Bernie Sanders, a principled liberal, does not like corporate welfare. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has built a successful career (and massive fortune) by trafficking in corporate welfare. Many of Clinton's close friends and associates have also gotten a piece of the action. People like Claudio Osorio, a Miami businessman currently serving 12 years in federal prison for defrauding the U.S. government. Osorio sought and received help from both Bill and Hillary Clinton in obtaining a $10 million loan from the taxpayer-backed Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) in 2010 for a housing project in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. It was all a scam. But that's what friends are for.
Some on the right have recently compared OPIC to the Export-Import Bank, describing it as a corporate welfare program for massive companies and Wall Street banks. Principled liberals such as Bernie Sanders, though, have been denouncing OPIC since the mid-1990s. Here in then-Congressman Sanders speaking on the House floor in September 1996, two months before Bill Clinton was elected to a second term:
Mr. Speaker, let us be frank. Exxon, Ford, Citibank, and DuPont are profitable multibillion dollar corporations who pay their CEO's millions of dollars in salary. These companies do not need OPIC corporate welfare payments from the taxpayers of this country to provide them with incentives to invest abroad. Incentives to invest abroad.
At a time when some Members of this body are proposing huge cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, veterans programs, environmental protection, it is totally absurd to increase the amount of corporate welfare that we provide to these huge profitable corporations.
Not only is this a bad deal for taxpayers, it is bad economic development and job creation. Many of these same corporations are downsizing, laying off hundreds of thousands of American workers. Our policy should not be to encourage these companies to invest abroad, our policy should be to demand that these companies reinvest in the United States of America, in the State of Vermont, all over this country, and create decent paying jobs here.
Let us vote no on this OPIC corporate welfare program.
Of the four companies Sanders mentioned—Exxon, Ford, Citibank, and DuPont—three are generous donors to the Clinton Foundation. Citibank is also the single largest source of campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton over the course of her political career. Citibank and Exxon are also members of a corporate coalition backing the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, a job-killing measure opposed by Bernie Sanders and other principled liberals such as Elizabeth Warren. Hillary Clinton doesn't really have a position on the TPP, even though she repeatedly praised it as the "gold standard" of trade agreement during her time as Secretary of State.