What did Clinton do at Walmart and what was she doing in 2006-2007 with them?

[Fresh_Start]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/politics/20walmart.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[MethuenProgressive]

1. Ask Michelle Obama - she was working with them then.

She'd know.

[FREEWILL56]

Got link?

I don't support either Barak or Hillary, but I would like to hear or see the particulars of this allegation towards Michelle that would tell me:
1> When she worked for them.
2> In what capacity she worked for them.
Failure to provide a link would tell me that either the allegation is false or that Michelle had worked as a common worker and not in a corporate power position making your statement of saying 'she'd know' what hillary was doing there to be complete bull.

[MethuenProgressive]

7. Here you go:

http://www.punditreview.com/2007/05/24/barack-obama-just-another-politician

[FREEWILL56]

14. OK. I see that Michelle would not know what Hillary was doing at Wal Mart.

As she did not work for Wal Mart. By your loose analogy everybody that shopped there would also know why Hillary was there. You could bring up what Michelle's role in that seperate company would be, but I see nothing stating what Michelle was really doing either. Do note that Michelle is not running for president and that Hillary quit Wal Mart for Bill to go for the presidency. Care to make further elaborations?

[semndem]

6. So no one can work for a supplier?

I don't understand this. She worked for a supplier of Wal-Mart. As I understand business, she would have no influence over what Wal-Mart's practices are. They are two different companies. Furthermore, wouldn't they also supply other grocery stores? Is she supposed to correct all of their labor practices too? What if she voiced concerns to her company about dealing with Wal-Mart and it fell on deaf ears? We just don't know, so it's hard to criticize someone when we don't know all the information. Same goes for Hillary. We don't know what she did or didn't do to influence the board of Wal-Mart, but I think the question should be asked. Being on the board and having direct influence and working for one of it's suppliers are two different things to me. Hillary just needs to answer some questions about this.

[rox63]

8. Lots of companies sell their goods to Wal-Mart

In some parts of the country, that's the only place for miles where people can buy things. When Wal-mart comes to town, most of the small, local businesses can't compete on prices, and are forced out of business. So I can't fault a company for selling their products to Wal-Mart. It says nothing about the company except that they need an outlet to sell their products. They have no control over Wal-mart's policies.

[maddiejoan]

11. ya mean --

Pickles II?

[mod mom]

2. "Wal-Mart’s vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said."

[rodeodance]

10. Instead she worked to get WOMEN in management & enviroment causes:

.....Fellow board members and company executives, who have not spoken publicly about her role at Wal-Mart, say Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart’s only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart’s vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said.

[mod mom]

13. One of the reasons she was on the Walmart Board was due to the Clintons relationship w

Jackson Stephens (google him...he had a role in the financing of WalMart, BCCI, Bush Campaigns and even Bill Clinton's campaigns.

While HRC was at the Rose Law firm, one of their most important clients was Jackson Stephens. One of my major problems with the Clintons is they look out for the interests of the most powerful. In my state of Ohio, they campaigned saying one thing about the terrible decision to build a toxic waste incinerator (with ties to JACKSON STEPHENS) located on a flood plain in East Liverpool OH near an elementary school but after elected, they looked away. Here is the story if you care to learn the truth:

Washington, D.C. - The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), the self-described political arm of the environmental movement, has given President Clinton a middling grade of "C-plus" overall for "not working up to potential" during his first year in office.

In particular, the League criticized the Clinton Administration for failing to halt Waste Technologies Industries' controversial hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio.

-snip

http://wasteage.com/mag/waste_fewer_onsite_hazwaste/



Waste Technologies Industry, Inc. (WTI)


WTI has also gained significant political support, as one of the original partners in the corporation was Jackson Stephens. Stephens, an Arkansas investor, was known as a significant contributor to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton campaigns.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The EPA has been accused of having bias in favor of WTI and carrying out decision-making activities without required public participation. The agency also violated rules established in RCRA during the WTI permit application process. EPA admitted such wrong-doing at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommitteeon Administrative Law and Government Relations, as well as the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/mcormick.html#Key%20Actors



Here is a portion of activist/mother, Terri Swearingen's acceptance speech for the Goldman Environmental Prize, given April 14, 1997:



I am not a scientist or a Ph.D. I am a nurse and a housewife, but my most important credential is that I am a mother. In 1982, I was pregnant with our one and only child. That's when I first learned of plans to build one of the world's largest toxic waste incinerators in my community. When they began site preparation to begin building the incinerator in 1990, my life changed forever. I'd like to share with you some of the lessons I have learned from my experiences over the past seven years.

One of the main lessons I have learned from the WTI experience is that we are losing our democracy. How have I come to this sad realization? Democracy is defined by Merriam Webster as "government by the people, especially rule of the majority," and "the common people constituting the source of political authority." The definition of democracy no longer fits with the reality of what is happening in East Liverpool, Ohio. For one thing, it is on the record that the majority of people in the Ohio Valley do not want the WTI hazardous waste incinerator in their area, and they have been opposed to the project from its inception. Some of our elected officials have tried to help us, but the forces arrayed against us have been stronger than we or they had imagined. Public concerns and protests have been smothered with meaningless public hearings, voodoo risk assessment and slick legal maneuvering.

Government agencies that were set up to protect public health and the environment only do their job if it does not conflict with corporate interests. Our current reality is that we live in a "wealthocracy" big money simply gets what it wants. In this wealthocracy, we see three dynamics at play: corporations versus the planet, the government versus the people, and corporate consultants or "experts" versus common sense. In the case of WTI, we have seen all three.

The second lesson I have learned ties directly to the first, and that is that corporations can control the highest office in the land. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore came to the Ohio Valley, they called the siting of the WTI hazardous waste incinerator next door to a 400 student elementary school, in the middle of an impoverished Appalachian neighborhood, immediately on the bank of the Ohio River in a flood plain an "UNBELIEVABLE IDEA." They said we ought to have control over where these things are located. They even went so far as to say they would stop it. But then they didn't! What has been revealed in all this is that there are forces running this country that are far more powerful than the President and the Vice President. This country trumpets to the world how democratic it is, but it's funny that I come from a community that our President dare not visit because he cannot witness first hand the injustice which he has allowed in the interest of a multinational corporation, Von Roll of Switzerland. And the Union Bank of Switzerland. And Jackson Stephens, a private investment banker from Arkansas. These forces are far more relevant to our little town than the President of the United States! And he is the one who made it that way. He has chosen that path. We didn't choose it for him. We begged him to come to East Liverpool, but he refused. We begged the head of EPA to come, but she refused. She hides behind the clever maneuvering of lawyers and consultants who obscure the dangers of the reckless siting of this facility with theoretical risk assessments.

-snip

http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/et0897s17.html




There has always been something incongruous about Stephens Inc. Despite the Little rock firm's attempts to portray itself as a small- city operation that closes for the duck season and got fabulously lucky on a couple of down-home deals like Wal-Mart, it was, at the incinerator's inception, the ninth-largest investment bank in the country. Since it is not headquartered in New York, its dealings are local news, little noticed by the national press, even when they have national implications. And, as a source close to the company once remarked, "The farther you get from Arkansas, the better it looks."

Stephens Inc. was founded by Witt Stephens, a state legislator's son who parlayed a Depression-era belt-buckle, Bible, and municipal-bond business into an immense personal fortune. After his retirement in 1973, the company was run by his shy younger brother, Jackson (a classmate of Jimmy Carter's at the Naval Academy). Witt Stephens and Stephens Inc. did much to create the economic paradox that is modern Arkansas: a desperately poor state with a scant 2.3 million inhabitants that is nonetheless home to a number of wealthy companies. Without the financial assistance of the Stephens brothers, Sam Walton might have ended his days as the most innovative merchant in Bentonville. Stephens money was also important to the fortunes of enterprises as various as Tyson Foods and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the television producer and reigning First Friend. Stephens Inc. is an important client of the Rose law firm, whose chairman, C. Joseph Giroir, made Hillary Rodham Clinton a partner. And back in 1977, Stephens assisted BCCI's infiltration of the American banking system by brokering the latter's purchase of National Bank of Georgia stock held by Bert Lance, former President Jimmy Carter's friend and disgraced budget director.

Jackson Stephens (who turned over the reins to his son, Warren, in the late eighties) and his firm were both substantial contributors to the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and Bush (to the tune of at least $100,000 in 1980 and 1989), but they have been closer still to Bill Clinton (whom Witt Stephens had been known to call "that boy").

On two occasions, once when Clinton was running for reelection in Arkansas in 1990 and again in March 1992, when his battered presidential campaign was broke, the Stephens family saved Clinton's bacon with an infusion of money. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that their Worthen Bank's emergency $3.5 million line of credit saved the presidential campaign from extinction. --L.J.D.

-snip

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1993/11/davis.html




Who is the octopussy that might be lurking in the Ohio River Valley? Perhaps we should start by asking shy Arkansas billionaire Jackson T. Stephens. After all, Stephens introduced BCCI from Pakistan to the United States and the WTI waste incinerator to East Liverpool, Ohio. Stephens would be a good sketch artist because he's seen some monstrous scandals in his day. Stephens' family firm is the largest privately owned investment bank outside Wall Street. In September 1977, President Jimmy Carter's Budget Director Burt Lance was forced to resign amid allegations about his bank dealings with Stephens (Stephens and Carter were classmates at the Naval Academy). In 1978, Stephens, Lance and BCCI were charged with violating U.S. security laws. The charges were dropped after the defendants promised not to violate security laws in the future, even though they admitted no guilt.

The New York Post reported in February 1992 that it was Stephens who enabled BCCI to gain a foothold in the U.S. and helped the fraud-plagued bank secretly acquire U.S. banks. In Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin's book, False Profits, perhaps the best account of the BCCI scandal, the authors outlined how opium revenue from Afghanistan Mujahedin fighting the Soviets ended up in the accounts of BCCI, founded by Agha Hasan Abedi. The Post reported that Stephens allegedly introduced Abedi to Lance shortly after Lance resigned.

In 1991, Lance testified that he urged Abedi to acquire a Washington bank holding company, but he denied any knowledge of BCCI's subsequent secret ownership of First American Bankshares. The Post reported that Securities and Exchange Commission documents from 1977 substantiate that the idea originated with Stephens.

During Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential run, Stephens and his son Warren boasted of raising more than $100,000 for the campaign. The Stephens family also owned a 38 percent share in Worthen National Bank that extended a crucial $2 million line of credit to Clinton in January 1992.

-snip

http://www.ohiocitizen.org/campaigns/wti/bob.html

[billbuckhead]

3. Sounds good to me

Advancing women and ecology.

[MethuenProgressive]

4. great quote:

“Did Hillary like all of Wal-Mart practices? No,” said Garry Mauro, a longtime friend and supporter of the Clintons who sat on the Wal-Mart Environmental Advisory Board with Mrs. Clinton in the late 1980s and worked with her on George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.

“But,” Mr. Mauro added, “was Wal-Mart a better company, with better practices, because Hillary was on the board? Yes.”
------------
Thanks for the link!

[asjr]

5. Probably a greeter.

[juno jones]

9. Michelle worked for a Wal-Mart supplier...Hillary was on the effin WM board of directors.

A little different, methinks. Apples and Oranges. Sure glad Hill made the Wal-mart experience better for the working human. on edit: Considering the wages and bennies are so low now, were the Wal-Mart board considering hiring prison labor for a buck an hour and Hil talked them out of it, thus saving the butts of the service class?....what, what, what, we're defending Wal-mart suddenly? On the grounds of 'hell, they could be worse'... And the fact she does not publicly renounce or explain her time there while 'distancing' is interesting too.Just like the IWR votes, Kyl-Liberman, etc.

[Fresh_Start]

12. I'm not drawing any comparison

between Michelle and Hillary not in any post anywhere.

But you should note that both leading candidates are corporate lawyers, defending corporations.
My candidate is the anti-corporate lawyer.