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Home > Excerpt from 'My Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
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Excerpt from 'My Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
By Doug Henwood [1] / OR Books [2]
February 29, 2016
The following is an excerpt from the new book My Turn: Hillary Clinton
Targets the Presidency [3] by Doug Henwood (OR Books, 2016):
The title of Daniel Halper’s book, Clinton, Inc., is key to understanding
the family. Unlike the Bush family, neither Bill nor Hillary was born into
anything near the ruling class. There was no Prescott Bush—the son of a
steel company president who went to Yale, joined Skull and Bones (just like
his son and grandson), and later became a banker and then a senator—in their
separate pasts. Bill was born poor, in one of the poorest states in the
country and into an unstable family, while Hillary was born into the
provincial petty bourgeoisie. Entry into elite schools was their ticket to
eventual membership in the ruling class; it took decades of striving for
them to get there.
Once established, however, politics became the family’s business, and it’s
been very good to them. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis showed that the
Clintons have raised between $2 billion and $3 billion since 1992—more than
three-quarters of it from industry sources—for their campaigns,
philanthropies, and themselves. At the top of the list of corporate donors
were financial firms, and highest up among them was Goldman Sachs. Citigroup
and JP Morgan Chase gave generously as well. Not far behind Wall Street were
communications/electronics firms and then, that perennial bedrock of
Democratic Party support, lawyers and lobbyists. Those three sectors alone
contributed more than ten times as much as organized labor, which pitched in
just $41 million of the total over the period of the Journal’s study.
It’s hard to separate the Clintons’ personal fortune from the Foundation’s;
the perks it provides are a form of imputed consumer services, to use the
language of national income accounting—jetting all over, staying in fancy
hotels, eating very well, and the rest. But they have been prodigious
earners on their own account. Bill did most of the heavy financial lifting,
earning $105 million from speeches in the dozen years after he left the
White House; a good week could yield $1.4 million. According to work by the
website 24/7 Wall St, Bill is the 10th-richest of our presidents, with a net
worth of $55 million. (Five of the 10 richest presidents have been
Democrats, compared to two Republicans, and on average, Democratic
presidents are more than three times richer than Republicans.) But Hillary
wasn’t just sitting around baking cookies: she’s worth $32 million,
according to a Politico analysis. The property taxes on their two houses,
one in D.C. and the other, for which they paid $4.5 million, in Westchester,
are $104,000, twice the average household’s income. It’s a good life they’ve
made for themselves.
The Foundation’s travel expenses alone are striking. According to a 2013 New
York Post analysis, the Foundation spent over $50 million on air travel over
the previous decade—$12 million of it in 2011 alone, “enough to buy 12,000
air tickets costing $1,000 each,” or 33 a day. Of course it’s true that the
Post is a Rupert Murdoch newspaper and might be expected to cast the
Clintons in the worst possible light. But before any Democrat says, “Yeah,
but that’s the Murdoch press!,” recall that Rupert threw a fundraiser for
Hillary’s Senate campaign in 2006 and told Fortune that he “could live with”
a Hillary presidency. All told, News Corp and other Murdoch properties have
given the Clintons over $3 million since 1992, according to a tally by the
Wall Street Journal, also a Murdoch property.
Value for Money
Wealth porn is always stimulating, but, besides providing the Clintons with
a luxurious life, what do all those donations actually mean? According to
Donald Trump, it was his contributions that persuaded Hillary to attend his
wedding in 2005 (Hillary later claimed she went only because she thought it
would be “fun”). But what else have these vast inflows of cash achieved?
On its appearance in May 2015, Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash was
roundly denounced by the Hillary camp, though the more honest members of her
intellectual enforcers conceded that its central message—that the family
business looks a lot like a lucrative shakedown and influence-peddling
operation—did present some image problems. In the New York Review of Books,
Michael Tomasky worried about a biased media making too much of Schweizer’s
claims as the presidential campaign began to heat up. It’s funny how often
the Clinton camp accuses reporters of bias against the Clintons, of an
irrational hatred even, as if they’d never done anything to earn the
dislike. But Tomasky does recognize that there’s a problem:
"A presidency can’t have questions like this swirling around it from day
one. Imagine speculation that a White House decision with regard to Russia
or Pakistan was influenced by a donation to the foundation from someone
pursuing a business deal in one of those countries."
After pleading with the Clintons to clean up their act, if only for
appearance’s sake, Tomasky admits that they probably won’t, leading him to a
heartstring-tugging final line: “[I]t’s hard on a lot of other people.”
Apart from his message, Schweizer’s résumé gets the Hillaryites all bent
out of shape. He is a conservative who has advised and ghostwritten for
Republican politicians. He also appears to have made mistakes in his
research, too, some of which were corrected in a revised Kindle edition.
And, as the Clintonites like to emphasize, he found no smoking gun—a point
that Schweizer himself concedes, more than once:
"The Clintons aren’t stupid people. They know the law and take pains to
operate within it. Besides, corruption of the kind I have described in this
book is very difficult to prove. We cannot ultimately know what goes on in
their minds and ultimately prove the links between the money they took in
and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and
their associates. That said, the pattern of behavior I have established is
too blatant to ignore, and deserves legal scrutiny by those with
investigative capabilities that go beyond journalism."
In other words, a mere journalist can’t uncover the smoking gun. You need
someone with subpoena power to get to the bottom of it all.
The recurrent pattern of benefits and favors looks too established to be a
long series of accidents. I’m not going to quote extensively from
Schweizer’s book, because it will encourage defenders of Hillary to focus on
the source rather than the content. He does, however, make an important
point that passed muster with PolitiFact: of the thirteen speeches between
2001 and 2012 for which Bill was paid $500,000 or more, ten were given while
Hillary was Secretary of State. Many of those speeches were sponsored by
groups with interests before the State Department.
Just one other broad point from Schweizer: the prominence of foreign
contributors to the Foundation is striking—and the donations are often made
by people not known for philanthropy in their home countries. To explain
this, Schweizer—accurately— cites an article in the Indian Express written
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, not some random internet commenter but a
distinguished political scientist, educated at Oxford and Princeton and the
president of a New Delhi think tank. Mehta asks a good question, which
answers itself: “[T]he top echelons of Indian capital are becoming
increasingly global, jockeying for access and influence. What else explains
why CII [the Confederation of Indian Industry] was so keen to donate to the
Clinton Foundation, when its discharging of its own commitments in India has
been, at best, very reluctant?”
Clintonites will also likely decry the Wall Street Journal as a fair source
of criticism. Nevertheless, its review in early 2015 of what it calls
Hillary’s “complex corporate ties” is worth attention. It opens by pointing
out, as was noted in the previous chapter, that Hillary was unusually
aggressive for a Secretary of State at promoting U.S. business abroad,
“pushing governments to sign deals and change policies to the advantage of
corporate giants such as General Electric Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft
Corp. and Boeing Co.” All these companies gave money to the Clinton
Foundation. The Journal counts at least 60 companies that lobbied the State
Department during Hillary’s reign as having given collectively $26 million
to the Foundation. At least 44 of the 60 participated in projects
coordinated by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
In Hard Choices, Hillary brags about her emphasis on what she calls
“economic statecraft,” a strategy she concocted with former Goldman Sachs
banker Robert Hormats that involves putting the vast U.S. diplomatic corps,
with offices in 270 cities around the world, to work “creat[ing] new
opportunities for growth and shared prosperity.” In the book, this takes the
high-minded form of breaking down protectionist barriers and promoting “an
open trading system,” a core goal of U.S. foreign policy since the end of
World War II. The intended beneficiaries are “American companies and
workers.”
The Journal article suggests that less high-minded considerations were
involved when theory was turned to practice. In 2009, at the request of
Microsoft, Hillary sent Hormats to lobby the Chinese to tighten things up on
software piracy. Microsoft, a longtime donor to the Foundation, subsequently
launched a CGI-coordinated initiative to provide discounted or free software
to teachers and students valued at $130 million. In 2011, Hillary personally
lobbied Algeria to buy GE nuclear power equipment; a month after her visit,
GE announced a health partnership with the Foundation providing it with
between $500,000 and $1 million. (Contributions are reported in ranges, so
we don’t know exactly how much.) Throughout her tenure, Hillary promoted
fracking at home and abroad, a policy supported by major U.S. energy
companies, many of whom are also Foundation supporters. Hillary lobbied
Russia to buy Boeing planes, rather than those made by Airbus. Soon after,
Boeing made its first contribution to the Clinton Foundation. She pressed
India to lift restrictions that hampered the growth of Wal-Mart and other
U.S.-based big box stores. Hillary, as we have seen, used to lawyer for
Wal-Mart and served on its board; the company has given over $1.5 million to
the Foundation.
They had it down to a system. Hormats told the Journal that before every
trip, he provided Hillary with a list of U.S. corporate interests to shill
for.
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lary
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[2] http://www.orbooks.com
[3] http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/my-turn-by-doug-henwood/
[4] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Excerpt from 'My
Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Excerpt from 'My Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
Excerpt from 'My Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
By Doug Henwood [1] / OR Books [2]
February 29, 2016
The following is an excerpt from the new book My Turn: Hillary Clinton
Targets the Presidency [3] by Doug Henwood (OR Books, 2016):
The title of Daniel Halper’s book, Clinton, Inc., is key to understanding
the family. Unlike the Bush family, neither Bill nor Hillary was born into
anything near the ruling class. There was no Prescott Bush—the son of a
steel company president who went to Yale, joined Skull and Bones (just like
his son and grandson), and later became a banker and then a senator—in their
separate pasts. Bill was born poor, in one of the poorest states in the
country and into an unstable family, while Hillary was born into the
provincial petty bourgeoisie. Entry into elite schools was their ticket to
eventual membership in the ruling class; it took decades of striving for
them to get there.
Once established, however, politics became the family’s business, and it’s
been very good to them. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis showed that the
Clintons have raised between $2 billion and $3 billion since 1992—more than
three-quarters of it from industry sources—for their campaigns,
philanthropies, and themselves. At the top of the list of corporate donors
were financial firms, and highest up among them was Goldman Sachs. Citigroup
and JP Morgan Chase gave generously as well. Not far behind Wall Street were
communications/electronics firms and then, that perennial bedrock of
Democratic Party support, lawyers and lobbyists. Those three sectors alone
contributed more than ten times as much as organized labor, which pitched in
just $41 million of the total over the period of the Journal’s study.
It’s hard to separate the Clintons’ personal fortune from the Foundation’s;
the perks it provides are a form of imputed consumer services, to use the
language of national income accounting—jetting all over, staying in fancy
hotels, eating very well, and the rest. But they have been prodigious
earners on their own account. Bill did most of the heavy financial lifting,
earning $105 million from speeches in the dozen years after he left the
White House; a good week could yield $1.4 million. According to work by the
website 24/7 Wall St, Bill is the 10th-richest of our presidents, with a net
worth of $55 million. (Five of the 10 richest presidents have been
Democrats, compared to two Republicans, and on average, Democratic
presidents are more than three times richer than Republicans.) But Hillary
wasn’t just sitting around baking cookies: she’s worth $32 million,
according to a Politico analysis. The property taxes on their two houses,
one in D.C. and the other, for which they paid $4.5 million, in Westchester,
are $104,000, twice the average household’s income. It’s a good life they’ve
made for themselves.
The Foundation’s travel expenses alone are striking. According to a 2013 New
York Post analysis, the Foundation spent over $50 million on air travel over
the previous decade—$12 million of it in 2011 alone, “enough to buy 12,000
air tickets costing $1,000 each,” or 33 a day. Of course it’s true that the
Post is a Rupert Murdoch newspaper and might be expected to cast the
Clintons in the worst possible light. But before any Democrat says, “Yeah,
but that’s the Murdoch press!,” recall that Rupert threw a fundraiser for
Hillary’s Senate campaign in 2006 and told Fortune that he “could live with”
a Hillary presidency. All told, News Corp and other Murdoch properties have
given the Clintons over $3 million since 1992, according to a tally by the
Wall Street Journal, also a Murdoch property.
Value for Money
Wealth porn is always stimulating, but, besides providing the Clintons with
a luxurious life, what do all those donations actually mean? According to
Donald Trump, it was his contributions that persuaded Hillary to attend his
wedding in 2005 (Hillary later claimed she went only because she thought it
would be “fun”). But what else have these vast inflows of cash achieved?
On its appearance in May 2015, Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash was
roundly denounced by the Hillary camp, though the more honest members of her
intellectual enforcers conceded that its central message—that the family
business looks a lot like a lucrative shakedown and influence-peddling
operation—did present some image problems. In the New York Review of Books,
Michael Tomasky worried about a biased media making too much of Schweizer’s
claims as the presidential campaign began to heat up. It’s funny how often
the Clinton camp accuses reporters of bias against the Clintons, of an
irrational hatred even, as if they’d never done anything to earn the
dislike. But Tomasky does recognize that there’s a problem:
"A presidency can’t have questions like this swirling around it from day
one. Imagine speculation that a White House decision with regard to Russia
or Pakistan was influenced by a donation to the foundation from someone
pursuing a business deal in one of those countries."
After pleading with the Clintons to clean up their act, if only for
appearance’s sake, Tomasky admits that they probably won’t, leading him to a
heartstring-tugging final line: “[I]t’s hard on a lot of other people.”
Apart from his message, Schweizer’s résumé gets the Hillaryites all bent
out of shape. He is a conservative who has advised and ghostwritten for
Republican politicians. He also appears to have made mistakes in his
research, too, some of which were corrected in a revised Kindle edition.
And, as the Clintonites like to emphasize, he found no smoking gun—a point
that Schweizer himself concedes, more than once:
"The Clintons aren’t stupid people. They know the law and take pains to
operate within it. Besides, corruption of the kind I have described in this
book is very difficult to prove. We cannot ultimately know what goes on in
their minds and ultimately prove the links between the money they took in
and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and
their associates. That said, the pattern of behavior I have established is
too blatant to ignore, and deserves legal scrutiny by those with
investigative capabilities that go beyond journalism."
In other words, a mere journalist can’t uncover the smoking gun. You need
someone with subpoena power to get to the bottom of it all.
The recurrent pattern of benefits and favors looks too established to be a
long series of accidents. I’m not going to quote extensively from
Schweizer’s book, because it will encourage defenders of Hillary to focus on
the source rather than the content. He does, however, make an important
point that passed muster with PolitiFact: of the thirteen speeches between
2001 and 2012 for which Bill was paid $500,000 or more, ten were given while
Hillary was Secretary of State. Many of those speeches were sponsored by
groups with interests before the State Department.
Just one other broad point from Schweizer: the prominence of foreign
contributors to the Foundation is striking—and the donations are often made
by people not known for philanthropy in their home countries. To explain
this, Schweizer—accurately— cites an article in the Indian Express written
by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, not some random internet commenter but a
distinguished political scientist, educated at Oxford and Princeton and the
president of a New Delhi think tank. Mehta asks a good question, which
answers itself: “[T]he top echelons of Indian capital are becoming
increasingly global, jockeying for access and influence. What else explains
why CII [the Confederation of Indian Industry] was so keen to donate to the
Clinton Foundation, when its discharging of its own commitments in India has
been, at best, very reluctant?”
Clintonites will also likely decry the Wall Street Journal as a fair source
of criticism. Nevertheless, its review in early 2015 of what it calls
Hillary’s “complex corporate ties” is worth attention. It opens by pointing
out, as was noted in the previous chapter, that Hillary was unusually
aggressive for a Secretary of State at promoting U.S. business abroad,
“pushing governments to sign deals and change policies to the advantage of
corporate giants such as General Electric Co., Exxon Mobil Corp., Microsoft
Corp. and Boeing Co.” All these companies gave money to the Clinton
Foundation. The Journal counts at least 60 companies that lobbied the State
Department during Hillary’s reign as having given collectively $26 million
to the Foundation. At least 44 of the 60 participated in projects
coordinated by the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).
In Hard Choices, Hillary brags about her emphasis on what she calls
“economic statecraft,” a strategy she concocted with former Goldman Sachs
banker Robert Hormats that involves putting the vast U.S. diplomatic corps,
with offices in 270 cities around the world, to work “creat[ing] new
opportunities for growth and shared prosperity.” In the book, this takes the
high-minded form of breaking down protectionist barriers and promoting “an
open trading system,” a core goal of U.S. foreign policy since the end of
World War II. The intended beneficiaries are “American companies and
workers.”
The Journal article suggests that less high-minded considerations were
involved when theory was turned to practice. In 2009, at the request of
Microsoft, Hillary sent Hormats to lobby the Chinese to tighten things up on
software piracy. Microsoft, a longtime donor to the Foundation, subsequently
launched a CGI-coordinated initiative to provide discounted or free software
to teachers and students valued at $130 million. In 2011, Hillary personally
lobbied Algeria to buy GE nuclear power equipment; a month after her visit,
GE announced a health partnership with the Foundation providing it with
between $500,000 and $1 million. (Contributions are reported in ranges, so
we don’t know exactly how much.) Throughout her tenure, Hillary promoted
fracking at home and abroad, a policy supported by major U.S. energy
companies, many of whom are also Foundation supporters. Hillary lobbied
Russia to buy Boeing planes, rather than those made by Airbus. Soon after,
Boeing made its first contribution to the Clinton Foundation. She pressed
India to lift restrictions that hampered the growth of Wal-Mart and other
U.S.-based big box stores. Hillary, as we have seen, used to lawyer for
Wal-Mart and served on its board; the company has given over $1.5 million to
the Foundation.
They had it down to a system. Hormats told the Journal that before every
trip, he provided Hillary with a list of U.S. corporate interests to shill
for.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [4]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/books/excerpt-my-turn-critical-doug-henwood-book-hil
lary
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/doug-henwood
[2] http://www.orbooks.com
[3] http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/my-turn-by-doug-henwood/
[4] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Excerpt from 'My
Turn, " a Critical Doug Henwood Book on Hillary
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
