Hillary Clinton's Big Benefactor Has Trade Links with Iran

Enemies of Hillary Clinton waiting to discredit her bid for the White House are likely to seize on news that one of the biggest benefactors to the Clinton Foundation has been trading with Iran and may be in breach of US sanctions imposed on the country.

Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, 54, has courted the Clintons for at least nine years – in the United States, the Alps and Ukraine.


earlier this year, he was confirmed as the largest individual contributor to the Clinton Foundation, whose aims include the creation of “economic opportunity and growth”. He also has links to the Tony Blair Foundation and represented its biggest single donor in 2013.

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/04/24/hillary-clinton-runs-white-house-and-row-over-ukrainian-benefactors-trade-322253.html

Steelworkers press Obama, Clinton to tackle China

The steelworkers union is running ads in several Ohio newspapers Sunday as part of an effort to push Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) into taking a tougher stand on trade issues with China.

The steelworkers want the candidates to focus more on China in comparison with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico that has been a focus of the two campaigns over the last week.

NAFTA was a big part of this week's debate in Cleveland between Clinton and Obama, and both candidates have said they would seek to renegotiate NAFTA if elected. In contrast, China was barely mentioned during the debate.

While some steel jobs have been lost to Mexico, the union argues a tsunami of jobs are being offshored to China. It says the exodus began when 2,100 jobs were lost with the 1998 closure of a Huffy Bike plant in Celina, Ohio.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/14422-steelworkers-press-obama-clinton-to-tackle-china

How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World



One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton’s plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria’s bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read “Stop fracking with our water” and “Chevron go home.” Bulgaria’s parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Clinton urged Bulgarian officials to give fracking another chance. According to Borissov, she agreed to help fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people.” But resistance only grew. The following month in neighboring Romania, thousands of people gathered to protest another Chevron fracking project, and Romania’s parliament began weighing its own shale gas moratorium. Again Clinton intervened, dispatching her special envoy for energy in Eurasia, Richard Morningstar, to push back against the fracking bans. The State Depart­ment’s lobbying effort culminated in late May 2012, when Morningstar held a series of meetings on fracking with top Bulgarian and Romanian officials. He also touted the technology in an interview on Bulgarian national radio, saying it could lead to a fivefold drop in the price of natural gas. A few weeks later, Romania’s parliament voted down its proposed fracking ban and Bulgaria’s eased its moratorium.


The episode sheds light on a crucial but little-known dimension of Clinton’s diplomatic legacy. Under her leadership, the State Department worked closely with energy companies to spread fracking around the globe — part of a broader push to fight climate change, boost global energy supply, and undercut the power of adversaries such as Russia that use their energy resources as a cudgel. But environmental groups fear that exporting fracking, which has been linked to drinking-water contamination and earthquakes at home, could wreak havoc in countries with scant environmental regulation. And according to interviews, diplomatic cables, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones, American officials — some with deep ties to industry — also helped US firms clinch potentially lucrative shale concessions overseas, raising troubling questions about whose interests the program actually serves.



https://medium.com/climate-desk/how-hillary-clinton-s-state-department-sold-fracking-to-the-world-5a291d7797f5

Hillary Clinton Fumed About Changing Passports For Same-Sex Parents In 2011


http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/crop_8_320_3334_1709,scalefit_630_noupscale/560c69ab1800002a0083169e.jpeg


WASHINGTON -- Hillary Clinton was furious about a 2011 State Department decision to replace the words "mother" and "father" with gender-neutral terms on U.S. passport applications, warning of the wrath of Sarah Palin, according to newly released emails.



"Who made the decision that State will not use the terms 'mother and father' and instead substitute 'parent one and two'?” Clinton wrote in an email to staff on Jan. 8, 2011. The email was released Wednesday by the State Department as part of an ongoing dump of emails that Clinton sent from a personal account during her time as secretary of state.



"I’m not defending that decision, which I disagree w and knew nothing about, in front of this Congress. I could live w letting people in nontraditional families choose another descriptor so long as we retained the presumption of mother and father," she wrote. "We need to address this today or we will be facing a huge Fox-generated media storm led by [Sarah] Palin et al."


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-same-sex-passports_560c68e6e4b076812700bf06

The "Electability" Argument Is Dead: All the Polls Show Bernie Does Better Against GOP Than Hillary


You hear this a lot: "I would vote for Bernie, but he's just not electable. We need a candidate who can beat the GOP." Sounds reasonable enough, right? So I started digging into the data. And it turns out, that not only does Hillary not poll better against GOP candidates than Bernie, but Bernie consistently polls better than she does.

A quick note on methodology: I am using only pollsters that use live pollsters and include cell phones because they have the best track record. I am not including any internet pollsters because some people don't trust them for some reason, even though they also have a pretty good track record. Robo-pollsters like PPP, have the worst track record and are therefore not included, even though PPP has stated over and over that Sanders runs just as well as, or better than, Clinton. See here and here. Also, I am only using recent data: only polls since September.

Before I start, keep in mind that pollsters, in their infinite wisdom, were often polling Biden, a non-candidate in head to heads, but not Sanders. As a result, there are fewer general election polls testing Sanders. However, there are some early-state polls that test general election head to heads.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/27/1440343/-The-Electability-Argument-Is-Dead-All-the-Polls-Show-Bernie-Does-Better-Against-GOP-Than-Hillary

The Hole in Hillary’s Flip-Flop Excuse

She keeps saying new information makes her change her mind on policy. But what new information?

Hillary Clinton has a propensity to change her mind on big issues. She has reversed her positions on gay marriage, immigration, gun control, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, mass incarceration and the Iraq War, and some believe her recent stand on the Keystone XL pipeline constitutes a flip, too.

Everybody agrees that changing facts can justify a change in one’s view. But Clinton’s insistence that learning about “new” or “better” information propels her reassessments prompts this question: What was the new information?

To my knowledge, no new “information” about gay marriage emerged from the day she endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples to the day she demanded the right to same-sex marriage. The immigration, gun control and mass-incarceration issues have been similarly unrippled by shocking new findings. Likewise, the information required to make a stand against the Iraq War was not hidden. Other senators found it and took that position! Perhaps the anti-war information escaped Clinton’s notice—in which case, bad on her—or perhaps she viewed it and decided not to act on it—in which case, double-bad on her. And who among us had a better vantage from which to assemble an encyclopedic view on the Trans-Pacific Partnership than Clinton? She praised it endlessly while secretary of state, but pulled a moonshiner’s turn last week to skedaddle away from it.

If Clinton lived in Gobles, Michigan, had no library card and no Internet connection, we could accept her new-information excuse. But for the past 25 years, Clinton has had some of the best researchers at her disposal—a private staff, a campaign staff, the wizards at the State Department staff, a senatorial staff, the busy beavers from the Congressional Research Service and the White House staff. And, in fact, every indication and story we know about Hillary Clinton’s policy work belabors just how much she studies and learns. So if new or better information has been the impetus for her policy shifts, she must concede that she has a fat history of taking the wrong position in the early going and then requiring a re-do. The constant need for re-dos appears to indicate that she’d make a lousy surgeon and a bad 3 a.m. president.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/democratic-debate-hillary-clinton-flip-flop-213247#ixzz3qumxy6T2

Mortgage Loan Crisis: FDR’s answer would prove useful today

Once upon a time, there was a nation where, during an era of prosperity, large numbers of citizens used short-term, interest-only loans to purchase their homes. They apparently were unaware that once the good times ended, they would be saddled with unbearable debt. Which is exactly what happened in America roughly 75 years ago.


Roosevelt’s real goal was to create stability from both an economic and social perspective. With the HOLC and the Federal Housing Administration, his administration created the long-term loan, which soon evolved into the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage. The local business community praised the program, which not only helped people keep their homes, but also provided employment for construction workers. From 1933 to 1936, more than 1 million people relied on HOLC loans. Close to 80 percent of the borrowers made good on their payments and kept their houses. When the HOLC shut down in 1951, it returned a slight profit to the government.

Many of the elements of the Home Owners Refinancing Act, which created the HOLC, would be useful today. Although foreclosure rates of the early 1930s still tower over today’s rates, foreclosures and defaults are advancing at a dangerous pace, as borrowers struggle to keep up with their adjustable-rate mortgages. “Our problems of today do not begin to approach those of 1933,” Kevin Pollock, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Congress last year. “But I suggest that HOLC could be usefully studied by anybody thinking about this issue.”

http://www.tnj.com/archives/2008/march/mortgage-loan-crisis

Negative $4,019

The Obama years have been brutal on middle-class incomes.

The Presidential race is boiling down to one dominant issue: which party's policies will do more to help the financially stressed American middle class. President Obama's campaign theme is that Mitt Romney and the Republicans cater to the rich, while Mr. Obama cares about struggling families.




http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303822204577468750027784434