Hillary Clinton's 1990's Telecommunications Investments

In July 1993 Joseph McNay’s Essex Investment Management Company “was selected by President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton to become the First Family’s personal money manager”—after a May 1993 consultation with 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate Clinton at the White House in which McNay “talked with her about his investment philosophy,” according to the Boston Globe (8/31/93). Among Essex’s largest stock holdings at the time it began managing Hillary Clinton’s “blind trust” stock portfolio (then-worth only $1.2 million) were $66.6 million in Tele-Communications Inc. stock and $41.1 million in CBS stock, according to Pensions & Investments (9/6/93) magazine. Pensions & Investments also reported that Hillary Clinton’s personal money manager favored “telecommunications, cable and entertainment, reinsurance, natural gas, selected health care and biotechnology stocks;” and Essex also owned stock in a corporation that Hillary Clinton directed before moving into the White House during the Clintons’ first term there—Wal-Mart.

Coincidentally, the husband of 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Clinton signed a telecommunications bill in 1996 which hurt cable-TV consumers, allowed CBS-Westinghouse to further monopolize their radio and TV broadcasting markets and increased the value of Tele-Communications Inc. stock.

Downtown/Aquarian asked the Clinton White House’s Office of Media Relations in 1996 how then-President Clinton responded to the charge that it was undemocratic for him to refuse to debate 1996 presidential candidate Ralph Nader on TV before the California primary.

“It’s a campaign decision,” a White House spokesperson replied, “which can only be answered by the Clinton-Gore campaign committee, not by the White House.”

Downtown/Aquarian then phoned the Clinton-Gore ’96 headquarters in Washington, D.C. to ask a campaign committee spokesperson for an official response to that charge that it was undemocratic for Clinton to refuse to debate Nader.

“Who’s making the charge?” a Clinton campaign spokesperson asked in return.

The Corporate Male’s Big Media has a history of attempting to rig U.S. presidential elections by denying news coverage to anti-establishment Third Party candidates like Nader. As The Other Candidates: Third Parties In Presidential Elections by Frank Smallwood concluded in 1983:

“The final major complaint of the third-party candidate involved the issue of the exposure—or more accurately, the lack of exposure—in the national media…Most were unable to obtain any significant coverage from the large television networks or national newspapers. According to the Rosenstone study, `in 1980 Reagan and Carter received about 10 times more coverage in leading newspapers and weekly magazines than did all the eleven third party…candidates combined. This disparity existed in network television news coverage as well.’…

“A review of the ballot access, the campaign finance, and the media issue reveals that the third-party…candidates face…institutional and procedural obstacles. During recent years these obstacles have increased in severity with…the erosion of equal-time access to broadcast media.

“Despite the homage that is paid in American politics to the concepts of free enterprise and free competition, the two major parties are intent on doing everything possible to kill off their third-party rivals…”

The official African-American unemployment rate under the Clinton Administration, incidentally, was 10.3 percent in February 1996, while the official Hispanic jobless rate was 9.7 percent in February 1996 under the Clintons.

(Downtown/Aquarian 3/30/96)

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