Haiti

The Clinton Foundation touts its programs in Haiti, particularly mentioning the Haiti Coffee Academy. According to the Foundation, they purchased the property in Haiti in 2012 for $350,000. Gifts totaling this amount from the Leslois Shaw Foundation and Todd Carmichael are in the Clinton Foundation donor database from 2011. The “Academy” functions as a coffee farm for single-source coffee from Haiti that is sold by reality TV star Carmichael’s company La Colombe Torrefaction. This isn’t months of investigative journalism: it’s reading what they’ve written themselves in their own blog posts and advertisements. The Foundation, for whatever reason, whether personal connections, bribes or love of this guy’s coffee or show, bought the property so Carmichael could use it. It’s very difficult for non-Haitian private companies to buy and use land for their business there: easy for Clinton “Foundation.”

There have been hundreds of thousands of words, perhaps millions, written about the lack of performance of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti — and evidence of the ugly picture is in the fact that the best “program” the Foundation can come up with to feature after the hundreds of $millions were given after the Haiti earthquake is what I just documented — acting as a pass-through for funds to buy land for a boutique coffee company to single-source exotic coffee from one of the poorest countries on earth. Coffee that he sells using celebrity endorsements on his reality TV show on the Travel Channel.

Todd Carmichael: American Exceptionalist.

Dady Chery has been documenting the $multi-billion exploitation of Haiti on her website and through books. Wherever the Clintons go, hundreds of Haitians protest. They want to know where all the money went, because they have seen no benefits.

As a side note, my organization was contacted regarding building actual housing in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. We had only a few meetings before being told “don’t bother, the Clinton Foundation will be leading the efforts.” This effort ended up being about 20 moldy, substandard trailers laced with formaldehyde, provided by the same company that also constructed substandard, poisonous emergency housing after Hurricane Katrina. You will read articles to this day in major publications that blame Haitians. The company that did this to our country in New Orleans, and to Haiti, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett.

Malawi

A recent Politifact article purports to “analyze” the Clinton Foundation tax returns, financial statements and website to “prove” that Republican claims that the Foundation spends 80% of its revenue on “overhead” are false.

The Republican claims are very likely “false” in that the Foundation has no clear mission and doesn’t really do anything that’s ordinarily regarded as charitable (and doesn’t do much at all that can be matched to the claims on their website and definitely not to the television pundit claims and campaign spokespeople —the most recent being “If the Foundation is closed down we won’t find a cure for AIDS”). But they’re not false the way Politifact means. “Overhead” is only a term with meaning if there are some type of charitable efforts going on. I’m really not seeing that anywhere I look to analyze the Clinton Foundation.

So Politifact repeats the Clinton Foundation website claim it has helped over 56,000 farmers in Malawi (prominent on the site as if it is a top “achievement”).

That’s flat out impossible and the poor guy they hired to try to make something of their scammy efforts there is already working somewhere else. The farm that was supposedly “helping” over 56,000 “smallholder” farmers can barely grow peanuts, is a for-profit corporation, and has been seeking FDi since 2013. If you don’t know what FDi is, then maybe you shouldn’t write message board posts talking about how stupid I am or Politifact articles saying that the Clinton Foundation does so much charitable good in Malawi.

This is the exact same circumstance and MO as the “Coffee Academy” in Haiti. It’s a for-profit business earning profit or losing money for someone foreign to its country, nothing to do with the local people and providing no charitable assistance whatsoever.

Colombia

Politifact asserted that the Clinton Foundation is “doing the same thing” through a training school for youth in Cartagena, Colombia. Actually, I’m going to give our friends at Politifact “4 Pinocchios” for that, since the Colombia “benefits” from the Clinton Foundation are likely much less than those received by residents of Malawi or Haiti.

Colombia is a center for action with Bill Clinton and Frank Giustra and their Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership. American Exceptionalists likely think of Colombia as a poor, backward South American country that was the heart of massive drug trafficking in prior decades.

I covered the Accesso Training Center in Cartagena in my first article about the Clinton Foundation.

Pictures do tell a thousand words, because Mexican ultra-billionaire Carlos Slim is involved along with Clinton and Canadian mining mogul and Lionsgate film founder Frank Giustra. The business that actually runs the center is called “Gente Estragetica” (People Strategies). It is a temporary employment agency that’s been in business since November, 1992. They state they have employment agencies in 60 Colombian cities and have about 9,000 employees. I speak and read Spanish, which enabled me to determine that there is nothing remotely “charitable” about the Accesso training center — it’s a for-profit business that trains people to work primarily in hotel and service industries. I also determined that their claims of how many “youth” will be trained (20,000+) were unrealistic at best — more likely, deliberately deceptive.

AIDS work in Australia/Papua New Guinea

The one aspect of the Clinton Foundation I have not researched in-depth is the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). Australian journalist Michael Smith has researched the results obtained from more than $80 million AUD donated by his country for AIDS relief efforts in their region, particularly Papua New Guinea, a country that has been highly impacted by AIDS. I am linking to his Twitter here: as of this writing his website is down [note: and back up — article link below].

Michael discovered an identical MO to what I had already determined was the case with every Clinton Foundation program I audited and analyzed.

Publically-stated outcomes and results were grossly divergent from possible outcomes or results as compared to other organizations. Offices in locations stated to be served were either non-existent or makeshift. For-profit businesses turned out to be the ones “doing” the work claimed to be of charitable or human benefit. Only one employee was given “responsibility” for large territories, or there was no employee at all.

In Asia, only one employee of the Clinton Foundation was given responsibility to “save lives,” including children with AIDS.

This woman. As her LinkedIn profile notes, she was also the Caterpillar Distributor for Vietnam at the same time she was responsible to “save millions of lives” of children suffering from AIDS in Asia and the South Pacific.

Here in America

I was responsible for an organization serving very poor working families and children in my hometown of Redlands, California during the early to mid-90s when many military bases were shut down. That had been during the Clinton Administration. They called it the “Peace Dividend.”

After the closure of the former Norton AFB in San Bernardino, CA, some neighborhoods went so far downhill that one had involvement of Colombian and Cambodian (yes I know — two very different parts of the world) drug gangs. One day we learned an entire family of Vietnamese immigrants that lived across from a school we served had been slaughtered in their home by a Cambodian gang, using the technique of “Colombian neckties” pioneered by the South American gangsters. A few months after that I was called out along with an emergency response team to visit some abandoned apartments near what is now the thriving San Manuel Indian Reservation (thanks to their casino).

That was where I saw the little girl playing with snails inside her bedroom in an apartment where all the windows had been busted out and the elements had caused mud and grass to grow inside. You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen what a bathroom with no running water looks like, or a crib resting in mud and weeds inside what’s called a “house.” In Southern California.

But you know I’m not an expert in American Exceptionalism like Rush Limbaugh, Politifact or Clinton campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon.

So, absolutely the Clinton Foundation has the same MO here in Southern California. It’s where I started.

They had one meeting one day in 2012, and got a bunch of local people to attend to “improve the health” in the Coachella Valley here in Southern California.

They just say they do things there because it justifies their paying for Bill Clinton to golf at what they used to call the Bob Hope (now “Career Builder”) Golf Classic. They’ve got one Ruby Shang type employee (or maybe even “volunteer” — who knows?). They are too cheap to even pay for an office. They hold their gala $20,000+ entry fee CGI meetings there, and they take time out of their busy schedules to do one-day “Days of Action” at places that don’t need it.