Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 12

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Clintongate Scandal Connection

In an Aug. 28, 2013 article, titled “The Press Scrutinizes the New Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation”, that was posted on the Philanthropy website, Rick Cohen noted that “the intersection of the Clintons’ foundation and Hillary Clinton’s presidential run has generated a spate of articles suggesting that the renamed and expanded foundation is really now a `pre-campaign organization’ for the campaign and is becoming `the command post for all things Hillary. The same article also observes: 

“If you were someone who wanted to get in good with someone with a decent shot of becoming the next president, you might show up at one of the upcoming fundraisers associated with Hillary or Chelsea, such as the scheduled November 9th `Millennium Network’ event, with top-tier $15,000 donors getting themselves photographed with Hillary herself…The association with a possible future president’s name probably makes the foundation nearly irresistible to donors….The ex-president has attracted some raised eyebrows due to the character of occasional donors (notably Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, who received some personal benefits from his association with the former president) and questions about some of his foundation’s initiatives…

“The new foundation with Hillary on the nameplate has garnered new scrutiny, including an in-depth article in the New York Times co-authored by Nick Confessore and Amy Chozick. The NYT reporters wrote about the ever-increasing size of the foundation (now with 350 employees), a constantly changing board of various Clinton intimates, $50 million in travel expenditures since 2003…and hints of conflicts of interest concerning [Doug] Band, who has left the foundation to start a private consulting business—not to mention Hillary Clinton’s expanding `nerve center’ of staff, which occupies two floors of the foundation’s Midtown Manhattan offices…

“There are plenty who are plying the foundation for access to the Clintons and their associates..The business and political overlaps show up with Band’s company, Teneo, which seems to have employed Huma Abedin while she was a `special government employee’ at the State Department while Hillary Clinton was secretary…

"The investigative journalism story...is the news that it is now officially being co-managed by the former president and the former Secretary of State. `I think having a place such as this for a platform gives her a great launching pad into 2016,’ former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told Politico. `It gives her, quite frankly, a great place with which to create or begin to create the message she would use should she decide to run….”

Yet as the New York City Public Advocate since 2010-whose public office website claims to be holding both corporations and tax-exempt “non-profit” organizations like the Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative accountable to the public--Bill de Blasio has apparently failed to adequately monitor or investigate the apparently self-serving and unethical way the Clintons have been operating their New York City-based Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative.

But around the same time that the Clintons’ former 1996 New York campaign director, Clinton-appointed HUD official and 2000 U.S. Senate campaign manager began his term as the New York City Public Advocate, the Washington Post observed in a Jan. 2, 2010 article:

“Foreign governments, longtime Democratic fund-raisers...gave money to President Clinton’s…foundation in 2009, according to a list of donors the foundation released yesterday under an agreement with President Obama to prevent the appearance of conflicts with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role as secretary of state.

“Some foreign governments…had been multimillion-dollar donors in the past, including Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Kuwait, and Qatar…, Other governments continued their giving, including Norway, which has given $10 million to $25 million over the past several years, and Oman, whose donations have totaled $1 million to $5 million.

“Also among the 19,047 donors from last year are Slim-Fast founder and billionaire Democratic donor S. Daniel Abraham, who has given the Clinton Foundation $5 million to $10 million; Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustra, who has given more than $25 million; and Scottish financier Sir Tom Hunter, whose foundation has donated $10 million to $25 million. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also gave money in 2009 and ranks among the top donors, having given more than $25 million...Some…Clinton Foundation supporters did not give money last year, including Hollywood magnate Stephen Bing and upstate New York businessman Tom Golisano, each of whose past donations total $10 million to $25 million. Citigroup, the banking firm that has received federal bailout money, is a past supporter…Richard Scaife, a conservative media baron… has given the Clinton Foundation $100,001 to $250,000…

“The foundation…financed the construction of Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock…. Clinton resisted revealing his foundation’s donors during his wife’s presidential campaign, but he agreed to do so in late 2008 when Hillary Clinton was negotiating with Obama’s transition team to join the Cabinet….”

In a Sept. 22, 2013 article in The New Republic, titled “Scandal at Clinton Inc.,”  Alec MacGillis also wrote the following in reference to the tax-exempt Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative “philanthropies” and their apparent connection to the for-profit Teneo consulting firm of Clinton Global Initiative Advisory Board member Doug Band:

“Bill Clinton now leads a sprawling philanthropic empire like no other…It has formed partnerships with multinationals and wealthy individuals… In July 2001, the former president had established the William J. Clinton Foundation....In 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was born.

“CGI is not a traditional charity…It is a series of collaborations with corporations or individuals…CGI was the perfect vehicle for Clinton…. It placed him at the center of a matrix of the ultra-wealthy and the ultra-powerful, the kinds of people Clinton has always taken a special pleasure in surrounding himself with…


“Teneo has its headquarters on the forty-fifth floor of the former Citigroup Center tower in Midtown and employs more than 200 people in 13 cities…It describes its raison d’être as `integrated counsel for a borderless world,’ offering investment banking, restructuring advice, and `business intelligence’” on dealing with `global disruptors.’… From the beginning, Teneo resembled an outpost of Clintonland more than an independent entity. Clinton and Blair came on as paid advisers…. Nancy Hernreich Bowen, director of Oval Office operations under Clinton, works in the Hong Kong office…. A number of key Teneo clients were also closely involved with Clinton’s charitable work. One month before the Rockefeller Foundation presented Clinton with an award for philanthropy, it gave Teneo a $3.4 million contract…Other Teneo clients include the big hospital chain Tenet (which is a lead partner in the new Clinton Health Matters Initiative) and UBS Americas (which launched a Small Business Advisory Program with the foundation). (According to The New York Times, Teneo’s monthly fees can be as high as $250,000.)… In February 2012, Bill Clinton’s office announced that he would no longer take payment from the firm. The page listing an `advisory board’ headed by Clinton and Blair vanished from its website….”
(end of part 12)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 11

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s 2013 Campaign Contributors

Besides apparently being able to collect up to $1,050 in public matching funds for each individual wealthy New York City resident who contributes over $175 to de Blasio’s 2013 campaign to succeed Billionaire Plutocrat Bloomberg as the Big Apple’s mayor in 2014, the campaign committee of de Blasio has collected over $5.7 million in campaign contributions, including a lot of individual campaign contributions of $4,950 from a number of extremely wealthy folks. As Christopher Robbins observed in an Oct. 6, 2013 article on the Gothamist website:

“…We poked around the New York City Campaign Finance Board's handy searchable database to see who is emptying their pockets for a Mayor de Blasio.

“First: the Big Names. De Blasio said he'd build (metaphysical) "spaces" for Occupy Wall Street to thrive in, but Zuccotti Park's namesake, John Zuccotti of Brookfield Properties, donated $4,950 to the candidate during the last filing period, the maximum amount allowed by law….Real estate developer Ben Shaoul, who sits on the vanguard of gentrification in the East Village, also donated the $4,950 maximum to de Blasio…So did real estate mogul Ed Scheetz.

“Michael Ratner, Karen Ranucci, and Ellen Ratner, who are developer Bruce Ratner's brother, sister-in-law, and sister, respectively, all donated the maximum amount to de Blasio's campaign…David Belt, a founding partner of DBI Construction Consultants… also donated the maximum amount to de Blasio, as did Jack Cayre, the CEO of Midtown Equities, the firm that is building the giant Yuppie Condo Mall at the Empire Stores site in DUMBO…And so did the co-founder of Bed Bath & Beyond, Leonard Feinstein.

“Billionaire…Alexander Rovt donated to de Blasio last year, but his son Maxwell, who is the Chief of Real Estate for the family business, IBE Trade Corp, donated $4,950 to de Blasio this past cycle. (His mother and father each donated $2,475 the previous cycle, in addition to other contributions made last year.) Meanwhile, the Soros family—George, Alexander, Andrea, and Jonathan, donated a total of $13,025 last cycle….Igor Medvedovskly, the general manager of Yellow Cab Medallion Company also donated $4,950 last month.

“As for Wall Street: Neil Mitchell, Morgan Stanley's private wealth executive director (and former senior VP at Lehman Brothers) donated $4,700 last cycle…”

Despite receiving a lot of money in campaign contributions from various labor union bureaucrats, de Blasio has also accepted big campaign contributions from the following individuals over the last few years: 1. $4,950 from William Zeckendorf of Brown Harris Stevens; 2. $4,950 from Arthur Zeckendorf of Terra Holdings; 3.  4,950 from Loudas Zoumas of The Avaris Group;  4. $4,950 from Alen York of Alen Sands York Association; 5. Over $4,950 from Joanne Wycott of Southhampton, New York; 6. $500 from Alice Wolf of Cambridge, Massachusetts; 6. $4,950 from Gilbert Winn of Boston, Massachusetts; 7. Over $4,950 from John Wilhelm of Santa Barbara, California; 8. $4,950 from Victor Weingarten of Gotham Yellow Taxi;  10. $3,475 from Rob Wavra of The Sentinel Homeland Security Group in Fairfax, Virginia; 11. $4,500 from James Vasey of Cab Management Corporation;  12. $2,500 from Michael Varner of JP Morgan Chase; 13. Over $4,500 from Jeff Thamkittikasem of The Sentinel Homeland Security Group;  14. $4,950 from Robert Tannenhauser of the Ruxton Capital Group; 15. $4,500 from Carol Tannenhauser of the Ruxton Capital Group; 16. $4,950 from Jay Snyder of HBJ Investment; 17.$4,950 from Robert S. Rubin of JP Morgan Chase; 18. $4,950 from Steven G. Rubenstein of Rubenstein Communications; 19. $4,950 from John Rove of Columbia University; 20. $4,950 from Nan Cooper Rothschild of Columbia University; 21. $4,950 from the New York State Economic Growth PAC; 22. $4.950 from Amy O’Donnell of Procter & Gamble;  23. $4,950 from W. Patrick McMullan of Bear Stearns; 24. $4,950 from Sanel Ljesnjanin of Millenium Taxi; 25. $4,950 from David Kuperberg of Cooper Square Realty; 26. $4,950 from Timothy Ingrarasa of Goldman Sachs; 27. $4,950 from Neil Greenbaum of All Taxi; 28. $4,950 from Howard Gottlieb of Glenwood Investment Capital; 29. $4,950 from Eugeny Friedman of the Taxi Club; 30. $4,950 from Alexander Durst of The Durst Organization; and 31. $400 from Cooper Union Trustee Jeffrey Gural.

(end of part 11)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 10

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

During his term as New York City’s Public Advocate, de Blasio also apparently used his position to obtain the political and financial backing of Billionaire Speculator and Plutocrat George Soros (who also operates the tax-exempt Open Society Institute foundation that subsidizes various left-liberal middle-class NGOs around the globe and left-liberal, Democratic Party-oriented middle-class activists and NGOs in the United States).

As the New York Times also revealed in its Aug. 31, 2013 article:

“…Mr. de Blasio nurtured a relationship with George Soros, the billionaire financier, whose foundation became the single biggest benefactor of an obscure nonprofit organization that paid for Mr. de Blasio to promote his advocacy work around the country….His advocacy brought him into contact with a powerful ally: Mr. Soros, who had long deplored the influence of corporations in the political system, even as he poured millions of his own fortune into campaigns.

“The billionaire banker and the Brooklyn activist met on an autumn evening in 2010, when Mr. de Blasio spoke on a panel…held in Mr. Soros’s grand Fifth Avenue home. The two chatted afterward, and Mr. de Blasio promised to stay in touch.

“Four months later, Mr. Soros’s foundation pledged $400,000 to the Fund for Public Advocacy…to support the work of the public advocate’s office.

“The donation was the largest single contribution to the fund, a tax exempt 501(c)(3), during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure….”

Yet Soros’ foundation obtained the $400,000 it used to subsidize de Blasio’s Fund for Public Advocacy from the surplus capital that Soros gets from speculating and investing in transnational corporations that exploit workers and middle-class consumers around the globe; and the special private economic and class interests of Billionaire Soros and his Soros Fund Management firm conflict with the economic class interests of the public and most of the people in New York City who work and live in New York City.

For unlike most people who live, work or grew up in New York City, George Soros and his Soros Fund Management LLC investment firm controlled or owned or collected dividends from over $5.7 billion worth of Wall Street corporate stock in 2013. According to its SEC filing, on June 30, 2013 the Soros Fund Management investment firm’s portfolio included, for example, over $344 million worth of Google stock, over $112 million worth of AIG stock, over $76 million worth of Macys Inc. stock, over $32 million worth of Apple Inc. stock, over $30 million worth of Wal-Mart stock, over $14 million worth of Time Warner Cable stock, over $3.4 million worth of Comcast stock, over 8 million worth of Citigroup stock and over $46 million worth of Loral Space & Communications stock.

Coincidentally, a retired Loral Space & Communications executive named Bernard Schwartz also gave “the maximum $4,950” to de Blasio’s “mayoral bid, then poured $25,000 into the Fund for Public Advocacy,” according to the Aug. 31, 2013 article in the New York Times.

(end of part 10)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 9

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

As the New York Daily News observed in a Sept. 22, 2013 article, “the records examined by The News…show that from 1995 to 2001, the now-candidate for mayor was registered with the city Board of Elections as Bill de Blasio and voted 10 times under that name, even though he had not yet petitioned the court to change his name from Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm;” and “on a June 25, 2003, mortgage with JPMorgan…he was listed as `Bill AKA Warren de Blasio AKA Wilhelm’ and he signed it, `Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm AKA Bill de Blasio. Yet registering to vote under a different name than your legal name—and then voting under a different name than your legal name in various elections-- was apparently considered legally “kosher” by New York City’s Board of Elections with respect to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm (who perhaps dropped the “Wilhelm” part of his name when he realized that people in New York City who voted on the basis of ethnic background rather than political philosophy might be more inclined to vote for a Democrat whose last name was just “de Blasio” rather than “de-Blasio-Wilhelm.”)

After getting elected as the Big Apple’s Public Advocate in 2009, de Blasio apparently used his office as a stepping-stone to more easily win election as New York City’s mayor in 2013. In addition, as New York City’s Public Advocate de Blasio apparently served special economic and corporate interests instead of serving the public interest. As the New York Times recalled in an Aug. 31, 2013 article:

“New York City was planning to allow thousands of new taxis to operate outside Manhattan…It was hard to imagine Mr. de Blasio…opposing a proposal to improve transportation for his chronically taxi-starved neighbors….Mr. de Blasio would emerge as the taxi plan’s most prominent opponent…and using his office to fight it in court — and confounding allies who found his stance incongruous with his typical stands.

“`I was flabbergasted,’ said David S. Yassky, the taxi and limousine commissioner whose former City Council district borders Mr. de Blasio’s. `After hearing all his rhetoric about standing up for the outer boroughs, here’s a program that actually would help 80 percent of New York City, and he did everything he could to stop it.’”

“The powerful taxi and limousine industry, which bitterly opposed the city’s plan, made its gratitude clear, sending about $200,000 in contributions to Mr. de Blasio’s mayoral campaign in the last two years, far more than his rivals received. And Mr. Kabessa, the chief executive of Carmel Car and Limousine Service, now sits on the campaign’s finance committee and was a host of a fund-raiser for Mr. de Blasio this spring.

“But a review of his years as public advocate shows that the office often served another aim: Elevating Mr. de Blasio’s political ambitions and his profile in anticipation of a run for mayor… “
(end of part 9)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 8

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Political Office-Seeking Career

As the New York Times recalled in an Aug. 25, 2013 article, de Blasio’s “assiduous courtship of Jewish leaders in Brooklyn” as Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2000 also “solidified his credentials for his own Council run in 2001,” when the political operative from Cambridge, Massachusetts decided to seek elective political office for himself in New York City; and “colleagues even joked about his frequent trips to Brooklyn during the Senate race, and started calling him Councilman.” The same article also noted that “his networking efforts paid off” because “Mrs. Clinton’s Senate donors eventually accounted for more than a third of his fund-raising haul in his Council race, according to an analysis by the New York Times.”

De Blasio claims to be pro-tenant and sympathetic to the economic goals of democratic socialism and in favor of democratic change in New York City. Yet as an elected member of the New York City Council between 2002 and 2010, de Blasio supported real estate developer Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project despite the opposition of most people who lived in the Park Slope neighborhood (whose interests he had previously pledged to represent) to the Atlantic Yards project. As a long-time African-American Movement activist in New York City and New York City Council member Charles Barron told the Brooklyn Paper in 2008, de Blasio “supported Ratner!.” In addition, as Barron also observed, de Blasio “supported the expansion of the 421-a subsidy, which is a handout to developers,” although “developers should not get tax breaks for building projects that are 80 percent luxury housing.”

Coincidentally, as Norman Oder observed in an Oct. 19, 2011 post on his Atlantic Yards Reports blog, on May 23, 2010 New York City real estate developer Bruce Ratner “gave $4,950, the maximum,” to the campaign chest of “Bill de Blasio, a likely 2013 mayoral candidate and a reliable, if not always credible, Atlantic Yards supporter;” and “Ratner…was the co-chair of a de Blasio fundraiser.” And according to the Office of the Public Advocate website, on Dec. 1, 2011 de Blasio met in his public office with Bruce Ratner and former Democratic New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s special assistant, Suri Kasirer—who is now the president of the Kasirer Consulting Services lobbying firm that also represents the special corporate interests of clients such as Goldman Sachs, CBS, NBC, Time-Warner, AIG and Goldman Sachs—to discuss the Atlantic Yards project that de Blasio still supports.

Dana Rubinstein also observed in an Aug. 30, 2013 Capital website article, that” in fact, de Blasio’s record as a councilman demonstrated a willingness to work with developers…using an approach to land use that at times bore a strong resemblance to Bloomberg's own..” As Rubinstein also recalled:

“In 2009, he pushed through a rezoning of a development site on the Gowanus Canal so Toll Brothers could build 447 condos there. And, when Toll Brothers said they would pull out if the federal government declared the canal a Superfund site, de Blasio backed a Bloomberg alternative cleanup… Critics countered that Bloomberg's alternative clean-up would prove less thorough.

“And, like Bloomberg, but to the consternation of some very vocal Brooklyn Heights residents, he supported the development of condos in Brooklyn Bridge Park…

“`“When he talks to the real estate industry, he tells us to look at his record,’ one real estate executive told me…

"`Mr. de Blasio has never criticized the deeply flawed process that gifted a complete zoning override and 22 acres of valuable Brooklyn real estate to a single developer without any vote or any bidding process,’ said Daniel Goldstein, the founder of Developer Don't Destroy Brooklyn, which led the anti-Atlantic Yards fight, in an email. `He's never railed against the sweetheart deal, or advocated on behalf of homeowners and tenants who faced the highly controversial use of eminent domain. From the start and right up to the minute he has unconditionally supported the biggest land grab of the Bloomberg years, a deal made entirely in back rooms.’"…

“De Blasio was also a staunch supporter of a Toll Brothers proposal to build hundreds of condos on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, to the dismay of some residents.

“In March, Toll Brothers hosted a fund-raiser for de Blasio at the developer's 99 Wall Street offices.

“`There’s no difference between him and the mayor on development schemes, as far as we can see,’ said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, known as FROGG…”

(end of part 8)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 7

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Cambridge, Massachusetts Roots and Polaroid Connection

During the years that de Blasio’s mother was apparently working for Land as a Polaroid Corporation public relations manager, the recipient of the National Education Association [NEA]’s 2012 Rosa Parks Memorial Award, Caroline Hunter, discovered that Land’s Polaroid Corporation was also collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa. As the NEA website recalled:

“At the age of 21, fresh out of Xavier University, New Orleans, Hunter landed a good job as a chemist at the Polaroid Corporation. Then one day, quite by chance, she spotted in her workplace an enlarged South African photo identification card. The year was 1970, decades before the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. had gathered steam. But Caroline Hunter knew the significance of that photo identification card. It was part of what Nelson Mandela called `the hated document’— that is, the South African passbook all Blacks in South Africa were required to carry at all times. It was an important link in the chain that the Apartheid regime used to control and monitor the movement of Blacks.

“Polaroid had in fact been doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa for years. Most important was its ID-2 system, which consisted of a camera, instant processor and laminator. It could generate a photo identification card in just two minutes and more than 200 in an hour—exactly the technology the apartheid government needed to enforce its Pass Laws Act.

“After finding the mock passbook, Caroline Hunter and her colleague (and later husband) Ken Williams, a photographer at Polaroid, launched their campaign. They distributed fliers around the workplace, alerting their colleagues to Polaroid’s complicity with apartheid. They organized demonstrations outside the company’s headquarters, and they spoke out to the larger community. Up until this point, Polaroid had a reputation as a liberal company—`an equal opportunity’ employer. But the Polaroid management did not take well to the protests, and they fired Hunter and Williams…”

In his book Sharpville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences, Tom Lodge also wrote that “the formation of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) by black employees at Polaroid’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters signaled wider concerns with US-South African connections: the PRWM was formed to stop Polaroid’s processing of film for South Africa’s passbooks…” And according to Insisting On The Impossible:

 “…Early in 1971, demonstrators protesting Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa and Land’s key role in defense nearly prevented Land from speaking about his color-view research at the American Physical Society in New York…In 1970 and 1971, employees and outsiders demanded that Polaroid cease selling its products in South Africa, including its photo-identification equipment…Some critics even took out large advertisements urging a boycott of Polaroid products. To meet the criticism, Polaroid sent a committee…to South Africa. The committee…recommended continuing sales through Polaroid’s South African dealer, which amounted to $1.5 million a year…”

And Polaroid apparently did not stop selling its products in South Africa until 1977.

Yet during de Blasio’s years as a teenage junior high school and high school student government politico in Cambridge during the 1970s (who was also profiled in the Boston Globe during the late 1970s) he apparently never questioned the morality of the political role his mother was apparently playing as a public relations manager for a corporation that was collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Coincidentally, de Blasio joined some other local politicians in signing a Jan. 31, 2013 letter to Brooklyn College’s president which attempted to pressure the college’s Political Science Department to withdraw its sponsorship of a campus panel discussion about the non-violent BDS campaign to use economic divestment tactics (similar to those used by the anti-apartheid Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement in the 1970s against the Polaroid firm in whose public relations department his mother worked) to get the Israeli government to end its denial of Palestinian human rights; which led columnist Katha Pollit to criticize de Blasio and the other local politicians who signed this letter for setting “themselves up as micro-managers of campus programming, backed up by threats of financial punishment,” in her Feb. 5, 2013 column of The Nation magazine. 

(end of part 7)

Bill de Blasio and New York City's Clintongate Scandal: A Tale of Three Phonies--Part 6

(A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of the Lower East Side underground/alternative newspaper, “The Shadow”)

Bill de Blasio’s Cambridge, Massachusetts Roots and Polaroid Connection

When Hillary Clinton named de Blasio in December 1999 to be her full-time campaign manager during her successful campaign in 2000 to occupy one of New York’s seats in the U.S. Senate between 2001 and 2009, she claimed she had chosen “someone who…grew up in New York—a point that was prominently mentioned in the single-page news release announcing the appointment,” according to the Dec. 4, 1999 New York Times article; apparently, according to the Aug. 25, 2013 New York Times article, because of  “the carpetbagging charges that dogged Mrs. Clinton.”

Yet, in reality, in late 1999 Hillary “The Carpetbagger from Arkansas and Washington, D.C.” had chosen a “Carpetbagger from Cambridge, Massachusetts” to be her U.S. Senate campaign manager in 2000: because Bill de Blasio did not grew up in New York, but did grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As Dan Janison noted in an Aug. 17, 2013 Newsday article:

“De Blasio was raised in Cambridge, Mass., Bay State roots being one of the…things he shares with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And de Blasio remains a Red Sox fan…. De Blasio attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School..”.

And as the Boston Globe recalled in a Sept. 30, 2013 article, “De Blasio moved to Cambridge in 1966, when he was 5” and “his mother, Maria, was a public relations manager at Polaroid.”

The old Polaroid Corporation (that went bankrupt in 2001, had its assets purchased by OEP Imaging Corporation in 2002 and ceased to exist in 2002), in whose public relations department the now-deceased Maria de Blasio Wilhelm worked for nearly 20 years, was formed in 1937 by Edwin Land—a grandson of Avram Solomonivich and the son of Harry Land, the owner of the H.M. Land Waste Company in Connecticut. According to Victor McElheny’s Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land, during the 1920s the “main business” of Edwin Land’s father “was to handle all the scrap metal from Electric Boat, the principal builder of submarines in the United States;” and “by 1927, Harry Land had begun to invest his profits in real estate.”

Established in 1937 with the financial backing of Wall Street investment bankers like James P. Warburg, during World War II Polaroid profited from the war by supplying “$2 million dollars’ worth of still [3-D] Vectographs to the U.S. military,” producing “filters for goggles” for U.S. Navy gunners, and making “periscopes, lightweight stereoscopic rangefinders, aerial cameras, the Norden bombsight, and a mechanism that antiaircraft gunners could use in training their tracer fire,” according to Insisting On The Impossible. The same book also recalled that during World War II, “the Navy asked Polaroid to work on a plane-launched, guided anti-ship bomb,” “for the thousand-pound guided bomb, the Navy awarded a contract that paid a total of $7 million dollars to Polaroid over several years” and “the contract represented a substantial fraction of the company’s wartime business.”

During the Korean War, Cold War and Vietnam War eras of the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid President and Chairman Land also headed the Republican Eisenhower administration’s Technological Capabilities Panel’s intelligence project that helped the CIA develop its secret U-2 spy plane and spy satellite programs. In addition, as a member of both the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and the President’s Science Advisory Committee (along with former Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank board chairman and MIT President James Killian), Polaroid’s president and chairman was “virtually in control of the development of U.S. technical means for gathering intelligence, especially in the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitored communications throughout the world” during the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to Insisting On The Impossible.

As the same book also recalled:

“Many years of largely secret government services had prepared Land for the work leading to U-2 and beyond…For the work on Project Charles, Land assigned one of his leading optical scientists, David Grey, to participate with him…The Project Charles report recommended use of one-step Land-type photography to record images off radar scopes…Land…set up a center for bringing together all the elements of the reconnaissance [U-2] plane. The small room was at 2 Osborn Street [in Cambridge] the modest red brick building that contained his office and laboratory…”

Coincidentally, some former CIA officials have apparently claimed that Bill Clinton spied on anti-war movement activists for the CIA in the UK while attending Oxford, not many years after Polaroid apparently collaborated with the CIA to develop its U-2 spy plane. According to a 1996 book written by a former senior aide to 1984 Democratic Party presidential nominee Walter Mondale named Roger Morris, titled Partners In Power:

“`Bill Clinton’s ties to the intelligence community go back all the way to Oxford and come forward from there,' says a former government official who claims to have seen files long since destroyed… One former agency official would claim later that the future president was a full-fledged `asset,’ that he was regularly `debriefed,’ and thus that he informed on his American friends in the peace movement in Britain. Similarly, he was said to have informed on draft resisters in Sweden during his brief trip there with Father McSorley…

“One more CIA retiree would recall going through archives of Operation Chaos at the Langley headquarters—part of an agency purge amid the looming congressional investigations of the mid-1970s—and seeing Bill Clinton listed, along with others, as a former informant who had gone on to run for or be elected to a political office of some import, in Clinton’s case attorney general of Arkansas. `He was there in the records,’ the former agent said, `with special designation.’ Still another CIA source contended that part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft....”

In a footnote to his 1996 book, the author of Partners In Power, Roger Morris, also noted that “interviews on the issue of Clinton and the CIA were arranged in part through organizations of retired intelligence officers and other national security officials and included former ranking members of the CIA stations in London, Stockholm, Paris and Moscow, as well as some who served at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, during the late 1960s and who were familiar with the Operation Chaos files.”
(end of part 6)