Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sluissa]

Except, you know, evidence is there. She did shady stuff. Stuff multiple people warned her against doing, including Obama. If she were running against anyone more reasonable than Trump her career would be dead.

This is a pill nobody wanted. (Except mainiac) A pill forced down our throats by a democratic party that ensured a clear way for her by keeping any other viable politicians out of their primary. So much so that a left wing socialist that can't even be fairly called a democrat pulled a strong second place.

[mainiac]

Except, you know, evidence is there. She did shady stuff.

Oh yes, "evidence" "stuff".

And then the even better "nobody" likes her (If you ignore people of color, older democrats and gay people so I guess they aren't people?) so that is evidence that the accusations against her are true?  Oh wait but why dont they like her?  Gee, maybe because of all those accusations?

[Sheb]

Except, you know, evidence is there. She did shady stuff. Stuff multiple people warned her against doing, including Obama. If she were running against anyone more reasonable than Trump her career would be dead.

This is a pill nobody wanted. (Except mainiac) A pill forced down our throats by a democratic party that ensured a clear way for her by keeping any other viable politicians out of their primary. So much so that a left wing socialist that can't even be fairly called a democrat pulled a strong second place.

This post is so bad I'm wondering if you're trying to prove mainiac right or something. The unnamed evidence (that you will not produce), the totally unclear accusation. (She did bad stuff! Not anything specific, but "stuff".)

And then of course the "everyone hates her" and "the Dem prevented other candidates from jumping in", again with not evidence. She won a huge number of votes. I guess none of them liked her?

[mainiac]

She won a huge number of votes. I guess none of them liked her?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/187922/clinton-admired-woman-record-20th-time.aspx

[SirQuiamus]

Was the abovementioned reduction in drug prices really a cost-efficient result of the money spent by the Clinton Foundation, or something that could have been achieved with a fraction of their budget?

As far as I know, the foundation's usual MO is to avoid spending money on anything that would directly improve the living standards of anyone outside a small elite of Ivy-League MBAs.

A couple of examples:

https://medium.com/@ASterling/bill-clintons-300-million-birthday-gift-44c672e1468f
According to the Clinton Foundation, “more than 3,400 ‘Commitments to Action’” have been made “to date” — and a blog post records that “123 new Commitments to Action were signed in 2015.”

Let’s divide 123 into $23,544,381 and see what we get:

$191,417.73

Reasonable!

Let’s see if we can find a typical “Commitment to Action.”

No funds of the Clinton Foundation are expended to do any of the work or “action” in the Commitment to Action. The organization/corporation that makes the Commitment is agreeing to undertake the stated Action and obtain the identified outcomes or results on their own. The “Commitment” is supposed to be reported on back to the Clinton Foundation each year.

My personal favorite of these “Commitments to Action” is McDonalds, signed with the theoretically separate organization The Alliance for A Healthier Generation (but the document says “Clinton Global Initiative” and so do all press releases).

We all have common sense.

So is McDonalds agreeing to give customers a choice of a side salad, fruit or vegetable as a substitute in value meals a CHARITABLE GOOD DONE FOR THE WORLD?

Did this cost Clinton Foundation anything? Was any donation made to that Foundation by anybody, whether Lebanese-Nigerian businessman or Saudi Arabia or government of Sweden, going to provide the funds for getting McDonalds to pay to attend the big annual Gala and rub elbows with Richard Branson & Bill Gates and Hollywood celebrities and the Clintons so they could say they would give fruit, salad or veggies with value meals? There are dozens of press releases about this amazing achievement.

But then there’s a fun nutrition or children’s well-being message on the Happy Meal panels, isn’t there?

Oh PS — the “estimated value” on this one is $35 million. That’s according to McDonalds.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/us/politics/rwanda-bill-hillary-clinton-foundation.html
The foundation may be most widely known for its Clinton Global Initiative, the wonky four-day Davos-on-the-Hudson held each September to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly. World leaders travel across town for panel discussions and awards dinners, with the Clintons taking center stage.

But the distinguishing feature is a parade of philanthropic “commitments to action” made by nonprofit organizations, corporations and governments. Some 3,400 pledges have been made over the past decade, including about 160 that involve Rwanda.

The commitments are supposed to be fresh, but many projects clearly would happen anyway, and the foundation does not back them financially. But for a $20,000 membership fee, invitees gain the Clinton imprimatur and a chance to showcase proposals to an audience of possible funders and partners.

At the 2007 meeting, the philanthropist Anne Heyman and her husband, Seth Merrin, committed his company, Liquidnet Holdings, to giving nearly $2 million to help build the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda for orphans of the genocide and AIDS. Plans for Ms. Heyman’s project were already underway, but the announcement “propelled things forward,” said Danielle S. Burenstein, the project’s executive director.

To me, it looks like the Clinton Foundation is a parasitical organization that spends enormous sums on consulting, conferences, and cocktail parties, and then takes the credit for the accomplishments of legitimate charities that were mostly going to happen anyway. If you have any good counterexamples, please let me know.

[mainiac]

To me, it looks like the Clinton Foundation is a parasitical organization

Every donation based organization has something of a circlejerk like that.  It's not just charities.  Candidates and parties are constantly shunting money back and forth as they "match" donations as part of drives.  When my church was getting renovated a while back they traded money back and forth with a local community charity and some big pocket anonymous donor.  My community theater takes money from people and then passes it along to a scholarship program.  It's a bit silly and there probably is some law that could be passed that would make all this more transparent and that would be a good law.  But dont get confused by that.

Yes there were existing charitable efforts but the Clinton foundation helped organize and maximize those efforts.  McDonalds might have put that money into a charity that sucked but was good for the McDonalds brand.  The Clinton foundation made sure that the "good for the brand" part wasn't in conflict with the actual "charity" part by letting McDonald pigback on their good name as long as it was for charity.  That's maximizing the benefits by cutting out the branding, not parasite.

Yes there are management costs.  That's because they did actual management.  For instance with the low cost AIDs medicine thing, they organized a new global supply chain to manufacture low cost drugs and ship them.  Yes that meant paying people instead of spending that money on charity.  But it also means that the charity money is spent a lot, lot more efficient.  If McDonalds and the rest had all just done things separately they would have paid a lot more for the medication and distributed it in a very haphazard fashion.  And even after accounting for these management costs they are still a very low overhead organization.

But the thing that is really important about the foundation is that their name can open doors that would otherwise be closed.  The article Sergarr linked to mentioned Muhammad Yunus who the Clinton foundation is trying to use it's political influence to help keep doing internationally praised work in Bangladesh.  There was also the case of Bill Clinton flying to north korea to negotiate for a couple of imprisoned journalists.  These are things that money can't buy.

[SirQuiamus]

To me, it looks like the Clinton Foundation is a parasitical organization

Every donation based organization has something of a circlejerk like that.  It's not just charities.  Candidates and parties are constantly shunting money back and forth as they "match" donations as part of drives.  When my church was getting renovated a while back they traded money back and forth with a local community charity and some big pocket anonymous donor.  My community theater takes money from people and then passes it along to a scholarship program.  It's a bit silly and there probably is some law that could be passed that would make all this more transparent and that would be a good law.  But dont get confused by that.

Yes there were existing charitable efforts but the Clinton foundation helped organize and maximize those efforts.  McDonalds might have put that money into a charity that sucked but was good for the McDonalds brand.  The Clinton foundation made sure that the "good for the brand" part wasn't in conflict with the actual "charity" part by letting McDonald pigback on their good name as long as it was for charity.  That's maximizing the benefits by cutting out the branding, not parasite.

Yes there are management costs.  That's because they did actual management.  For instance with the low cost AIDs medicine thing, they organized a new global supply chain to manufacture low cost drugs and ship them.  Yes that meant paying people instead of spending that money on charity.  But it also means that the charity money is spent a lot, lot more efficient.  If McDonalds and the rest had all just done things separately they would have paid a lot more for the medication and distributed it in a very haphazard fashion.  And even after accounting for these management costs they are still a very low overhead organization.

But the thing that is really important about the foundation is that their name can open doors that would otherwise be closed.  The article Sergarr linked to mentioned Muhammad Yunus who the Clinton foundation is trying to use it's political influence to help keep doing internationally praised work in Bangladesh.  There was also the case of Bill Clinton flying to north korea to negotiate for a couple of imprisoned journalists.  These are things that money can't buy.

Thank you for your reply.

[Max™]

I was very amused to note that Rider in Fate/Zero was watching tv and as part of the "THIS TAKES PLACE A DECADE OR SO AGO" setting they had him comment on how "this Clinton fellow seems like he might get in my way" as in "while I'm conquering the world" and whatnot, and then pondering how he would get some B2 bombers.

[mainiac]

Thank you for your reply.

Thank you for participating in a civil discussion.

As a further musing; one could imagine that the most efficient thing would be to direct the charity money towards the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and then just keep the political influence and management stuff in house.  But if they did that it would look abso-fucking-lutely horrible because they would be spending 100% of the money on consulting fees and flying politically connected people around the world.

[Max™]

Yeah, as rabidly anti-windows as I am, I would hug Bill for the shit he's done afterwards, throwing your huge fortune at trying to eliminate diseases people in the first world haven't cared about for a century, spreading access to the internet, computers, and so forth to a segment of the population that had no real likelihood of getting it in the near future, true bro moves.

[sluissa]

Except, you know, evidence is there. She did shady stuff. Stuff multiple people warned her against doing, including Obama. If she were running against anyone more reasonable than Trump her career would be dead.

This is a pill nobody wanted. (Except mainiac) A pill forced down our throats by a democratic party that ensured a clear way for her by keeping any other viable politicians out of their primary. So much so that a left wing socialist that can't even be fairly called a democrat pulled a strong second place.

This post is so bad I'm wondering if you're trying to prove mainiac right or something. The unnamed evidence (that you will not produce), the totally unclear accusation. (She did bad stuff! Not anything specific, but "stuff".)

And then of course the "everyone hates her" and "the Dem prevented other candidates from jumping in", again with not evidence. She won a huge number of votes. I guess none of them liked her?

The evidence has been produced and ignored. The "stuff" is ground thats been covered a dozen times already. The everybody hates her is a bit hyperbole, but certainly its been shown that her opinion polls are low and even her own supporters overwhelmingly believe she's corrupt.

[Criptfeind]

Even if what you say is true it's somewhat unfair to expect everyone to have read 250 pages of a forum thread if they are already not aware of your evidence, so since it's apparently in doubt I guess it should be easy enough for you to simply link to again, or even just quote the posts it was in.

[mainiac]

Bring out this "evidence" that we've been so blindly ignoring, please.

It's 62 days until the election, we've got 60,000 emails and half a page of copypasta, it's dark and

[Rolepgeek]

If you place all the scandals of the Clinton family on her, rather than taking a look at which one's are Bill's, you can find some. Sorta. Squint a little.

The whole issue that makes this thing contentious is a lack of hard evidence. Basically everything is circumstantial or hearsay.

[Frumple]

Even the rather hawkish is... arguable, iirc. She has perhaps been a bit more willing than your average democrat to agree with military intervention, but pretty consistent about it also being pretty limited, and generally well targeted from what I can recall (probably still not stuff I'd be inclined towards, personally, but it's nothing approaching the general conservative positions over the last few decades.). Compared to the actual hawks in this country she's still pretty milquetoast about digging the metaphorical claws into stuff, imo, from all I can remember at the moment.