At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

"It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States’ excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. … And in the most recent leak of the TPP’s Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.”






So far, Clinton’s campaign has raised $97,763,283, according to figures released on Oct. 16 by OpenSecrets, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics. Her campaign committee raised $77,471,604, while super PACs and other outside groups raised $20,291,679.

Top donors to her campaign include powerful law firms like Morgan & Morgan, which donated $277,326, and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld which gave $133,756. In July, journalist Lee Fang revealed in The Intercept that Akin Gump has been hired to lobby for candidates from both major parties, including Clinton and Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush. In addition to their direct donations, Fang wrote that lobbyists like Akin Gump help drive presidential campaigns through soliciting major donations to super PACs.

Another top donor, the materials corporation Corning, Inc., which gave $209,100 to Clinton’s campaign, was criticized in 2011 by the nonpartisan group Public Campaign for spending millions on lobbying while paying no taxes between 2008 and 2010. Citizens For Tax Justice reported that Corning received $4 million in tax rebates during the same period. In 2012, Susan Ford, a top executive at Corning, testified before Congress to argue for a lower corporate tax rate, according to ThinkProgress.


http://www.mintpressnews.com/lawyers-investment-bankers-hollywood-media-among-hillary-clintons-top-donors/210769/

Wall Street has made Hillary Clinton a millionaire


As Clinton tries to talk tough about how she will stand up to America's biggest banks, her Democratic rivals are likely to remind voters just how cozy she's been with Wall Street.

Clinton made $3.15 million in 2013 alone from speaking to firms like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and UBS, according to the list her campaign released of her speaking fees.

"Her closeness with big banks on Wall Street is sincere, it's heart-felt, long-established and well known," former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley has said on the campaign trail.

While Clinton has given paid speeches to many groups, Wall Street banks and investment houses made up a third of her speech income.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/13/investing/hillary-clinton-wall-street/

Lis Smith Retweeted Glenn Thrush
Deeply, deeply offensive to families--including mine--that were forever changed by that tragedy.



@Lis Smith
My dad worked in WTC from the day it was built to the day it went down. @HillaryClinton, never invoke 9/11 to justify your Wall St positions

Hillary Clinton's Big Debate Gaffe: Defending Her Wall Street Donors to 9/11 Terror Attacks

While much of the world's attention was still focused on the terrorist attacks in Paris, Hillary Clinton made her worst stumble in Saturday night’s Democratic debate in Iowa by defending her cozy relationship with Wall Street contributors as a consequence of being New York’s senator after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

The exchange that led to that eyebrow-raising explanation started with CBS moderator John Dickerson saying, “So you’ve received millions of dollars in contributions and speaking fees from from Wall Street companies. How do you convince voters that you are going to level the playing field when you're indebted to some of its biggest players?”

“I have never heard of a candidate never, who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street, from the military industrial complex, not one candidate say, oh, these campaign contributions will not influence me,” he said. “Why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something. Everybody knows that. Once again, I am running a campaign differently than any other candidate. We are relying on small campaign donors, 750,000 of them, 30 bucks a piece. That’s who I’m indebted to.”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute, he has basically used his answer to impune my integrity. Let’s be frank here,” she began. “So, I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.”


http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/hillary-clintons-big-debate-gaffe-defending-her-wall-street-donors-911-terror-attacks

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