A collection of Web resources to examine the connection between Bill Clinton and a Canadian billionaire who has done more than one favor and become a partner in Bill's global philanthropic endeavors.

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OK, if Bill Clinton was not such an operator, he could just raise money for Kiva.org which is honest and reputable and makes no deals -- just micro-credit facilitated by online smarts and a network of loan-hungry entrepreneurs worldwide. Bill has talked up Kiva but I am sure it is nothing to his other charitable ventures. Nothing about the Clintons is without high politics and rampant complexity. Compared to the Clintons, I think Richard Nixon was probably an amateur, a mere babe in the woods. (Disclosure: I knew Nixon. My late dad took Nixon into his law firm at the behest of the late Elmer Bobst.) In any case, I will devote this page to determining if there is a pile of back-scratching going on as Bill Clinton saves the world philanthropically. This is a simple mining of what's out there.

In 2005 Canadian mining financier Frank Guistra traveled to Kazakhstan with former President Bill Clinton. Guistra won rights to buy three uranium projects in Kazakhstan, and months after the agreement was finalized Guistra gave $31 million dollars to Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. Some hackles were raised during the Kazakhstan trip because Bill Clinton made it a point to praise the Kazakh President, dictator, and human rights violator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. This was in direct contradiction with the U.S.’s policy toward Kazakhstan. With the release of the Clinton’s tax statements, some are asking what happened to the $15 million that Bill Clinton received from Ron Burkle over a four-year period.

Read more of the above in a recent Daily Kos Post.

At the end of the day, philanthropy, like business, must be globalized. I am proud that I and other leaders in the mining industry have demonstrated that we can do our part to promote worldwide sustainable economic growth and poverty alleviation. Likewise, I am proud of my relationship with former President Clinton, which is based solely on our shared global charitable causes - nothing more and nothing less. Demeaning the philanthropic efforts of Bill Clinton does a grave injustice to all of the good works he has undertaken, and in this instance, a disservice to our entire industry.

Frank Giustra, president and CEO
Fiore Financial Corp.
Vancouver, B.C.

For the record, readers can find details of the programs announced at the March 1 fundraiser in Toronto ("President Clinton Announces Projects of the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative") at www.clintonfoundation.org under Resources/Newsroom/Press Releases.

To read all of Mr. Giustra's composition go here.

January 31, 2008
After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

The above reporting from the New York Times is salient. And there is much more that bears reading. Click and see. A comment on this story provides some context:

This story, which the MSM has largely ignored, raises a lot of important questions.

Are foreign governments using the Clinton foundation as a front to pay off a former president and a (perhaps) future one?

Does this mean that, in unmonitored corners of the world, President Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy will be for sale—or appear to be?

The Saudis are also major donors to the Clinton foundation. What do foreign donors expect in return for their money? Why does the law allow foreign governments and firms (which in Saudi Arabia, and many other places, amounts to the same thing) to donate to a former president’s foundation?

What is Guistra expect for his planned $100 million? Is Bill selling Hillary’s influence before she gets it?

For that matter, what is Bill Clinton planning to do with the $100 million? It is not like he is university president who wants to build a new science lab…

The questions are endless. Still, one query stumps me: Why would Hillary allow Bill to do so much dodgy stuff when she is vulnerable as a presidential candidate? Couldn’t they both wait until 2009?

From Richard Miniter.

And while Dick Morris would hardly qualify in the Clinton lexicon as a reliable source, he is often insightful, on the basis of his past experience with the Clintons. He writes:

Yet, in late 2006, as his wife was laying the ground work for a presidential race and serving in the U.S. Senate, Bill Clinton flew on a lavish private plane to the former Soviet State and met with its President, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, known best for eliminating all opposition in his country. In the short time that he was there, Clinton promoted Nazarbayev for chairman of a U.N. committee - a position that the United States government, and his own wife, had opposed. That made no difference to Clinton. Of course, he never mentioned anything at all about the rampant human rights violations.

Clinton was there as the guest of Frank Giustra, a Canadian billionaire who wanted to buy the country's uranium rights. Although he had no experience in this area of the world, he was suddenly awarded the contract which the New York Times termed a "monster deal.... [that] suddenly transformed the company into the world's largest uranium producers."

Clinton made sure that the Kazahstan President understood that Giustra and Clinton were an item.

After the deal was closed, Clinton's foundation received a $31 million contribution from Giustra and a pledge of another $100 million.

What's wrong with that? Well, aside from deliberately and publicly undermining the articulated policy of the United States government, Bill Clinton traded his power and his prestige in exchange for an unprecedented contribution to his foundation, which refuses to release the names of its donors. Clinton has considerable latitude in how the foundation funds are spent and the foundation board is filled with his cronies.

Again there is considerably more worth reading. Find it here.

Mr. Giustra has been assiduous in crying foul about efforts by Bloomberg and others to get to the bottom of his relationship with Clinton. My own guess is that Bill has been the intuitive puppet master. If that is so I expect that Mr. G will have a few moments of chagrin before this is all over.

Will life be any better for the world's poor?

Try kiva.org if you want to help. The Clinton's have the fast track to themselves -- with evident support from the philanthropic establishment which has published the Clinton Foundation's announcements without comment.

I have a sudden impulse to wash my hands.

ADDENDUM:

To keep this on one page, here is a recent roundup of the Clinton-Guistra Connection as it manifests itself in Colombia. The full article is in the HuffPost.

Clinton has helped Frank Giustra, one of the biggest donors to the Clinton Global Initiative, score meetings with high-ranking Colombian officials. Giustra has several business interests in the country, and both he and Clinton have collaborated on an effort to fight poverty in developing world by partnering up with mining companies in Colombia and elsewhere.

What significance these ties have on the current presidential campaign is debatable. The former president was also a proponent of free trade agreements like NAFTA while in the White House. However, Sen. Clinton, as her campaign has repeatedly noted, has a long-standing opposition to the Colombia deal. And her acceptance of Penn's resignation (although he will still serve as a campaign adviser) was indicative that she did not approve of his meeting with the Colombia ambassador to the U.S.

"Senator Clinton's position is clear and unequivocal: She is opposed to the deal," said campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson.

But the former president is a different type of adviser; one with even more influence than Penn, and one who cannot be pushed out of the campaign. In a hypothetical Clinton administration, his voice would likely hold large sway in policy debates. As such, it is important to note that his ties to the Colombia trade agreement have on several occasions put him at odds with his wife's stated positions.

ADDENDUM TWO: (Courtesy of a fellow Obama supporter.)

Brand Clinton

In June 2005, Giustra provided his luxurious MD-87 jet for Clinton to make speeches in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Brazil. According to Bloomberg News, the tour earned Clinton $800,000 in personal income. Giustra "has since put his plane at Clinton's disposal at least a dozen times to raise money for charity, his wife's presidential campaign or himself," Bloomberg reported.

American law does not permit Giustra, as a Canadian, to contribute directly to Hillary Clinton's campaign. Whether providing his plane to raise campaign money counts as a contribution, I leave to the legal eagles.

A far more telling payoff involved Colombia, which has long faced international condemnation for its well-documented violations of labor and other human rights. In the oval office and after, Bill Clinton never let this get in his way, steadfastly backing a free trade agreement with the country along with a $3 billion "Plan Colombia" to fight drug traffickers and guerrillas. As he publicly told Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and others in Bogota, he was "absolutely convinced that it was vital to American interests that Colombia succeed" against the left-wing narcotraficantes.

In September 2005, Clinton hosted "a philanthropic event" at which one of his aides arranged for Giustra to meet Uribe. According to The Wall Street Journal, the two men sat in the hallway speaking for about ten minutes. A Clinton aide later told Giustra the meeting had gone well.

Giustra wanted Colombian oil. He was working with a Canadian group that subsequently paid more than $250 million to operate oil fields in conjunction with Colombia's state-owned petroleum company. Giustra's associates - now operating as Pacific Rubiales Energy Corp. - also signed an oil pipeline deal and was invited to do further oil-development work in Colombia, the Journal reported. -- Steve Weissman Recommend you read his entire April 8 piece.

Perhaps we are going to have to create a whole branch of shady practices known as Bill-Phil -- or Bill Philanthropy.

You find your mark and you make sure that nothing as crass as a large donation comes into the campaign coffers.

Instead you simply get the use of a plane for charitable purposes -- sort of a 501-c-3 carte blanche. You end up with massive speaking honoraria instead of, er, um, dare I say, the b word -- no, call them considerations. Maybe a room in your library.

Bill Clinton's stature has lost about 40 poll points in this campaign. I honestly do not know, even with some years of UN experience under my belt, if Bill Clinton is doing more good than bad.

My own sense is that philanthropy in today's world is part of the global system which I have called benign genocide -- the unholy marriage of capitalism (by which I simply mean business for profit) and philanthropy (by which I mean everything nonprofit) to create a world in which about 20 percent of the population routinely falls through the cracks, children and women first.

A few of these lost become posters for the whole enterprise and we call our good works charity -- deduct it.

All this is doing is making me long for Obama's election and aspire to go back into the UN under a President who will use that organization as it was meant to be used.

Authors Website: http://stephencrosehome.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:
Born in NYC, attended Oberlin & Trinity Schools, then Exeter and Williams (Phi Beta Kappa 1958). Worked with the Reverend James Robinson, finished Union Theological Seminary in NYC (1961). Joined Student Interracial Ministry in Nashville. Founded Renewal Magazine in Chicago, served The Christian Century and Christianity Crisis magazines. Covered civil rights in Oxford, Birmingham and Selma. Interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X. My book The Grass Roots Church had impact on the ecumenical movement. Have authored some 15 books, been a house-husband and father of three wonderful (grown) children. I have written published music choral and popular. Most recently I served in UN agencies including UNICEF in NYC and edited CHOICES which was the flagship magazine of UNDP.