Monthly Archives: May 2015

Sirota:”Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department”

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David Sirota reports @ International Business Times on a major arms deal – American companies would sell 29 billion dollars worth of arms and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia, a country with an appalling record on personal liberty, and the home of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. The deal was approved by the State Department, then headed by Secretary Hilary Clinton, in  late 2011. Mr Sirota reports that in the previous year, Saudi Arabia had contributed at least 10 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and Lockheed, one of the US companies in the deal, had contributed 900,000 dollars to the Foundation.

The Saudi arms deal is part of a much larger pattern exposed by the IBT investigation:

Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House.

As a Senator, Hilary Clinton voted in favor of President Bush’s pre-emptive war on Iraq. As President, Bill Clinton launched bombing strikes on Yugoslavia and Iraq. As a candidate for President, Bill Clinton picked Al Gore as his running mate because Senator Gore had voted in support of President George H W Bush’s war in Iraq.

Antiwar voters, concerned about the cost – in money and lives – of world wide interventionism will need an alternative to Hilary Clinton. The antiwar alternative is not offered by Republican candidates who were for the Iraq War before they were against it.

Full expose by David Sirota @ IBT http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187

Root: Rand Paul affirms right to privacy in NSA Filibuster

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Sen. Rand Paul is holding the Senate floor in an extended debate on the issue of the National Security Agency and the threat it poses to the rights of Americans, including the right to privacy. Damon Root @ Reason notes that this pits Sen. Paul against the mainstream position in the Republican Party which denies that the Constitution guarantees a right to privacy.

…as I’ve previously noted, many conservatives believe the Constitution does not protect the right to privacy at all, since the word privacy is mentioned nowhere in the text of the Constitution. As the late conservative legal theorist Robert Bork once put it, there are no individual rights in those areas where “the Constitution has not spoken.”

During his filibuster yesterday, Paul tackled this conservative orthodoxy head on.

“Some conservatives say, well, there is no right to privacy. I don’t see it in the Constitution,” Paul observed. But those conservatives forget the text of the Ninth Amendment, he countered. “The Ninth Amendment says that all the rights aren’t listed, but those that aren’t listed are not to be disparaged. Even our Founding Fathers worried about this.”

Conservative opposition to the right of privacy is largely a response to the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which invoked the Right to Privacy – inherent in the 4th Amendment and the 5th Amendment to the Constitution – to overturn state laws banning abortion. (Roe v Wade did not affect California, which has had legal abortion since Governor Ronald Reagan signed a bill in 1967 guaranteeing the right.)

Senator Paul is to be commended for his defense of the privacy rights of Americans, under attack from the National Security Agency and from other government agencies as well. But the willingness of many conservatives to deny constitutional rights in their pursuit of national security, or their desire to enforce their views on issues of personal behavior, means that the conservative movement and the Republican Party cannot be relied on to defend the freedom of Americans.
Full post by Damon Root @ http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/21/rand-paul-filibuster-your-rights-are-man