Bernie Sanders Announces He Is Running For President In Democratic Primary

Independent US Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders has formally announced that he is running for president in the Democratic Party primary. The issues Sanders plans to run on should surprise no one - fixing an economic and political system rigged for and by plutocrats. Those are issues Senator Sanders has spent his entire career trying to ameliorate.

Though an independent, Senator Sanders caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate and has a voting record that is likely to sit well with many Democratic Party voters. Though Sanders says he has never run a negative ad and has no plans to in the 2016 race, he was willing to note to the Associated Press the clear distinctions between himself and Hillary Clinton.

While Hillary Clinton backed imperialism in the Senate and as Secretary of State, Senator Sanders opposed military adventurism in the Middle East. And while Clinton is sucking up to multinational corporations, Sanders is offering sincere opposition to money in politics.

The 73-year-old Sanders starts his campaign as an undisputed underdog against Clinton. Sanders said he has known the former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state for more than two decades. "I respect her and like her," he said. He noted he has "never run a negative ad in my life," but still drew a distinction with Clinton in the interview, promising to talk "very strongly about the need not to get involved in perpetual warfare in the Middle East." "I voted against the war in Iraq," he said. "Secretary Clinton voted for it when she was in the Senate." 

Clinton is hosting a series of fundraisers this week, starting what could be an effort that raises more than $1 billion. Sanders said he will make money and politics a central theme of his campaign, including a call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which he blames for unleashing a torrent of money from wealthy donors into politics."What you're looking at here is a real disgrace," he said. "It is an undermining of American democracy.

Despite a solid voting record on progressive issues Senator Sanders will have a hard climb to the nomination. Hillary Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination even with recent scandals.  The silver lining some offer is that Sanders may drive Clinton to the left - don't bet on it.

Clinton is no mystery and though there may be opportunities through social movements to scare a President Hillary Clinton into making concessions, her heart belongs to Wall Street and the corporate technocrats of DC and Davos.

So on the plus side, no surprises if she is elected - a widening wealth gap and the encroaching police state necessary to protect it. Are you Ready for Hillary?

Clinton Foundation Took Money From Firms Lobbying Hillary Clinton State Department, Paying Bill Clinton

Last Sunday the acting CEO of the Clinton Foundation, Maura Pally, posted a statement on the Clinton Foundation's blog that the organization was "committed to transparency," and was planning on refiling tax forms "for some years," after recent reports showed they were inaccurate. Unfortunately for Pally, more stories have come out since Sunday of how the Clinton Foundation operated - none of which paint a pretty picture.

More problematic than non-disclosure of donors is what those that donated received or may have been looking to receive in return. One estimate notes that at least 181 companies, individuals, and foreign governments gave money to the Clinton Foundation while lobbying the State Department when Hillary Clinton was in charge. Not all of which were disclosed despite an agreement between Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration to disclose them.

Perhaps more troubling is that Hillary Clinton's State Department reportedly gave out roughly $40 million in government contracts to firms that were lobbying her and paying money to former President Bill Clinton.
Under US corruption laws there has to be a clear quid pro quo which Hillary Clinton appears to have gotten awful close to.

Many of the companies that paid Bill Clinton for these speeches -- a roster of global giants that includes Microsoft, Oracle and Dell -- engaged him within the same three-month period in which they were also lobbying the State Department in pursuit of their policy aims, federal disclosure documents show. Several companies received millions of dollars in State Department contracts while Hillary Clinton led the institution. 

The disclosure that President Clinton received personal payments for speeches from the same corporate interests that were actively seeking to secure favorable policies from a federal department overseen by his wife underscores the vexing issue now confronting her presidential aspirations: The Clinton family is at the center of public suspicions over the extent of insider dealing in Washington, emblematic of concerns that corporate interests are able to influence government action by creatively funneling money to people in power.

You can say that again. In fact, that is surely one of the reasons these stories have caught on - they confirm something true about the Clintons even if they have not provided - as of yet - a smoking gun. The stories confirm the fear many have that a second Clinton Administration will be much like the first - an executive branch run by an incestuous elite of government and corporate bureaucrats that focuses entirely on their own interests while in power.

The experiment has been run and it gave us the crash of 2008 and record inequality and dampening opportunities. Should we do the same thing again and expect different results?

Clinton Foundation Dealings Become Headache For Hillary Clinton Campaign

Hillary Clinton's campaign for president had already gotten off to a rough start with the deleted email controversy, now the Clinton Foundation is back in the news after it was revealed that the non-profit took even more money from entities Hillary Clinton helped when she served as Secretary of State.

Foreign governments and businesses giving money to a foundation run by the family of the Secretary of State is, not surprisingly, a problem. Taking money from people, organizations, and governments makes it harder to treat them objectively. The Obama White House told Hillary Clinton to at least disclose the donations her family's organizations were receiving - an order she did not always follow.

The conflicts are beginning to add up, the Clinton Foundation had a financial relationship with:

• A Canadian agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline; State Department ruled Keystone XL would not hurt the environment or adversely contribute to climate change.
• Business interests seeking support for the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, which was received.
• The Moroccan government which sought better relations with the Clinton family.
• Cisco which built censorship tools in China; State Department gave award to firm for "corporate citizenship, innovation and democratic principles.”
• Russian state company that bought a Canadian uranium mining concern after donation to Clinton Foundation.

And there is likely more to come as soon to be released book called "Clinton Cash" about the Clinton Foundation's dealings will be featured extensively in the New York Times and Fox News. 

The Clinton organizations will reportedly refile their taxes after the latest series of revelations, but that does not mean the Clinton's are planning a full disclosure any time soon. The perpetual calculators may still think it is worth the risk to withhold. 

Wall Street Is Cool With Hillary Clinton Pretending To Be A Populist

At this stage of the game you have to be exceedingly dim or incredibly delusional to think that Hillary Clinton is a progressive. Her record of supporting cuts to programs helping children in poverty, voting for reckless wars overseas, applauding domestic surveillance, and standing with corporate power in Congress speaks for itself.

But in order to win an election in a country with a population increasingly skeptical of trickle-down economics Hillary Clinton is going to have pretend to be a populist. The risk is that her rhetoric could scare away her corporate base especially her strongest supporters working in finance.

Fortunately for Clinton those supporters understand the pretense of modern electoral politics and, according to Politico, aren't holding the charade against her. Wall Street understands they are unpopular after bringing the US economy to its knees with their greed and criminality. They know Clinton has to criticize them in public even after taking their money in private.

Hillary Clinton sounded like a woman on a mission after her long drive into the heartland: “There’s something wrong,” she told Iowans on Tuesday, when “hedge fund managers pay lower taxes than nurses or the truckers I saw on I-80 when I was driving here over the last two days.” But back in Manhattan, the hedge fund managers who’ve long been part of her political and fundraising networks aren’t sweating the putdown and aren’t worrying about their take-home pay just yet. It’s “just politics,” said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008...  

The only surprise, even to those who are apparently the targets of the remarks, was that Clinton’s denunciation on the trail in Iowa and in a fundraising email — widely read as a nod to the wing of the Democratic Party that prefers Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Clinton — came so soon. Far from creating genuine waves on Wall Street, Clinton’s comments were met with a resounding “meh.”

The banksters understand the game all too well. Clinton will try to position herself as a populist during the primary, maybe somewhat less during the general, then come home to Wall Street after she takes the oath of office. She had the opportunity to see her husband do it firsthand and, if a mirror was around, herself do it while serving as Senator.

The most pathetic part of the primary process may end up being progressives trying to contort their brains into seeing her as a progressive - she isn't one. She is from the corporate wing of the party and now would be a good time to accept that reality.

Hillary Clinton Announces Run For President As Clinton Foundation Faces Further Scrutiny

On  Sunday Hillary Clinton officially announced that she was running for president. The announcement surprised few as Clinton has been positioning herself to run for president for quite some time. In the video announcing Clinton's candidacy Clinton said she was going to be a champion for "everyday Americans." t What that will actually entail has yet to be disclosed.

In previous months Hillary Clinton has been dealing with questions about controversial donations to her foundation as well as a scandal surrounding her using a private email server for government communications outside federal rules. Whether or not the stories postponed her announcement for a presidential run is unknown.

Just days previous to her announcement, news broke that when Clinton was Secretary of State she supported a controversial trade deal that helped a major donor and board member of the Clinton Foundation. Though as a presidential candidate in 2008 Clinton had refused to support a free trade deal with Columbia due in part to human and labor rights concerns, when Secretary of State Clinton changed her views and endorsed the agreement. During that same time the Clinton family forged ties with business interests that benefited from Clinton's policy shift.

At the same time that Clinton's State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire. 

The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation -- supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself -- Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. Having opposed the deal as a bad one for labor rights back when she was a presidential candidate in 2008, she now promoted it, calling it “strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States.” The change of heart by Clinton and other Democratic leaders enabled congressional passage of a Colombia trade deal that experts say delivered big benefits to foreign investors like Giustra.

Ready for shillary? Workers are used to getting sold out by the Clintons (see NAFTA for details) the question is whether labor unions and activists will delude themselves into thinking they are being strategic by laying down in the primary and letting the Clinton Machine roll them over.

The real issue comes down to trust. Why should progressives trust Hillary Clinton to side with the people over moneyed interests?

Governor Martin O'Malley Says Dodd-Frank Did Not Go Far Enough, Weighing Presidential Run

Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley recently wrote an op-ed endorsing further regulation of Wall Street to prevent another financial crisis.  Just as noteworthy as the sentiment of the article is where it was published, the Des Moines Register of Iowa.

In recent weeks O'Malley has been signaling a clear interest in a run for the presidency and appears to be positioning himself on Hillary Clinton's left flank with on a platform of "reinstating Glass-Steagall banking regulations, hiking the capital gains tax, increasing the minimum wage, raising the threshold for overtime pay and strengthening collective bargaining rights." A progressive message no doubt and certainly to the left of Wall Street-friendly Clinton.

On Sunday the Boston Globe made an open appeal to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for president saying there needed to be a progressive populist in the Democratic Party and that "Democrats would be making a big mistake if they let Hillary Clinton coast to the presidential nomination without real opposition."

Given Warren's popularity within the party due primarily to her ideas, there seems to be a solid constituency for a progressive economic populist to run. But Warren has stated repeatedly and concretely that she is not running for president in 2016, so who will take up the mantle?

The O'Malley op-ed in the Des Moines Register claims efforts to gut Dodd-Frank are finding support in the Democratic Party and that "[T]oo many Democrats have been complicit in the backslide toward less regulation." It's no secret that the faction of the party backing a Dodd-Frank rollback is the same one most supportive of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. So is O'Malley picking a fight?

Such a fight could be exactly what the Democratic Party needs to clarify the boundaries (if any) of Democratic Party support for Wall Street.

Jim Webb Looking To Challenge Clinton In 2016

Former US Senator Jim Webb has been loudly exploring the option of running for president in 2016 appearing at numerous campaign-esque events such as a speech before the firefighters union as well as on ABC's This Week yesterday where he discussed his prospects as a candidate and his vision for the country.

In the interview with ABC Webb said he was "truly exploring" a run for president and claimed that he was looking to see if there was enough support for his candidacy before formally deciding whether or not to run. He will continue "exploring" that support by traveling to South Carolina, Iowa, and New Hampshire.

On his website Webb plays up his military record both as a soldier in Vietnam and as a defense official including the Secretary of the Navy. Webb also positions himself as economic populist and in the ABC interview he asserted that the economic system has "become rigged against working people," and that "the people at the very top have clearly moved away from everyone else in our society in the benefits they are receiving."

The value of a Webb candidacy would be, in theory, that he could appeal to white working class voters both with his message and his background. That remains to be seen, though Webb will start out with less negatives than Hillary Clinton with that group. But the advantage will do little to even the odds in a contest between Webb and Clinton as Clinton will have a tremendous advantage both in resources and initial popularity within the party.

Beyond overcoming the Clinton Machine there is the legitimate question over what Webb's policies are and how they will supposedly help workers, address inequality, and fix a rigged economic system. Web's issue statement on "economic fairness" does not offer much change from traditional neoliberal pablum:

I would agree that we cannot tax ourselves into prosperity. But we do need to reconfigure the tax code so that our taxes fall in a fair way. It is possible to simplify the tax code, including reducing the corporate tax rate in exchange for eliminating numerous loopholes, and to examine shifting our tax policies away from income and more toward consumption. We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913. The loopholes and exceptions that have evolved have made a mockery out of true economic fairness. I would never support raising taxes on ordinary earned income, whether it goes to a school teacher or a nurse or a doctor or a film star. But we need to find a better way.

Webb makes the point that executive compensation is a key driver of inequality and has increased considerably in recent decades. Whether closing "loopholes and exceptions" is enough to fund social programs for the working class if income taxes are frozen has yet to be proven. Most candidates, of both parties, claim they are in favor of closing special interest tax advantages - the devil is in the details.

Whether Webb is a serious candidate should become known in the coming months, 2016 is not so far away.

Hillary Clinton Addresses Email Controversy

Yesterday former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the controversy surrounding her use of a private email account while acting as Secretary of State. At a press conference at the United Nations Clinton said she had used a private account simply out of convenience and said “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.” She said if she had the choice again she would have carried two devices.

Clinton also confirmed that she and her personal staff were the ones in control of the emails and they had selected which emails to submit to the State Department and which ones not to. That is precisely what is not supposed to happen under the Federal Records Act and the agency regulations in place since 2009.

Further complicating Clinton's explanation is a memo sent out during her tenure in 2011 telling all State Department personnel to stop using private email and start using government email if they were not already with the specific order to "Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts."

Physician, heal thyself.

One of the other concerns over Clinton using a private rather than a government email account is security. At the press conference Clinton claimed she never sent an email with classified information from her private account. Given her high position and how prevalent classification has become that assertion has been met with a lot of skepticism.

A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that while it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton’s staff identified as involving government business.  

“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.”

Even if former Secretary Clinton was able to stay within the boundaries of the government's increasingly expansive secrecy laws, the explanation she has offered for bypassing the records laws leaves much to be desired.

In an interview with VICE, a former director of the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy (OIP), Dan Metcalfe, claimed Clinton's actions were a "blatant circumvention of the FOIA [in addition to] the Federal Records Act by people on both sides of it who unquestionably knew better."

All of which leads to the question that won't go away - what is in the emails Clinton refuses to disclose to the State Department?

Hillary Clinton: 'I Want Public To See My Email'

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded to the controversy surrounding her use of a private email account yesterday by tweeting: "I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible," - meaning that she wants the public to see the emails her staff was willing to disclose to the government years after her public service.

Clinton has been facing criticism in the aftermath of a story published by the New York Times which reported that she never used nor even established a government email account while serving as Secretary of State. The story pointed out that Clinton may have violated the Federal Records Act by not keeping an official record of her communication while acting as Secretary of State.

Clinton supporters began pushing back on the notion that Hillary Clinton had violated any rules claiming the rules in question were not put in place until 2014, after Clinton left the position. But, as noted by Politico, the relevant rules to Clinton's email use are the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements which have been in place since 2009.

According to Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA requirements, which Schmidt provided in an email, "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."

In short, the State Department was required to ensure that Secretary Clinton's emails, including those on personal accounts, were preserved in an agency record-keeping system. The failure to ensure such preservation would therefore likely be in violation of the federal requirements, though it's not clear whether all of her personal emails – or just those related to official business – would be required.

Now there are reports that some in the White House were not even aware Clinton had a private account until the investigation into the attack on US personnel in Benghazi, Libya. White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said there were some  records already of Clinton's emails given that people Clinton emailed with were using government emails. Of course, if both government officials were using private emails then those records would not exist until either or both parities submitted the emails to the government.

This entire episode is too clever by half. Clinton did not use government email because she did not want to risk the public having access to her communications. By now calling on the government to release only the emails she voluntarily disclosed after the fact is a complete smokescreen. She should release all her emails during her tenure as Secretary of State to the government and have those emails be subject to public review.

Hillary Clinton Used Private Email When Secretary Of State Outside Federal Records Law

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only used private email while holding her state department office according to a report in The New York Times.The report claims Clinton did not have a government email address during the four years she served as Secretary of State nor did her staff preserve her private email which puts Clinton arguably out of compliance with the Federal Records Act.

Under the Federal Records Act emails written and received by a federal official are considered government records and have to be preserved and archived. This archive provides the basis for review either by other parts of the federal government or the public at large. By not keeping accessible records Clinton's work can not be reviewed - a tempting proposition for any politician that is, in theory, neutralized by the need to be compliant with the Federal Records Act.

Two months ago, in response to a new records initiative from the State Department and years after she stepped down, former Secretary Clinton's staff submitted 55,000 pages to be part of the record. What criteria the staff used to rule which private communication should be submitted for the record - and which should not - is not clear.

Regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration at the time required that any emails sent or received from personal accounts be preserved as part of the agency’s records.But Mrs. Clinton and her aides failed to do so.

How many emails were in Mrs. Clinton’s account is not clear, and neither is the process her advisers used to determine which ones related to her work at the State Department before turning them over.

Given it was Secretary Clinton's private email account there were obviously numerous emails sent during her tenure as Secretary of State that had nothing to do with her government work making submitting the entirety of Clinton's private email records problematic - which, of course, is exactly the reason why government officials are supposed to have official government email accounts. This is a problem Clinton created by not following the rules.

It is no secret why Hillary Clinton is getting increased scrutiny now. She is reportedly preparing to openly announce her intentions to run for president in April though it will hardly come as a surprise to anyone. The Clinton machine has been gearing up for months and, despite some early stumbles, appears ready to grab the nomination or at least make a solid effort to do so.

The open records scandal comes after news broke about foreign governments making donations to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. A State Department spokesperson backed away from earlier claims that all donations have been reviewed by ethics lawyers to avoid conflicts of interest.