On January 19th, Mayor Karen Weaver endorsed Hillary Clinton. This was certainly beneficial to Clinton, because though she lost the state of Michigan to Bernie, she won Genesee County, which includes Flint. Obviously, the Mayor’s endorsement didn’t hurt. So, what did Mayor Weaver receive for the service she rendered?
Answer: $500,000, announced on March 6, 2016, just two days before the Michigan primary was held.
The Flint WaterWorks initiative, a program that will help provide young people with jobs to assist those impacted by the water crisis, was announced on Sunday by Flint mayor Karen Weaver and former first daughter Chelsea Clinton.
A story from the Detroit Free Press revealed that the project was created through a $500,000 donation from J.B. and M.K. Pritzker, who are among the top donors to outside groups that support the former Secretary of State.
So, in essence, Hillary got one of the top donors to her candidacy to come up with the money necessary to pay Mayor Weaver for her timely endorsement. Just out of curiosity, how much money have the Prizkers contributed to a Super Pac that supports Hillary Clinton? Two Million, Eight Hundred Thousand Dollars ($2.8 Million) to Priorities USA Action. The only candidate this Super Pac supports is Hillary Clinton, and the Pritzkers are determined to spend whatever it takes to see her elected President.
Pritzker and his wife, Mary Kathryn (known as M.K.), are among the top five donors to outside spending groups backing Clinton, contributing more than $2.8 million to Priorities USA, a political action committee (PAC) that supports Clinton and can legally take unlimited donations. Pritzker and his wife, who each donated $1 million in January, will contribute more, he says, if necessary. He declined to say exactly how much he’s willing to spend, but the 51-year-old Chicagoan, who is worth an estimated $3.3 billion, is calling this election “one of the most important of my life.”
I can’t imagine why a billionaire might consider Hillary Clinton a better candidate as the Democratic nominee than Bernie Sanders, can you? Well, maybe Sanders’ proposal to raise taxes on the upper 1% and corporations didn’t sit well with him. Maybe that has something to do with it.
It should be noted that this Pritzker foundation’s $500,000 grant was not contributed directly to the City of Flint but to an organization controlled by Mayor Weaver and Chelsea Clinton:
According to Weaver, the Flint WaterWorks initiative was developed in partnership with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose team helped the mayor establish the public-private partnership program.
The initiative is being started with a $500,000 contribution from J.B. and M.K. Pritzker to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.
“For my mother and for me, this is not political,” Chelsea Clinton said at a news conference. “It is deeply personal and I think it should be personal to every American. … (We want) to see the children of Flint as our children and to see the youth in Flint, as the mayor says, as being a promising youth for Flint and really our country.”
Of course it is not political! Just because Hillary was publicly asking her supporters to contribute to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint back in February, a group with which Mayor Weaver has long had close ties did not make it not political. And the fact that this Clinton/Weaver Flint Waterworks Initiative was announced two days prior to the primary election in Michigan, one where Hillary hoped her victory would knock Bernie Sanders out of the race, could not possibly be political. No sirree bob!
I absolutely believe Chelsea Clinton when she said this was a very personal matter for her and her mother. After all, what could be more personal than doing whatever it takes to ensure Hillary wins the Presidential election in November? And if that means getting her good friend, “The other Mayor of Chicago,” to dig into his deep pockets to pay for it, so what? I’m sure it was personal to him, as well.
Martin, one of your better pieces.
And Hillary DEMs continue to deny that the DEM institutional-elites have nothing to do with all the endorsements and voting blocs that team Clinton has garnered. Oh, and Hillary will propose tax increases equal to or better on the wealthy than Sanders would. Rubes falling for no evidence of any “a quid pro quo deals.”
Thanks for comparing me to Martin. 🙂
Caught my mistake too late. And not a comparison — it did seem a bit different from usual and better.
Oops == sorry the credit goes to Steven. Good job!
Had a moment of doubt a split second after hitting post to my comment.
Hillary is proposing tax increases on the rich, as well. And there’s no reason to doubt Hillary’s commitment to the people in Flint. She’s put a decent amount of time and energy into helping them.
Making the point that money is possibly related to endorsements is a good thing. But please do so fairly.
Close, but no cigar.
You probably believed this is October 2009 as well.
Just another example of why almost 2/3 of the American people find her untrustworthy. I never believed Hillary when she said she would never run for president again. She has been “running for president” for decades.
no reason to doubt her commitment to the ppl of Flint? there are plenty of reasons
Thought that county went to Bernie…
Also, Ms. P was a negotiator on TTIP and TPP deals. Jes saying…
No — HRC carried Genesee County. No reported breakdown for the City of Flint, but it was my understanding that it was very close.
Thought it was Penny Pritzker, US Sec of Commerce, that has been involved in TTIP and TPP. Jay is her brother.
Odd. Penny was the name I saw in the first article.
Penny was a huge Obama backer in 2008, while R.B. supported Hillary then as well as now. Penny’s involvement with trade agreements comes are because Obama repaid her for support by making her commerce secretary and giving her responsibility for negotiating the things. You need to recognize that when you condemn HRC on these issues you also condemn BHO (who had much stronger backing from banking industry in 2008 than she did).
yes, it was initially reported as Penny, on the day of the MI primary, the thread had a few comments about it, iirc I referenced a Detroit Free Press report on it [?]
yes, I know we had that discussion on MI primary day. Clinton only started winning the count late in the count. I wrote that I thought Chelsea’s announcement hadn’t turned the city for HRC
Hillary’s speech to AIPAC opened my eyes to the fact that she’s learned nothing and not grown as a human being since her despicable 2008 campaign against Obama in which she dog whistled to racists or since her vote for the Iraq war. I was supporting her but now, at the Washington caucus on Saturday, I’ll be a Sanders man.
That said, assuming she goes on to win the nomination, I’ll still vote for her. She is the lesser evil. We’ll see if I still campaign for her. Likely not but maybe, if I get angry enough about whomever she’s running against.
I plan to hate-vote for Hillary Clinton.
The reason I’ll be hate-voting for her is because with no House, no Senate after 2018, Republican gridlock, and her Kissinger-tonguebathing warhawkery, her Presidency is doomed to failure. And said failure will completely discredit the Clintons, their pack of dumbass friends and subalterns, and their ideology once the Republicans get a clean-sweep in 2020.
If Clinton loses 2016, there will be no reckoning of the neoliberals and neoconservatives who have hijacked the party. There will be a little bit of reckoning, but not as much as there would be with an actual failed Presidency. We’d be going into 2020 and maybe even 2024 with the establishment toadies still firmly in control.
Also, I’ll get to point and laugh at the pragmatists who thought that their moral compromises and blood and sweat and tears would save the party. “Look! Look what you myopic quislings have wrought! You thought that your sacrifices would save the party when instead it only brought it to ruin! You brought this upon yourself when you decided that the Clintons must win at any cost! You will be remembered as the generation that destroyed the Democratic Party and possibly the planet! Weep amongst the ashes of the party you ruined in your desperation and fear, you failures. You cretins.” Or something like that.
The fantasy is better than the reality. The morning after Nixon resigned, all my GOP colleagues were in shock and couldn’t comprehend how they’d been fooled into voting for him. I felt almost as good that day as the day I’d cast my vote against him. All those “fools” likely voted for Ford and then Reagan the in next two presidential elections.
The truth about the WMDs rolled out so slowly that there was no precise moment when the “fools” were forced to confront their idiocy and acknowledge to those that had been right all along that they had been stupid.
DEM partisans will blame an imploding DEM party on the usual suspects — Republicans and DFHs. They wear their victimology as firmly planted on their sleeves as every rightwinger and Republican.
I dunno. If you listen to all of the non-rich centrists and pragmatists of the Democratic party, their entire raison d’etre is to stop a complete Republican takeover. They justify all of their compromises and overlooking of Democratic malfeasance in those terms — we have to overlook all of the grifting and warhawkery and electoral backsliding because the Republicans are just that bad.
If they get what they asked for, won’t at least a portion of them realize that they’ve been had? I mean, it’s one thing to continue supporting Nixon or W. Bush after their regimes blow up because the underlying causes they represent weren’t discredited — but the Clintons and the New Democrats’ underlying cause is ‘the Republicans are so awful and only we can protect you from them’.
Remember: there’s only two things that can get authoritarian followers to turn on their leaders. One of them is if the leader is convincingly exposed as ‘not one of them’. The other is if the leader exposes them to danger and inflicts the insight that the covenant that every authoritarian leader makes with their authoritarian followers (do whatever I want and ignore those pangs of conscience and I’ll protect you from what you fear) is null and void.
The other is if the leader exposes them to danger …
That tends to increase support for a destructive leader and direct attention to the danger and away from the leader’s culpability. The whole idea behind false flags (not anywhere near as common as the CTs folks claim but more common than most people can acknowledge).
the “non-rich centrists and (so called) pragmatists” have been fed a steady diet of Republicans as the evil ones for three decades that they can barely think outside the box. In part because that has been the only opposition with any power to their DINO economic policies. However, they were mighty quick to grab and hold onto blame the Nader voters for the 2000 election outcome. And they’ve been sharpening their knives and sticking them where they can against Sanders and his supporters since mid-October when the 9/30 fundraising numbers were released.
Right. That’s why I don’t want the Clinton wing to lose in 2016, because it won’t shake them free. They have to lose in 2020, as the only thing that will shake them free of her grip is if her Presidency fails in a way that can’t be easily blamed on the DFHs/Republicans. Which it will.
Because I never get tired of posting this, here we go one more time:
Your projections are far too dramatic. Expect a version of what we’ve seen over the past seven years. Except Hill and Bill won’t be as inclined as Obama to nod to the left and will be inclined to be more strident wrt GOP obstructionism as they advance more GOP policies and use of military force. Different from the 1990s when DEMs in Congress weren’t so in lock-step and/or compromised to the “third way” agenda that left Bill doing his deals with the GOP and selling them to the public as “pragmatic.”
A majority of left leaning Indies are currently wide awake but still a long way to go for a majority of DEMs to wake up. They’ll be as protective of Hillary as they have been of Obama. There’s probably something(s) on her agenda that could be deal breakers with a majority of DEMs, but I don’t know what they would be.
I expect a major war from Ms. ‘Kissinger is a friend and I vacation at his place’. Why wouldn’t you expect one from someone who orchestrated a coup of Honduras and Libya?
Or do you think that Hillary Clinton will continue to roll boxcars when it comes to international blowback?
Did say that I expect this: they advance more GOP policies and use of military force.
A major war will be tough for her to pull off. As much as the GOP loves war, they aren’t about to let Hillary spearhead a major one. And there either won’t be enough DEMs in Congress or too many that won’t bow down to her on this to get her war on with approval from Congressional DEMs. Finally, the Pentagon doesn’t have a stomach for a major war — small-scale, mostly aerial bombings and covert actions, is what they prefer.
She doesn’t have to. Johnson didn’t go hat-in-hand for a war declaration right away. Neither did Kennedy or Eisenhower or Truman. She can just keep up her constant campaign of warhawkery and then a conflict will blow up. So then she escalates as much as she can (recreating the original problem) until she runs up against the Congress roadblock. Then one of two things will happen:
1.) The GOP keeps her on the hook. It’s tempting for them to let HRC stew in her own juices. Only problem: the media class loves war and the GOP base hates being perceived as weak.
2.) The GOP’s handlers and owners decide to hop onboard the War Train, much like they were able to put aside their differences to let the Deporter in Chief do his deportation thang or let him sign the TPP. Conflict escalates to the next phase and it blows up in her face.
The only way Hillary Clinton doesn’t lead the country into a dumbass centrist wet-dream war is if she continually gets lucky for the next four years and her low-grade warhawkery doesn’t blow up in her face. Feel like betting the future of the Democratic Party on that?
DARPA had better get their assembly lines speeded up for drones and killer robots, cause the National Guard is gonna have some trouble recruiting bodies this time. Even with a provocation. Regular services are already there.
yeah the demographics will be so good for the republicans in 2020 they are sure to win.
i wish more people studied math.
1.) A disastrous enough Presidency can override any demographic advantage. See: 1938, 1952, 1976, 1992. If it gets really bad, such as in 1932, 1980, and 2008 it can outright cause an electoral realignment.
2.) Demographics look a lot better for the Republicans if the Millenials sours on the Democratic Party. The Obama Coalition does not exist without Millenials. Turnout with Asians and Latinos is still too low and too urbanly concentrated to guarantee wins, especially in the Rust Belt. If you only have racial minorities with the 1996 Clinton/2000 Gore %-s and turnout, elections will look like a cross between 2004 and 2012.
2012 Obama badly slipped with Millenials from 2008 to 2012 despite losing no other major demographic by more than 2%. Not just in turnout, but raw voting margins; he lost a whopping 11% of white Millenials and 14% of black male Millenials to Romney.
The signs for Hillary Clinton reversing this trend do not look good. Her voting-% with this demographic is downright awful.
The Democratic Party losing a huge chunk of their demographic advantage won’t happen in 2016 unless the Clinton campaign sucks even more than it has already sucked. But 2020, after 4 years of disillusionment, warhawkery, and clientelism? Get prepared to watch those Millenial vote-% and turnout-% drop like a rock.
Expect indie % to keep climbing.
Who is paying for the Dem Party organs these days–not small donors, who have wised up. They donate directly to the candidate. Chuckie Schumer is crying poverty with respect to the DSCC.
Extraordinarily unusual for someone over the age of 55 (and for most over the age of 45) to move left in their political orientation. Most stay about the same, but a large number do move right and don’t reverse course from that.
Surprising to me that so many DEM/liberals even considered that HRC ’08 would be better in ’16. Even more surprising is the number that expect as President she will be other than what her record in public office says she had been.
It’s one of those lies people tell themselves when they’re asked to make a justify a tough decision that will require ongoing effort/engagement.
The real reason to support Hillary Clinton, if you’re not an affulent centrist or a media toadie looking to climb the ladder of success, is because the current incarnation of the Republican Party is just that bad. Of course, as you have to go a loooooong way before you’re as bad as Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, any reasonably smart potato would show that this justification would be just as applicable for voting for ’74 Richard Nixon or ’88 Ronald Reagan over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.
So that goes back to what I said earlier about Sophie’s Choices. One coping strategy is for people to tell themselves that the choice wasn’t so bad. Why, the NKVD will certainly make an exception for my pacifist self when I choose to desert in the face of operation Barbarossa. They’re not barbarians or mass murderers; that’s just bourgeois propaganda. One or two years in a gulag and I’ll be out!
I’d vote for Nixon over Trump or Cruz in a heartbeat.
And if you gave a lot of young Baby Boomers the choice between voting for Donald Trump or Richard Nixon, how many of them would choose not to make a decision at all? And of those who did make a decision, how many of them would start suddenly telling lies to themselves about how Nixon and/or Trump wasn’t just better than the alternative but was actually desirable in an independent way?
Well the guy did create the EPA and was willing to consider drug war alternatives. And while happy to use them to gain power from what I know he hated the rich Texans that infected the GOP.
I was born long after Nixon left the stage and grew up in the very late Gingrich/Bush II era, so maybe it counts for more to me by comparrison.
Well the guy did create the EPA and was willing to consider drug war alternatives.
Lies. He didn’t create the EPA. He signed the bill that had overwhelming veto-proof majorities. When such majorities were not present in 1972, he did what he could to gut environmental protection. As for the drug war, I suggest you read the recent Harpers about that:
Legalize It All
Near and dear to Booman’s heart
From what I have heard Nixon was actually about to ramp up the program in a huge way then watergate happened so it never happened.
i dont know any hillary voters who are making sophies choice. we are happily voting for the best candidate. im really tired of the sandbaggers labeling us hillary voters in such derogatory terms. step out of your ethnocentrism every once in a while and try to understand why so many more people are voting for hillary than bernie. 2.7 million more.
See, DeathTongue, I don’t know why you’re papering over our real differences in ideology. As anna says right here, they WANT to vote for mushy neoliberalism. They LIKE it. They want more of it.
nothing like more wars – hey it’s a job creation program
The two M’s: money and media bias/complicity.
Many of my generation (Depression/WWII) have steadily moved left in the last 30-40 years. Of course, both major parties have moved well to the right, but even so my views have changed quite a bit, by any measure.
If that were true, as a general observation, (and note I didn’t say that moving left as one ages doesn’t happen; only that it’s rare), the left wouldn’t be in a minority in the DEM party today. HRC has been the overwhelming choice of those age >44 (NH, VT and possibly one or more of the caucus states that weren’t polled excepted); it’s younger voters that have carried him to his close finishes and wins.
Don’t doubt that most perceive themselves as having stood still while the two parties continuously moved right. But like a frog in a pot of water being heated, not so many notice that all those little compromises over a few decades means that they too have moved right.
that is absolutely ridiculous. the democrats have gotten more and more liberal and moved faster to the left than anyone predicted. gay marriage, sanctuary, less religion, SOCIALISM! the list goes on and on. you want to know whats holding us back from moving even farther left? democrats dont get off their asses and vote.
well, with an “inspiring” candidate like HRC, why should they? even with DWS making it so easy to vote,
Whuh?
Gay marriage happened completely outside the control of the Democratic Party apparatus. Try peddling that talking point to a LGBT activist, why don’t you.
Socialism — that also gets some major lols. The Democratic Party, what between the Bowles-Simpson commission, the TPP, and ongoing shrinking of government has embraced neoliberalism hardcore.
Sanctuary?? Again, go ask some Latino activists what they think about Obama, aka Deporter-in-Chief.
As much as I hate to admit it, the alt-right is right on the broad contours; a Democratic plantation exists. Granted, they were wrong about who it served (lol non-rich/upper-middle class blacks getting any help from centrist Dems) but they were right about how it worked and how it was sustained.
Fuck the Democratic upper-middle class and above all else fuck the upper-middle class black community. Fuck Corey Booker, fuck John Lewis, fuck Maxine Waters, and fuck Karen Weaver. The affulent centrist wing needs to leave, before they further wreck the Democratic party. My black ass would rather make common cause with a bunch of neo-confederate revanchists than those selfish bourgeois pricks.
If all the Ms P’s had been paying their property taxes to Detroit, there might have been resources for a bond issue to replace those pipes decades ago.
Or Flint, or any of those rust belt cities subject to abandonment by those who used the cities to make wealth for themselves.
I was born democratic upper middle class… Im not there anymore though, lower middle now.
The Center for Responsive Politics, through their website OpenSecrets.org, shows that this Super Pac (Priorities USA Action) has tens of millions of dollars.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate.php?id=N00000019
For Clinton’s campaign, Large Individual Contributions make up 73%; Small Individual Contributions comprise 18%. Bernie Sanders has no big Super Pac; his Small Individual Contributions are 67% of his total campaign contributions.
Hillary is the worst. My gawd, she’s terrible, with her “inside” game and all. I’m tired of her, Obama, and the rest of the Dem corporatist class.
Purity is what matters, people. That’s why a candidate like Ted Cruz, who’d lock in right wing nutballism for decades, is the right way to go. An affiliator-with-the-rich like Clinton, who knows how to survive and fight when politics is rough, is not who we want in office. Let’s tear it all down!!! Only then will the progressively pure rise.
Sanders is there staring you right in the face. What is this talk about purity? It has to do with basic ethics and honesty. Chelsea Clinton and her mother are ‘committed’ to the children of Flint. I’m sure the children of Flint are ecstatic.
plus 500,000. is cheap considering what they could spend and what they get for it [and will they actually spend it?]
Sanders isn’t “pure”. He supported military contractors for a failed military project coming to his home-state, for God’s sake. This isn’t about being “pure”. What a nonsense strawman.
the trolls are sure coming out of the woodwork to argue the inevitability of HRC, her superiority to Trump and the rudeness of Sanders supporters (i forgot, they actually have a 3 point program, not just 2)
I agree. Which is why it’s so important that the Democratic Party leadership insists on running a platform of neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and clientelism despite how much it antagonizes people within the Democratic Party and on the margins of the Republican Party. As a bonus, not only do you get to be pure like DWS and Hillary, you get to preen about how mature and pragmatic and flexible you are for holding to those principles! What a racket!
Centrist Purity is more important than winning elections, after all.
Centrist purism is what DEMs ran on in 2014. Worked so well that they blamed voters for not being pure enough to show up and endorse the DEM party worldview.
So now the US is dependent on ladies compassionately distributing alms to the poor so they can get clean drinking water. This is what it has come down to. What an absolute disgrace, the elite of the First Gilded Age are turning in their graves with envy.
The behavior of charitable billionaires here and in the EU is very instructive. Over there, they would give their money directly to the state to manage.
Over here they set up Foundations, so it’s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich …
Often, it is used as a backdoor to set government policy, as we have seen in charter schools replacing public.
The Flint water arrangement makes the victims beholden to their betters. So behave kiddies, otherwise you’ll get nothing. That’s what all charity does. Don’t have any illusions about European super rich.