[ExI] The Clinton Foundation

Wed Aug 31 20:55:19 UTC 2016

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2016 10:29 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] The Clinton Foundation

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 2:14 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net> > wrote:

> >…John, the problem with these lines of argument is that it tends towards ends-justify-the-means in government which is dangerous…

>…Sometimes the ends justify the means and sometimes they don't. If the ends never justify the means then nobody would ever do anything because there would be no way to do it…

Oh my, John, I disagree with that comment so very much.  The end does not justify the means if the means are illegal.  There is a way for State Department people to do things, even by illegal means, however… it must all go through their .gov accounts which are encrypted and archived automatically.  They cannot be erased, which is one possible explanation for why a former SoS refused to use it.  

Should there ever become a question or catastrophic outcome, the proper authorities would retrieve everything and find out who did what.  We would know who attacked the US embassy in Libya for instance, and why.  Instead, we go on a very expensive and probably futile effort to un-delete communications, some of which have been deleted with industrial-strength privacy products such as BleachBit.  Now, after all this public expense, we still do not know who attacked that embassy and why.

On the other hand, a politician uses that server and is doing something illegal, such as activities by the State Department arming groups we do not officially support against the will of congress for instance, and arranging to accept payment indirectly through… I don’t know… a family-operated “charity” for instance, well now, that’s a good deed ja?  Good work they do, fighting AIDS and such as that, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and such.  To do all those good deeds, they only needed to illegally sell arms to Syrian rebels, some of whom may have turned on us because we were also arming another group of Syrian rebels against which the one group of Syrian rebels were at war being as they were the wrong brand of Presbyterianism perhaps.  If they were doing all this against our own government, illegally and unaccountably, it was just the means to an end, fighting AIDS and such, so what difference, at this point, does it make?

Plenty.

There are ways to do government business legally.  But it comes with accountability. 

> 

Huma Abedin’s employment by the Department of State in 2012 in particular.  She was being paid as a GS12 by the State Department with GS6 credentials and no supporting documentation to justify it.  This is contract fraud itself.

I don't know what you mean by "GS6 credentials"…

Those GS6 pay scale qualifications are well known.  The restrictions on over-promoting secretaries, administrative assistants, personal assistants and so forth are well known.  If you go around that, and do things like arrange to have an attractive young secretary, with say, a Bachelor of Arts degree, being paid as a Brigadier General at age 36, then you caught, you face 1 to 5 in Club Fed.  There are no exceptions for Secretary of State.   

>… If you're hired for job X 

 then there is a set pay scale for that …GS scale says you should get

 for that job…

JA!  Exactly.  Right on, John.  There are standards in place, legal safeguards, so that a top brass-hat at the Pentagon can’t just hire his favorite secretary and make her a GS12.  It invites corruption.  All that must be documented carefully if it is even attempted, and go through review processes and contract verification and so forth.  Otherwise that whole arrangement starts to look like what it probably is.  Lotta smoke you know, no actual fire, unless the general is caught in the sack with his attractive young GS12 with few documented credentials.

> >…Simultaneously she was on salary to the Clinton Foundation.  This is conflict of interest

>…Perhaps but not illegal, and besides I don't give a hoot in hell about 

Huma Abedin, she's not running for president…

John the reason why we must answer the old “what difference does it make” question with Huma Abedin is that Mrs. Clinton has argued there is no fire in all this smoke.  Her arrangement with Ms. Abedin is fire.  It is contract fraud.  Contract fraud is a smaller flame than leaking classified information and pay-to-play, but it is fire just the same, which in this case is being obscured by smoke.  Contract fraud is a crime.

> >..Everyone who deals in government contracts is trained in avoiding the appearance of impropriety,

>…They may be trained in it, but every President , every member of the House of Representatives, every Senator, and every state governor (including Gary Johnson)  every mayor, and every city councilman has engaged in the appearance of impropriety…

But not contract fraud.  It doesn’t even apply to Trump for he has never held an elected office nor any government position.

>…they all accept campaign contributions…

But they don’t sell government favors for them.  Or if they do and get caught, there is hell to pay.

>….and those contributions help nobody but the candidate himself…

Oh?  Can we not assign getting a candidate elected as a good end, and use that to justify any means, illegal or otherwise?  Why not?

>…Contributions to the Clinton foundation help millions of people but Hillary doesn't get a nickel of the money…

I see.  Can you prove that?  Having a family charity puts the burden on the recipient of contributions to prove there is no connection between the charity and government access, no connection of any kind between anything in the family charity and the candidate.  That contention is looking pretty shaky now in the case of one well-known politician and a particular family charity.  But what difference at this point does it make?

>>… Note that none of this has anything to do with any of Mrs. Clinton’s opponents; her mainstream rival has never held any elected office.  Any mention of his name is a diversion

>…I disagree, I believe it has everything to do with her opponent, you should always vote for the least bad person who has a chance to win…

Ja, but how do we define the term “bad” please?  Illegal is bad.  Crazy is a different kind of bad.

>…As I have said it is infinitely (and I don't use that word lightly) more important to avoid a apocalyptically bad president than it is to elect a great one….

But not a criminal.  Recall that not everyone believes that Mrs. Clinton’s rivals will use nukes.  I don’t think that is a big risk.  Yes I know what he said.  But I don’t think he will do that, once he sees the alternatives, some of which are even scarier in some ways, but can be done quietly under the radar, since it doesn’t create a mushroom cloud and doesn’t run the risk of triggering a nuclear war.  I see a big risk in both mainstream candidates using conventional forces in a bad way however.

The notion of voting for a criminal in order to escape the risk of nuclear weapons being used is illegitimate.  We should be working to take the nuclear football away from the president.  That argument is how we ended up with the Vietnam war.

>… We'll be fine if we get a mediocre president or even a bad one provided she's not too bad…

Criminal is bad.  It is far too bad.  Contract fraud is a crime.  People who commit crimes are criminals.

>…and who knows she might even be as good as her husband was…

Unless she is a criminal.  Then it doesn’t much matter how good she would have been, her VP gets the office.  Problem is, no one actually knows who her VP is.  I never heard of him or her.

>…The charges brought against the two are grotesquely ridiculously unsymmetrical…

It isn’t that serious a charge really.  Fraud conviction, 1 to 5 in the big house, she should be out on parole in time to run in 2020, or 2024 worst case.  Unless they find more stuff.  Then more stuff.  Then more…

…

>…*On the other side we have a woman who's assistant (that I've never heard of until a few weeks ago)…

Don’t worry, you will be hearing a lot more in the coming few months.

>…may have done something that has the appearance of impropriety…

Unless they can produce some documentation on that employment arrangement in 2012, lots of it, that isn’t just an appearance of impropriety, it’s contract fraud.

>…The magnitudes just don't match!   And I STILL don't understand why, with the exception of my own posts, Hillary receives at least 10 times as much criticism on this list as her opponent even though he would be the most anti-free trade President in a century…

Those criticisms aren’t much about which one will make a better president; in that plenty of us agree or might agree partially.  Where we disagree is if we can accept a candidate who has done a criminal act.  A candidate who has already taken the oath of office and violated it.  Who appears to have ignored and thus violated well-known federal law.  The rest is irrelevant.  If the candidate is a criminal, we can’t elect, regardless of how bad is her opponent. 

> >…So… Does Mrs. Clinton get a special pass?  Who else gets that? 

>…Every single elected official in the USA gets that special pass

 without exception, and they got it for doing worse crimes than having a friend donate to a philanthropic foundation… John K Clark

John are you suggesting that politicians get a pass to commit contract fraud?  That employment arrangement of Abedin is a clear violation of established law.

spike

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