Hillary, as Secretary of State, sold American uranium to the Russians and signed off on weapons deals to foreign countries, but only after they donated money to the Clinton Foundation (CGI). And even though this story has been reported in the NYT, Washington Post, AP, ABC, and a host of others, the elite media simply reported it and dropped it, thus most people are simply unaware of it.
The United States should not be for sale. Weapons for bribes. How much worse can it get? Even the very left wing Mother Jones reported this story.
Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors. An investigation finds that countries that gave to the foundation saw an increase in State Department-approved arms sales.
Now we know from Clinton Campaign emails that Hillary’s top staff and her marketing team were well aware of this corruption and discussed how to make it go away. Read the email for yourself HERE.
You ask someone to watch Fox News saying these things and a Democrat will just laugh it off and refuse to even look at the evidence.
This is the full MSNBC panel, including Mika Brzezinski, calling out the “Clinton Empire” and “Clinton Inc.” for enriching themselves with their “sleazy” relationships to Wall Street and banks.
The entire panel calls out the Clinton’s for millions in pay to play, corruption, and using government power to enrich themselves. The panel also blasts the Clinton’s for literally bragging about it while most of the elite media stays mum.
In this email exchange provided by Wikileaks, her top staff says straight up that bribery laws are “REALLY dicey territory” for Hillary Clinton. It goes on to say that Hillary is “so tainted that she is really vulnerable.”
The email is between Neera Tanden, the current head oh the Clinton’s pet think tank, campaign adviser etc. and Jake Sullivan, top foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton. Copied in the email are campaign chairman John Podesta and Sara Solow.
When you are the Secretary of State you are mandated to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
Giving donors to your private foundation access to State Department resources and favors when your foundation pays you huge speech fees goes way beyond the mere appearance of impropriety. Giving donors briefings with classified information breaks an entire host of laws. Newly released State Department documents reveal even more of just that.
Of course, the Clinton Foundation being tax free, breaks the law when it engages in partisan politics.
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 207 pages of new Department of State documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin worked with top Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) executives to set up group photo sessions for Clinton with “primary sponsors” of CGI and members of the CGI staff. CGI is a project of the Clinton Foundation.
The new records also reveal that Abedin sent classified information concerning “foreign relations or foreign activities of the U.S., including confidential sources,” about Afghanistan to her own unsecured email address. Also included are more instances of the State Department doing special favors for high-dollar Clinton Foundation donors and the distribution of Clinton’s government schedule to members of the Clinton Foundation staff.
The new documents contained seven Hillary Clinton email exchangesnot previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date of such emails uncovered by Judicial Watch to 235 of new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.
(CNSNews.com) — Newly released Department of State documents show that longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin helped top executives at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) set up then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for group photo sessions with primary sponsors of CGI and its staff members in September 2009.
CGI is a project of the Clinton Foundation. Clinton served as Secretary of State from January 2009 to February 2013. The photo sessions occurred at a CGI meeting on Sept. 25, 2009, just prior to a speech by Secretary Clinton.
The documents were obtained by the government watchdog group Judicial Watch. There are 207 pages of State Department material, including a series of email exchanges between Abedin, who served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff during her time as Secretary of State, and CGI executives regarding a request for a group photo session with Clinton and “about 20” primary CGI sponsors prior to the secretary’s speech.
Although not mentioned by name in the email exchange, the primary sponsors of the 2009 CGI Annual Meeting, according to Judicial Watch and the CGI website, included Tom Golisano; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Laureate International Universities; P&G; Victor Pinchuk Foundation; Grupo ABC; Shangri La Industries; Booz Allen Hamilton; Cisco; Duke Energy; ExxonMobil; Hewlett-Packard Company; Standard Chartered; Swiss Re; Goldman Sachs; The Rockefeller Foundation; CLSA (Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia); Crédit Agricole; The EKTA Foundation; The Economist; Dell; Deutsche Bank; Microsoft; Inter-American Development Bank; Visa; APCO Worldwide; Diageo; Knoll; and PR Newswire.
Remember when Hillary said in the debate that 90% of what the Clinton Foundation brings in goes to charity and those in need? Well those in need must include themselves and their pals according to their 2013 tax filing:
In order for the 88 percent claim to be even remotely close to the truth, the words “directly” and “life-changing” have to mean something other than “directly” and “life-changing.” For example, the Clinton Foundation spent nearly $8.5 million–10 percent of all 2013 expenditures–on travel. Do plane tickets and hotel accommodations directly change lives? Nearly $4.8 million–5.6 percent of all expenditures–was spent on office supplies. Are ink cartridges and staplers “life-changing” commodities?
Those two categories alone comprise over 15 percent of all Clinton Foundation expenses in 2013, and we haven’t even examined other spending categories like employee fringe benefits ($3.7 million), IT costs ($2.1 million), rent ($4 million) or conferences and conventions ($9.2 million). Yet, the tax-exempt organization claimed in its tweet that no more than 12 percent of its expenditures went to these overhead expenses.
How can both claims be true? Easy: they’re not. The claim from the Clinton Foundation that 88 percent of all expenditures go directly to life-changing work is demonstrably false.
The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”
The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.
But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.
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.
There aren’t that many of them, but there are a very few politicians who actually believe the values they profess. Congressman Dennis Kucinich is one of them.
Congressman Kucinich (D-OH):
“I think the issues that Catherine Herridge has raised and that Judge Napolitano has raised are compelling. If you look at Andrew McCarthy’s piece in the National Review, he made it clear that this is a very political process, having very little to do with the scales of justice, and having everything to do with the 2016 presidential election. The Justice Department and the FBI are inevitably a part of the executive branch of government, and the executive branch of government made an early determination that no matter what came up, that there was no way that Hillary Clinton was going to have to be accountable under law to — for anything dealing with the mishandling of classified information.”
“I will say, it is distressing to see the politicization of the justice system, and the attempt by people in the State Department to try to shade the classified document process in favor of an outcome during the period in which these records were being subpoenaed.”
In the last debate, and for decades really the Democrats, Hillary Clinton in-particular, has promised to reign in Wall Street and stop their excesses. She make sit look like Wall Street fears her. The truth is that they overwhelmingly fund her and as these speech transcripts from her own campaign emails via WikiLeaks she has a very cozy relationship with them.
In October 2013, the transcripts show, Clinton told bankers she had “great relations” and worked closely with Wall Street as New York’s senator, and said “the jury is still out” on whether the Dodd-Frank financial reforms put in place after the financial crisis had been the right approach. She said more openness from the start could have prevented the uproar on Wall Street over those reforms.
“What happened, how did it happen, how do we prevent it from happening? You guys help us figure it out, and let’s make sure that we do it right this time,” she said.
Working to relate her speech to her audience, Clinton in one speech likened her experience as secretary of state to business and finance, saying “it’s like anybody’s balance sheet,” with both opportunities and potential liabilities. In one exchange, a conference participant from Texas told Clinton that she had “the honor to raise money for you” during her 2008 presidential campaign.
Thanks to WikiLeaks and the carelessness to witch Hillary and her crew spread information we have learned just how far their tentacles go into crime, Wall Street, academia, the press corps etc. There is no real line where the Democratic Party ends and these other institutions begin.
One of the biggest institutions is billionaire George Soros, who funds dozens of far left foundations, pressure groups, think tanks, SuperPAC’s and media and ties them all, sometimes illegally, into the Democratic Party machine. He is, for Democrats, sugar daddy number one.
In this email, Soros summons Hillary Clinton to one of his far left voter registration (and fake voter registration) groups this one being called America Votes:
Hi Huma (and Lona): It was wonderful to see you last week. Thanks so much again for making the time in a very, very busy week. Attached is an invitation for Secretary Clinton to join us at an evening reception at the home of George Soros in December.
We would be thrilled to have her serve as honored guest and speaker at this gathering of our top supporters honoring America Votes’ work over the past 10 years and looking forward to the next decade. Thanks so much in advance for your and the Secretary’s consideration of this request.
We are now holding dates at Mr. Soros’ home in the middle of the month (Dec. 15-17) and hope we can find a mutually agreeable date during that window if possible or an alternative. Please let us know if we can provide any further information, address any questions, etc.
Thanks very much again and look forward to talking again soon.
In the email between Robby Mook, campaign manager, Huma Abedin, Hillary’s personal assistant, and John Podesta, Hillary’s Campaign Chair discuss the event but one thing is clear, make George Soros happy:
Hillary doesn’t want to reign in Wall Street, as we have learned in many ways from her own emails, she is Wall Street.
The nexus among private companies, Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton family foundations is closer and more complex than even Donald Trump has claimed so far.
While it is widely known that some companies and foreign governments gave money to the foundations, perhaps in an effort to gain favor, one of the key parts of the puzzle hasn’t been reported: At least a dozen of those same companies lobbied the State Department, using lobbyists who doubled as major Clinton campaign fundraisers.
Those companies gave as much as $16 million to the Clinton charities. At least four of the lobbyists they hired are “Hillblazers,” the Clinton campaign’s name for supporters who have raised $100,000 or more for her current White House race. Two of the four also raised funds for Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.
Among the donors to the Clinton foundations who also used Clinton-connected lobbyists at the Department of State:
• Microsoft has given between $1 million and $5 million to the foundations, as the tech giant also lobbied for visa issues, protection of critical infrastructure and cybersecurity, software industry licensing and government procurement.
• Pfizer, one of the world’s top biopharmaceutical companies, has also given between $1 million and $5 million to the foundations, while lobbying for such issues as intellectual property rights overseas and issues related to medicines in Turkey and India.
• ExxonMobil, the global oil and energy company based in Texas, gave the foundations between $1 million and $5 million. The company lobbied the Department of State for issues involving hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as fracking, oil sands and other provisions.
• The Northeast Maglev, a Washington, D.C.-based company that advocates for high-speed, magnetic levitation rail service in the U.S., donated as much as $100,000 while lobbying the Department of State to help provide support for the issue.
• Mexico TV network Azteca and its affiliates donated as much as $375,000 while lobbying for U.S. business opportunities, an education initiative involving students from the U.S., Mexico and Latin America, and other causes.
Do you ever wonder why there is, all too often, not much difference in policy between Bush/Clinton/Obama?
We all saw Hillary in the last debate, as well as Democrat for decades blast Wall Street, say that the gravy train is over, that they are going to clamp down on excesses and reign in the big money influence of Banks and Wall Street, only to watch as both Democrats and Republicans make the gravy train even larger? Well, you are about to catch a glimpse at just why that is.
Micheal Froman is an executive at CitiGroup and his company in part received massive bailouts form the tax payers after the mortgage collapse. So why is he picking, with almost 100% accuracy, who should be in Obama’s cabinet and who should be in many of the deputy positions as well?
In these emails (one & two) CitiGroup’s Micheal Froman sends Hillary for President campaign manager and former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff, John Podesta, an attached list of who he thinks should fill the major government positions. This is from the first page:
As you can see the list is something beyond prescient.
A careful look at Micheal Froman shows a revolving door from various positions on the Democratic Party, Wall Street and back again. In short, there is no line between the political leadership and in Wall Street/International Mega-Corps etc.
So the next time that a Democrat tells you that they are going to tax the rich, now you understand why they have been “taxing the rich” for the last 50 years and somehow managed to repeatedly miss the target.
After many revaluations from the Clinton Campaign’s own emails show that there is no line between the Democratic Party and the New York Times as seen by the following:
In January, one of the world’s richest men, Carlos Slim, doubled his stake in the New York Times, which allowed him to control an unprecedented 16.8% of the company. Slim also turns out to have quite the close relationship with the Clintons, according to the Washington Free Beacon:
“Not only has Slim contributed between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 to the Clinton Foundation, but his company Telmex has contributed an additional grant between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 through its foundation. Slim has also pledged $100 million to the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, a collaboration between the Clinton Foundation and Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra.”
Slim doesn’t appear to be troubled by any conflict of interest, as his history with the Clinton’s doesn’t stop there. The Clinton Foundation reports Hillary was once paid between $250,000 and $500,000 for a speech to Slim’s Telmex Foundation:
A glowing quote from Bill Clinton about Slim’s charitable efforts even appears on Slim’s website.
Mexican BIllionaire Carlos Slim
The Washington Free Beacon also notes that Slim has received two awards from the Clinton Foundation in the last decade:
“Slim was given an award for his philanthropic work by Clinton at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, which was presented to him by actress Eva Longoria. He was honored again in 2012, when he was given the CGI Global Citizen Award.”
The business mogul isn’t the only notable figure to have connections with the Clinton Foundation. One of The New York Times’ board of directors and the CEO have both donated large sums of money to the organization.
The Clinton Foundation donated $100,000 to a New York Times group in 2008, which was the same year the paper endorsed Clinton for president over then-Senator Barack Obama.
This is not the kind of thing that just gets randomly picked to be in your retirement portfolio….
International finance and money laundering just seem to go together like bacon and eggs, death and taxes, politics and corruption….and Hillary says that it is Trump who is too close to Putin?
Please pardon the length of the quote, international finance and corporations can get pretty arcane.
Emails released this week by Wikileaks indicate John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, laundered shares of stock he received from an energy company cited in the Panama Papers money-laundering probe that has received funding from the Russian government.
He also has received consulting fees from the Wyss Foundation, a group controlled by Swiss billionaire Hansjoerg Wyss, an investor in Joule Energy, according to Peter Schweizer’s Government Accountability Institute in a report, “From Russia with Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism.”
Joule Global Stichting and Joule Global Holdings figure prominently as a client of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is at the heart of the Panama Papers investigation into offshore money-laundering operations on a massive international scale.
WND reported Russian entities that funneled money to Joule and its related companies, and ultimately to Podesta, include Viktor Vekselberg, a controversial Russian billionaire investor with ties to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
Vekselberg is a board member of Rusnano, the Russian State Investment Fund, as well as president of the Skolkovo Foundation, named for Russia’s version of Silicon Valley.
Rusnano made a multi-million dollar investment in Joule Unlimited, a small Massachusetts-based energy company owned by Joule Global Holdings B.V. in the Netherlands and Joule Global Stichting, the ultimate controlling entity.
On Jan. 6, 2014, Mark Solakian, a senior vice president and general counsel with Joule Unlimited, emailed Podesta, confirming that Podesta had exercised 75,000 shares of 100,000 options in Joule Unlimited. Podesta had been issued the shares in 2011 in partial compensation for his work on the Joule board of directors.
Secondly, Solakian confirmed Podesta had transferred the resulting 75,000 common shares of Joule Unlimited to Leonidio LLC in a transaction that most likely would prevent the stock shares from showing up directly as an asset owned in any financial statement Podesta prepared.
The denials are already flying:
WND reached Bournakis by telephone in Salt Lake City, and he confirmed that 5835 Waterbury in Salt Lake City was his home apartment address. Bournakis denied knowing anything about John Podesta or Leonidio LLC, the company registered under his name.
Growing irritated by the phone call, Bournakis firmly denied he knew anything about the transfer of 75,000 shares of Joule Unlimited stock that Podesta made to Leonidio LLC.
So, you want some cheap labor and you happened to be a company that exploits that labor for sex and other illegal activities? No problem! Just donate to the Clinton Foundation and the State Department will help you set up shop in Haiti and call it charity!
Hillary Clinton (left) and Cheryl Mills (right) in Haiti
According to this devastating report from ABC News It is literally that bad. Be sure to check out their video report HERE. We are often tough on the elite media and rightfully so, but ABC did a fine piece of journalism here and they deserve huge credit for this story.
In a series of candid email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials during the hours after the massive 2010 Haiti earthquake, a senior aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly gave special attention to those identified by the abbreviations “FOB” (friends of Bill Clinton) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).
“Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC,” wrote Caitlin Klevorick, then a senior State Department official who was juggling incoming offers of assistance being funneled to the State Department by the Clinton Foundation. “Most I can probably ID but not all.”
“Is this a FOB!” Klevorick writes later, when a Clinton Foundation aide forwards a woman’s offer of medical supplies. “If not, she should go to cidi.org,” she adds, directing the person deemed not to be a Clinton friend to a general government website.
Klevorick and Amitabh Desai, the director of foreign policy for the Clinton Foundation, exchanged dozens of emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee and then shared with ABC News. ABC News independently authenticated the emails.
The Supreme Court determined that this would not “give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” so long as Super PACs’ expenditures were truly independent — i.e., not coordinated with candidates’ campaigns.
But after years of inaction by the FEC, campaigns have realized that this restriction can be ignored. And now both the Trump and Clinton campaigns are coordinating with Super PACs in the same way your hands coordinate with your brain.
Hillary Clinton blasted Wells Fargo Monday over the scandal that led to thousands of employees being terminated for collecting fees on fake accounts.
Clinton, however, is now being revealed as Wells Fargo’s top recipient of campaign donations, outpacing the next presidential candidate — Jeb Bush — by more than 300 percent. In all, Wells Fargo has contributed $258,351 to Clinton’s campaign.
The second highest recipient is Bernie Sanders’ Senate campaign, which collected $61,043.
Of the latest scandal, Clinton said it shows that, “Eight years after a cowboy culture on Wall Street wrecked our economy, we are still seeing powerful bankers playing fast and loose with the law.”
For a more complete understanding of Hillary’s connection to Russia as well as how Hillary misused her position as secretary of state for pay for play schemes feel free to read this report by the government accountability institute (1). One of the major Russian front originations involved in Hillary’s pay for play schemes is outlined in the declassified intelligence assessment by United States European Command that exposed skolkovo innovation center as a front for the Russian military and Russian intelligence. (2) Such assessment was further corroborated by a waring issue from the FBI Boston office regarding skolkovo innovation center (3). Indeed during the time where the potential sale of a uranium mine which underwrites United States nuclear deterrence was being discussed within the United States government and Hillary Clinton was secretary of state an increasing Russian owned and operated company paid 500,000 $ to the Clinton foundation (4).
NORTH KOREA
In 2010 Hillary’s state department knew and approved of Syracuse university organizational and operational ties to North Korean’s nuclear program (5). Indeed at that time former Clinton undersecretary of defense Dr Wallerstein was the dean of Maxwell school (6). In 2013 ABC outed Bill Clinton reached out to Hillary’s state department with request to approve for invitations to / paid speeches for North Korea (7).
IRAN
From 2006 – 2009 the Clinton foundation received numerous annual donations from Alevi Foundation. For example in 2005 Alavi Foundation gave 30,000 dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation (8). On Dec. 19, 2008 Alavi foundation donated between $25,000 and $50,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation (9). This would be two years AFTER Alavi Foundation was designated a terrorist entity by the FBI on Oct 25 2007. In 2008 Alavi foundation was busted by the treasury department and the FBI as being a front organization for the mullah regime in Iran as well as engaging in money laundering actives for Iran’s terrorist activities (10). Even after Alavi was prosecuted and convicted of being a front for terrorist organizations the Clinton’s refused to turn the money over to the FBI (11).
5. http://www.syracuse.com/…/north_korean_nuclear_envoy_to.html “U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the envoy was coming at the Maxwell School’s invitation for three days next week to attend “track two,” or unofficial discussions the school is sponsoring, starting Wednesday.”
6. http://news.syr.edu/mitchel-wallerstein-baruch-college/ “From 1993-97, Wallerstein was deputy assistant secretary of defense for counter-proliferation policy and senior defense representative for trade security policy in the U.S. Defense Department. He was nominated as the first presidential appointee in this position and was responsible for the development and implementation of U.S.”
Austan Goolsbee is the former Chief White House Economic Adviser for President Obama. Last week Goolsbee pelted Sean Hannity with the latest Democrat Party talking point, that Obama is a fiscal conservative because he cut the deficit in half!
Hannity rightly took Goolsbee to task on how he came up with such a whopping stretch. Follow these numbers:
In FY2007, the last year Republicans had total fiscal control the yearly deficit was 188 billion and Democrats to this day go on and on as to what big spenders Republicans were under Bush.
Democrats take over the Congress and in FY2008 the yearly deficit goes to 500 billion.
Obama is elected and FY2009 through 2013 the YEARLY deficits are 1200 – 1400 billion per year.
This year the yearly deficit is projected to be just over 680 billion.
“”OMG LOOK WE CUT THE DEFICIT IN HALF!! See how conservative we are!””
This is the kind of twisted logic spoiled children use to get their way. We don’t tolerate it from them, so don’t tolerate it from those in power.
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!
How corrupt is the Florida State GOP?
Aside from the fact that the Florida Republican leadership worked to get Allen West out of office in spite of the record amount of money he raised for them, read below via Jennifer Gratz:
Today the Florida Senate rules committee takes up legislation that would force breweries to sell our beer to a distributor, let the distributor mark it up and then sell it back to us before we could sell it in our tasting rooms. Adding insult to injury, the beer would never have to leave the brewery, the distributor wouldn’t have to actually distribute. Talk about getting paid for nothing. What a racket. Little faith in our government these days.
UPDATE – Just as we predicted, Democrats in the Senate are floating a bill to allow the President to raise the debt limit in direct violation of Article I of the Constitution. The Democrats have written the bill so that it would take a super majority in both chambers to block the President from giving himself an unlimited credit card.
Congress is not a rubber stamp. What President Obama and the Democrats are doing is a frontal assault on separation of powers, Congress’s power and responsibility of oversight of the Executive Branch, and the budgetary authority of Congress
The Democratic Party is pining for a powerful post-constititional Executive Branch that can illegally line item veto, pick and choose who laws will and wont apply to – Chicago style, and seize power to legislate on its own.
Legislating On His Own
Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, President Obama has taken it upon himself to change the law in ways he sees fit, a power that only Congress has under the Constitution. President Obama has given over 1,400 waivers to political allies be it groups or businesses which is illegal and corrupt.
The Grassley Amendment mandates that the Affordable Care Act apply to Congress just as it would to regular citizens; a law the President has waived under no constitutional authority whatsoever. He has done this in collusion with some in the congressional leadership and over the objection of some Republicans who believe doing so is unfair.
If a Republican president had behaved such a way Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media would be screaming for impeachment and enough Republicans would likely agree to get it done. Until this recent assault on the constitutional authority of Congress, Republicans have been somewhat timid in fear of being called “racist” by the praetorian media.
While Democrats would claim that Obama’s actions fall under the regulatory authority granted to the Executive Branch by Congress, regulatory authority is for the purpose of creating due process in carrying out the laws passed by Congress. It is not license to change the law or invent new laws unilaterally, nor is such authority permission to pick and choose winners and losers by deciding what parts will apply to who and who it will not. The President is seizing the power to legislate on his own and has been doing this more and more be it immigration laws, voting laws, domestic spying, and the list goes on.
UPDATE – Newt Gingrich: The President has decided that he wants to be “Legislator In Chief” – http://tiny.cc/wrtw4w
Many things are negotiable, equality under the law is not.
Assault on the Oversight and Budgetary Authority of Congress
Normally, under the regular order of appropriations and budgeting, committees in Congress will hold hearings on and then vote on how your money is spent, how much is spent, and review the stewardship of that spending after the fact with its constitutionally mandated power of oversight. This is how government is accountable to you and the representatives in Congress that you elect.
Through the committee and appropriations process the separate segmented appropriations measures are put together into a budget which sets the taxing and spending limits of various parts of the government. Next, the parts of the budget are reviewed and combined by certain standing committees in Congress such as the Budget Committee; that budget is then voted on by the entire House and Senate. Once passed the Budget is published and anyone can examine it. This is the process that Congress has generally used for the last 200 years and is why this process is called “regular order“.
Regular order makes sense. When you look at your budget at home, you look at each line item, see where your expenses are going and you make priorities to adjust your expenses so that you don’t over spend, right?
When President Obama was elected the Democrats began to refuse to even consider passing a budget, abandoning all regular order. Since the Democrats control the Senate no budgets have been passed.
The Democratic Party Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has said again and again that the House of Representatives has no right to pick and choose what it will fund and what it will not. Then Harry Reid and the Democrats started calling Republicans in the House hostage takers, anarchists, arsonists, terrorists, and every other “ists” you can think of. At the same time the Democrats have said they want an all or nothing blank check in the form of a continuing resolution instead of a budget.
Article I Section VII – All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives
Article I Section VIII – The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
Article I Section IX – No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The Constitution is clear that all bills dealing with revenue must originate in the House of Representatives; which also must pay the debts, set taxes, borrow money and as Section IX makes clear that the records must all be in a budget for the people to see.
By claiming that the House of Representatives does not have the right to do exactly what the Constitution instructs in plain English, the Democrats are trying to make an unconstitutional “new normal” where there are no budgets, no oversight as we have known it for two centuries, and just write gargantuan blank checks in the form of massive continuing resolutions(CR) for President Obama to spend as he sees fit.
It is for these reasons that there is nothing clean about the Democrat’s demand for a “clean CR”.
Senator Mike Lee, who is well-known to be one of the top lawyers in the country, speaks of this:
Now Democrats are combining the two power grabs above by saying that Congress has no right to revisit Obamacare because it was passed (without a single republican vote) after Obama was elected and that only President Obama has the right and the power to (illegally) change the law on his own.
Of course the very idea Democrats and their friends in the praetorian media are pushing, that Congress can never revisit a law, is silly on its face. Social Security and Medicare are laws that have been on the books for decades and Congress has changed those programs many times.
It is the job of each new Congress to look at existing law and make changes where the people’s representatives see fit. The very notion that one Chief Justice or one President can decide Obamacare’s fate and that the Congress cannot is laughable and yet the praetorian media has been advocating this very point of view every night since the partial government shutdown.
In an effort to keep members of his own party in line President Obama has illegally changed the law by executive fiat to give Members of Congress and their staff a 72% subsidy if they buy the expensive coverage on the Obamacare Exchange, other portions of the law do not apply to Congress as well.
The Obama Administration ordered federal police to close the open air WWII Memorial and went so far as to rent “barrycades” to keep visiting WWII vets out.
Republican Members of Congress assisted the aged vets in “storming” their own memorial. Park Rangers, who are veterans themselves, refused to lay a hand on our WWII heroes:
The Obama administration ordered Park Police to close even privately funded memorials, private businesses adjacent to them, and even ordered elderly couples to be ejected from their homes which are adjacent to Lake Mead. In doing so Democrats have blamed Republicans for these outrages and for the most part the praetorian media has gone along with it. None of these parks or memorials were closed in the 17 previous government shutdowns since 1976.
The administration has threatened military priests who attempt to give Mass during the partial shutdown with arrest, and the administration has ordered that thousands of Department of Defense workers be furloughed in spite of the fact that the Defense Department has already been paid for with a separate continuing resolution. Of course President Obama has ordered the military to keep his personal retreat at Camp David open while cutting football and baseball coverage from the Armed Forces Television.
Speaker Boehner is outraged by the administration’s behavior:
President Obama has deliberately tried to spook the markets which affects the savings of millions of Americans in hopes to damage the economy even worse so that he can also blame that on Republicans.
The latest attempt to spook the markets is to threaten default on the national debt if the House of Representatives doesn’t give him all of the power that he wants. The 14th Amendment demands that the President make the scheduled payments on the debt. The Treasury takes in almost $240 billion a month which is much more than enough to pay the debt, Social Security etc. President Obama would have to willingly decide to default on the debt.
President Obama has also said that it is unprecedented for the Congress to attach strings to a raising of the debt ceiling. In fact, Congress has done so dozens of times as that is their enumerated power under the Constitution. When Obama was a Senator he favored just such a tactic himself. The President’s lie was so over the top that McClatchy News, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Fox News have all reported that the President’s claims are bunk.
The New Republic, a political magazine that favors the Democratic Party, has suggested that President Obama use the military against TEA Party activists. Other media outlets who have historically slanted reporting to favor the Democratic party have found President’ Obama’s rather obvious falsehoods a threat to their own credibility and thus are sending messages that their willingness to spin for him has limits.
NBC’s Chuck Todd grilled Jay Carney on why the White House won’t accept some of these individual continuing resolutions passed by the House to fund portions of the government that will put some people back to work:
While Obamacare may offer an expensive policy, which is implemented more like a massive tax, in exchange for “deductible not met”, “claim denied”, & “procedure not covered”; this fight is about much more than Obamacare, it is about power. A massive swing of power from the representatives of the people to the President. This is genuine third world style authoritarian power play.
One might not feel the authoritarian chill as of yet, but just wait until the next debt ceiling or government spending fight that leads to a partial shutdown and the President decides to abuse the power of Obamacare to halt payments for medical visits and prescription drugs as leverage to get his way. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when.
Editor’s Note: A reader sent a note asking, “What about the budgets that President Obama proposed and what about the budget that Harry Reid put up in March 2013?”
These are good questions but the answer is well known to those who have followed politics.
President Obama’s budgets got next to no support from his own caucus in the Senate as they were so outrageous that Democrats did not want to sign their name on it or be associated with it. Since the Senate Democrat Caucus would not back the House GOP budgets or the President’s budgets they died in the Senate.
After taking criticism for the abandonment of Regular Order for not passing any budgets for four years, Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid put up an outrageous budget last March (2013) that was completely unserious, was opposed by four Democrat Senators, violated the Sequestor Law, and amounted to a political gag – as explained by The Hill:
The Senate-passed budget has $975 billion in new taxes, does not balance, and does not cut spending when the fact it turns off sequestration is taken into effect.
The Constitution is clear that tax bills MUST start in the House. Any tax increase that is not approved by the House first is a non-starter. Harry Reid putting up a budget that violated the Sequestor Law and imposes almost a trillion in new taxes was out of Regular Order. Of course Reid knew it, and so did those four Democrats who voted against such a stunt. Reid put up that “budget” to create the illusion of supporting Regular Order when the heat was on. This was no secret as press reports and political blogs reported as much.
UPDATE – Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accuses House Republicans of TREASON for not handing Obama a blank check CR http://tiny.cc/cs7q4w
UPDATE – Obama Administration hires private armed thugs to ring Independence Hall http://tiny.cc/9ybr4w
UPDATE – Senator Mike Lee: The best argument against Obamacare is the behavior of the Obama administration during the “shutdown”; DO WHAT I SAY OR ELSE:
Use junk science, arbitrary regulations, and abuse of enforcement and licensing to restrict energy at home to raise energy prices so Obama’s “green donors”, who are profiting not from the market, but from massive tax payer support, can make more money and look more “competitive”.
On Good Friday, a day fewer people would be paying attention to the headlines than on most other days, the Obama administration released news about its plans to raise the price of gasoline. Gasoline prices for the first quarter of 2013 are higher than the same time in 2012. Intentionally pushing prices up would seem stupid in the midst of a struggling economy—that is, if your goal is to help those most impacted by higher fuel and food prices, rather than boosting the bottom line for your billionaire donors.
The plans, announced Friday, call for stricter limits for sulfur in gasoline—from the current 30 parts per million to 10. (Sulfur is an important element that is found naturally in crude oil has many industrial uses.) The EPA estimates that the low-sulfur gasoline will raise the price of a gallon of gas by “less than a penny,” while industry sources say it will be closer to ten cents a gallon.
Energy analyst Robert Rapier, told me that the new regulations “will certainly make gasoline more expensive.” He said; “Note that diesel was historically less expensive than gasoline until the ultra-low sulfur diesel standard was passed. Since then, diesel has often been more expensive than gasoline. I am not saying whether or not those standards were needed, maybe they were. But the impact on cost is undeniable. I worked in a refinery when those standards were passed, and we spent a lot of capital making sure we could comply.”
Though air pollution is a worthy consideration, it is low on the public’s list of priorities, while gas prices are of utmost importance. If the public doesn’t see air pollution as a problem, and the President’s popularity has peaked, why would he put out policy that would hit the middle class the hardest? Because, despite his campaign rhetoric, he’s not “a warrior for the middle class.
One year ago, Christine Lakatos launched her blog— “The Green Corruption Files”—through which she set out to prove that “green corruption is the largest, most expensive and deceptive case of crony capitalism in American history. Stay tuned as we expose one piece of this scandal at a time.” Last summer, Lakatos and I partnered to draw more attention to Obama’s Green-Energy Crony-Corruption Scandal. To date, I’ve written fifteen columns based on her research—this is the sixteenth.
A week ago, she posted her expose on George Soros and his profiting from his, apparent, insider information on green-energy investments. Within her post, Lakatos says: “be prepared for regulations and legislation that will, in some form or another, resemble cap-and-trade and demand additional funds to bank roll Obama’s efforts to save our planet.” Exactly one week later, the new EPA standards on gasoline were released. The standards will raise the cost of fuel—which has been the underlying goal of the Obama energy agenda: make what works more expensive so people will accept the high cost of “green energy” in the name of saving the planet. (Remember outgoing Energy Secretary Chu’s 2008 statement: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”)
But, as the Soros story shows, it’s not about the planet, it’s about the profit. Soros’ investment portfolio shows he invests where he can make money—both traditional and green energy (though, as you’ll see, through Obama’s green energy emphasis, he has more control over green energy investments). In a 1998, 60 Minutes interview, Soros said: “I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.”
And this is a fact, as of March 13, 2013 these are just the Obamacare regulations, over 20,000 pages (photo below). The tax code is over 60,000 pages.
Apple founder Steve Jobs, according to his book, told Obama that government has rendered it almost impossible for him to build a factory here in the United States, which is why he builds them in China. This very writer has a dear friend who runs a small business with less than ten employees. He tells me of the constant efforts by state and federal bureaucrats to put him out of business.
Over 20,000 pages of Obamacare regulations as of March 2013. Courtesy Senator Mitch McConnell
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s $60.4 billion request for Hurricane Sandy relief has morphed into a huge Christmas stocking of goodies for federal agencies and even the state of Alaska, The Post has learned.
The pork-barrel feast includes more than $8 million to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments. It also includes a whopping $150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska and $2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in DC.
Other big-ticket items in the bill include $207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center; $41 million to fix up eight military bases along the storm’s path, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; $4 million for repairs at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; $3.3 million for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and $1.1 million to repair national cemeteries.
Budget watchdogs have dubbed the 94-page emergency-spending bill “Sandy Scam.”
Matt Mayer of the conservative Heritage Foundation slammed the request as an “enormous Christmas gift worth of stuff.”
“The funding here should be focused on helping the community and the people, not replacing federal assets or federal items,” he said.
Now keep in mind that we were promised that the government would eventually make a profit in the deal just as we did when Reagan fixed the S&L crisis. We aren’t even getting cheaper cars out of the deal, unless of course you consider the government subsidized Chevy Volt that nobody wants and the taxpayers are took a shellacking on.
GM would have been fine if the government just stayed out of it, they would have reorganized with creditor protection form the courts just like every other company has who has gone through this process legitimately. Of course if that happened GM would have broke the over-reaching union who gives hundreds of millions in campaign money to Democrats. Anyone want a Twinkie?
The American taxpayers stand to lose billions as General Motors today announced a plan to buy back 40 percent of the company owned by the federal government.
“The Detroit automaker said it will purchase 200 million shares of GM stock held by Treasury for $5.5 billion — or $27.50 per share — nearly $2 above the stock’s closing price on Tuesday,” the Detriot News reports.
However, the break even price — the price that GM would need to pay for each share in order to pay back the money the government put in to the company —was $53 a share. That number has now risen dramatically.
“As a result of GM’s buy back, the government has recovered about $28.6 billion of its $49.5 billion GM bailout, which means it will most likely lose billions when selling its remaining shares,” MLive.com reports. “The government would need to sell its remaining shares at a price of $69.72 to break even. That’s up more than $15 from earlier this year, when the U.S. Treasury would have to sell its 500 million remaining shares at about $53 per share.”
The U.S. Treasury initially owned nearly 61 percent of GM as part of the auto bailout, which forced the automaker and crosstown rival Chrysler through a government-backed bankruptcy.
The Obama administration completely exited Chrysler last year after recovering $11.2 billion of its $12.5 billion bailout to the Auburn Hills-based automaker.
At least one student in Chicago’s public school system is mad as hell. And if the YouTube video posted Thursday by the urban culture website World-Star Hip-Hop is any indication, she’s definitely not going to take it any more.
The video shows a student from a high school on Chicago’s South Side berating a music teacher because, she says, he isn’t teaching students anything despite striking for a week for better wages.
“You went on strike for a whole week to get paid to teach us,” the furious student says. “And now you’re here, and you don’t want to teach. Man, you better teach me something.”
“You get paid, right? I want an education!” she continues. “I refuse to sit in this class and not be taught.”
“Every day I walk out of this class with nothing. Why? Because you don’t do your job,” she yells.
This week, Jeffrey Zeints, Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner in which he pled for a huge chunk of cash, supposedly to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy. “As the impacted region addresses the damage caused by the hurricane,” he wrote, “the Administration believes additional Federal resources are necessary to fund response, recovery, and mitigation efforts.” All in all, the Obama administration asked for $60.4 billion. The letter stated, “the Administration proposes that controls be put in place to ensure that funds are used appropriately to protect against waste, fraud, and abuse.”
They don’t need another set of controls. The request itself is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. Zients’ proposal accompanied the letter. And, among other frivolous propositions, it requested tons of money … for cars. Yes, cars:
$300,000 to replace Secret Service law enforcement vehicles and other equipment;
$855,000 to replace Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles and other equipment;
$2.4 million to replace destroyed or damaged vehicles and other equipment for the Department of Homeland Security;
$20,000 for the Department of Justice to “repair and replace vehicles”;
$4 million to the FBI to “replace vehicles, laboratory and office equipment, and furniture damaged”;
Another $1 million for the Department of Justice to “repair or replace over 15 vehicles”;
$230,000 to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to replace three vehicles.”
Every appropriations bill these days includes a large cash request for vehicles. That might have something to do with the fact that the government now owns General Motors. No government in history has bought more civilian vehicles than this one. From 2005 to 2011, the Department of Justice, which has a grand total of 114,873 positions, grew its number of vehicles by 12 percent to 40,111. That’s one vehicle for every 2.9 employees. The Department of Homeland Security now has 56,534 vehicles, a 48 percent jump over 2005, to serve 240,000 employees – one vehicle for every 4.2 employees. If you took those cars and lined them up end-to-end, they’d stretch for 308 miles.
In the video below Mark Levin very gently takes apart Dr. Teresa Gilarducci. She works for George Soros now, but before that she was an econ professor at Notre Dame. She was also on President Clinton’s Social Security task force.
When she was at Notre Dame I debated her when I was an undergrad in front of an audience, as I was the only one between IU and Notre Dame who would take the partial privatization position point of view on Social Security. Her incredible hypocrisy, that Levin exposes so well in the video below, showed itself in true form in my debate with her as well. Her “logic” is entirely political, circular and based largely on denial and misdirection. She is sweet, attractive and charming, and well knows it as she uses that as a weapon in her arsenal.
Dr. Gilarducci thought she was going to be debating a “college republican” undergrad, what she got is a former radio talk show host who passed the state exams and used to sell retirement and insurance products.
I will not outline the entire debate, but in short I did two things.
First: I outlined the Galveston Plan which has worked wonders as a legal exception to Social Security. I also pointed out the government managed, but partially privatized retirement plan that Members of Congress have which has been a great success through thick and thin. Such a plan would serve as a good model to grow at least a small percentage of Social Security to at least attempt to have a growth to pre-fund our retirement benefits.
All she would say about these partially privatized plans is that the retirees wouldn’t get the money and even though retired Members of Congress and some in Galveston were already getting great benefits now she insisted that soon that money would vanish because only government transfer payments can be trusted. She kept saying again and again, “Until you go to get your money at retirement and it’s not there.”
Ironically in the video below, the type of plan she insisted could never work because the “greedsters” in the private sector would steal it all, is the exact same plan that she has for herself for her own retirement by her own admission.
Second: Dr. Gilarducci had written some good papers on 401K reform. She argued that too much of the 401K investment is in the employers own stock, so if the employer goes under said employee looses a lot of their retirement. As a fix she proposed that 401K laws be changed to require diversity of investment to more reliably pre-fund such retirement plans. Social Security has much the same problem as all of the eggs are in one basket, there is no diversity of investment and people’s retirement’s are not pre-funded.
So I used her own words and arguments on how to have a reliable and secure 401k, but replaced the term “401k” with “Social Security”. I used those near verbatim arguments to make most of my case.
All through the debate she insisted that (what she didn’t realize were her own arguments in her own published work) were just bad arguments from a young undergrad who just didn’t know better and that is how she treated me……until the end when I dropped the bomb that many of the arguments she so cutely poo-poohed were actually her own published work. She was floored.
During my last few shows, including as recently as yesterday, I have alerted you to Obama’s desire to nationalize your 401-k plan and eliminate your mortgage interest deduction.
Some background on the former. Back in October 2008, I got word that Professor Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School had testified before Rep. George Miller’s committee in support of a plan to nationalize private pension plans — in particular, 401-k plans. I not only spoke about it on my show back then, but we tracked down the professor and I conducted the first interview on talk radio. I will discuss this at more length on my program this evening, but I thought you might want to be among the first to listen to that interview again. Please pass it along to as many people as you can. See below.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 