Money disappeared.
The Clinton administration did nothing to contain these abuses. Instead, a company called Fusion, run by Democrats—including Joseph P. Kennedy II, Mack McLarty, who had been Clinton White House chief of staff, and Marvin Rosen, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee—went into the long-distance telephone business with Haiti Teleco, the government-owned monopoly.
As long as the spin holds, Hillary will ask, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Let’s hope the American public doesn’t put the Clintons back in the White House.
Related:
The Hillary Letters
Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky correspondence revealed
Hillary shall remain concussed while in Punta Cana
Hillary hospitalized with blood clot.
Hillary, who shall remain concussed until next week, has taken her concussion on holiday to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. Gateway Pundit posts that Hillary Clinton So Sick She Had to Travel to Punta Cana Resort to Celebrate the New Year.
The poor woman will not only be nursing her concussion at the tropical resort, she’ll also be nursing her hangover in Bill’s presence,
According to press reports, the Clintons will celebrate New Year’s at the Puntacana Resort & Club and could also attend a fashion show scheduled for December 29, which will be held in honor of famous Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta.
Worse yet, Anna Wintour will be at the party. “Just don’t be late!”
Snark!
That Hillary concussion is so serious that only a New Year’s drunken binge in the Dominican can cure it. dominicantoday.com/dr/people/2012…
— Razor (@hale_razor) December 29, 2012
UPDATE,
Linked by Pirate’s Cove. Thank you!
State Dept. Says Clintons Are Not Partying in Dominican Republic as Was Reported; where are they partying, then?
@iowahawkblog State Department denies. Apparently she is partying somewhere else?
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) December 30, 2012
UPDATE 2,
Did she have a facelift, maybe?
Benghazi: Hillary strikes back, UPDATED
The Last Refuge has the story,
So the White House trotted out Susan Rice to sell a false story, unbeknownst to her direct boss Hillary Clinton, who was then told to toe-the-line. To provide elbow room, and cover for the White House, a bogus AP report mentioning the CIA was seeded to, and picked up by, the press thereby providing enough space and time to coordinate with James Clapper, so that he could arrange a bogus intelligence mistake story to back them up.
All of this before the “discovery” of U.S. officials on the ground in Libya asking for more security help. Which, unfortunately for the White House, became a bigger story than the false “movie” explanation.
The failure to provide the requested security creates the White House back in a position of blaming the State Dept. The same State Dept who was providing cover for the false “movie” explanation.
Hence the ping-pong ball back and forth.
While Hillary might have been willing to cover for the White House movie story “coverup” under the guise of faulty intelligence, which she did diligently, she ain’t gonna take being thrown under the bus for the lack of security protection.
Bill’s on task, sharpening knives,
sources close to the Clintons tell him that Bill Clinton has assembled an informal legal team to discuss how the Secretary of State should deal with the issue of being blamed for not preventing the Benghazi terrorist attack last month.
But, what exactly are Hillary’s (and Bill’s) options? A defamation suit is unlikely,
Hillary’s leverage is at its peak now, when Bill is leading the Obama reelection charge and when a sudden resignation would represent a huge setback for Obama. The Clintons can try to use this leverage to halt White House efforts to scapegoat Hillary. Then, they can hope the issue blows over.
However, the Benghazi story isn’t likely to blow over. And after November 6, the Clintons can do nothing to avoid the scapegoating of Hillary by the Obama administration.
So much for “bonhomie.”
You must go to The Last Refuge and read their post in full.
Video:
UPDATE,
John Hinderaker posts on What Happened in Bengazi
The State Department has released a transcript of a briefing that two high-ranking department officials gave to a number of reporters via conference call on October 9 (Tuesday). I am not certain about this, but I believe the transcript was only made public today. You should read it in its entirety; it is the most detailed description I have seen of the events in Benghazi on September 11.
…
So Hillary Clinton and the State Department unequivocally reject the account that Barack Obama and Joe Biden have given. It is hard to imagine what “intelligence” reports Obama could have received that blamed the YouTube video. He is lying, evidently.
Read the transcript in full.
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