The good, the bad and the ugly

A Tale of Three Foundations: Carter, Clinton and Trump by Peter Van Buren for We Meant Well.

Hard choices and lesser evils: links 9/13/2016

The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee by Maureen Dowd for The New York Times.   Hillary Clinton, the ideal Republican.

The Only Shocking Things Donald Trump Has Yet to Do by David Rees for The Baffler.

Here’s what happens if a presidential nominee has to drop out of the election by Jeff Stein for Vox.

More about the Clinton Foundation

To do good is noble. To teach others to do good is nobler, and less work.           ==Mark Twain

Most of the controversy over the Clinton Foundation is whether Hillary Clinton ever used her political position to so anybody a favor because that person made a donation to the foundation.

I think this would be hard to prove, unless I had the power to read Clinton’s mind and the minds of her donors.

I myself don’t think that Clinton or the foundation ever took a specific cash payment for a specific favor rendered.   The gifts, like Clinton’s Wall Street speaking fees, are just a way in which the world’s rich and powerful solidify their relationships.

What Amy Sterling Casil and other investigators have shown is how little the world’s poor and needy have benefited from all this.

What does the Clinton Foundation actually do?

Amy Sterling Casil wrote an excellent series of articles for Medium about what the Clinton Foundation, which takes in as much money as the March of Dimes, actually spends its money on.

There is a lot to dig through, but, in summary, she described the foundation’s business model as follows:

• Take in as much money as possible, by whatever means.
• Expend as little money as possible on anything other than what the Principals want to spend money on, typically self-promotion and world travel.
• Take credit for stuff somebody told you they do.  Avoid expending funds on any outside activities.

Source: Amy Sterling Casil — Medium

Charity Navigator, an organization that rates the effectiveness of charities, does not rate the Clinton Foundation because of lack of information.   Casil contrasted it to the Carter Foundation, which does good work and is scrupulously documented.

Corporate feminism and the cult of micro-lending

Thomas Frank, with his usual incisiveness, explains in the current issue of Harpers why so many rich liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates endorse micro-lending.

It is a way of identifying the interests of American women who aspire to be corporate executives or partners in law firms with Third World women basket-makers and market-place vendors.

Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.

What was most attractive about micro­-lending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions.