A conversation relating to Hillary Clinton's "scandal" regarding money and the Clinton Foundation

Great Debates
1

I realize that that is an awkward thread title, but I couldn’t really come up with a better, meaningful description.

Anyway, for purposes of this discussion, let’s suppose that it is commonly recognized that The Clinton Foundation does good things around the world. Whether or not this is true is not relevant to this discussion. Let us also assume that Hillary Clinton believes that The Clinton Foundation is a force for good in the world. Finally, let us assume that Hillary Clinton is a decent, though flawed, person who wishes for good things to happen and attempts to do good things herself.

So, we have the rich and powerful donate funds and resources to The Clinton Foundation, a group commonly recognized as a force for good. Secretary of State Clinton knows who has contributed to the Foundation. Is it reasonable for SoS Clinton to assume (absent other information) that the people/groups who contribute to the good Foundation are good people/groups themselves? Given that assumption, is it bad if, in the execution of her authority as US Sec’y of State, that Clinton use that information?

In other words, XYZ country contributed $1 million toward a good cause being carried out by the Foundation. XYZ now requests some concession from the United States. This concession falls within the Obama foreign policy agenda. So, Clinton grants whatever it is to XYZ since she knows they are good people doing good things.

We make this kind of assumption all the time. “Acme Widgets is the official widgets of the US Olympic Team!” “Hey,” says I, “I like the Olympics. I need a widget. Acme Widgets and Amalgamated Widgets both have a product that meets my needs. I’m going to buy from Acme because they support my Olympic team.” Is this wrong? Why would it be wrong if Hillary Clinton does it?

I understand the idea of currying favor. If the Republic of XYZ gave money to the Foundation purely to get Clinton’s attention, that would be one thing. If Hillary knows that XYZ gave money to the Foundation’s “save the spotted horny toad” campaign, but is also in the habit of beheading puppies at home, then they’re evil even though they want to save the spotted horny toads. But if XYZ does good things at home, does good things internationally, and supports The Clinton Foundation, where is the harm?

2

I’m sure that Charles Manson gave money to beggars. That doesn’t make him a good person.

I have no reason to believe that Clinton is naive enough to think that a donation to charity makes someone good in all respects. Nor do I think she is naive enough to think that someone might donate to her charity solely to meet her approval, so that she will work towards their ends.

On the contrary, I’m quite willing to think that she is quite willing to assign a certain amount of good will to charitable acts and to balance that Good against the person’s Bad and decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. So in an ethically gray world, if we stop there, doing this is a good for the world.

But between oaths of office and general professionalism, the expectation would be that people separate their hobbies from their jobs and don’t let the two interact in any way. It is/was not Hillary Clinton’s prerogative to make such a decision in her professional role.

3

Hitler loved dogs, but was an otherwise monstrous person. Good deeds don’t outweigh the evil in some people.

I don’t understand your last paragraph. If I know someone who does things that I like, why wouldn’t I like him/her in my professional life?

4

For starters, the Clinton Foundation appears to be an utterly awful charity.
Between 2009 and 2012, the Clinton Foundation raised over $500 million dollars according to a review of IRS documents by The Federalist. A measly 15 percent of that, or $75 million, went towards programmatic grants. More than $25 million went to fund travel expenses. Nearly $110 million went toward employee salaries and benefits. And a whopping $290 million during that period — nearly 60 percent of all money raised — was classified merely as “other expenses.”
Far be it from to suggest that someone whose charity does so badly is probably not a good choice for handling the federal budget of 3.5 trillion dollars.

There’s a big hole in your argument: other information is not absent. Clinton’s foundation took money from governments such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and the UAE. The human rights records of these countries are atrocious, Saudi Arabia’s particularly so. In recent years they’ve been the news for murdering women who wear the wrong clothes, executing people for crimes such as apostasy and homosexuality, and torturing people for incorrect speech. They’ve also funneled vast amounts of money to a galaxy of terrorist and extremist groups all over the world. No one should agree to take a cent from such people. Hillary, who spends a lot of time bragging that she fights for the interests of women and homosexuals, should be particularly loath to do so. What excuse does she have?

It’s also worth mentioning that the controversy erupting in the past couple days isn’t limited to donations to the foundation. The New York Times has reported that Bill Clinton got paid $500,000 to give a speech in Kazakhstan, and a few days later the State Department took action that helped Kazakhstan. That’s cash directly in the Clintons’ pocket, not going to their charitable foundation.

It appears at the moment that there’s no “smoking gun” showing that Clinton used her influence illegally to benefit anyone who donated, but it surely wasn’t intelligent to handle things in such a manner and ignore State Department rules about reporting these donations.

5

Because liking someone has (almost) nothing to do with their merit so far as your profession goes.

I might like my friend Bob, but if I’m the manager of a 3D animated special effects studio and Bob has no artistic skill, no computer knowledge, and no interest in film, then I have no business hiring Bob to fill an animation role. So far as my professional life is concerned, the needs of the company come before my personal desires.

If I know, from outside of work, that a person is completely pleasant to be around, then taking that knowledge into the hiring decision is reasonable because the object of the hiring decision is to find the best candidate for the role, based on everything you know about them that pertains to the role. That a person will be pleasant to work with is pertinent to the role. But it’s also of limited pertinence. Hard qualifications are like 99% of the consideration. It’s really only in the case of a tie where that comes into effect.

Whether you give money to beggars, though, is not something that’s relevant to any role, since it’s not a measurement of how nice you are to work with. As previously noted, charitability has no link with being a pleasant person. So it’s not a measure that fills in that remaining 1%.

So if all I know about you is that you give to charity, that’s worth bupkis when I consider you as an animator.

If I’m the Secretary of State, considerations of the United State’s best interests are the highest consideration. Being able to have a meaningful, collaborative relationship might be a real consideration in terms of quantifying where the United State’s interests lie. But giving money to Hillary Clinton’s personally managed charity organization is completely irrelevant in that calculation.

6

If there’s a scandal here, it’s that the Clinton Foundation seems to be really, really bad at channeling money where it actually needs to go.

So, how’s that electric car working out for you?

7

I think you mean no one should be obliged to them, certainly not the way the Bushes were. Nothing wrong with taking their money as such, though.

Is she not supporting women’s and gays’ rights in Saudi?

Isn’t that always the case? Damn, those Clintons are good at hiding evidence, aren’t they?

8

Do you really want to lob that particular softball?

9

Go on, take a swing at it then.

10

The Clinton Foundation may in some sense be a “force for good”. It is also a publicity and political vehicle for the Clintons. They’re getting something out of it. So are the foreign governmental and corporate donors who’ve funneled money into it, as we have seen.

Another odiferous example was Congressman Rangel’s charity* (Rangel solicited contributions from corporate donors with business interests coming before his Ways and Means committee, and did so on Congressional letterhead. No proven quid pro quo there either. :dubious:).

This New York Times article notes the prevalence of members of Congress donating money from their campaigns to local groups to “cement political ties” and boost their popularity.

*my favorite quote in this story is from (then) Congressman Anthony Weiner, who referred to the Rangel mess as “regrettable”. :slight_smile:

11

I assume the Clintons believe that they separate their decisions in an official capacity from the influences on their lives outside of office. Whether or not they can do this doesn’t matter, it is the claim made by every corrupt politician, and many of them were unaware that they were too imperfect to realize at what point the external influences had colored their judgment. The Clintons have continued this practice for many years, and amazingly used the claim that they have skirted around illegality as an excuse. They are not measuring their actions according to the greater good, they are measuring by their own benefit and it is corruption whether done with good intentions or not.

12

Charity Navigator has them on their watch list. If you scroll halfway down the page their are several quotes from various news articles, such as:

and

13

Do you have a better cite? I checked Charity watch which is my go to place for such things, and they seem to think its pretty good.

14

What? You don’t trust a study done by The Federalist, whose top story today is headlined: “I’m Gay, And I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage”, by “Paul Rosnick”(a pseudonym because he fears the “Gaystapo” :rolleyes:)?

15

The problem is Hillary Clinton is supposedly helping to craft the foreign policy agenda. Thus what we want from the people in government who are crafting and executing the agenda is to have only one thing on their minds, what is best for the country as a whole. The whole reason you have ethics rules is to keep people from having to choose between helping out someone who has given them money and the best interests of the country. The influence can be unconscious but nevertheless real. That is why if you work for the government you are not supposed to accept anything worth over $20 from a vendor, you are not supposed to let lobbyists buy you meals, you are supposed to disclose any investments you have or any source of income.
It doesn’t matter whether the Clinton Charity is killing puppies or curing the common cold. It has to do with undue influence. Public office is a public trust, taxpayers need to know that she is representing the country’s interests without any thought to whether a particular country is giving the foundation that employs her husband and daughter millions of dollars.
Even if she is perfectly incorruptible it would still be bad, because you have officials in corrupt foreign governments thinking that they can do things because they have influence with the Secretary of State. This is bad any way you look at it.

16

Presumably, there would only be a conflict of interest if the money is going to the Clintons rather than to the hungry and impoverished.

17

But…but…CLINTONSarglebarglearglebargle…

Interesting that most of the people stink-eyeing Bill’s charity had nothing at ALL to say about Cheney’s BUSINESS extracting billions of dollars in taxes from the government to do (poorly, no less!) what that government had been doing for less for decades.

18

Why would you presume that?

19

The question is: does Hillary understand that the people donating to her charity are doing so to curry favor with the vast influence carried by the Clinton hegemony?

And does she have the moral character to take their peddled influence, toss it aside, and do the right thing as potential president?

All signs indicate that she is a ruthless politician, often showing ethically questionable behavior. Anyone that would actually believe there isn’t the above-mentioned tradeoff occurring is naive.

20

You still have your copy of The Clinton Chronicles on your DVD shelf, don’t you?

What are your favorite examples? Use factual cites, please.