ConservativeINC

Hundreds of books are about how to make money quickly. These books don’t know the real secret though. Do you know what that secret is? No? Well, today only, I will tell you how to accumulate more wealth than you will ever know what to do with. Befriend Bill Clinton.

You will get to jet around with the ex-president promoting his foundation. But, in truth, that’s just the cover story. What is really going to happen is you will get to use Mr. Clinton’s influence to get a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure, the ex-prez will have to undermine American policy and, gasp, contradict his own wife’s official positions, but so what.

The only drawback, and there always is one or two with the Clintons, is that you will have to share the loot. It’s only 100+ million dollars, but hey, what’s $100 million when you’re going to make many times that amount?

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.

Source: nytimes.com

I just thought that this article was particularly delicious because it is a perfect response to another article at Now Public, by Mountaineer, about how John McCain is in the pocket of the investment world. I don’t want to defend McCain, so I won’t. But I do think it is more than just to point out that when other politicians are getting hundreds of thousands for their presidential campaign the Clintons, particularly Bill Clinton, are getting hundreds of millions for his foundation. A foundation (which has to do some good, maybe) that allows the former president to jet around the world and live it up.

BigT

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