Hillary Clinton is bashing CEOs -- while taking their money

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You best believe it. But unfortunately she's likely an easy winner, even without my massively important vote.
You know how she WILL generate the needed enthusiasm to win easily, like Obama did in 2012 when he faced the same sort of ambivalence as Hillary will? When idiots like you on the other side attack continually her for not leaving Tips at Chipolte, or Parking 2 inches beyond a handicapped parking sign, Benghazi, etc.
Instead of attacking her for actually important things that have some traction like her Iraq vote, E mails.

Hillary is old, tired, corrupt, uninspiring and entitled.

Many on the left like you will simply stay home. Ditto for blacks now that a bro isn't running.

If it's Hillary vs Jeb...well, I'm not sure which base will be less motivated.

Hillary/Jeb (D) - 2016...because it no longer matters.
 

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Hillary is old, tired, corrupt, uninspiring and entitled.

Many on the left like you will simply stay home. Ditto for blacks now that a bro isn't running.

If it's Hillary vs Jeb...well, I'm not sure which base will be less motivated.

Hillary/Jeb (D) - 2016...because it no longer matters.

Speaking only for myself, if that’s the case I will sit it out.

Not worth my time to get involved in a lose lose situation.
 

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So far not 1 candidate that's announced is worthy of an Americans vote.....
 

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Hillary has some serious 'splaining to do about her role in Cisco's China cover-up

Matthew Cunningham-Cook
Posted with permission from International Business Times

Cisco Systems had a public relations problem: Having invested $16 billion in the Chinese market, the technology giant was suddenly facing congressional scrutiny over its alleged complicity in building the so-called Great Firewall that helps China's authoritarian regime censor information and surveil its citizens.

The San Jose, California, company endured a high-profile Senate hearing about its Chinese operations in 2008 and reaffirmed its “continued commitment to China.” But the issue wouldn’t die. A group of investors stormed the company’s annual meeting in November 2009, pressing a shareholder resolution that would force the company to prevent the Chinese government from using Cisco technology to engage in what critics said was widespread human-rights abuse.

That’s when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tossed the company a lifeline. Weeks after Cisco executives killed the shareholder initiative, Cisco was honored as a finalist for the State Department’s award for “outstanding corporate citizenship, innovation and democratic principles.” The next year, the company won the award. While the honors were for the company’s work in the Middle East, they gave Cisco a well-timed opportunity to change the subject and present itself as a champion of human rights.

What Clinton did not say at the State Department award ceremonies was that Cisco had been pumping money into her family’s foundation. Though the foundation will not release an exact timeline of the contributions, records reviewed by International Business Times show that Cisco had by December 2008 donated from $500,000 to $1 million to the foundation. The company had hired lobbying firms run by former Clinton aides. After the money flowed into the foundation, Clinton’s State Department not only lauded Cisco’s human rights record, it also delivered millions of dollars worth of new government contracts to the company.

The most recent foundation records available show that Cisco has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, all told. Cisco employees have been generous financial supporters of Hillary Clinton’s political career, delivering more than $140,000 to her campaigns, data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation show. The foundation, the State Department, and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign all declined IBTimes’ requests for comment.

A spokesman for Cisco said the company does “not participate in business activities that would aid repression.” The company declined to answer when asked specifically about human rights in China and declined to comment on the nature of the contracting work it has with the U.S. government. The company’s website says the money it has donated to the Clinton Foundation is for efforts to combat climate change.

'Crony Capitalism'
Internet freedom advocates say Clinton’s moves helped Cisco whitewash its image and also raise questions about the sincerity of her often-stated commitment to human rights.

“Crony capitalism has defined Clinton's career, from her tenure on the board of Walmart, to the Wall Street execs whom she surrounded herself with at the State Department, to her allegiance to Cisco, even as it violated principles on which she staked her tenure,” said David Segal, executive director of the Internet freedom advocacy group Demand Progress.

Clinton begins her campaign for the presidency amid intensifying questions about whether donations to her foundation unduly influenced her actions as a top U.S. government official. The Wall Street Journal reported that the board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation will continue to accept donations from Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway; other countries can still participate in the Clinton Global Initiative, a subsidiary of the foundation.

An IBTimes report last week demonstrated how Clinton changed her position on a Colombia trade deal and backed military aid to that country after the Colombian subsidiary of a Canadian oil company and its founder delivered large donations to the foundation. Clinton’s family foundation also has received donations from countries like Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all of which had sensitive relationships with Clinton’s State Department.

The State Department’s relationship with China was also delicate. Over the years, Clinton developed a reputation as someone willing to be tough on Beijing. In 1995, as first lady, she gave a speech in the Chinese capital firmly declaring that “women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.” When Chinese authorities moved to assert control ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, she spoke out for the cause of Tibet and for jailed dissidents.

In her 2014 memoir "Hard Choices," Clinton reiterated her support for human-rights advocates in China. She specifically criticized the Great Firewall, writing that after she made comments about the right to dissent in China in 2011, “censors went right to work erasing mentions of my message from the Internet.”

But the issue of Chinese repression -- and Cisco’s role -- was already known by then. In 2009, weeks after Clinton’s State Department had named Cisco a finalist for the secretary of state’s Awards for Corporate Excellence (ACE), a report from the Electronic Freedom Foundation noted “Cisco's deep involvement” in building the Chinese government’s censorship system. The report pointed out that “Cisco engineers gave a presentation acknowledging the repressive uses for their technology.”

In 2010, the Clinton Foundation gave Cisco CEO John Chambers a high-profile speaking role at its “Turning Ideas Into Action” annual meeting. Cisco also won an ACE that year -- just before the Human Rights Law Foundation filed a lawsuit against Cisco outlining what the foundation's executive director, Terri Marsh, said was the “key role Cisco played in the design, construction, and maintenance of China’s Internet surveillance system.”

In an interview with IBTimes, Marsh said that “Cisco’s conduct has enabled an unprecedented and widespread crackdown on religious minorities, Tibetans, and democracy activists in China.” Cisco’s work in China, she said, “runs contrary to Secretary Clinton's stated commitment to ‘a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.’” She added: “We are disappointed that the State Department has chosen to reward rather than condemn such a company, and believe that the United States should instead be sending a clear message to American technology corporations that complicity in global human rights abuses is not acceptable.”

Cisco has argued that it cannot control how its products are used, and can’t be held responsible for a government that might employ its technology to undermine democratic rights.

“We have never customized our equipment to help the Chinese government -- or any government -- censor content, track Internet use by individuals or intercept Internet communications,” the company said in a statement in 2011. “Cisco does not supply equipment to China that is customized in any way to facilitate blocking of access or surveillance of users. Equipment supplied to China is the same equipment we provide worldwide.”

Wired magazine reported in 2008 that internal company documents show that Cisco saw the Great Firewall as an opportunity to expand its business operations in China.

Daniel Wade, an attorney who represented Chinese dissidents in a lawsuit against Cisco, told IBTimes that “Cisco knew full well that its products were going to be used to suppress and facilitate the torture of democracy activists.”

'Ample Evidence'
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which today works with Cisco on an Internet encryption project, said Cisco technology enabled violent repression by the Chinese government.

“We have ample evidence to indicate that the technology Cisco created was instrumental in the tracking down of religious minorities, detaining them, and murdering them,” said Rainey Reitman, the EFF’s activism director. “Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a full public accounting.”

Clinton’s State Department did more than simply praise Cisco’s human rights record. Starting in 2010, Cisco began receiving lucrative contracting work from the department, totaling more than $3.5 million during Clinton’s time as secretary of state (January 2009 to February 2013). There’s no data available indicating that Cisco had received contracting work from the State Department prior to Clinton’s tenure.

The human rights award and government contracts coincided with Cisco hiring lobbying firms Franklin Square Group, Capitol Solutions, and Capitol Counsel, which are all run by former Clinton aides. The firms received almost $2 million in lobbying business from Cisco during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, federal records show.

None of the firms had received lobbying business from Cisco prior to Clinton’s appointment to head the department.

Bill Clinton’s financial relationships in China add another layer of complexity. The Clinton Foundation has received more than $500,000 from the Alibaba Group, which has assisted Chinese government efforts to crack down on dissent in Tibet. And in 2005, Bill Clinton appeared in China at an event jointly sponsored by Yahoo and Alibaba after Yahoo had handed over evidence to the Chinese government for its legal case against a critical journalist.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Cisco has continued. In August, she appeared at the company for a surprise visit. Chambers interviewed her onstage, telling employees: “I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park."
 

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New Book, ‘Clinton Cash,’ Questions Foreign Donations to Foundation

By AMY CHOZICKAPRIL 19, 2015


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Hillary Rodham Clinton at a small-business round table on Wednesday in Des Moines. CreditCharlie Neibergall/Associated Press

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The book does not hit shelves until May 5, but already the Republican Rand Paul has called its findings “big news” that will “shock people” and make voters “question” the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” by Peter Schweizer — a 186-page investigation of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities — is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy.
The book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, asserts that foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.
“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Mr. Schweizer writes.
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His examples include a free-trade agreement in Colombia that benefited a major foundation donor’s natural resource investments in the South American nation, development projects in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, and more than $1 million in payments to Mr. Clinton by a Canadian bank and major shareholder in the Keystone XL oil pipeline around the time the project was being debated in the State Department.
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What Hillary Clinton Would Need to Do to Win

In the long lead up to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign announcement, aides proved adept in swatting down critical books as conservative propaganda, including Edward Klein’s “Blood Feud,” about tensions between the Clintons and the Obamas, and Daniel Halper’s “Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.”
But “Clinton Cash” is potentially more unsettling, both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book.
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which includes Mr. Paul and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, have been briefed on the book’s findings, and its contents have already made their way into several of the Republican presidential candidates’ campaigns.
Conservative “super PACs” plan to seize on “Clinton Cash,” and a pro-Democrat super PAC has already assembled a dossier on Mr. Schweizer, a speechwriting consultant to former President George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who has contributed to the conservative website Breitbart.com, to make the case that he has a bias against Mrs. Clinton.
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Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)?

And the newly assembled Clinton campaign team is planning a full-court press to diminish the book as yet another conservative hit job.
A campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon, called the book part of the Republicans’ coordinated attack strategy on Mrs. Clinton “twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories,” and he said “it will not be the first work of partisan-fueled fiction about the Clintons’ record, and we know it will not be the last.”
Mr. Schweizer and a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corporation and is publishing the book, declined to comment.
The timing is problematic for Mrs. Clinton as she begins a campaign to position herself as a “champion for everyday Americans.”
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From 2001 to 2012, the Clintons’ income was at least $136.5 million, Mr. Schweizer writes, using a figure previously reported in The Post. “During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, he writes. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”
The Clinton Foundation has come under scrutiny for accepting foreign donations while Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state. Last week, the foundation revised its policy to allow donations from countries like Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and Britain but prohibit giving by other nations in the Middle East.
Mr. Schweizer’s book will be released the same day former President Bill Clinton and the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, will host the Clinton Global Initiative gathering with donors in Morocco, the culmination of a foundation trip to several African nations. (A chapter in the book is titled “Warlord Economics: The Clintons Do Africa.”)
There is a robust market for books critical of the Clintons. The thinly sourced “Blood Feud,” by Mr. Klein, at one point overtook Mrs. Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” on the best-seller list.
But whether Mr. Schweizer’s book can deliver the same sales is not clear. He writes mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist and meticulously documents his sources, including tax records and government documents, while leaving little doubt about his view of the Clintons.
His reporting largely focuses on payments made to Mr. Clinton for speeches, which increased while his wife served as secretary of state, writing that “of the 13 Clinton speeches that fetched $500,000 or more, only two occurred during the years his wife was not secretary of state.”
In 2011, Mr. Clinton made $13.3 million in speaking fees for 54 speeches, the majority of which were made overseas, the author writes.
Correction: April 19, 2015
An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for the think tank for which Peter Schweizer is a fellow. It is the Hoover Institution, not the Hoover Institute.​

 

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