Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumThis is SO shocking & makes me wonder if guilt is why Hillary made up a story about Nancy Reagan.
The year Bill Clinton became governor of Arkansas, that states prison board awarded a fat contract to a Little Rock company called Health Management Associates, or HMA. The company was paid $3 million a year to run medical services for the states prison system, which had been blasted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court as an evil place run by some evil men.
snip
HMA not only made money from providing medical care to prisoners, but it also started a profitable side venture: blood mining. The company paid prisoners $7 per pint of their blood. HMA then sold the blood on the international plasma market for $50 a pint, splitting the proceeds 50/50 with the Arkansas Department of Corrections. Since Arkansas is one of the few states that does not pay prisoners for their labor, inmates were frequent donors at the so-called blood clinic.
snip
When American drug companies and blood fractionizers stopped buying blood taken from prisoners in the early 1980s, HMA turned to the international blood market, ...But the prime buyer of HMAs tainted blood, largely drawn from Cummings Unit prisoners in Grady, Arkansas, was a notorious Canadian firm, called Continental Pharma Cryosan Ltd. Cryosan had a shady reputation in the medical industry.
snip
Dr. Francis Bud Henderson started HMA in the 1970s. As the company began to expand, he brought in a Little Rock banker named Leonard Dunn to run the firm. Dunn was a political ally and friend of the Clintons. He was appointed by Clinton to sit on the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission and served as finance chair of Clintons 1990 gubernatorial campaign. Later that same year, Dunn purchased the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan (later to achieve great notoriety in the Whitewater Scandal) from Clintons business partner, James McDougal. Dunn later served as chief of staff to Arkansas Lt. Governor, Winthrop Rockefeller.
snip
Dunns ties to Clinton served HMA well after the company came under scrutiny for both abusive treatment of prison patients and shoddy management of the blood center.
snip
When investigators began probing the companys practices, Dunn repeatedly boasted of his ties to Bill Clinton. Mr. Dunn spoke openly and freely and explained to these investigators that he was the financial portion of the corporation as well as its political arm, investigator Sam Probasco stated in his report. Dunn advised that he was close to Gov. Clinton as well as the majority of state politicians presently in office.
snip
Much of the blame for the problem landed on another Clinton pal, Art Lockhart, who was the head of the Arkansas Department of Corrections.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/04/arkansas-bloodsuckers-the-clintons-prisoners-and-the-blood-trade/
Long article so I've left lots out.
peacebird
(14,195 posts)Totally repugnant. Hillary is truly totally repugnant.
LiberalArkie
(15,715 posts)And somehow ending with Vince Foster killing himself by pulling the trigger of the gun with his thumb?
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)I never really followed all the scandals as I bought into the idea of the RW conspiracy against the Clintons.
LiberalArkie
(15,715 posts)You know, money is money.
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)More than 1000 Canadians who received plasma contaminated by that drawn from Arkansas prisoners were infected with HIV and 20,000 with hepatitis C.
In England, Lord Peter Archer of Sandwell began, in March 2007, a public inquiry into contaminated blood given to British hemophilia patients in the 1970s and 1980s. At the beginning of the inquiry, the number of deaths from blood contaminated with hepatitis C and HIV in England stood at 1,757 out of over 6,000 infected; blood extracted from Arkansas prisoners has been linked to this contamination.
http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=3732
The article doesn't mention the number of victims in other parts of the world where the blood was shipped but that it was shipped worldwide means that there was a lot of tainted blood.
One thing thing this article (Encyclopedia of Arkansas) does note is that Bill Clinton has never apologized.
What I absolutely can't get over is how I so bought into the spin their spin that there was a huge RW conspiracy against them. I so bought into the spin that I tuned all the scandals out. And what's more surprising is that from the get go I did not like Bill Clinton.I remember so clearly how disappointed I was that he won the nomination but that didn't stop me from thinking they were victims of baseless smear campaigns.
Anyway since coming across that Counterpunch article today, I spent the evening reading about the tainted prison blood. It is clear as day that in the 80s when the Reagans were ignoring AIDS (to put it politely) so were the Clintons. For Hillary now to look back at that time and imagine Nancy as helping AIDS is imo no different than Hillary looking back and imagining she dodged sniper fire.
winter is coming
(11,785 posts)snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)some degree sociopathic, until now I saw them as simply selfish, corrupt, power and money-hungry pols. But this puts a whole new light on them and it doesnt seem a stretch to use the word sociopath especially that Clinton has never apologized.
I know this may be old news to everybody else but I am completely blown away by this.
tk2kewl
(18,133 posts)are not part of bill and hillary's vocabulary