Hillary's being swift-boated because she's advocated for "micro-finance" since 1983 -- the opposite

[pnwmom]

of big banking.

One of the (less than 1% of) Clinton Foundation donors she has met with or called was the Nobel-prize winning economist who first developed the concept.

The AP featured her meetings with him as a sign of something shady going on, even though she's been talking and working with him since 1983. His being a Clinton foundation donor had nothing to do with his access to her.

But his promotion of a concept that threatened big banks' lock on the market certainly has something to do with Hillary herself being targeted. She's being swift boated. A strength of hers is being turned into the opposite . . . and the AP and most of the media is playing along.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/08/24/how-the-ap-spun-the-story-about-the-clinton-foundation/#.V72vJUbthsT.facebook

But here is where the AP blew their story. In an attempt to provide an example of how this becomes an “optics” problem for Hillary Clinton, they focused much of the article on the fact that she met several times with Muhammad Yunus, a Clinton Foundation donor. In case you don’t recognize that name, he is an economist from Bangladesh who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance as a way to fight poverty, and founded Grameen Bank. For those efforts, Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.

The connection the AP tries to make is that SoS Clinton met with Yunus because he was a Clinton Foundation donor. What they didn’t mention is that their relationship goes back over 30 years to the time Hillary (as first lady of Arkansas) heard about his work and brought him to her state to explore the possibility of implementing microfinance programs to assist the poor.

During the time that Clinton was Secretary of State, the government of Bangladesh was trying to discredit Yunus and remove him from leadership at Grameen Bank due to the fact that he was seen as a political threat. In case you think Clinton’s engagement on that presents and “optics” problem, consider this press release from then-Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry.

I am deeply concerned by efforts to remove Muhammad Yunus as managing director of the Grameen Bank. The international community will watch this situation closely, and I hope that both sides can reach a compromise that maintains Grameen Bank’s autonomy and effectiveness. Institutions like the Grameen Bank make a significant contribution to Bangladesh’s development and democracy and Professor Yunus’s life-long work to reduce poverty and empower women through microloans has deservedly received world-wide attention and respect.