Tag Archives: Money in Politics

News

Largest individual donor to Clinton Foundation has trade ties to Iran

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

This is from the leftist Newsweek, of all places.

Excerpt:

The fourth richest man in Ukraine, Pinchuk owns Interpipe Group, a Cyprus-incorporated manufacturer of seamless pipes used in oil and gas sectors.

Newsweek has seen declarations and documents from Ukraine that show a series of shipments from Interpipe to Iran in 2011 and 2012, including railway parts and products commonly used in the oil and gas sectors.

Among a number of high-value invoices for products related to rail or oil and gas, one shipment for $1.8m (1.7m) in May 2012 was for “seamless hot-worked steel pipes for pipelines” and destined for a city near the Caspian Sea.

Both the rail and oil and gas sectors are sanctioned by the US, which specifically prohibits any single invoice to the Iranian petrochemical industry worth more than $1m.

Hot Air says that the group should not have been doing business with Iran:

In other words, Interpipe should have been slapped with penalties and sanctions for its operations with Iran. Pinchuk’s company has a US subsidiary, which means that US sanctions apply across the entire organization. The agency for imposing penalties for sanctions violations in these cases, Ross notes, is the State Department. Who was in charge at the State Department during this period? None other than Hillary Clinton.

[…]Despite all of Pinchuk’s activity with Iran, the State Department apparently took no action against his company or Pinchuk himself. That lack of response finally got the attention of Rep. Steve Stockman last November, before his retirement, who requested that the Department of the Treasury investigate Interpipe. So far, there have been no developments on that front.

Hot Air also linked to this Wall Street Journal article that specifies the amounts of the donations.

Hold on to your hats:

Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

Mr. Pinchuk and his wife—the daughter of former Ukraine PresidentLeonid Kuchma—began donating to Clinton charities in 2006 after being introduced to Mr. Clinton by Doug Schoen, a pollster who has worked for both Clintons.

In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

Now you might think that millions of dollars is a lot of money to Hillary Clinton, but actually, her campaign is expected to blow through $2.5 BILLION, according to the radically leftist New York Times.

The ultra-leftist New Yorker listed some more of the Clinton Foundation donors, and one of them is a monster:

The Guardian story, by highlighting the fact that some of the Clinton Foundation’s donors have been maintaining bank accounts in Switzerland, has focussed attention on its sources of financing rather than its makeover or its philanthropic activities. Among the donors named by the Guardian were the British retail mogul Richard Caring; Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate who appeared earlier this week at C.G.I.’s annual winter meeting, in New York; and Jeffrey Epstein, a New York financier who was jailed in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from underage girls. According to the Clinton Foundation’s donor database, Giustra and charities linked to him have donated at least fifty million dollars. In 2006, Epstein gave twenty-five thousand dollars, the Guardian said. Other donors to the foundation who were identified as clients of H.S.B.C.’s Geneva office included Eli Broad, the Californian entrepreneur and philanthropist, and Denise Rich, whose former husband, the fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, was pardoned by Bill Clinton just before he left office, in 2001.

Maybe Epstein is hoping for a pardon, the way that Marc Rich got a pardon from Bill Clinton, just before he left office? This whole situation is incestuous. It sickens me that this is what Democrats do in order to get elected. TWO AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS? That’s how you get elected President?

Or maybe it’s just being a woman:

Do you think those college students know about where the Clinton Foundation gets its millions of dollars of donations?

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Videos

How unions lobby Democrats to prevent competition and raise consumer prices

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This video from Reason.tv that ECM found at Big Government explains how unions destroy competition by using political contributions to Democrats. Competition is achieved when consumers like you and me have choices in the marketplace. Without choices, one company (or the government) has a monopoly, and can deliver low quality for a high price – and there is nothing you can do about it.

Here’s the video:

And here’s the blurb:

You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s-and more than twice as expensive.

So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor.

Unions are major, major donors to the Democrat party, and they want to make sure that you have no choice at all about how you spend your money. And that includes government-run education!

And of course, removing competition is only one thing unions do to raise consumer prices – they also advocate for tariffs, which also makes you and I pay more for consumer goods. Unions are against consumer rights.

News

Do teacher unions care about providing high quality education?

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Story from Big Government. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

In case you haven’t heard, the state of Hawaii, facing the same type of budget crunch as other state governments, has to cut more than $400 million from its education budget over the next two years. Logically, that would lead to some teacher layoffs in a number of school districts.

But the Hawaii State Teachers Association has a better idea. It wants to adopt a four-day school week, with unpaid “furlough Fridays,” to avoid any layoffs. In other words, the teachers are willing to sacrifice one-fifth of their students’ education to keep the paychecks rolling in.

The idea is apparently catching on in other states, as well.

The union’s perogative of “no lay-offs” is clearly self-serving.  Our organization, Education Action Group Foundation, which is based in Michigan, has estimated that 2,500 school layoffs in Michigan equals about a $1 million hit to the Michigan Education Association in terms of dues.  When a state is talking about significantly more than that, one can see why the union doesn’t want layoffs.

The union needs those dues to help elect Democrats, who will then turn around and block competition from homeschoolers and private schools. This way, parents are powerless to choose a better way to have their children educated the way they choose.