Clinton foundation admits receiving $1mn donation from Qatar that it previously hid
RT | November 5, 2016
On the heels of damning WikiLeaks revelations, the Clinton Foundation has confirmed allegations that it received a $1 million ‘gift’ from Qatar without telling the State Department, breaking a signed agreement requiring it to reveal all foreign donations.
The payment, which was first revealed in an email exchange with Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta a month ago, has just been officially confirmed by the Foundation. The check was reportedly a gift to former President Bill Clinton in 2011 for his 65h birthday. A meeting was to take place between him and Qatari officials at some point, according to an email published last month. It is not clear if this ever took place, however.
Earlier in 2009, when Clinton became Secretary of State, she had to sign an agreement to prevent any conflicts of interest which stipulated that her influential global foundation could not receive any support from foreign sources without her notifying the State Department, according to Reuters. This was intended to ensure transparency and combat public perception that US foreign policy could be dictated by foreign money.
The agreement was also designed to give the State Department time to examine donations and raise any concerns in cases when a foreign entity wanted to “increase materially” the funding for any of the Foundation’s programs.
However, Clinton kept the $1 million check from Qatar a secret. While Foundation officials declined to confirm its existence last month, with just days to go before the election, the daily WikiLeaks revelations, and the FBI’s relaunched investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server gaining momentum, its spokesman, Brian Cookstra, finally admitted to receiving the money, though he insisted that the sum did not qualify as a “material increase” in Qatari support of the foundation.
When Cookstra was asked by Reuters what the Foundation considered an increase in funding, he refused to specify, only saying that the Qatar donations were intended for “overall humanitarian work.”
For additional comments, Reuters tried to contact the Qatari embassy, the Clinton presidential campaign and Bill Clinton personally, but received no response from any.
Although Cookstra said the sum did not constitute an increase in funding, there is evidence of at least eight other countries besides Qatar whose donations can clearly be construed as an ‘increase in funding.’ This includes the UK, which tripled the sum slated for the Foundation’s health project to $11.2 million in the years 2009-2012.
When questioned by Reuters last year, Cookstra admitted that a complete list of donors hadn’t been published since 2010. In other cases, the Foundation said that there was either no increase in funding, or that a particular donation had simply slipped past unnoticed, and should have been caught earlier.
The only thing that’s certain, and spelled out on the Foundation’s website, is that it received up to $5 million from the Gulf Kingdom over the years. However, the Foundation appears to want all of this to be relegated to the past. It promised in August that, if Hillary becomes president, it will stop accepting money from all foreign governments and close down any ongoing programs sustained by those funds.
According to Foundation records and testimony, the Qatar money continued to come in at “equal or lower” levels after 2009, but it declined to specify the differences in the funding before and after that period, or if it had changed significantly after Clinton took on the post of secretary of state.
A former Foundation fundraiser details some $21 million raised for Bill Clinton’s birthday in another email.
The Foundation’s somewhat forced admission that it had received Qatari money comes shortly after a recently leaked email exchange between Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, from 2014 startlingly revealed that she was aware Qatar and Saudi Arabia are directly funding Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] terrorists. This was discussed at length in John Pilger’s exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that airs on RT on Saturday and can be viewed in full here.
The WikiLeaks founder points to clear evidence that Clinton knew about her donors’ questionable dealings as early as several years back. The 2014 email from Clinton to Podesta says “that ISIL, ISIS is funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar – the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” according to Assange.
Assange admitted to Pilger, “I actually think this is the most significant email in the whole collection.”
“And perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the place, including into many media institutions, all serious analysts know, even the US government has mentioned or agreed with that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS, funding ISIS. But the dodge has always been, that’s… what… it’s just some rogue princes using their cut of the oil money to do what they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that – no, it is the governments of Saudi and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”
Pilger and Assange go on to discuss Clinton as a “cog” in a greater machine involving big business, banks, and “a network of relationships with particular states.” According to Assange, she is “the centralizer that interconnects all these different cogs.”
The Coming Plague of Poverty Among the Elderly: Clinton’s Plan For Gutting Social Security
By Alan Nasser | CounterPunch | November 4, 2016
In the recent Wikileaks revelations confirming Hillary Clinton’s duplicity, one of the clearest disclosures of her policy plans concerns her intention regarding Social Security. She stated that she would return to the position of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, charged with producing recommendations for reducing the deficit, i.e. cutting government social spending.
The Commission, or “Simpson-Bowles committee” -named after co-chairs former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, and Erskine Bowles, former Morgan Stanley board member and chief of staff under Bill Clinton- was appointed by Obama in 2010. Among its members were some of the most persistent deficit hawks. Most significantly, the Commission was stacked with leading enemies of Social Security flailing their arms over the “impending insolvency” of the program. The day before his appointment as co-chair, Simpson said in an interview with the Washington Post: “How did we get to a point in America where you get to a certain age in life, regardless of net worth or income, and you’re ‘entitled’? The word itself is killing us.” (Feb. 17, 2010) In a later e-mail he described Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million teats,” and had characterized its beneficiaries as “greedy geezers.” Bowles’s record was in line with Simpson’s. He had earlier negotiated with Newt Gingrich how best to cut safety net programs. The ultimate objective was to privatize Social Security.
In a rare moment of candor, a then-editor of The New York Times, Fred Brock, wrote an article critical of the Social-Security-is-going-broke alarmists titled “Save Social Security? From What?” (Business section, November 1, 1998). Brock attributed the faux hysteria to “hidden agendas…..Wall Street would love to get its hands on at least some of the billions of dollars in the Social Security trust fund . . . But knowing that the idea [of full privatization] won’t fly politically, [politicians] are pushing for partial privatization, in which individuals would invest a portion of their contribution in the stock market, all in the name of rescuing the system.”
Bowles’s efforts to undo Social Security through “partial privatization” began during the Clinton regime. The left-liberal economist Robert Kuttner, in his 2007 book The Squandering of America, detailed how Washington elites of both Parties had been planning to weaken Social Security since the Clinton Administration. Steven Gillon’s 2008 book The Pact included letters and interviews with reliable sources illustrating Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich’s collaboration to get Congress behind a plan to begin turning Social Security’s so-called trust fund over to Wall street, which would manage, for a fee, retirees’ benefits. Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had prodded the president to work with Gingrich not merely to reduce benefits and extend the retirement age, but to begin the privatization of Social Security. Clinton appointed Bowles as his intermediary. But the Monica Lewinsky scandal caused both embarrassed Congressional Democrats and Gingrich to distance themselves from Clinton. The privatization plan fell apart.
A waiting game was now under way.
Hillary Clinton’s speeches to the captains of finance strongly imply that she would resume the project of privatizing Social Security. Hers will be a gradual, stealth approach. The opening salvo will be further cuts in benefits and extensions of the full-benefit retirement age. But these alone will not satisfy Wall Street. The privatization plan will be resurrected, first in the form of legislation once again to begin “partial privatization.” In the end, the objective will be to turn the program into a broker’s-fee-for-service plan entirely in the hands of Wall Street. Retired workers will no longer be unqualifiedly entitled to Social Security benefits. Their fortunes will be tied to the vagaries of the stock market and other speculative ventures favored by brokers. And retirees will pay for this “service.” There will be no refunds when the market goes belly-up.
What Do Retirees Now Get From Social Security?
Because so many seniors have scant savings and have been employed in low- to middle-wage jobs, poverty threatens the majority absent government income supplements raising them above the poverty line. 1 in 3 working Americans has zero retirement savings, and the median working-age couple has a mere $5,000 in retirement savings. The Social Security Administration reminds us that “Social Security is the major source of income for most of the elderly.” (1) It is in fact the federal government’s biggest domestic program, paying benefits to around 1 in 6 Americans and to over 90% of the elderly. With Social Security benefits in decline as the retirement age is steadily raised, the future portends especially hard times for old folks and for the population as a whole, because the elderly are a growing percentage of the entire population.
An outstanding feature of American society well before my 20 year old daughter reaches middle age will be a serious poverty plague among the growing numbers of the elderly. This is evident in the current state of Social Security and the most reliable projections for its future.
Social Security benefits are conspicuously modest. In the countries included in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average public pension benefits replace about 61% of median earnings. The corresponding figure for the U.S. is 37%, after subtracting (escalating) Medicare premiums. The U.S. ranks 26 out of the 30 OECD nations in this respect. The average retiree receives $1,328 a month in Social Security benefits. A third of beneficiaries receives 90% of their income from the program and 61% receive more than 50% of their income from the program. It is a telling indication of the niggardliness of the median household income that paltry Social Security payments kept 22 million from poverty in 2015. Thus, without Social Security benefits, 41% of elderly Americans would have incomes below the official poverty line, whereas with the program, “only” 9 percent do.
Social Security also benefits the non-elderly, and they too will be hit by Clinton’s announced offensive. More than 1 million children were lifted from poverty last year. Some received benefits because a parent died or became disabled or retired, and some live with relatives who receive Social Security. (2) Some 12 million disabled persons received benefits in 2015. According to the Social Administration itself, “That is barely enough to keep a beneficiary above the 2014 poverty level ($11,670 annually).” (3) All in all, without Social Security 20.5% of the total population would be in poverty; because of the program, “only” 13.5% are in poverty. The total number lifted out of poverty by Social Security in 2015 is 22,090,000. (4)
The Simpson-Bowles Recommendations for Social Security
The figures above make it clear that Clinton’s planned attack on Social Security will significantly raise total poverty, particularly among the elderly, the disabled and children. Clinton’s planned revival of Simpson-Bowles virtually guarantees this outcome. What were the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform? The emphasis is on cutting benefits by three means.
First, the retirement age would be increased. The then-retirement-age of 66 was to be increased to 67 by 2022 for people born in 1960 and later. Early retirees would be able to claim reduced benefits at 62. The Commission recommended that both the full and the early eligibility age would continue increasing after 2022. At an unspecified time before 2050 the early eligibility age would rise to 63 and the full retirement age would increase to 68. By 2070 the early eligibility age would reach 64 and the full retirement age would climb to 69.
The recommendations would force the elderly either to work full time into the years when their physical capacities have undergone normal decline, or stop working when their bodies tell them that persistent work effort is bad for their mental and physical health and thus suffer the penalty of reduced benefits and an even lower standard of living. The recommendations amount to escalating cruelty to the elderly.
What may not be obvious at first glance is that any increase in the full retirement age entails a cut in benefits for each and every retiree irrespective of the age at which they file. (5) Because the full retirement age is the age at which full benefits are paid, so that workers who file sooner collect permanently reduced benefits and those who file later get larger benefits, raising the retirement age means that the early retiree suffers a deeper reduction and the later retiree gets a smaller increase. The economic security of everyone in the system is jeopardized whenever the retirement age is raised. And Social Security “reform” means gradually raising the retirement age.
Clinton’s announced plan means a wholesale assault on the entire elderly population.
The second means of cutting benefits consists in changing the formula for determining payments so as to reduce benefits.
The third way the Committee would lower benefits is to reduce cost-of-living adjustments. The idea is to devise a different measure of inflation in order to lower cost-of-living adjustments by 0.3 percentage points a year. A number of tricks have been effected to underestimate inflation and hence lower the estimated cost of living. E.g., the substitution hypothesis assumed that when the price of hamburger went up the typical consumer would substitute chicken in the “basket of goods” stipulated to reflect the cost of living. Hence, the measure would not count a rise in the price of ground beef as inflation. What was actually measured was the cost of maintaining a declining standard of living.
All these strategies functioning to put the squeeze on seniors are implemented on top of a system whose basic structure already fails to do what it is allegedly intended to do, to protect the elderly’s buying power. In addition to fudging inflation estimates, the weight attached to various components of the basic market basket of goods is skewed against the elderly, precisely in order to depress Social Security payments. Older Americans tend to spend a greater portion of their budgets on medical care and housing than do younger people. Yet less weight is assigned to medical care and housing costs, which have risen more than 7% and 5% respectively since this time last year, and more weight to gasoline, which has declined deeply over the same period. And because the Consumer Price Index excludes the spending patterns of those over the age of 62, it does not include one of the fastest growing costs for retirees, rising Medicare premiums. It is as if the idea was to hit the elderly especially hard. As if indeed.
It is no surprise, then, that the scandalously inaccurate estimates of increases in the cost of living actually increase the cost of living for everyone, especially seniors. The COLA increase for 2017 will be a niggardly 0.3%. From 2010 to 2016, the COLA was increased, respectively, by the following percentages: 0.0, 0.0, 1.7, 1.5, 1.7, 0.0 and 0.0.
Clinton vs. Obama on the Simpson-Bowles Recommendations
Obama opted not to endorse all of the recommendations of the Commission but to “build on the fiscal Commission’s model.” (6) He accepted most of the major tenets of the Commission but went slower on their implementation. Austerity measures would be implemented over 12 years instead of 10. But he adhered to one of his principal reasons for putting the Commission together, that Social Security benefits would soon increase deficits to unsustainable levels. He supported the Commission’s aim to cut Medicare and Social Security. But his Social Security and Medicare cuts would be smaller than the Commission’s recommendations.
Clinton will at the least swallow whole the Simpson-Bowles recommendations. All stops will be pulled. The woman holds popular sentiment in contempt, so public disapproval will count for nothing. Let us not forget that a principal function of neoliberal policy is to do away with democratic government, a requirement if the distribution of private and public resources is to be consistently to the benefit of the plutocracy. Those most dependent on government assistance -the elderly, the unemployed and the disabled- will be hit hard.
The elderly tend to be more politically active, at least with respect to voting behavior. Their demographics are noteworthy. Between 2012 and 2050, the United States is expected to experience considerable growth in its older population. People 65 and over represented 14.5% of the population in the year 2014 but are expected to grow to be 21.7% of the population by 2040. (7) By 2050, the population aged 65 and over is projected to be 83.7 million, almost double its population of 43.1 million in 2012. By 2060 there will be about 98 million older persons, more than twice their number in 2014.
The elderly are growing both in number and as a percentage of the population. They will be hit very hard under financialized neoliberal capitalism. Will they quietly bemoan their fate, or will they be among the historical descendants of Occupy and the Sanders movement, making up a growing force of resistance to an increasingly austere and repressive (dis)order?
Notes.
(1) Social Security Administration https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/basicfact-alt.pdf
(2) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities http://www.cbpp.org/blog/social-security-lifts-22-million-americans-out-of-poverty
(3) https://www.ssa.gov/disabilityfacts/facts.html
(4) Census Bureau Current Population Survey, March 2016 http://www.bls.gov/cps/
(5) See (2) above.
(6) Jackie Calmes, “Obama’s Deficit Dilemma,” The New York Times, February 27, 2012
(7) https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p25-1140.pdf
Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy and Philosophy at The Evergreen State College. His website is:http://www.alannasser.org. His book, United States of Emergency American Capitalism and Its Crises, will be published by Pluto Press early next year. If you would like to be notified when the book is released, please send a request to nassera@evergreen.edu
Russia demands Washington explain after reports say US military hacked into Russian networks
RT | November 5, 2016
Russia expects Washington to provide an explanation after a report claimed that Pentagon cyber-offensive specialists have hacked into Russia’s power grids, telecommunications networks, and the Kremlin’s command systems for a possible sabotage.
“If no official reaction from the American administration follows, it would mean state cyberterrorism exists in the US. If the threats of the attack, which were published by the US media, are carried out, Moscow would be justified in charging Washington,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said, according to the ministry’s website.
NBC News said earlier in an exclusive report that US military hackers have penetrated crucial infrastructure in Russia, “making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the US deem it necessary.”
The report was based on the account of a senior US intelligence official and top-secret documents. NBC said the hack was carried out in preparation for waging a full-scale cyberwar with Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also commented on the report, saying Russia had “cybersecurity measures taken at the level proper for the current situation, and the threats voiced against us by officials of other nations.”
US officials earlier alleged that countries like Russia and China could use hackers to disrupt American power grids and other crucial infrastructure.
READ MORE: US gov’t officially accuses Russia of political hacks; Moscow calls it ‘nonsense’
In Clinton Cuckooland: 1000s-Strong Army of Russian Babushkas is Hacking America
Sputnik – 05.11.2016
If you thought there was nothing left for the Clinton propaganda machine to blame Russia for during this election season, hold on tight!
Newsweek’s infamous Kurt Eichenwald just released another bombshell: the US is being hacked by a massive army of elderly Russian emigrants who, underneath those headscarves, are actually top-notch cyberspies!
Newsweek has finally cracked the case!
Moscow is hacking America on behalf of Donald Trump — it’s an accusation that’s become a familiar refrain for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But who, exactly, are the soldiers behind Putin’s nefarious plan? Senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, who made headlines last month for pushing an equally absurd conspiracy theory about Sputnik’s own role in the intrigue, has the scoop: Western intelligence and law enforcement say tens of thousands of people have been working with Russia on its hacking and disinformation campaign for many years. They include propagandists and cyberoperatives stationed in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, located in the southwestern part of Siberia. Operations have also been conducted in the United States, primarily out of New York City, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Those involved include a large number of Russian émigrés, as well as Americans and other foreign nationals. Intelligence operations in Europe and the U.S. have determined that the money these émigrés receive for their work is disguised as payments from a Russian pension system.
Evidence? Nah, who needs it.
You read that right: thousands of Russian retirees that moved to the States to live with their kids are hardly who they pretend to be. Those babushkas and dedushkas are really soldiers (or maybe even officers!) in the army of cyberspies hacking America from within for Donald Trump, according to Newsweek.
Why Trump? Because he’s Putin’s puppet, of course! Eichenwald goes on to reiterate his earlier theory, which, according to his own admission, was fed to him by US intelligence. He claims that the Republican nominee rehashed Russian “propaganda” at a rally speech — transmitted to the candidate by none other than yours truly, Sputnik News. What Eichenwald misses entirely is the irony of admitting that he was handed the story by his own government — the very definition of propaganda.
“You need to ask yourself — how does someone like me who is deeply wired into the intelligence community know so fast that you had posted this? It’s not like I was sitting around reading Sputnik. Others are though, and they are not reading it 24-hours a day in real time for the purpose of keeping abreast of the news,” Eichenwald told former Sputnik News writer and editor Bill Moran in an email. Newsweek magazine is displayed on a shelf at a news stand at South Station in Boston, Wednesday, May 5, 2010. The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine.
Not to mention that Eichenwald tried to bribe Moran with a job as a political reporter for The New Republic in exchange for his silence, when his lies and attempts at a cover-up were revealed — he also left that out of the new report.
Newsweek’s darling also failed to mention that, since his original story was published, it has been widely debunked across the board as an absolute lie.
The New York Times recently dismissed the myth of a Trump-Putin connection, reporting that the FBI has failed to find any links between the two despite a thorough investigation. The Washington Post also dismissed Eichenwald’s conspiracy theory, openly calling him out. And the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald wrote a piece tearing apart Eichenwald’s false report.
None of these facts have stopped Newsweek’s bizarre crusade to spread this misinformation to smear both Trump and Russia, however. And Newsweek is not alone in its campaign: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday night previewed Eichenwald’s story as an important piece of evidence against Trump, and the next morning Eichenwald himself appeared on CNN to present his latest conspiracy theory. Naturally, none of the Clinton-campaigning correspondents challenged his statements.
To sum up, Eichenwald published an entirely fabricated conspiracy theory, which has been widely debunked. He attempted to bribe a journalist for his silence. He is now continuing his crusade, with new revelations about an army of geriatric ne’er-do-wells, all the while becoming more and more of a laughing stock.
Bravo, Newsweek. Now we know why you went out of print.