The L.A. Times uncovers yet another sleazy donor to the Clinton Foundation.
This one, Alibaba Inc., is a Chinese internet company that is helping the Communist government to crack down on Tibetan activists.
Last month, the firm, Alibaba Inc., carried a government-issued "most wanted" posting on its Yahoo China homepage, urging viewers to provide information on Tibetan activists suspected of stirring recent riots.
Alibaba, which took over Yahoo's China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.
"A former president of the United States received a donation from a Chinese firm that is involved in censorship, and now his wife is running for president. This is a shame of the U.S.," said Harry Wu, an exiled Chinese activist based in Washington.
This is by no means the only sleazy Clinton Foundation donor that is linked to a brutal, repressive, autocratic regime.
The Clinton foundation and the former president's library in Little Rock have received millions of dollars in donations from the Saudi royal family and the Middle East sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, along with the governments of Taiwan and Brunei.
And the Clintons go along to get along with their megabucks donors. When Bill spoke in China in exchange for Alibaba's large undisclosed donation, he made no mention of internet censorship in China or a Chinese prisoner of conscience, Shi Tao, a writer who was locked up by the Communist regime in 2004 after the Chinese operations of Yahoo! collaborated with the Communists and gave the government private internet data that led to Shi Tao's arrest.
Bill Clinton was asked to speak out about Shi Tao and internet censorship, but he did not. For the Clintons, dirty money speaks louder than human rights.
... [W]hen he spoke at the conference hosted by Alibaba in 2005[,] [d]ays before his appearance, two prominent rights groups, Human Rights in China and Reporters Without Borders, asked Clinton to raise Internet freedom issues during his speech and address the plight of Shi Tao, a Chinese writer arrested in 2004 after Yahoo's China operation provided state security authorities with private Internet data.
In his keynote address, Bill Clinton hailed the Internet as "an inherently cooperative instrument and an inherently shared technology. The Internet has the potential to put power through information and communication in the hands of ordinary people."
But he said nothing about China's Web censorship or Shi Tao's arrest.
This sorry episode is apparently just the tip of the iceberg.
Another example was uncovered by the New York Times a few weeks ago:
Bill Clinton's disgusting endorsement of the brutally repressive president of Kazakhstan, linked to Kazakhstan giving three lucrative uranium projects to a Canadian mining company, UrAsia, run by a Clinton pal and major Clinton Foundation donor, Frank Giustra, who then kicked back $131.3 million to the Clinton Foundation:
Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.
Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.
The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.
Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.
Mr. Giustra was invited to accompany the former president to Almaty just as the financier was trying to seal a deal he had been negotiating for months.
This is how the Clintons went from being of modest means after leaving the White House in 2001 to declaring more than $109 million in income on their tax returns from 2000 through 2007.
The last thing we need in the White House is large-scale influence peddling to autocratic regimes. We've had enough of that over the last 16 years.