Hillary Clinton's Foster & McDougal Connections Revisited

Before 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s former corporate law partner, Vincent Foster, allegedly killed himself during the Clintons’ first term in the White House, he was apparently also a business partner of Hillary Clinton in the 1980s. As Blood Sport by James Stewart observed:

“[Roy] Drew had been working as a stockbroker at E.F.Hutton when Hillary called in the Spring of 1983, wanting to open a joint brokerage account with Vince [Foster] and [former Clinton Administration Associate Attorney General] Webb [Hubbell]. Each would contribute $15,000, she said, for a total of $45,000…The three Rose [Law firm] partners, opened an account with Drew called Midlife Investors…Hillary called nearly every trading day to check on the progress of Midlife’s stocks.”
The same book also recalled how (before he was convicted of 18 counts of bank fraud in the 1990s), the Clintons’ now-deceased former business partner, Jim McDougal, apparently helped raise money to pay off Bill’s campaign debts during the 1970s:

“He [Clinton] was $24,000 in debt from his unsuccessful 1974 campaign for congress…Clinton went in on the five-acre investment, paying $500 down…In 1978, just as Clinton was starting to mount his campaign for governor, McDougal was able to sell the tract for $5,000, a 75 percent return on their initial investment of $2,850…” (Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 10/16/96)

During the Clintons’ first term in the White House, Hillary Clinton’s husband was not eager to answer questions about the Clintons’ role in the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Scandal while Bill was Arkansas’s governor. As The Buying of The President by Charles Lewis revealed in 1996:

“…Governor Clinton…hired fellow investor McDougal onto the public payroll. To add conflict upon conflict, McDougal purchased a thrift, Madison Guaranty, represented by Hillary Clinton before state regulators.

“In what might be the clearest quid pro quo for McDougal, Governor Clinton apparently cleared the way for state agencies to move into a building owned by the S&L, for which they paid an estimated $200,000 in yearly rent…

“President Clinton declined…to respond to written questions submitted by the Center for Public Integrity.
The same book also observed:

“…The point of Whitewater and Bill Clinton’s…career in Arkansas is that long before the presidential election of 1992, his political identity as an accommodator of the largest, most powerful monied interests was well established. While he was governor, millions of dollars in private favors at public expense accrued to various companies and individuals…”
When asked by federal investigators whether she knew how Whitewater’s losses had been made up year after year, 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton replied in a May 1995 sworn written statement that “my husband and I did not receive annual reports or regular financial summaries” and “we were passive investors” who “relied upon the McDougals to manage and operate it” (NY Times 8/5/95).

Yet in a Boston Globe (3/24/96) review of Blood Sport by James Stewart in 1996, Steven Levingston noted that “Stewart presents evidence” that Hillary Clinton “became responsible for the day-to-day management of the investment’s finances, even signing for Whitewater on various tax returns using the title `president’ and “Stewart’s portrayal flies in the face of the White House claims that the Clintons were passive investors.”
(Downtown/Aquarian Weekly 4/3/96)

Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 5

Columbia University Institutional Racism In 21st-Century?

Over 30 years after the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt that protested against Columbia University’s historic policies of institutional racism during the 20th century, the Columbia University Administration, like most U.S. university administrations, was apparently still not eager to hire many African-Americans as tenured faculty members (despite Columbia’s West Harlem location). As The Great Wells of Democracy by Manning Marable observed in 2002:

“In 2001, the total number of African-American faculty at all institutions was 61,183, a figure representing only 6.1 percent of all U.S. faculty…A 2001 survey of the twenty-seven highest-ranked research universities in the United States indicated that 3.6 percent of all faculty was black. African-American educators remain underrepresented in the upper levels of academic administration…At Columbia University…the total number of tenured full professors and associate professors in the College of Arts and Sciences was eight out of a total of approximately 440 tenured faculty. Three out of these eight African-American faculty members only received tenure in 2001 and 2002…”

Despite the opposition of most Harlem community activists, the Columbia University Administration is also attempting in the 21st-century to expand its campus more into West Harlem, north of West 125th Street.

As The Closed Corporation by James Ridgeway observed as long ago as 1969, “While Columbia passes as a university, in reality it is among the great real estate development corporations.” And in The Tenant Survival Book, Emily Jane Goodman noted how Columbia University operated within Manhattan’s real estate industry during the 20th century:

“Columbia and its chain of associated institutions on Morningside Heights and Washington Heights…engaged in surreptitious acquisitions of multiple dwellings, housing thousands of poor and moderate middle-income families in the neighborhood where Columbia corporate institutions were planning a $250 million expansion plan.

“It has been estimated that almost 10,000 apartments all structurally sound, low-rental and rent-controlled housing were systematically demolished over the years to make room for the Columbia complex.”

Not surprisingly, Columbia has never been very popular with most NYC tenants. As The Closed Corporation also observed:

“It would be difficult to find an institution of higher learning in the country so deeply and justly detested as is Columbia University in New York City…The Ford Foundation approached Columbia…to run some urban programs…The main function of the Ford projects was to provide a publicity shield behind which the educational institutions on Morningside Heights, led by Columbia, continued their land grab…Columbia refuses to make public its real estate holdings.” (Downtown 3/5/97)

Next: Hillary Clinton’s Foster & McDougal Connections Revisited

Nader's Critique of Clinton Dynasty's First Administration

In the July 8, 1996 issue of The Nation magazine, Ralph Nader indicated how the Clintons failed to serve the public interest during their first administration in the 1990s:

“Clinton has no consumer policy; his environmental policy is largely rhetoric and accommodation (note his obeisance to the nuclear power and timber industries, and to the auto industry on fuel economy). The federal regulatory agencies’ behavior under Clinton (e.g., banking, the Federal Aviation Administration, auto safety, railroad and job safety) is either indistinguishable from their performance under his Republican predecessors or worse…

“Clinton’s business-indentured motif went into high gear with his surrender to the Republican-fashioned telecommunications bill that so delighted oligopolists and autocrats. To make sure that the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t reverse its anticonsumer positions, Clinton undermined his own chairman…by appointing two other commissioners with pro-industry leanings…Other major Clinton nominations—to the Supreme Court, the Treasury Department and the omnipotent Federal Reserve—are all Wall Street approved.

“…Like Bush, Clinton cannot make himself speak out against fast-growing brutalized child labor abroad…Nor will he confront on human rights grounds global corporations that coddle dictatorships, thus encouraging the contagious corporate criminality that arises from those alliances…

“In no area is Clinton’s…strategy more transparently expedient…than in his erosions of civil liberties protections…

“…Clinton has never been serious about campaign finance reform, while sending very serious letters to the affluent, offering them a seat at his dinner table for a $100,000 contribution.”

In his July 1974 testimony before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, Nader also had stated:

“To take the worst features of what now passes for a health care system in the form of billions of dollars in annual retentions (profits and expenses) for private health insurance companies, billions wasted on unnecessary hospitalization, inappropriate and useless drugs, and thousands of excess hospital beds—and then to add to this a so-called national health insurance plan which requires low-wage earners to pay far more of their income than the rich through payroll taxes, deductibles and coinsurance—is to perpetuate a fraud on the American public.

“There is no room in taxpayer funded national health insurance for private insurance companies. They have already proved they are far more concerned with their over $5 billion profits and retentions than with providing low-cost comprehensive preventive health care.

“You only have to look over the history of Metropolitan, Prudential, and other health and life insurance companies…to see how little attention is being paid to preventive health care…

“Congress should reject any plan designed to massively subsidize a private corporate insurance system whose primary objectives are increasing their wasteful ways and increasing profits…” (Downtown 10/13/93)

Yet, according to the 1994 book by David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, The National Health Program Book, most of the health care reform plan that 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proposed during the Clinton Administration’s first term “adheres to the complex Managed Competition developed by the Jackson Hole Group with the financial backing of the big insurers;” and while Hillary’s husband “loudly declaims against the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA—the trade association of the smaller insurers) and other `special interests’ who oppose” their “plan, the biggest insurers—Aetna, Prudential, Cigna, Metropolitan Life, Travelers, Blue Cross—all support” the Clintons’ “approach, along with the American Hospital Association.”

Next: Columbia University Institutional Racism In 21st-Century?

`Grit TV' Host and `Blue Grit' Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 `Downtown' Interview--Part 4

Before she began working as the Grit TV producer-host, Blue Grit author Laura Flanders used to co-produce and host a non-commercial daily alternative morning news show called Undercurrents with Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight of KPFA’s Flashpoints (http://www.flashpoints.net/) daily alternative evening news show. Following is the fourth part of a 1991 interview with Flanders that appeared in the June 26, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.

You’ve written articles about the war in Ireland which have appeared in In These Times, The Nation, different women’s publications. What’s your opinion of the British Establishment’s media coverage of the war in the North of Ireland and the U.S. Establishment’s media coverage?
Laura Flanders: The reason I got involved or interested in the subject of Northern Ireland was that I was going to school in Britain and the Northern Irish situation was the first time that I realized that the history I was being taught was only one side of the story. And that the history I was being taught about Ireland was not history from the point of view of the Irish. And that there was an enormous job of the Conquerors teaching the history going on.

So, as far as my experience of the British media, right down from the history books to the current daily press, obviously, how I would characterize it is: beyond political considerations, beyond fear of being associated in any way with “terrorism” and the Irish Republican Army, there is a level of anti-Irish racism that pervades the British culture in a way that somebody from outside Britain might not notice. It is a racism, I believe, as strong and as damaging and as blindfolding as anti-Black violence and white racism in this country or racism in any situation. The fact that the Irish are the butt of jokes is…used to put down the Irish as a whole and to minimize their experience. And once you have a culture which successfully minimizes the experience of another culture with which it’s in conflict, then it becomes thoroughly political.

In this country, the situation is different. In spite of the mainstream media, there is often the kind of human interest angle to the situation in Northern Ireland. But there isn’t in Britain. It’s not a human interest story in the same way there, as it is here. Because I think it is seen there as threatening and challenging. Most British people, like myself, were brought up with this fear of “IRA terrorism,” a largely irrational fear that was very successful in blinding most people to even looking at the situation in a city, say Belfast, that is just an hour away by plane. People didn’t even think of going there.

Whereas here, what tends to be the opposite, in the Irish-American community in particular, in their journals, is this very romantic image of the struggle—which is not very romantic. It is enormously painful. It is about economics. It’s not just about “the old sod.”…The Irish independence movement and the Irish nationalist movement in the North of Ireland are very connected to an internationalist, anticapitalist agenda and community. But it is not acknowledged by the Irish-American supporters of that movement, by and large, in this country.

You mentioned you grew up in Britain. What caused you to come to the United States? You’ve been here 10 years [as of 1991]?
Flanders: I’ve been here 10 years [as of 1991]…I originally came to the States to take up a job…between school and college. And once I had got kind of hooked into New York it seemed like a shame to leave the place. I realized that it was kind of hard to break into and I felt like I was just getting connected here.

You know a lot of people have said it, but it’s true. Coming from Britain, or certainly from London, I felt in some way liberated by the U.S. sense, or the New York sense, of possibilities…If you have an idea, it’s not the craziest thing in the world that you might try and pursue it. There might not be any money for you to pursue it, but no one can just tell you off the bat that it’s just a bad idea or that you shouldn’t try. Whatever it is. Whether it’s going to the beach right now, today. Or, you know, traveling across the country on a bicycle…There is something about a sense of possibility here and a sense of openness to those possibilities that was very attractive to me. And I ended up going to college here and staying here.

But I should also say that…my mother was from the U.S., my father was British. So there had always been a fairly Anglo-American, Mid-Atlantic sense, growing up in my background. It wasn’t the strangest thing in the world to come and live here.

Are there negatives about life in the United States compared to life in Britain, as far as you can see, compared to life in London?
Flanders: Compared to life in London?...Life in London, whenever I go back now, it seems like it’s getting more and more like New York, with the homeless, with the vast disparity between rich and poor, with the kind of isolated artistic community expressing less and less in the way of political opinion.

I miss the British sense of subtlety, the British sense of irony, British sarcasm, British satire. Definitely, I miss that. I think satire is something that’s sorely lacking in this culture.

But as far as day-to-day living? I love it that the subways run all night. I love it that you can buy something to eat at midnight. I go back to Britain and I forget that everything shuts at six, at least in most parts of the country. And I find the class structure even more obvious than I ever did and oppressive, in addition to the distinction that there is between the Southeast—between the London area—and the rest of the country.

When I go back now I try to spend a lot of time outside of London. And the disparity, the economic and cultural disparity between London and the rest of the country, is so enormous that it’s…almost like going to two different places. If I were to compare places outside of London with this country, or with my experience of New York, it would be quite different from comparing London to New York.

I have to say I don’t feel that I know this country very well. I haven’t traveled that much in the U.S. It’s only been recently, doing reporting say about the miners in south West Virginia, that I was able to connect to a community outside of New York in that same way that I’ve connected to some of the communities outside of London. And then I found that there were many connections and many similarities in sort of the same environment.

You’ve traveled to Nicaragua and some other Latin American countries as a journalist. What do you think of the media’s coverage of Latin America, both in Britain and the United States?
Flanders: Well, that’s a big question. I think in the U.S. the alternative media covers Central America much more than the alternative media does in Britain. As far as mainstream media…I would say the British mainstream press, as a whole, does a better job of consistent international reporting (including stories like coverage of Peru, or Colombia or Nicaragua on a daily basis or on a weekly basis or at least on a monthly basis), than does the press in this country, which I think picks up on a few countries…

Except on the issue of Ireland?
Flanders: Right. On the issue of Ireland…which is seen as a “domestic issue’…As are many other important domestic issues in Britain that are never covered…I’ve been out of Britain for a long while, but my experience is that the U.S. press is much more susceptible to trends in what areas of the world it is going to cover. And the British press is a little bit more consistent, at least in quantity, if not in quality. (end of part four)

Next: Nader’s Critique of Clinton Dynasty’s First Administration

Woody Guthrie's Post-1950's FBI File Once More

In a July 15, 1946 letter, Woody Guthrie wrote the following:

“I think that I have proved that a folk singer, to sing best what the people have thought and are thinking, is forced to turn his back on the bids of Broadway and Hollywood to buy him and his talents out. I feel like my work in this field will someday be seen as the most radical, the most militant, and the most topical of them all…

“Every folk song that I know tells how to fix some things in this world to make it better, tells what is wrong with it, and what we’ve got to do to fix it better. If the song does not do this, then, it is no more of a folk song than I am a movie scout…

“When you ask yourself which of the so-called folk singers live up to the real name, you can cross lots of their names entirely off of your list…Ask yourself, does the singer, (artist or poet), take part in the fight to win a better world for the worker? There is only one big fight with a million and one legs to it, the fight of the worker to win his fair share from his owner (boss, etc.). The more the owners allow a singer to be heard around, the less he can sing the tale of the worker’s fight. Before your voice can be heard or your face fotographed, you must actually turn into a weapon of the owner against the workers. I know from a hundred cases of my own experience that any work of protest, fight, militance or plan for the worker, was blue penciled, and censored a dozen times. Any word that was too true, too strong, or too loud in criticizing the world owned by the big boss was scratched out by several hands under a thousand reasons.”
Coincidentally, among the pages contained in Woody Guthrie’s declassified post-1950s FBI file (#100-29988) is an April 10, 1951 memorandum from the FBI’s New York City office to the FBI Director on the subject “Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, Security Matter,” which states that “It is recommended that a Security Index Card be prepared on the above captioned individual.” This April 1951 document also categorizes Woody as “Communist,” indicates that “49 Murdock Court, Brooklyn, NY” is now Woody’s residence address and lists Woody’s “business address” as “Free Lance Folk Singer.”

For more information about Woody Guthrie’s historical contribution to U.S. musical history, you can check out the official Woody Guthrie site at www.woodyguthrie.org.

Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 4

`The Marines Have Captured Grenada'

Oh, say can you see?
The ships on the sea
And an island so small is surrounded
And paratroopers land
With guns in their hands:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

Jets attack from the sky
A sovereign country
Destroying hospitals with bombs
The radio station
Will not speak again:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

Like Nazis they came
Six thousand Marines and Rangers
To start an occupation
To crush democracy
With heavy artillery:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

To cover their war crimes
They broadcast many lies
And people who resist they do slaughter
International law
They choose to ignore:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

The bully of the world
He has struck again
Like Hitler, he fears all revolt
To keep their empire
They’ll do it again:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

But Grenada fights on
With selfless Cubans
And resists deep inside the mountains
And Nicaragua
Will not surrender:
The Marines have captured Grenada.

The Fascists again
Imperialist Uncle Sam
Have used War to smash Revolution
But people now see
What free enterprise means:
The Marines have captured Grenada.


To listen to "The Marines Have Captured Grenada" folk song, you can click on following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/The+Marines+Have+Captured+Greneda

This protest folk song was written shortly after the Pentagon’s October 1983 invasion of Grenada following the death of Grenadian revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop.

In his introduction to In Nobody’s Backyard: Maurice Bishop’s Speeches 1979-1983 [Memorial Volume], former Grenada Attorney General Richard Hart wrote:

“…To what extent the American Central Intelligence Agency participated in the events leading up to the killing of Bishop is not yet clear. That `agents provocateurs’ were at work in Grenada is evident from the crowd of…placards. Some read `C is for Coard, Cuba, Communism.’ The involvement of the CIA in the removal of political leaders disliked by the U.S. government is too well established for the probability that its agents had a hand in the events leading to Bishop’s death to be discounted…”

On April 17, 1982 Grenadian revolutionary leader Bishop had noted that “we know that the CIA has direct access to over 200 newspapers” and “we also know that it puts out its Bi-Weekly Propaganda Guidance to radio stations right through our continent..” A month before the Pentagon’s October 1983 invasion of Grenada, Bishop also observed:

“In February this year…the Washington Post carried this long article disclosing a CIA plot against us under Carter and again under Reagan. It seems that Carter approved propaganda, Reagan approved economic aggressions, and on top of the propaganda also added what they called certain unusual and unspecified components. I assume it means assassinations, etc….” (Downtown 10/26/94)

Next: Woody Guthrie’s Post-1950’s FBI File Once More

`Grit TV' Host and `Blue Grit' Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 `Downtown' Interview--Part 3

Before she began working as the Grit TV alternative news show producer-host, Blue Grit author Laura Flanders used to co-produce and host a non-commercial daily alternative morning news show called Undercurrents with Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight of KPFA’s Flashpoints (www.flashpoints.net) daily alternative evening news show. Following is the third part of a 1991 interview with Flanders that appeared in the June 26, 1991 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newsweekly Downtown.

What about the argument that Establishment media people give—and pollsters—that “women in the United States aren’t interested in politics. They’re not interested in geopolitical issues. They’re primarily interested in personal concerns, raising families”? And therefore, that’s why you won’t have many women analysts or women commentators?
Laura Flanders: Well, that brings up two things. One, is the old question about which came first: the media representation or the reality. If it’s true, for example, that little boys won’t watch little girls on kids’ TV. Is that because they are just not used to it and they haven’t been encouraged to see girls in heroic roles? And, if so, is it okay for the networks to capitulate to that and say “Oh, well, that’s why we don’t have any girl heroines on children’s TV? And that’s just on the children’s level.

But I think the evidence is clear. Almost every progressive organization in this country is run largely, predominantly by, women. I mean many organizations are headed by women…You know, women are visible in the progressive community. They’re visible in issues of concern way beyond so-called “women’s issues.” And at the point where we’re looking at an economic crisis that is devastating our society, those “women’s issues” even are the key issues of the day: health care, housing, reproductive rights, family. And women are out front talking about these issues. There’s no way that anyone can say that they’re not.

If you look behind most congress people or senators they have a whole staff of advisers, a large number of which are women. And most likely the most active and the most energetic are women because they have to be, still, to get to the places that they’re in.

What is the relationship between WBAI and Undercurrrents? Often WBAI has marathons. Isn’t the money that WBAI raises at the marathons…doesn’t that go to Undercurrents?
Flanders: In some respects, it does. Undercurrents is an independently-produced program that is aired on WBAI and by WBAI. We produce in the studios of WBAI and, hence, the money that goes to WBAI and keeps the station alive makes it possible for us to continue producing the program.

The people that subscribe to ‘BAI during the Undercurrents time, and think that the money then somehow goes to Undercurrents, are mistaken. The money goes to the overall pool for the station and for our other costs: any salaries that we might pay, any expenses that we have of tape and cassettes, and telephone, mail and an office. Those kinds of things are part of a budget that we have to raise independently. Which is why we formed Undercurrents as a project of the Institute for Social Justice, through which we raise money to cover our costs and are able to distribute and syndicate the program. All of which is paid for by ourselves, not by WBAI.

So it’s two separate organizations which are interconnected and kind of co-dependent, interdependent. But the money that goes to ‘BAI does not come to Robert [Knight] or I.

You used to be into filmmaking and video before you got into radio. What kind of films and videos did you make and how was that work different?
Flanders: I got into film and video through connections to people who were involved in film and video. And the two films that I was active in producing: One was about domestic violence in the north of Ireland and its relationship to the political violence that was taking place on the streets. The other one was about the miners’ strike in Britain of 1984-85, which was a study of a women’s group that kept striking miners alive throughout a year of strike in a small village in South Yorkshire. From that film, footage was produced: one short film about the women and a longer film on which I was a co-producer that featured many news items that had been taking place in the years 84-85, that hadn’t been covered. And one of which was the “New York 8 Trial.” So the film kind of jumped from the New York 8 Trial to the miners to the women’s peace encampment up at Seneca and various other stories.

What was the New York 8 Trial?
Flanders: The New York 8 Trial was the trial of, in fact, nine defendants charged with “terrorist” activities, with trying to free a colleague out of jail. That was a trial that was brought under the RICO statutes in 1984, I believe, to intimidate the Black Liberation Movement in this country. And it was dependent on the evidence of a turncoat witness whose evidence fell apart in court. The group was actually finally acquitted.

Who did you work with?
Flanders: I worked on the miners and the New York 8 case film with a woman called Andrea Kirsch. And on the Ireland film with another woman called Mary Jane Sullivan.

Are they still working in media?
Flanders: Andrea Kirsch is still working in film. And Mary Jane Sullivan is the director of a production company called Now and Then Productions that co-produces video and film and poetry and other projects in the New York area.

We had an article in Downtown a few months ago talking about the boom in the sale of video cameras and the article argued that this was an effective means to fight the Establishment media on the media world level, on the level of culture. As far as radio and video compare, what are the advantages and the limitations of each? Can an alternative media based on video be an effective tool for social change?
Flanders: It can be. We need all the tools we can get and it certainly is one, I think…I think that independent video and radio both can perform a very important function in terms of being witnesses to a scene. Video and radio can both record a scene right there that moment, very cheaply, very accessibly, that is then a document that can be used.

As far as really affecting the mainstream, certainly there’s evidence of the Gulf Crisis television project, much of which was put together out of nonprofessional video stock. But that was effective. It was seen all around the world and got a lot of questions stirring in a lot of hearts and minds, I’m sure.

But when I was working in film and video it became very clear to me that production values do count. That if you’re going to convince the unconvinced, “the unconverted,” your product does need to be appealing, does need to be attractive, does need to reach out and affect someone. You can’t depend on them sitting there in front of the television or the screen and giving you the benefit of the doubt in a culture that is so hyped-up that it’s just kind of saturated with video images and film images. What eventually pulled me out of working in film was that I felt that, in order to produce a product which would be seen by enough people to really be effective, it required so much money that it ultimately—unless you were really going to have enormous distribution—wasn’t worth the money. That it was not an effective use of funds. And that’s where radio and noncommercial video come in. It’s that, for the impact they can have, they’re incredibly cheap and accessible. (end of part 3)

Next: The Marines Have Captured Grenada lyrics