One of my friends asked, “Why do you care that the Clintons are such crooks and liars? After all, there have been cheaters and liars since the beginning of time.”

I thought about it for a while. I thought about all the honest people in their millions who voted for Bernie Sanders and sent money to his campaign, often money they could little-afford. I thought about all the people who’ve joined the military to protect what we thought was our freedom, fought overseas, risked their lives. I thought about people in my own family who had done that.

I thought of the time I spent learning to be a good teacher. I thought of all my students, working hard, trying for good jobs, hoping for a good future for themselves and their families.

I thought about all the businesses I’d worked with, how many great ideas they had, how hard they worked, how they hoped for success. Not hundreds of millions of dollars: most of the time, just a good living for themselves and their families.

I thought about how hard all the homeless families had worked to improve their lives. I thought about how hard I and the other people at the charities where I’d worked tried to get decent places for the families to live — help them get jobs, go back to school, have a good home for themselves and their children.

Hatred doesn’t come naturally to me. I am by nature a positive person. For me to harbor a deep, abiding rage, even with everything that’s happened to me, is just not natural. So if I feel it, I should pay attention. Then I came to understand: the Clinton betrayal is so global, so all-encompassing. I have to fight because their Clampdown —

Our votes don’t count

No new businesses can get started

More oppression of all kinds

Working harder, longer hours for less pay

Education worth less, costs more

Student loans and credit cards bleeding young people dry

Media reports lies constantly

is robbing everyone of hope. It’s the ultimate in backstabbing because it covers everyone.

Without Hope, There is no Future

Clinton Foundation’s faceless Haitian coffee farmer.

I’m not an expert on Haiti. However, Haitians have been protesting the Clintons for years because they promised so much after the Haiti earthquake and delivered nothing. I worked with a legitimate start-up organization that wanted to develop a new way to holistically improve health and lives in the Caribbean. They weren’t focused on money, so much as on people.

Before that, I had been aware of the horrific deforestation problem in Haiti, one of the root causes of the country’s deep poverty.

Haiti (left), Dominican Republic (right) —deforestation obvious in aerial photo (photo credit Caribbean 360)

So when I chose to revisit the Clinton Foundation website and its almost-daily “updates,” I chose to play the “Seeding Opportunity” game offered, and selected coffee farming.

The game is not very “fun” and one doesn’t learn much by “playing it” (scrolling from screen to screen while bland language appears beside the faceless Haitian coffee farmer, “ Stéphanie.” The action consists of Stéphanie blinking).

“Haiti has a deep history in coffee. In fact, we were once responsible for half the world’s coffee production,” Stéphanie tells me.

Stéphanie — she blinks.

The artwork on this is so bad that I think, of course they will even be killing good art too. Even the people who can afford to work for free for years won’t be able to continue with the Clampdown. Forget anyone who needs to be paid to do art, write, or play music.

I saw a Clinton supporter tell someone on Twitter to start a “Go Fund Me” for Haitians if they cared so much about them.

So anyway, what the Clinton Foundation is claiming it does to help farmers in Haiti is — well I’ll let Stéphanie tell you,

Recently, we joined the Haiti Coffee Academy, co-founded by the Clinton Foundation and La Colombe. The Academy is a model coffee farm and training center where we attend trainings in basic agronomy, harvesting practices, and processing techniques.

As with everything involving the Clinton Foundation, time is fluid. In this case, “recently” may mean 2011, 2012 or 2013. So what is this? The Clinton Foundation may or may not have made any type of financial gift to fund the Haiti Coffee Academy (note: according to Todd Carmichael’s obviously self-provided Wikipedia entry, the Clinton Foundation gave $350,000 in 2012 to PURCHASE THE PROPERTY where the Academy is located in Haiti). The information our faceless Haitian coffee farmer is providing comes from 2012, four years ago:

The Clinton Foundation is working to grow Haiti’s coffee sector by bringing Haitian coffee to new markets and has facilitated new purchase agreements between Haitian coffee companies, cooperatives and international buyers. In 2012, the Foundation began work on the Haiti Coffee Academy with international coffee company La Colombe Torrefaction. With support from the Leslois Shaw Foundation, the Haiti Coffee Academy will be a model coffee farm and training center …

La Colombe IS an American company founded 20 years ago when that could still happen. They do have an active website linking directly to the Haiti Coffee Academy website. And a Travel Channel show with founder Todd Carmichael. And, they are recorded as a Clinton Foundation donor of between $10,000 and $25,000 as is the other “project sponsor” the Leslois Shaw Foundation (between $100,000 and $250,000) donated to Clinton Foundation. The Les and Lois Shaw Foundation is based on a bequest from this Canadian gentleman who died in Barbados in 2007 — aka Shaw Industries aka mining, land development and “One of Canada’s best run companies!”

If I know my Clinton Foundation, there will be zero actual Foundation dollars going toward this “purchase” of land to guarantee the coffee production for the privately-owned Philadelphia based company. In Todd Carmichael’s 2011 Esquire profile, the Clinton Foundation supposedly was giving $34 MILLION toward this project. Really? It would be like them for that to be reduced to oh, say — $34. Maybe not even that. Why the hell should Bill Clinton pay for anything? Those women were all liars by the way.

Dangerous Grounds ran from 2012–2015 on the Travel Channel.

OK, enough said. I have semi-comped this business and the most recent Inc. profile says it employs approximately 150 people, based in Philadelphia, PA. At its stated revenue of $35 million it is officially an SME. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. Those are what 70,000 more went out of business last year than started in this country.

People like Carmichael suck all the air out of the room. I can easily see how the incredibly stingy Clinton Foundation’s one-time $350,000 gift in 2012 that they are still taking credit for, could help this man take control of acreage and coffee production in Haiti.

Because that’s what it is.

Oh? The air out of the room? I just noticed these guys raised $28.5 million in venture capital from Goode Partners in 2014. They will have to pay that back. Likely soon.

So, since there is limited actual reporting out there (I link to major publication reports when possible — the public has largely ignored several books’ worth of reporting from organizations funding the Clinton Foundation such as Thompson-Reuters, or that clear articles ahead of time with Hillary Clinton such as the New York Times) — here’s the thing.

You can read many emails to and from Hillary Clinton via Wikileaks. And they are similar to the Clinton Foundation website and even this guy Todd Carmichael and the so-called Haiti Coffee Academy. The topics are not very much work-related, but very much PR or public perception-related. Todd’s company was doing the heavy lifting for the Haiti Coffee Academy. I noticed that organization’s website looked like it was done by the same web people as La Colombe’s website. And sure enough: it was once a much simpler document.

Original Haiti Coffee Academy web page, maintained by the La Colombe Coffee roasters which uses the property bought through a one-time $350,000 Clinton Foundation “donation” 4 years ago.

It looks like the newer look to the site came some time in 2014. In 2015, they brought back some “Savon Zombi” coffee (I kid you not).

This supposed “charitable venture” is 100% put forth in the public by the for-profit, US-based, small-to-medium enterprise La Colombe.

Now, there’s this blog post on the Clinton Foundation website from 2013 written by La Colombe’s head roaster Tobin Bickley which refers to the company searching for good coffee in Haiti since 2010.

According to Tobin in 2013, this is what they were doing.

So I don’t know much about coffee, quantities, etc. Nor does this blog post let me know too much about what the farmers are actually making from their efforts. But I do know what I decided to do after I left the field of affordable housing for homeless and very low income families. So fairly quickly I found a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that is directly importing and paying Guatemalan farmers for their coffee: De La Gente.

Off approximately 65,000 pounds of coffee grown and sold, this small organization managed to give 2/3 of the amount of money back to the farmers that are participating.

This one page from the organization’s annual report shows the difference between a for-profit business run by a fame-whore taking resources (La Colombe) and a legitimate organization that has ethics and is trying to improve things for farmers in another country (De La Gente). The variance in quantity and specificity is extreme. And, once again, it turns out that the Clinton Foundation’s one-time “gift” to enable the for-profit Philadelphia-based company to source its coffee is minimal and pathetic compared to the legitimate international aid organizations and their efforts.

Despite the fact that the Clintons control large swathes of the media we consume through a combination of fear tactics, journalistic lack of experience in the business or industry they cover, and unwarranted bias (honestly, anyone calling themselves ‘progressive’ can hardly support these greedsters), they cannot control every article written, every time, everywhere, so major overviews like this one published in the Seattle Times show that the small coffee academy is grossly dwarfed by real cooperatives operating in Haiti, and real planting efforts by organizations like Catholic Relief Services (the article cites a $150,000 ‘gift’ from the Clinton Foundation). I also found a Medium article from 2013 referencing the “amazing” efforts of La Colombe and this model farm. How much coffee ya sell? How much ya pay those farmers? WHO THE HELL KNOWS?

Why would this coffee company seek to “work with” the Clinton Foundation, and why would the Foundation seek to buy the property where the coffee training center is located? Because it is difficult, if not impossible, for private corporations to buy and own property in Haiti.

This is what happens. This is how all the air gets sucked out of the room.

Oh: and this, too:

Just in case anyone in the world missed that Melania Trump “plagiarized” portions of 2 paragraphs from Michelle Obama’s speech. I’m sure this one will be fact-checked by our fact checkers paid by Warren f-ing Buffett and whomever else in the Fortune billionaires list.

You can read the other articles in the series here, here and here.