Clinton Foundation Fueled By Blood Money

By Rob Larson, AlterNet. Posted January 30, 2009.

The scale of Mittal's steel empire stacks the deck against smaller competitors and undermines a Clinton Foundation goal. But a nice seven-digit check to the Clintons' global charity levels the playing field enough to sleep at night. The Open Hand giveth, and the Invisible Hand taketh away.

Or take AIDS, often seen to be the foundation's core issue. The foundation recently negotiated heavy price reductions for certain AIDS drugs sold in the developing world and has come to partially support moves by Brazil and Thailand to break the patents on AIDS therapy drugs held by U.S. companies. This new policy has been pushed for by AIDS activists and groups like Doctors Without Borders, who have seen thousands of lives improved by cheap generics that violate patent rights. But only recently has the hand of the foundation been forced by Brazil's and Thailand's patent breaking, which is seen even by conservative observers like the Economist as successful in fighting the disease.

The business press describes the position of the most prominent AIDS activist in South Africa, Zackie Achmat: "Like many activists, he believes drug companies have been goaded into their recent donations -- only by terrible publicity," and that "contrary to what the industry said, patents were indeed an obstacle to affordable medicines." The Financial Times describes the pharmaceutical industry's limited giveaways or price reductions of AIDS drugs as "part of public relations efforts by Western companies to deal with an onslaught over the prices they charge for their drugs."

So while the Clinton Foundation has gradually come to support production of some far-cheaper generics in the developing world, it took public and activist pressure, plus the growing independence of developing countries like Brazil, to bring them and Big Pharma around. And some of the medicine can even be paid for with the hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to the foundation by AIDS drug patent-mongers Pfizer and Ranbaxy, paying for a few generics to fight the disease they helped to spread.

While the foundation's work is clearly invaluable to the people and desperate communities it serves, the point is that its money comes directly from parties contributing heavily to the problems it's fighting, from the brutal Saudi tyrants paying to encourage human development, to the global steel tycoon kicking in for classes on entrepreneurship, to the drug-patent owners grudgingly contributing to production of the generic drugs they fight against.

The foundation would probably defend itself by saying that its median gift amount is just $45, from its thousands of small-scale donors, who are admirable, well-meaning people. But that doesn't get you to the $492 million total the foundation manages. That comes from the Clintons' big-ticket donors, which also include Victor Pinchuk, the Ukrainian steel oligarch who built his empire from the Soviet Union's assets sell-off, and Blackwater, the U.S. mercenary company under legal sanction for its killings in Iraq. Blood money still spends.

In the end, the Clinton Foundation's big-ticket donors are a ruling-class rogues gallery with a guilty conscience. But in a world of tyrannical regimes, powerful global corporations and spreading disease among the poor, you can count on more ego-stroking from the guilty parties that keep the lights on at Big Charity.

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