The Clintons — At the End of All Things

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling.

VDH crushes another one……and the Clintons along the way.

What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?

Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail–server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 “investment,” or Hillary’s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children’s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons — such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.

So the Clintons finally got their millions and what such millions can ensure for their separate lifestyles. They have at last beautiful gated estates, tasteful and secluded from hoi polloi, light years away from Arkansas and the Rose Law Firm. Progressive Chelsea married a multimillionaire hedge-fund operator whose father served five years in federal prison for bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Her parents’ profiteering can allow Chelsea to announce, perhaps even sincerely, that she is not interested in money. Why should she be, given her own reported $15 million net worth from maternal spin-off favors? She lives in a $10 million Manhattan residence, so her parents had no motivation to get more in order to “provide” for their offspring. Instead, was bringing Chelsea down to Bill and Hillary’s level as a Foundation fixer a way to leave her a post mortem primer on how to get even richer?

In sum, there was certainly no need for Hillary to even have considered flying to the Moroccan autocracy on the eve of announcing her presidential candida to leverage a $12 million speaking “fee” from a cut-throat Moroccan mining company, Why the drive to pile profits on top of profits on top of profits? Or, as Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin, put it of the quid pro quo fee (i.e., the mining company felt that it had gotten from the Clinton-run State Department a U.S.-financed Export-Import Bank loan of $92 million):

This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request.

Translated: A President Hillary Clinton would probably have no regret that dozens of heads of state, the majority of them dictatorial and not especially friendly to the U.S., would feel that they had done business with Hillary and Bill — and she, as a recipient of their largess, would owe them commensurate attention.

Why did multimillionaire Hillary charge UCLA, in the era of thousands of indebted students, $300,000 (rather than, say, $149,999.99) for a brief, platitudinous speech? Why did multimillionaire Bill need more than $17 million for being honorary “chancellor” of the financially for-profit but tottering Laureate University (whose spin-off associate organization was a recipient of State Department largesse)? Did he think the extra millions were worth the embarrassment of being the highest-paid and least-busy college executive in U.S. history?

Apparently, the good life did not drive the Clintons so much as the quest for the supposed best life. Even though they had finally “made it” among the multimillionaire set, the Clintons always saw others (no doubt, deemed by them less deserving) with far, far more — whether Jeffery Epstein, with his ability to jet wherever and with whomever he pleased, or green half-a-billionaire Al Gore, who ran even more successful cons, such as rapidly selling a worthless cable TV station to beat impending capital-gains taxes, and selling it to none other than the anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, whose carbon-generated profits come from autocratic Qatar. (The media never audited Gore’s attempt to become a cable mogul, unlike their current concerns about a potential Trump media outlet).

The rich did not pressure the Clintons for paid favors as much as they sought out the Clintons as targets for graft. They certainly understand and smile at Hillary’s boilerplate promise of “making the rich pay their fair share” — the mantra of those who are worth over $100 million and immune from the impact of any tax hikes, or, for that matter, immune from any consequences whatsoever of their own ideology.

The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.

Power and pride were the other catalyst for Clinton criminality. I don’t think progressive politics mattered much to the Clintons, at least compared with what drives the more sincere Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Hillary, like Bill, has no real political beliefs — though she doesn’t hesitate to pursue a mostly opportunistic progressive political agenda. By temperament and background, the Clintons are leftists and will follow a leftist vision, sort of, but one predicated on doing so within the constraints of obtaining and keeping power.

Trade deals? Hillary is flexible given the fickle public mood. Fracking? It depends on where the money is. The Keystone Pipeline? What are the pros and cons in key swing states? Wall Street criminality? One has to distinguish a wink-and-nod political façade from a private flexibility. Gay marriage? She can reluctantly “evolve” under pressure. Immigration? It hinges on Latino demography in swing states, and how bothersome, as their aides put it, “needy” Latinos and “brown” op-ed writers become. Black Lives Matter? Had the black vote not won Obama the 2008 and 2012 elections, Hillary would probably have persisted in Bill’s 1990’s mode (when he condemned rap singer Sister Soulja for her racism and her anti-white rhetoric) and in her own critique of black “super predators,” as she called gang members in 1996.

For the Clintons, power is the narcotic of being sought out, of being surrounded by retainers, of bringing enemies to heel and enticing sycophants with benefits. Liberalism and progressivism are mere social and cultural furniture, the “correct” politics of their background that one mouths and exploits to obtain and maintain political clout — and to get really, really rich without guilt or apology.

As in the quest for lucre, the Clintons’ appetite for high-profile authority is endless. Just as $150 million seemed as nothing compared with the billions and billions raked in by their friends and associates, so too eight years in the White House, tenure as governor, senator, or secretary of state were never enough. In between such tenures, the Clintons suffered droughts when they were not on center stage and in no position to wield absolute power, as they watched less deserving folk (the Obamas perhaps in particular) gain inordinate attention. A Hillary presidency would give the Clintons unprecedented Peronist-like power, in a manner unlike any couple in American history.

Of course, the Clintons are not only corrupt but cynical as well. They accept that the progressive media, the foundations, the universities, the bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley honor power more than trendy left-wing politics; they well understand that their fans will, for them, make the necessary adjustments to contextualize Clinton criminality or amorality. Sexual predations, the demonization of women, graft, and unequal protection under the law are also of no consequence to the inbred, conflicted, and morally challenged media – who will always check in with the Clinton team, like errant dogs who scratch the backdoor of their master after a periodic runaway.

The Clintons have contempt for the media precisely because the media are so obsequious. They smile, that, like themselves, the media are easily manipulated and compromised — to the extent of offering their articles, before publication, for Clinton approval (as the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich did; leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign (as Donna Brazile did); or saying (as Politico’s chief political correspondent did), “I have become a hack. . . .  Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.” The Clintons view such sycophants not with affection, but with disdain, given that they are moochers no better than the Clintons, with the same base desires, albeit better camouflaged by their pretense of objectivity.

To paraphrase Demosthenes’s warning of the impending arrival of the war-scarred and half-blind Philip II, the Clintons have devoted their lives, their health, their very bodies and souls to get where they are. And their visible scars prove it.

They have long ago lost any sense of shame — Bill is hourly caricatured as a sexual predator, and the best that can be said of Hillary’s character is that the bankrupt Left shrugs, “She may be a crook, but she’s our crook.” In Dorian Gray fashion, their sins are now imprinted on their faces and visible in their tremors. They were and are capable of any and everything.

And one wonders whether, in fleeting seconds here at the end of things, they still believe that it was all worth what they have become.

Investigative Journalism Is Alive And Well…………

Jack Cashill reveals and unloads the goods on The Clintons’ Other, Truly Bodacious Mine Boondoggle.

The New York Times reported this week on the unseemly transfer of cash from parties interested in a major uranium deal to the Clintons.  The Canadian company selling Uranium One to the Russians donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation.  And Russians tied to the deal gave Bill Clinton $500,000 for a Moscow speech.

The deal had global consequences.  It would put one fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States under Russian control.  So critical was the deal that it needed the approval of the U.S. State Department.  State approved the deal, and it managed to so without fanfare.  Hillary had failed to disclose the Canadian donors to Obama’s White House – this despite her presumed agreement to do just that.

As outrageous as this deal sounds, however, it was not the Clintons’ most egregious adventure in mining skulduggery.  That adventure climaxed nearly twenty years ago – September 18, 1996, to be precise – when then President Bill Clinton unilaterally transformed a 1.7-million-acre slice of southern Utah into a new national monument.

“We’re saying, very simply, our parents and grandparents saved the Grand Canyon for us,” Clinton told the cheering crowd.  “Today, we will save the Grand Escalante Canyons and the Kaiparowitz Plateaus of Utah for our children.”  Less than two months before the 1996 presidential election, the national media chose not to ask why Clinton had made so astonishing a move.

The answer could be traced back to the November 1994 midterms.  On that black Tuesday, Democrats lost fifty-two seats in the House and eight in the Senate.  Mario Cuomo lost.  House speaker Tom Foley lost.  Popular Texas governor Ann Richards lost to underdog George W. Bush.  Newt Gingrich now loomed as Speaker of the House.

Bill and Hillary Clinton caught the blame.  After days of anger and self-pity, they began to focus again on the one principle that had directed their lives to date: getting Bill re-elected.  Not by chance, just a week after the election, the Clintons were heading to the one place in the world most capable of nurturing a comeback: Indonesia, the home base of the Riady family.

The Riadys had bailed Clinton out as governor when he mismanaged Arkansas’s Teacher’s Retirement Fund.  They had rescued him with cash twice on the 1992 campaign trail.  They had seemingly bought off Clinton aide Webster Hubbell before he had to seek a deal with Whitewater prosecutors.  Soon enough, Clinton would reciprocate.

The mood on the Indonesia trip was sour from the beginning.  On the seemingly endless flight over, then adviser George Stephanopoulos reported, “The president and Hillary rarely left their cabin.”  This could not have been Bill’s idea.  What transpired in that cabin is unrecorded – in Hillary’s memoir, Living History, there is no trip to Indonesia – but from this moment on, the presidency would assume a much sharper edge, and Hillary was doing the sharpening.

It was with this trip, for instance, that the CEOs accompanying the Clintons saw their $100,000 donation to the DNC morph from a discreet expectation into the price of admission.  With this trip, too, shadowy figures like Gene and Nora Lum, John Huang, Charlie Trie, and Thai citizen Pauline Kanchanalak began to operate in the open.  All would later be charged in one scandal or another.

In Jakarta, Bill Clinton quickly got down to business.  He chided Democrats for their historic “adversarial” relationship with business and Republicans for their “inactive” one.  Boasted Clinton, “We have unashamedly been an active partner in helping our business enterprises to win contracts abroad.”  Unashamedly?  As to human rights, Clinton made clear that there were different rules for Indonesia from those for South Africa or Serbia.  “We do not seek to impose our vision of the world on others,” he groveled.  “Indeed, we continue to struggle with our own inequities and our own shortcomings.”

The CEOs, like John Bryson of Mission Energy, had more important things on their minds than human rights. Bryson wanted the White House to lean on the Asian Development Bank to support a massive new coal-fired electric plant for Indonesia called the Paiton project.  Although Paiton was hailed as the first “private” electric plant in Indonesia, “private” had a different meaning in Indonesia from what it means elsewhere.  In this case, it meant owned and operated, at least in part, by the “Indo ruling family,” the Suharto clan.

According to Commerce Department notes from John Huang’s file, a certain percentage of this project was set aside for a management company owned by Suharto’s daughter.  The cut for her and other relatives was to be a $50-million upfront loan to be paid back through presumed profits generated by the plant.  This arrangement troubled the ADB, which was reportedly “skiddish” (sic) about offering what amounted to a $50-million bribe to the family of a corrupt oligarch, paid, at least in part, by the U.S. taxpayer.

John Huang met with the CIA on the Paiton project as well. What the CIA did not know is that after the meeting, according to the Thompson Senate Committee, Huang repaired to “a secret office” and placed a three-hour call to his former employer, the Riadys’ Lippo Group.

Lippo had a lot at stake.  Mission Energy, as it turns out, was part of a larger consortium known as Edison International, and Edison was a Lippo partner.  There is more.  Suharto’s family had secured an exclusive, no bid, no-cut contract to supply clean coal to the Paiton power plant.  The family’s financial backer in his Indonesian coal mining business was none other than Mochtar Riady.  The Lippo Group controlled one of the only two commercially viable low-sulfur coalmines in the world, this one conveniently located near the Paiton plant in Indonesia.

The other one just happened to be located in Southern Utah.  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that the people of Utah were “furious” with Clinton for signing away their future.  They claimed that the move was “a land grab” by the federal government “at the economic expense of the state.”  Blitzer raised the issue of coal – perhaps $1 trillion’s worth of clean, low-sulfur coal – that would never be mined.  Said the president of this grand environmental gesture, “We can’t have mines everywhere and we shouldn’t have mines that threaten our national treasures.”

In her memoir, Living History, Hillary does not talk about the deal.  Bill gives it a paragraph in his memoir, My Life.  “My action was necessary to stop a large coal mine that would have fundamentally changed the character of the area,” said Clinton.  “Most of the Utah officials were against it, but the land was priceless, and I thought the monument designation would bring in tourism income that over time would more than offset the loss of the mine.”

In a stroke of the pen, Clinton had handed the Riadys a monopoly on the world’s supply of low-sulfur coal.  One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots between Utah and Indonesia.  The FBI had made the connection as well.  Consider the following field notes from an FBI interview with Huang:

HUANG laughed in response to questions concerning J.RIADY’s interest in Utah coal restrictions. J. RIADY’s coal interests were minimal. Indonesia had significant infrastructure problems which prohibited the development of its coal resources.

Huang was lying.  The Riadys had a powerful interest, and they would exploit it for all it was worth.  In fact, at the Paiton plant, the price of the coal exceeded the price of the electricity produced.  Each kilowatt generated drove the plant deeper into debt.  Of course, this meant there were no profits, which meant Suharto’s family members did not have to pay back their up-front $50-million loan.  If this plot sounds familiar, it is because it is nearly identical to that of Mel Brooks’s play and movie, The Producers.

PLN, the state Indonesian power company, caught the drift of the plot.  In 1999, the company sued the Clinton administration.  Its attorneys charged that U.S. officials knew the Paiton power plant contract to be awash in “corruption, collusion, and nepotism” from the beginning.  In December of that year, an Indonesian court ruled in its favor.  The PLN estimated that it had lost over $18 billion in total from Suharto corruption inside U.S. government-sponsored power plant contracts.

In September 1996, even if the media had been interested, Bill Clinton made his move too close to the election to allow for serious scrutiny.  In April 2015, Hillary Clinton is much more exposed, much too early.  If need be, her allies will bury her before it’s too late.

Fire in the hole!