Hillary’s Defense Dough
By Ruth Conniff, December 2007 Issue
As much as the anti-war Left has tried to push Hillary Clinton on her vote to go to war in Iraq and her statements on Iran, maybe the most important questions the frontrunner should answer now are what role private contractors should play in these wars, how they should be monitored, and whether there is a conflict of interest for public officials who take their money.
By Ruth Conniff, December 2007 Issue
In the so-called money primary, Democrats are running a lap ahead of the Republicans, and Hillary Clinton is crushing the other Democrats.
The candidates’ third quarter reports, released in mid-October, showed that Hillary had raised $90.9 million. That exceeds her $75 million goal for 2007, the Center for Responsive Politics points out, noting that Hillary is asking her big donors, the “Hillraisers,” to come up with $1 million a piece—ten times what George W. Bush asked his elite donors, the Pioneers, to pony up. Barack Obama is running second to Hillary, at $80.2 million, while Mitt Romney has raised $62.8 million and Rudy Giuliani is at $47.3 million.
But the big news is the massive contributions by defense contractors to Hillary. Talk about “making history.”
The defense sector as a whole gave Hillary $122,988 this quarter, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, compared with Romney’s $82,975, Giuliani’s $58,400, and Obama’s $57,990. Only Chris Dodd, who has a major General Dynamics submarine project in Groton, Connecticut, fared better than Hillary, with $168,900.
Reversing their historical pattern of giving lopsidedly to Republicans, employees of the nation’s biggest weapons makers chose Hillary as their candidate, reports Thomas Edsall, Columbia journalism professor and Huffington Post political editor. Analyzing records of individual candidate contributions of $500 or more, Edsall found that employees of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon gave Democratic Presidential candidates $103,900 and Republicans only $86,800 in the third quarter. That’s a big vote of confidence for the Democratic Party, and particularly the frontrunner.
“The contributions clearly suggest that the arms industry has reached the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed,” Edsall writes.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Clinton has befriended the defense industry (the contractors tend to be big donors to members on Armed Services, who control their access to lucrative government contracts). She has also issued calls for beefing up the military, increasing troop strength in Iraq and, most recently, refusing to discount the possibility of war with Iran.
But taking money from big military contractors isn’t the most troublesome fundraising issue in the current election season. The more worrisome group of donors is the private contractors that have been quietly taking over the war business from the military. It’s one thing to endorse boondoggle weapons programs like Star Wars, as Hillary did, or bring home the bacon for the base in your state, like Dodd. But the rise of the mercenary industry is a new threat to our democracy.
Democrats have begun to question the lack of accountability and oversight of such Iraq War profiteers as Halliburton and Blackwater. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, held hearings on the issue, explaining that Congress doesn’t even know how much money these private contractors receive or how they spend it. And despite being a favorite Senator of General Dynamics, well before the Democrats regained Congress, Dodd introduced an amendment after Abu Ghraib to prevent the use of private military contractors for interrogations.
But now the construction and mercenary firms in Iraq have been reaching out to Democrats. “As Democrats continue to spearhead oversight efforts, defense contractors are swiftly hiring lobbyists with Democratic ties,” writes Lindsay Renick Mayer of the Center for Responsive Politics.
To help answer questions about a rash of killings by his employees in Iraq, Erik Prince, the founder and CEO of Blackwater, hired the PR and lobbying firm run by Hillary Clinton’s top campaign strategist, Mark Penn. Penn is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, whose lobbying arm, BKSH, prepped Prince for his testimony.
Among the other companies in the metastasizing war profiteering network is the Fluor Group, which testified before Waxman’s committee about its construction contracts in Iraq. Fluor gave Hillary Clinton $5,000 in the 2006 election cycle, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics.
As much as the anti-war Left has tried to push Hillary Clinton on her vote to go to war in Iraq and her statements on Iran, maybe the most important questions the frontrunner should answer now are what role private contractors should play in these wars, how they should be monitored, and whether there is a conflict of interest for public officials who take their money.
Ruth Conniff is the political editor of The Progressive.
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On January 9, 1909, Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin founded La Follette's Weekly to be "a magazine of progress, social, intellectual, institutional." The goal, he wrote, was "winning back for the people the complete power over government — national, state, and municipal — which has been lost to them." He attacked private greed in the form of corporate monopolies that hoarded power. He championed the public interest, campaigning for social and economic justice. And he urged the United States not to entangle itself in foreign wars.
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Matthew Rothschild, Editor
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and social justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on Nightline, C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his newspaper commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, and a host of other newspapers. Rothschild is also the author of a book entitled You Have No Rights: Stories of America in Our Repressive Age (New Press, 2007). A graduate of Harvard University, Rothschild prior to coming to The Progressive worked as the editor of Multinational Monitor, a magazine founded by Ralph Nader. Rothschild came to The Progressive in 1983, and has worked for the magazine in many different capacities, first as associate editor, then managing editor, then publisher, and since 1994 as editor. Rothschild brought on distinguished social critics as columnists, including Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, and Howard Zinn. He added monthly original poetry from the likes of Martín Espada and Adrienne Rich, and he added the humorists Kate Clinton and Will Durst. On the magazine's website, Rothschild contributes several times a week with his "This Just In" commentaries. And he keeps a running tally of civil liberties infringements in his "McCarthyism Watch." Rothschild writes monthly in The Progressive. He has interviewed Senator Russ Feingold, singer Ani DiFranco, Robert Redford, and the journalist Robert Fisk. He also hosts Progressive Radio, a syndicated weekly half-hour program, and he does radio commentaries Monday through Friday. Rothschild is also the co-founder and director of The Progressive Media Project, which since 1993 has been distributing opinion pieces to newspapers around the country in an effort to diversify and democratize the national debate. In 2007, Rothschild published his first book, You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression (The New Press). In 2009, he edited Democracy in Print: The Best of The Progressive, 1909-2009 (Univ. of Wisconsin Press).
Amitabh Pal, Managing Editor
Amitabh Pal came to the Progressive Media Project, an affiliate of The Progressive magazine, in 1997 as the associate editor. A few years later, he became the managing editor of The Progressive magazine. And for the last several years, he has served both in that capacity and as the co-editor of the Progressive Media Project. For The Progressive, Pal has written several articles on nonviolence, including a profile of Badshah Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. For The Progressive, he has interviewed Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and Joseph Stiglitz. He also is finishing up his first book about nonviolent activism in Muslim societies, forthcoming from Praeger.
Ruth Conniff, Political Editor
Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio programs. Conniff was a regular on CNN's Sunday Capital Gang and is now a regular on PBS's To the Contrary. She also has appeared frequently on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and on NPR and Pacifica. Conniff's op-ed commentaries have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. She also contributes regularly to Isthmus, Madison's weekly newspaper. Conniff became The Progressive's Associate Editor in 1991, and Managing Editor in January 1997. In recent years, she has interviewed William Greider, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth DiNovella, Culture Editor
Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive magazine. She writes about activism, politics, music, books, and film. She also produces Progressive Radio, a thirty-minute public affairs program hosted by Matthew Rothschild.
In recent years, she has interviewed Amy Goodman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Elena Poniatoska for The Progressive.
DiNovella joined The Progressive staff in 2001. She became Associate Editor in 2002 and Culture Editor in 2003.
Before working for The Progressive, DiNovella was the News and Public Affairs Director at WORT-FM, the community radio station of Madison, Wisconsin. She now volunteers in the news department at WORT-FM.
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