Pulse Of The Peninsula: Clinton Foundation attacks unfounded

For a few precious days each year for the past 10 years, I have had the privilege of stepping into what felt as an alternate universe — a place of possibility and progress, where the intractable challenges of all time, like health care, religious wars, systemic poverty, racism and sexism, global warming, had solutions, not just pie-in-the-sky ideas, that were being implemented.
Year after year, we could see the faces of people whose lives were saved or improved  —many even attended the annual meeting to talk personally — and we could measure the progress.
This was the Clinton Global Initiative, an extraordinary gathering of Movers and Shakers of the world — senior ministers of government, CEOs of multinational corporations and financial institutions, wealthy philanthropists, along with the NGOs (nongovernmental organization) worker bees who are the ones who actually labor to improve lives in their local communities.
They included among them Nobel laureates like Mohammed Yunus of Bangladesh, who transformed his society using microfinance and Malala Yousafzai, who since getting shot in the face by the Taliban in Pakistan, has become a global advocate for universal access to education.
They had the scions of billionaires like Warren Buffet’s son, Peter Buffet, Co-chair, NoVo Foundation, which committed $30 million over five years to help rebuild the education systems and address violence against women and girls in post-conflict West Africa; the Nike Foundation that financed programs empowering girls (“The Girl Effect”), Sophie Gasperment, CEO of BodyShop who sponsored a new approach to stop child sex trafficking.
This was not charity.  This was a nonprofit institution that figured out how to create sustainable development.
The model has since been used by the Obama Administration, in the design of Strong Cities, Strong Communities program which forged public-private partnerships to spur economic development in cities like Detroit, for example, in programs forging public-private partnerships to cultivate adoption of clean, renewable energy, and in Michelle Obama’s “Let Girls Learn” initiative and the “Joining Forces” program to incentivize companies to hire veterans returned from war.
At the first Clinton Global Initiative, Condoleezza Rice shared the stage with Al Gore.
Over the years, other prominent Republicans — including Republican candidates for president (John McCain, Mitt Romney) — made appearances if not in person, by videolink.
But that pretty much stopped after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was photographed hugging President Clinton at a session on climate change; the photo was blasted on page 1 all over Florida, and he was drummed out of the Republican Party and Florida politics.
Sure I gagged when I heard Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs say “We are doing God’s work,” but there was former Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson calling for a tax on carbon. “We need a national policy to unleash the markets, unleash innovation, that will lead to new technologies and change behavior — business and consumer behavior.”
“We started CGI to create a new kind of community built around the new realities of our modern world, where problem-solving requires the active partnership of government, business, and civil society,” President Bill Clinton stated when he announced changes to the Clinton Foundation and that this year’s Clinton Global Initiative would be the last.  “We’ve brought together leaders from across sectors and around the world both to talk about our challenges, and to commit publicly to actually do something about them. It was something different, but our bet paid off: there was a hunger for the chance to make an impact that brought together people and organizations with the resources to make a difference with people who have the knowledge and experience to turn good ideas into action.  Corporations, governments, and non-governmental organizations began combining their strengths and finding entirely new approaches to old problems.  CGI quickly became an embodiment of what works best in the 21st-century world, and what has been behind all of the Clinton Foundation’s work since the very beginning: networks of cooperation.
“This partnership model, which may seem self-evident today, was simply not how philanthropy and corporate responsibility worked over a decade ago.  Today, members of the Clinton Global Initiative have made more than 3,500 commitments that are already improving over 430 million lives in more than 180 countries. These projects will continue to make an impact around the world and in the U.S.  The idea that working together beats going it alone has caught on well beyond our CGI community.”
The programs have not just fostered new insights and new partnerships that could produce solutions to problems, but have changed cultures of countries and corporations and societies and generations.
The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have been the greatest force for good in a very disturbed, unsettled, increasingly dark world — it makes Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity look like the Cub Scouts.
And because Clinton Global Initiative has been such a game-changer in actually making progress against the most intractable challenges facing the planet today, the Republicans have been trying to kill it forever.
That’s because the Republicans realize that their power and control depends upon persistent income inequality, suffering and despair, and an underclass of voiceless, unrepresented people, and “reducing the excess population,” as Dickens would have put it.
They don’t want real solutions to anything. They want to be able to throw a few dollars at a problem for their own sense of redemption, while actually committing pay-for-play in accommodating their donors, like dirty fuels and the NRA (which is spending $1.7 million to re-elect Rob Portman senator in Ohio and defeat Ted Strickland. Do you think that buys access and votes? See maplight.org).
So far, besides a couple of requests for meetings (which Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin said needed to go through official channels), a request for help with a visa (denied), or introduction to an ambassador by a Lebanese Nigerian who wanted to convey some information about an upcoming election in Lebanon, there has been no evidence of inappropriate action on Secretary Clinton’s part — that is, something that went counter to US interests, or specifically benefited the Clinton Foundation or the Clintons personally.
The billions of dollars that have been funneled into these commitments went into the projects, not into the Clintons’ pockets.
Ah, but the appearance, the perception, we are told.
Trump is trumping this whole thing up because he is absolutely desperate to distract from investigations into his own corrupt business practices, as well as his proud pronouncements that no one knows how to work the system better than he does — yet another case of “projection” of the evil that one does onto the opponent.
His dream is that there be a special prosecutor, a la Ken Starr, who imprisoned witnesses until they would give false evidence about the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal, which morphed into an impeachment over Clinton’s adultery.
And the real tragedy is that the Clintons are planning to shut down Clinton Global Initiative altogether and dramatically curtail the work of the Clinton Foundation.
Instead, they should do what any other president would do — resign as members of the Board and have a “blind trust” while Hillary Clinton is president.