Monthly Archives: March 2016

September 11, 2012. A Day in the Life of Hillary Clinton’s Career Ambitions

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had two chief rivals in the corridors of power–Vice President Joseph Biden and then-Ambassador to the U.N. Susan E. Rice. Each outweighed her in credibility, dependability, and sincerity. Biden posed by far the biggest threat as potential presidential candidate. Rice was being mentioned as next Secretary of State.

Two of the first emails Mrs. Clinton issued before dawn on September 11, 2012, reflected the influence of Biden and Rice.

At 4:39 a.m., Clinton sent her first email, asking to see Stella O’Leary, founder of Irish American Democrats, who had written through channels praising the Clintons’ work with Ireland. O’Leary referenced a meeting with Clinton that week scheduled for Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Back on St. Patrick’s Day, 2012, McGuinness had met with President Obama and Vice President Biden. In the ongoing effort to maintain ties with Irish Americans, Clinton needed to catch up. Events later that day–the tragic attacks in Benghazi, Libya–altered the timetable. Clinton met with McGuinness in October.

Pre-dawn on September 11, by 5:15 a.m. Clinton had forwarded eight articles, previously emailed to her. They went to “Russorv@state.gov” (Robert V. Russo), with the request, “Pls print.” (First was a blog post by Paul Krugman at the New York Times, forwarded by Clinton at 4:44 a.m.)

At 4:57 a.m., Clinton forwarded a Foreign Policy article titled “The Point Guard,” by James Traub.

The ‘point guard’ was Susan Rice. The article’s sub-heading read, “Susan Rice calls the plays for Barack Obama at the United Nations. Could she lead his foreign-policy team next? Should she?”

In hindsight, the Traub article seems to have had impact. The piece focused largely on Libya–and on Susan Rice. While administration policy and Rice get mixed marks, the piece nevertheless devotes mega-watt attention to Rice (see at link). Her impressive educational credentials, powerful life story, and phenomenal work ethic are forcefully highlighted.

Of particular interest:

In the entertaining parlor game of “Who would be secretary of state in a hypothetical Obama second term?” Rice is now considered the leader, or perhaps tied with Donilon, though questions about his possible role in the recent disclosure of sensitive national security information to the New York Times could threaten his confirmability. (Handicappers now place both in front of Sen. John Kerry.) It’s unclear that she’d be good at a job like that, though; her smile may be just a trifle too forced, her patience a bit too thin. A State Department official who has known her since the Clinton days says that though Rice is hard-driving, diligent, and effective, “There is a disconnect between that and wisdom.” The president, a shrewd judge of character, may know this about her, but the fact that he trusts her may matter more. Susan Rice is not to be denied. She has never faltered along the steep upward trajectory of her career. Some high-powered women have dropped out of the administration to tend to their families, and Rice says she is sympathetic to their plight; she just doesn’t share it. At one point I asked Rice whether she had ever experienced a serious failure. She thought about it. No, she hadn’t. “Some have tried to take me on,” she murmured. Presumably, they lived to regret it.

Traub also gave Rice forceful credit for her loyalty, her passion, her pragmatism, and her blunt honesty. He also noted that, after working in President Clinton’s administration, Rice chose to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. One hesitates to be a mind reader, but it is hard to imagine Secretary of State Clinton shrugging that off. For one thing, four articles Clinton next forwarded to Russo for printing were relatively laudatory as they pertained to her.* For another, Clinton requested that the Traub piece, like the others, be printed.

“Pls print.”

“Pls print” —

Side note: While Clinton as we know set up a private email server at home, she seems not to have set up a printer. Or if she did, she did not use it much. Was her “Pls print” request just a way to save paper and ink cartridges on the home front? Were the State printers that much better than the State email servers?

Or can one assume that when Secretary of State Clinton asked a State employee to use Department resources to print an item, she considered that document to be State Department business?

For perspective, the searchable SecState Clinton emails are posted online here–30,322 emails. Clinton’s frequent “Pls print” request turns up more than 3,400 times. Assuming that many of the results are duplicates or email chains, that’s still hundreds of pages of printing requests submitted to State. (Once again, as when they exited the White House and then had to return White House furniture to the public, the Clintons look like a couple of cheese-parers. But that’s another story.)

For all searchable State Department emails released and not just Clinton emails, go here. In this archive, 13,850 emails contain the private email address “hrod17@clintonemail.com.” Of these in turn, Clinton sent more than 8,200. (Emails received by Clinton begin only about page 413 out of 693–at 20 emails per page.) Again, many are duplicates and/or parts of email chains. But again, the total is hundreds of emails. Probably few people have read all of them. A quick check reveals that many emails sent by Secretary of State Clinton have parts redacted. In other words, either they contain private email addresses or other personal information about non-government employees, or they contain material now deemed classified. As written earlier, one consequence of Clinton’s private email server was to comingle State and off-duty communications.

Back to the early morning hours of September 11, 2012 —

At 5:14 a.m., Clinton replied to Melanne Verveer, who had fulsomely praised an appearance by Bill Clinton. From Verveer (September 6):

H I’m in the business lounge at Dubai airport en route to Dhaka watching your husband’s extraordinary speech and surrounded by countless foreigners all cheering him on. Only he would elicit that kind of reaction at home and abroad! I think it was his most brilliant performance yet, all bias aside. [NAME REDACTED] emailed me in the middle of it to say that you have to run for president so she can work for you!!!

Clinton’s reply:

That must have been a surreal moment–so far from home but so present. He did a great job for the President, the party and the country. Come see me when you have time this week.

At 5:22 a.m., Clinton emailed Cheryl Mills, simultaneously at both her home and work addresses. Subject line: “Need to be sure we talk today.” Message: “What time works for you?” At 5:35 a.m. she emailed Mills again, with the same subject heading and asking “How about 4:30?” At 5:41 a.m., she again emailed Mills with the “need to be sure we talk” and an additional request, “Also, can I call you around 7:30 this morning?” (Mills replied early that she was coming in.)

Clinton’s emails to Mills look increasingly urgent if not agitated. They had nothing to do with Benghazi, where the attacks had not erupted. However, the article on Susan Rice does seem to have inspired an action regarding Libya. Clinton’s next email went to Huma Abedin at 5:50 a.m.:

Request:

Can you get us a copy of Bernard Henri-Levi’s film about Libya? I think Harvey made it and showed it at Cannes last spring.

This would presumably be the documentary about the Libyan war by Bernard Henri-Levy. Other writers have addressed this item.

Clinton then turned to more respectable daily State business, at 5:15 forwarding a CNN article to Russo titled “Chinese media make inroads into Africa,” with “Pls print.” A minute later, she replied to the sender, “I don’t know why we can’t get the Congress (or anyone else in Washington) to care about this.”

Incidentally, the tone and diction of this comment are very unlike Clinton–unusually feeling and colorful, in contrast to the banality of most of her State emails. Either she got hold of a genuine issue for American concerns, or she suspected that Chinese media in Africa would not likely feature her, or both.

At 7:30 a.m., Clinton emailed four people in State with the subject heading “Xi Xinping‘s letter to me.” Message: “I’d like to respond as quickly as possible. Pls get me a draft today. Thx.”

At 8:38 a.m., she sent a message headed “Schedule”:

Pls reach out to schedule the following: Terre Blair–mtg in NY or DC Maggie Williams–she prefers dinner in NY John Kerry–he asked to see me when I saw him last night. Maybe mtg after work– for drinks or dinner? Not sure what’s best.

A few other emails on State matters were followed by a friendly reply to Capricia Marshall at 6:57 p.m.–“Are you still here in office?” Marshall had emailed Clinton at 5:45 that “Jake was simply amazing”– “He was our featured speaker at our State of the Administration on Monday. He really wowed the Ambassadors as he has such a command of your accomplishments. Have a few thoughts on this.”

By coincidence, Susan E. Rice had received word of the Benghazi attacks a few minutes earlier, in a message not yet transmitted to SecState:

From: Pelofsky, Eric 3 Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 6:42 PM To: Rice, Susan E (USUN); Singh, Priya (USUN); Ryu, Rexon Y; Oat-Judge, Siobhan Cc: DiCarlo, Rosemary A (USUN) Subject: RE: URGENT – Benghazi I should have mentioned that NEA conveyed to me that all of this is closehold. SBU

From: Pelofsky, Eric 3 Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 6:41 PM To: Rice, Susan E (USUN); Singh, Priya (USUN); Ryu, Rexon Y; Oat-Judge, Siobhan Cc: DiCarlo, Rosemary A (USUN) Subject: URGENT – Benghazi As reported, the Benghazi compound came under attack and it took a bit of time for the “Annex” colleagues and Libyan February 17 Brigade to secure it. One of our colleagues was killed — IMO.Sean Smith. Amb. Chris Stevens, who was visiting Benghazi this week, is missing. U.S. and Libyan colleagues . . .

For future reference, emails released show Clinton sending only 29 emails, including a few duplicates, on September 11, 2012. Relatively few emails fore-grounded State concerns over Clinton’s own. Fewer still had anything to do with Benghazi. Word of the attacks came only late in the day.

Only at 8:51 p.m. did Clinton’s emails about Benghazi begin, with the heading “I’m in my office,” sent to Diane Reynolds (i.e. Chelsea Clinton):

Because of attacks on our embassy in Cairo and our office in Benghazi so email when you can talk.

At the time, with incomplete information, she may have guessed that Cairo was the worse problem. At 11:12 p.m., Clinton emailed her daughter again with the heading “I’m in my office”:

Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow. Let’s try again later.

U.S. Consulate, Benghazi

“Chris Smith” —

After word of the Benghazi attacks, Clinton sent two emails headed “Chris Smith.” Notwithstanding her poignant “I handpicked” Ambassador Christopher Stevens, she seems to have conflated his name with that of Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, who like Stevens was killed in the first attack. CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed in the second attack.

The first went out at 11:38 p.m. It contained a rather weighty question, asking input:

11:38 p.m. “Chris Smith.” “From: H <hrod17@clintonemail.com>Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 11:38 PM To: ‘sullivanjj@state.gov’; ‘millscd@state.gov’; ‘nulandvj@state.gov’ Subject: Chris Smith

Cheryl told me the Libyans confirmed his death. Should we announce tonight or wait until morning?

The second went at 11:40 p.m., with the brief message–“Ok.”–in response to Mills’ reply: “We are awaiting formal confirmation from our team. We are drafting a statement while we wait.”

At some point, exact time and author not given, a “Statement on the attack in Benghazi” was issued. The initial email is archived with several others issued over the next few days–with progressively more personal statements over Clinton’s name, about the four Americans killed, some repeating the personal asseveration that she had handpicked Ambassador Stevens.

The take-away here is hard and painful. First, for a sitting cabinet member to send emails by private email server at home was almost pathologically stupid. Despite GOP bloviating, there are genuine security issues involved. Add in the optics of cost-saving by sending your emails to be printed at government expense, and the set-up doesn’t get any smarter or sunnier. Add in the banal light in which they present the Secretary of State herself.

Second, while a Secretary of State might not be determined responsible for security concerns, it should be a given that s/he show concern as a matter of character. Mrs. Clinton’s emails are devoid of that concern. They show–and again, these are the emails written by Clinton herself–a public figure self-engrossed, self-advancing, and relentlessly concerned about image. Some State Department personnel seem to have concerted with her. At 9:46 p.m, after the attacks had commenced, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul sent this email, subject line “Help”:

Clintn with Putin was on front page of Kommersant yesterday. Jake Sullivan, head of policy planning, wants to get a copy. Could you help me find it electronically ? Thanks mike

(McFaul resigned as ambassador in 2014.)

Paradoxically, the rigid concern with image leads to a gargantuan tin ear. Setting aside if one could the deeper issue of character, this is the issue for Mrs. Clinton as a campaigner. The problem with her hoarse yelling is not that she is a woman, but that she comes across as inauthentic. People can yell in passion, but when Hillary Clinton yells, it’s not from passion. She is trying to sound like a genuine dyed-in-the-wool pol on the hustings. Channeling Bill Clinton. Channeling Bernie Sanders. But it’s not who she is. So she always comes across as trying to seem — something. This is not a feminist issue. True it is that any woman in public life will be on the receiving end of misogynistic attacks. Equally true is that the Clintons are not the messengers for that message.

*5:01 a.m. forward “The Comeback Vegan,” by Maureen Dowd; 5:06 a.m. forward “A Touchy Relationship,” a NYTimes editorial; 5:10 a.m. forward “Faithfully Democratic,” a Washington Post blog post; and 5:15 a.m. forward “The Two Clinton Legacies that Obama Should Continue,” from The Hill.

 

The Clinton disaster for Democrats continues

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So far, in election 2016, Mrs. Clinton has won primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and possibly Missouri. What commentators call her “Southern sweep” is complete.

Now let’s evaluate her chances of a Southern sweep, or any kind of sweep, or the narrowest electoral win, in 2016. Clinton’s total so far is fifteen states.* Of the fifteen states in which she has defeated or may have defeated a stronger Democrat and much more appealing candidate,

  • Four states–Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas–have not gone Democratic in a presidential election even once since 1976
  • One state–North Carolina–has gone Democratic in a presidential election once since 1976, in Barack Obama’s commanding win in 2008
  • Six states–Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia–have gone Democratic in a presidential election twice since 1976 (Georgia in 1980 and 1992, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee in 1992 and 1996, Virginia in 2008 and 2012)
  • One state–Florida–has gone Democratic in three presidential elections since 1976 (1992, 2008, and 2012)
  • One state–Ohio–has gone Democratic in four presidential elections since 1976 (2008 and 2012, 1992 and 1996)
  • Illinois has gone Democratic in every presidential election from 1992 on
  • Massachusetts has gone Democratic in every presidential election from 1988 on

So far, the electoral math is daunting. Reversing the order above to start with the results most favorable to the Democratic Party,

  • Illinois and Massachusetts combined have 31 electoral votes
  • Ohio and Florida have a combined 47 electoral votes
  • The eleven states which have gone Democratic no more than twice in the past forty years have a combined 62 (never) + 15 (once) + 64 (twice) = 141 electoral votes

So far, that’s 141 electoral votes quite possibly in the GOP column, to 78 votes possibly going Democratic (in an optimistic view of 2016 Illinois and Ohio). Add in Iowa’s six electoral votes for the Dems, and the total goes up to 84.

Run the same numbers more optimistically, and give weight to recent wins for Democratic nominees–or rather, for Democratic nominee Barack Obama. Obama won Virginia in 2008 and 2012 and North Carolina in 2008. Assuming for sake of argument that Hillary Clinton can replicate Obama’s success in both states, that’s another 28 electoral votes plused for Dems, minused for Repubs. The total so far then becomes 113 electoral votes for the GOP, to 106 for the Democrats.

This is Mrs. Clinton’s ‘inexorable’ series of victories in Democratic primaries, vaunted by the national political press, mostly, as a juggernaut. The fact that Clinton’s wins have mostly occurred in solidly red states or dicey swing states has not been foregrounded.

Turnout is discouraged, when media representations relentlessly shove one candidate down the public’s collective throat as inevitable.

Speaking of turnout, let’s look at some other numbers–again, just for the states in which primaries have already taken place. The Economist article linked here summarizes 2016 turnout, the take-away being that–as Trump has said–Trump has boosted GOP turnout over 2008. Primaries won by Clinton had lower turnout than in 2008. Hillary Clinton is no Barack Obama.

There are a few other points to make about 2016 turnout, scanted so far in major media outlets.

  • Except for Louisiana, Democratic turnout in the old Confederacy states has been significantly less than Republic turnout. Alabama had 857,000 GOP votes and 398,000 Democratic votes. Georgia had 1.3 million GOP votes to 761,000 Democratic votes. South Carolina had 741 GOP votes to 371,000 Democratic votes. Virginia had 1.02 million GOP votes to 783,000 Dem. (Louisiana had 301,000 GOP votes and 312,000 Democratic votes.)
  • The same pattern holds for Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas. Clinton’s erstwhile home state of Arkansas had 221,000 Democratic votes to 411,000 for Republicans.
  • Since no one is counting on southern states for the Democrats, it is yet more scary to look at turnout in Ohio last night. GOP votes: 2.04 million. Democratic votes: 1.2 million.
  • Only in Illinois, last night, did Democratic turnout exceed GOP, 1.9 million votes to 1.4 million. And Clinton barely won Illinois.

In my view, the disparity between the major parties in southern states is intensified by set-in-concrete media emphasis on ‘minorities’. Commentators also emphasize ‘minorities’ in northern and midwestern states, of course–county by county, precinct by precinct. I am caucasian myself, but as someone concerned for racial justice I cringe at the relentless pigeonholing that links Democratic votes–or in 2016, Clinton votes–to ‘minorities’ or to ‘African-Americans’. The pigeonholing itself is dispiriting and discourages turnout. The keep-hope-dead crowd is still in there, embedded as ever.

Only candidate Obama was able to overcome these representations; I see no indication that candidate Clinton can–even after hiring some of Obama’s people (disappointingly, David Plouffe went over to Clinton, even though he must remember the 2008 election).

On the less elevated plane of partisan politics, if you want a good thumbnail view of what this linkage does to Democrats in elections, you might look at the electoral history of the state of Mississippi over the last fifty years. “Republican” is effectively a synonym for “white” in Mississippi; thus any precinct in which whites are the majority is effectively a lock for the GOP.

(It also makes me cringe to see stagily diverse, if small, crowds of voters pathetically holding up signs for Clinton that read “Fighting for Us.” When? When did Mrs. Clinton ever fight for ‘us’?)

Back to the electoral college–

Looking at states Mrs. Clinton has won so far, it is hard to envision her game plan for winning the general election in November. In a highly optimistic view, she wins all of New England; California and New York; Maryland and New Jersey; Illinois and Pennsylvania; at least a couple of western states; and enough of the battlegrounds–the old industrial states, Florida, and Virginia–to eke out the total needed. This view disregards the fact that several of the states referred to have recently elected Republican governors or have deep internal divisions among Democrats. What are the Clintons imagining? That Bill Clinton can pull in the states he got in 1992 and 1996? That Hillary Clinton has the same appeal for the minorities her campaign focuses on so much that Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012? That the Republicans, or Trump, will sink themselves–even though Donald Trump and John Kasich are both infinitely better speakers and campaigners than Hillary Clinton? That Hillary Clinton will automatically get all Bernie Sanders voters?

Or do they cling to the idea, regardless of reason or evidence, that there is a national groundswell of devotion to the Clintons?

Bill Clinton in 2016

Or are they counting on their entrenched media supporters to carry them across the finish line?

The most plausible successful scenario I have seen comes from University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato:

 

Electoral college scenario 2016

 

This particular electoral map generates a scary 270 electoral votes for Clinton, 268 for Trump.

This is scary from more than one perspective. One is that a race predicted to be this close carries the seeds of its own defeat, where the public interest is concerned. This is an Al-Gore-in-2000 campaign in the making. In such a scenario, Clinton from her perspective would have every excuse to trim toward ‘centrist’ positions on domestic issues, and to hint at hawkish intentions in foreign policy. She would thus be justified, were she to win the nomination, in ‘pivoting’–that nice media euphemism for abruptly disclosing that the candidate has been lying about her/his positions all along.

That one does not enhance turnout either.

 

More on the 2016 GOP race later.

*Clinton has also won delegates in Iowa, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas.

The low-class Washington, D.C., chattering classes

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The chattering classes are lower-class than the masses.

We have seen this before. In 2002 and 2003, millions of ‘ordinary’ Americans figured something was wrong about wantonly invading Iraq. That perception was not shared, however, by established media authorities including George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, the entire Republican noise machine, the three original major television networks and Fox, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the major cable outlets. The upshot was a bloody and unconstitutional invasion of a sovereign nation that basically amounted to the betrayal of the less educated by the (nominally) educated.

Now we are seeing it again. The newest representation is our more elevated media mouths’ reaction to Donald Trump.

Typically inadequate commentary about Trump’s rise or support can be found here and here, among many other places.

The ground rule of pundits like these: always blame the many rather than the few. So much for participatory democracy. So much for each-one-teach-one. For Democrats, so much for winning in November 2016.
In commentary pieces like these, however well-meant they may be, a good guideline is to look at what is missing. Thus, in these particular pieces linked and in many others, there is no account of the staggering dearth of valid information in what passes for ‘political reporting’ in our big media outlets. Nothing about the paucity of genuine information in our politics coverage. (Far too typical. Did we learn about segregation and desegregation from the big media outlets? — not until the latter was dramatized by protests that lighted racial justice up on the big board. More recently, did we hear about insurance companies’ stiffing their own customers? — not until John Grisham and Michael Moore and, on a lesser scale, I, voiced the issue. For that matter, when was the last time Wolf Blitzer used the word ‘redlining’?) Nothing about the infotainment dished out by what Chris Matthews actually called (with a straight face) “Washington insiders.” Nothing about the brutal assaults on public education that leave many students unknowing about checks and balances. Nothing about the internal corruption in the Democratic Party that shut out an excellent candidate, Vice President Joseph Biden, away from voters who would have liked more choices. The behind-the-scenes money-and-connections apparatus, you will recall, did its collective best to lock up the party nomination for the deeply flawed Clintons. One result was that 17(?) 27(?) 127(?) GOPers were salivating at the chance to run against Hillary Clinton. And one result of that was Donald Trump–the cue ball banging into the rack, with the arithmetic of the field always in his favor.
Some of these guys in media commentary have even found ways to be unfair to Donald Trump–not a feat any ordinary person could pull off. Trump has at moments engaged in more accurate political commentary than the analysts covering him–one example being when he called out Ted Cruz for megaphoning that Ben Carson was liable to drop out of the race, just before the Iowa caucuses. The result was that Cruz came out on top in Iowa, beating Trump by a few points, with Carson well down toward the bottom. (Incidentally, the loss may have helped Trump in the long run. If he had ‘won’ Iowa and gone on to win the next couple of races, the rest of the field and the party establishment would have homed in on him that much sooner.)
More importantly–to do Donald Trump justice, it is Trump who has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush’s wanton and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq. Only Trump has had the temerity to point out that for George W. Bush to take credit for our ‘safety’ when 9/11 occurred on his watch is a dubious claim. (Imagine what would have happened to the principal of Columbine High School, had he gone around boasting, à la Bush/Pataki/Giuliani, about his actions in the immediate wake of the tragic events there). One predictable outcome is that all the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signatories are now up in arms against Trump. PNAC was co-founded by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush, and all the apologists for the Iraq War, all the movers and shakers who think the problem is that we just didn’t spill enough blood, are now joined with the remains of the GOP establishment to take an imaginary moral high ground against Trump.

PNAC

WOULD THAT HILLARY CLINTON AND THE SO-CALLED MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATS HAD MADE THE SAME CLEAR STATEMENTS, in recent years. Hillary Clinton never does, for obvious reasons; she voted for the Bush war. But too many Dems who see themselves as either connected or cerebral have spent the last seven years on the sidelines. Worse yet, too many of them dug in with passive-aggressive tactics against President Obama– undoubtedly partly out of the pettiest and most parochial envy/jealousy/competitiveness, partly out of spite because they underestimated him, and partly out of residual bigotry that afflicts some leftish writers as well as some rightwingers. So you have GOPers blaming President Obama, rather than GWBush, for every disaster in the Middle East. And the Blue Dog ‘centrist’ types and the sideline sitters seldom or never step up to the plate to defend one of the best presidents we have had. (Hillary Clinton now claims to be his defender, having adopted the line from people with my view that Obama should get more credit. Meanwhile, her emails show her as SecState chiefly intent on gauging Obama’s and Biden’s popularity. Read some of them.)

Priorities

I might add that the same left-ish media sources are not exactly eager to pay their own writers and lower-level staff; look at Arianna Huffington, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for examples. Too many producers take advantage of the passion of populist writers by paying, if at all, on the Walmart model–calling them Kossacks, or bloggers, etc., rather than employees, even contract employees. The treatment of PT/contingent workers has affected our republic of letters. This again is something you do not hear discussed by Hillary Clinton-type candidates–not for decades. Not until her people pick it up via social media from someone like me, or until some event makes it safe and popular.
The Democrats underestimate Trump at their peril in 2016. And downplaying Trump’s supporters as dumb will not help. Quite the contrary.
If some of the guys/gentlemen who have profited most from their media positions could be a little more concerned about fellow human beings and a little less concerned about vague notions of status, they might pull off some actual analysis once in a while. In the meantime, their accuracy will inevitably be hobbled by their vulgarity. It is quintessentially vulgar to proceed on an assumption that some individuals are worth more than others, purely on the basis of position or status or anything else extraneous to merit. The assumption also leads to a very simple but very obtuse logical slide–the view that if So-and-so is not important, then misrepresenting him is also not important.

Financial-political corruption is not just a “single issue”

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Lead Paint and the Tangled Web of Corporate Finance

Back in August the Washington Post ran an excellent, heartbreaking article on rip-offs of victims of lead paint poisoning. The article linked here should be read in full, but the short story is that finance companies induce poor people with annuities to cash their annuities in for a lump-sum pittance. In Baltimore, which like other older cities has been plagued by paint containing lead, some sufferers had received compensation for damage to their health from lead paint. But some recipients later sold their valuable annuities for pennies on the dollar. This nasty turn of events followed–of course–the previous heart-rending saga, beginning with the harm to human and animal victims and progressing to most landlords and property owners coming out financially unscathed, or close to it–while the victims fell disproportionately on the public welfare rolls. (Some lead-paint sufferers were then cleansed off the welfare rolls in President Bill Clinton’s ‘welfare reform’.)

The annuities were intended to protect the victims, somewhat, for the rest of their lives, giving them a steady monthly income, since a number of the people harmed were left so affected or ill as to be unemployable. But many of the annuities have been bought up, sold in exchange for ‘ready cash’ by the recipients or by unsophisticated relatives. This kind of scheming is not new. It figures as a plot point in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811:

Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person. He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance and consequent distress had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.

Two hundred years later, this particular suppurating pimple of financial chicanery has cropped out on the face of Wall Street, with some of the same blaming the victim, too.

Less poetically, we can narrow down the focus from Wall Street.

One company involved is Access Funding, located according to its Zoom Company Information in the LexisNexis database at 6900 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland, Suite 700.

Company records suggest that the company has recently dwindled. Access Funding recently listed $5M – $10M in revenues and 20 to 50 employees–including a “Director of Lottery Services.” However, its recently updated entry in the Lexis database lists “two employees” and revenue in six figures. Public investigations are under way, though slowly. After I recover fully from pneumonia and bronchitis, I hope to do some research in, among other things, the company’s interest in “Lottery Services.” Presumably the link is lottery winners who choose to take their winnings in annuity payments.

For the moment, I am interested in the murk of property ownership. The umbrella concept is responsibility. Property owners can sometimes be held to account for what happens on their property. The idea is that even a wealthy and politically connected landlord is still a landlord, and what happens on the property may be the responsibility of the owner, unless investigation reveals that full responsibility lies elsewhere. According to general principle, however, at least the question of responsibility is to be investigated. This general principle is supposed to apply, so far as I know, regardless of whether the owner is an individual or a corporation. If any harm done turns out to be exclusively the fault of a tenant, so be it, but a light has to be shone. Needless to say, this is exactly the kind of principle under attack by the Republican Party, under the guise of releasing “small business” from the burden of “regulation.” Instead of transparency and investigation, the public gets closed records and murky corporate layers that conceal ownership and responsibility. Instead of accountability, the public gets privatization of the rewards (dignified as “investment”) and socialization of the damages. Ethically or rationally under-qualified insiders do the harm; the public pays for the harm. (As goes the GOP, so go the Clintons. The secretive Clintons have triangulated exactly the same undermining of transparency and accountability throughout their careers, or at least since Bill Clinton lost an early election in Arkansas. This “Republican lite” pattern tends to be under-reported in political commentary, but it is a consistent theme in Hillary Clinton’s life since she was in college–following a track created by paralleling bad actions, but to a lesser degree or in a more secretive way, under the guise of mediating between opposing sides. More on that later.)

Corporate ownership is not an easy trail to follow.

The database of the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation indicates that Access Funding, based in affluent Chevy Chase, Maryland, had at least a couple of previous avatars, now canceled or forfeit. State records indicate the owner as “6900 Wisconsin LLC”–a limited liability company, not required to disclose details of individual personnel or ownership. The owner’s address is given as “c/o Washington Property Company, 4719 Hamden Lane FL 3, Bethesda MD  20814-2909.” Ironically, the secured party for both 4719 Hampden Lane and 6900 Wisconsin Avenue properties is the American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company. Thinking outside the box, it could be helpful if life insurance companies took an interest in health issues connected with the properties they underwrite. But then, American Equity may not have known of any connection between its property interest and the lead paint sufferers. This is one of the unimaginative principles guiding our eponymous ‘Wall Street’: sometimes it pays not to know. Again–this is exactly the guiding principle consistently upheld by a) the GOP, and b) the Clintons. (What is the ‘centrist’ number of lead poisoning cases?)

6900 Wisconsin Avenue

As mentioned, the “Washington Property Co” is pretty faceless, judging from public record. Checking political donations at opensecrets.org, from the Center for Responsive Politics, we can find that some Washington Property Co. exec donated more than $7,000 to candidate Mitt Romney. Peering closely at the state database, we can see an unhelpful typo in the street address of Washington Property Co., listed as “Hamden Lane” rather than “Hampden Lane.” (Typos and other mistakes that impede research are typical for these databases.) For the rest, Washington Property Co. has been active in Maryland since 2004, is as said located at 4719 HAMPDEN Lane, and the owner of 4719 Hampden Lane is “Hampden Lane Project LLC.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

Except that we’re not. The owner of the soul-stirringly named “Hampden Lane Project LLC”? — “c/o Washington Property Company   4719 Hampden Lane Fl 3  Bethesda MD 20814-2909.”

Let’s follow a different version of the company name and see whether that one pans out–the corporate name, rather than the Limited Liability Company name. Washington Property Company Inc., as opposed to Washington Property Co LLC, originated in August, 2004, in Delaware.

This one actually gets us somewhere. Owner name: “c/o Morgan Stanley, Suite 800,  3424 Peachtree Rd, Atlanta GA 30326.” Again, there is a typo in the public record: the name “Morgan Stanley” is misspelled. Again, typical of corporate records in state databases, in Maryland and in other states, adding to obstacles including LLC, LC and corporate names; old names; lack of disclosure of key personnel; and use of registered agents.

The 3424 Peachtree Rd building currently has spaces for lease btw.

3424 Peachtree

Consulting the donor database from the Center for Responsive Politics, one finds that Morgan Stanley in Georgia donates almost entirely to a) Republicans and b) Hillary Clinton. A quick search of the current election cycle shows Morgan Stanley (Georgia) and its key people donating mainly to Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio–and Clinton. The Peachtree company/office has donated $43,000-plus to the Republican National Committee since 2012, mainly in 2012. It donated $20,000-plus to Right to Rise USA, the Jeb Bush-support PAC, in 2015. As in the 2008 election, Hillary Clinton is the stopgap candidate, the fallback position, for the GOP and for Wall Street.

So much for silk-stocking Republicans as somehow separate from the worst elements of either Wall Street or their party. So much for the Clintons as “Fighting for Us”–the slogan the Clinton campaign produced after jettisoning its earlier “Fighting for You.”

One thing the Bernard Sanders campaign has exactly right is that political-economic corruption is game-rigging. This is not just “one issue.” It touches virtually everything. There is no ‘centrist’ amount of lead in house paint.

One more quick point. First, a number of financial companies are in the business of buying annuities, some more respectably than others. Buying up annuities is big business. Second, all these companies contribute politically–if they donate at all–to the usual suspects: top preference goes to the GOP, next tier is Clinton.

Thus–in a quick look–people at Woodbridge Investments, for example, have donated some $135,000 in recent cycles, to Republican candidates including Carly Fiorina. Corona Capital has donated at least $6,400 to GOPers, including Rep. Todd Young of Indiana and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Client First Settlement Funding conveyed a more modest sum of $500.00 to Florida State Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, among other donations to GOP candidates and the Republican National Committee. Someone at Settlement Capital Corporation gave $500.00 to John Boehner.

Other company names include Liberty Settlement Funding, J. G. Wentworth, CIYA, Annuity Transfers, RSL Funding, and Sell My Structured Settlement. More research awaits.

One of the biggest of these interested companies is Peachtree Financial Solutions. From company statements in the Lexis Nexis database:

Peachtree Financial Solutions is an affiliate of Peachtree Settlement Funding (Peachtree). Peachtree is a specialty finance and transactional tax-planning firm employing over 150 professionals in three offices located in Georgia, Florida and New Jersey. Peachtree has in excess of $500 million in committed financing lines for its specialty finance businesses and has originated over $2 billion in assets. Peachtree is the primary servicer on more than 5,000 transactions and is backed up by The Bank of New York. Peachtree’s servicing activities are routinely reviewed and subjected to agreed upon procedure audits by our financial partners. Peachtree is a full financial audit client of PricewaterhouseCoopers and its principal outside tax counsel for the WealthBuilder program is Foley & Lardner.
REVENUE: USD 17,500,000   www.wealthbuilder.com

Predictably, Peachtree Settlement Funding has been a big donor to both parties, Republicans and Democrats, in past cycles. Sen. Chuck Schumer has particularly benefited from Peachtree Settlement Funding–like any other office holder connected with Wall Street. Interestingly, in the current election cycle Peachtree Settlement Funding appears only in relatively modest donations such as $1,000.00 to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida. Either Peachtree Settlement Funding has stayed on the sidelines because of the Trump phenomenon, or it is cooling its jets in the wake of reporting on chiseling suffering people out of their annuities, or both.

Meanwhile, there are other problems with annuities, including problems with the annuities themselves. One of the first things that happened to my late mother after the death of my father was that someone came to her front door and sold her a substandard annuity she did not need. (My mother died in 2012, from Alzheimer’s. Fortunately, she did have a good and honest banker, on the ball, who got in touch with the vendor and reversed the transaction.)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has reported on yet another scam–that of financial kickbacks in selling annuities in the first place. The information is reported here.

This is the kind of report not produced by Sen. Hillary Clinton, “a workhorse not a show horse,” as she put it, during her time in the U.S. Senate.

Sanders’ claim to turnout is valid

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Several commentators have disparaged Sen. Bernard Sanders’ argument that turnout will be vital to Democrats in November and that he can help the turnout. He is right on both counts.

Commentators at MSNBC, CNN and now some of the networks have gotten on a train recently, though–pointing to the undoubted fact that Democratic turnout in primaries this year is lower than in 2008. (Barack Obama ran that year. No one has turned out newly energized voters like President Obama.) They also point out that the Democratic turnout is lower than turnout in Republican primaries, where Donald Trump has gotten the GOP moving. So–they go on to gloat–where is the turnout that Sanders promises to deliver? (Some particularly unappealing and smarmy gloating on this item has come from Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Matthews. No surprise there. Matthews’ wife, Kathleen Matthews, is losing her race for Maryland’s 8th District congressional seat, in spite of locking hips with the Clinton team and its donor base behind the scenes; you can’t expect him to be a good sport–a man who uses the phrase “Washington insiders” with a straight face is hardly going to be an objective observer of the nation’s fortunes. Blitzer and a tiny handful of others at CNN have been drawing envious blood from Obama since moments after the president’s election November 4, 2008. They apparently resent both his and Vice President Biden’s independence of the DC media establishment. Maddow seems long since to have bought in to the notion that careerism=feminism, or something to that effect. In between fawning on Brian Williams, she seems to be pretty much engaged in boosting the most mediocre women she can find in public life.)

But there is a factor at work this year that did not weigh on turnout in previous elections. The factor is “superdelegates.” Regardless of how hard Sanders’ ardent supporters work–and most of his supporters are ardent–Hillary Rodham Clinton and her team quietly sewed up somewhere around 450 party insiders, to paste her into the nomination should she have difficulty with voters.

Senator Sanders

Hint to analysts: if you want to be an analyst, it might help to analyze. Is there any realistic possibility that the mass of offstage superdelegates would not discourage turnout, among any voters who knew about them? Or among voters who just saw the delegate tallies for the candidates, without clarification?

So much for hope and change. The insider campaign against both–again, by ‘Washington insiders’–has been relentless–while it has also been picayune, bigoted, petty, envious and competitive. Money does not mean sense.

Nor, in the media establishment, does it mean rigorous adherence to journalistic standards. (You read it here first.) Any political analyst is intellectually required to clarify those superdelegates, in the public interest. That is not happening.

The accrual of more than 400 superdelegates by the wealth- and foundation-supported Clintons should also have been rigorously and accurately reported as it occurred. That did not happen either.

This process will have to change, and will change. In the narrowest partisan terms, it is disastrous for the Democratic Party. Democrats are living in a dream world if they think that a Hillary Clinton campaign can just skate by a nominee like Donald Trump. Trump has already appealed to independents–and to Democrats. It is unrealistic just to assume that a gravely flawed candidate like Clinton can defeat him. This is a pipe dream, and that’s even before the rest of the information on the private-server emails comes out. The insecurities about Hillary Rodham Clinton as a candidate are already manifest, in the behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent anyone else from even running.

Vice President Biden

This strategy is also being feverishly boosted by the Maddows and Matthews of the media world. Maddow spent a lengthy segment one evening on some whack-job’s push to get a death penalty(?) for gays. The clear implication was that Hillary Clinton is our only firewall against measures such as, as Maddow put it, “executing homosexuals.” Do Maddow and her ilk really think that executing homosexuals would be opposed only by a Clinton? They don’t think a candidate like, for example, Vice President Joseph Biden would step up to the plate? They don’t think Biden would oppose executing homosexuals? Do they really think Jim Webb would not have opposed these ills, if he had been allowed in the field? Lincoln Chafee? Wouldn’t even Gov. Martin O’Malley have opposed executing homosexuals, at least if the polls were going the right way?

Bernie Sanders could crush Trump. But he has to become the nominee to do so.

Meanwhile, when these over-promoted, overpaid, and under-qualified folks joined up behind scenes to paste Clinton into a nomination she has not earned and does not deserve, they took away part of my vote. They will not get the rest of it. I will not be blackmailed into voting for the ‘electable’ candidate. For one thing, she’s not. For another, the blackmail is being pushed by the very people who put us in this situation in the first place. This is not a process, a candidate, or a strategy that can withstand accurate scrutiny.