Leid Stories

Election 2016 should be the Year of the Third Parties, given the palpable dissatisfaction among voters, building over several years, with both the Democrats and the Republicans. Yet the duopoly dominates the field of political choice, as they do the political process. In this respect, this election cycle remarkably will be like previous elections—essentially a contest between two wings of the same flightless bird, with only token opposition from “third” parties.

What accounts for this? Dr. J. David Gillespie, author of Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics, explains.

A party delegate/superdelegate vote, not the popular vote, decided who the duopoly’s presidential nominees would be. Come November, the United States Electoral College, not voters directly, officially will decide on who the president and vice president of the United States will be.

Dr. David Brady, the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy professor of political science in the Stanford Graduate School of Business, discusses the Electoral College, its historic role in the political process, and whether it is an impediment to democracy.

With the summer break ending, school districts all across the country are humming with activity, preparing for a new school year. Not so in Detroit, where the state’s largest school district, still under state-imposed emergency management, remains mired in a series of overlapping crises—fiscal, political, administrative and pedagogical—that appear certain to doom any hopes for a productive new year.

Elena Herrada, an elected member of the “old” school board whose authority over local education was overridden by the state, explains the dire situation with education in her home town.

Detroit is in its third year of servicing a $20-billion debt under the strict terms imposed by a federal court. Those terms have caused an evisceration of budgets for essential services and practically a bargain-basement giveaway of its land and municipal assets to the politically well-connected.

In a related report, Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African News Wire and a Detroit organizer for the Workers World Party, provides updates on foreclosures and water shutoffs by the city and its “re-imagining” of Detroit to attract a “different” population.

Dr. Julius Garvey, son of the Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, discusses a years-long effort to clear his father’s name and reputation via a presidential pardon. The founder and driving force behind the first global Black nationalist movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), in 1923 was convicted in a rigged federal trial of wire fraud. Garvey’s conviction served as the basis for his deportation back to Jamaica and, eventually, destroy the UNIA-ACL.

Dr. Julius Garvey and several noteworthy organizations and individuals in recent years have been pressing for a presidential pardon of the revered leader by President Barack Obama, but so far have received no encouraging signs. 

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who for six years stonewalled Haitians’ claims that poor sanitation practices of U.N.-supervised troops stationed in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake caused a cholera epidemic that has left 10,000 dead and 800,000 infected, now admits responsibility. But not total responsibility—as an official statement released Aug. 19 suggests.

Veteran journalist and documentarian Kim Ives, editor of Haïti Liberté and Leid Stories correspondent on Haiti, discusses Ban Ki-moon’s stonewalling on this critical matter and the impact it continues to have on Haiti and the Haitian diaspora.

The U.N.’s six-year negation of responsibility did not go unchallenged. Brian Concannon and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, which he directs, are among a small but formidable coalition pushing hard for legal redress for Haiti’s cholera victims under international law. He discusses that ongoing effort and what happens now, with the U.N.’s admission of responsibility.

Charles Ortel wraps up his exclusive, weeklong special reports on The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation with a Q&A session.

Ortel (charlesortel.com), a former Wall Street banker and investor, gained international attention when he independently proved that General Electric and, later, insurance giant AIG were engaging in fraud.

Ortel since February last year has been doing his own investigation of the Clinton foundation. He told Leid Stories he has found overwhelming evidence of “massive” charities fraud.

Whistleblower Charles Ortel’s investigations into the operations of The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and its global network of affiliated “philanthropic” organizations have led him to a startling conclusion: The foundation has engaged in, and continues to engage in, massive fraud and illegal conduct.

Since May, Ortel has been spelling out in great detail how a project chartered initially to build a presidential library and research facility in Arkansas, President Clinton’s home state, illegally was morphed into a global pseudo-philanthropic conglomerate that raked in billions of dollars, ostensibly to support the foundation’s “charity” work. But Ortel says the evidence clearly shows the foundation was operating almost all of its projects illegally, and many major “donations” it received were from foreign governments and well-placed corporations seeking political favors from the Clintons.

The “developing world” has been, and still is, a billion-dollar bonanza for the Clintons’ coffers, says Ortel. Often besieged by humanitarian crises, the international community responds generously to countries in dire need. The Clintons, who keep watchful eyes on countries’ misery index, find ingenious ways to corral sizable portions of available humanitarian cash.

Charles Ortel, a former Wall Street banker and investor who exposed General Electric’s massive fraud in 2007-2008 by proving that it had overvalued its stock by hundreds of billions of dollars, for several months has been deconstructing the highly irregular inner workings of the Clinton Foundation and related entities operating “charitable” programs all over the world.

But the foundation and its projects are in flagrant violation of U.S. and international law, Ortel says. While their stated purposes are philanthropic, he says, the foundation and its various offshoots appear to be an elaborate, multibillion-dollar slush fund for the Clintons, who have been able to run a renegade operation without tight oversight.

Continuing Leid Stories’ close look at the foundation and its various “charities,” Ortel today focuses on The Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, which it launched in 2009 in partnership with leading drug manufacturers “to improve treatment access for people with drug-resistant HIV in developing nations.”

Following yesterday’s discussion, Charles Ortel returns with more on the Clinton Foundation:

House and Senate Republicans, convinced that the Obama administration is blocking their efforts to probe and expose serious ethical and criminal violations allegedly committed by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, have intensified their campaign. The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and several of its affiliated organizations once again are at the center of the legislators’ focus as they look into how the Clintons funneled through them hundreds of millions of dollars in “charitable donations” that appear to be linked to political favors for the donors.

And new—and very troubling—evidence showing the Clintons’ stranglehold on Haiti, their foundation’s prized “possession.”

Ortel since May has been filing regular investigative reports on Leid Stories about the Clintons and their various global “charities.” A former Wall Street banker and investor, his digging into the financials of General Electric in 2007-2008 proved that the conglomerate had fraudulently overvalued its stock by hundreds of billions of dollars.

With great media fanfare, the Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine Democratic presidential ticket released its tax returns Friday, with Clinton taunting Republican nominee Donald Trump to do the same in the interest of “transparency.”

Clinton’s tax records were for 2015; Kaine’s, for the last 10 years. But Clinton’s tax records appeared to have been prepared in such a way as to minimize income derived from the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and several subsidiaries related to the mega enterprise, which our guest, former Wall Street banker and investor Charles Ortel, says has been engaging in massive fraud under the guise of philanthropy.

Ortel, who since May has been filing regular investigative reports on Leid Stories about the Clintons and their various global “charities,” reveals in today’s report that several governments have opened up far-reaching investigations into the Clinton Foundation and several of its “initiatives” in their countries  about which they have serious questions. Several U.S. states also have initiated probes, and members of Congress are pushing for federal investigations.

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