Bill Clinton Was Paid $400K By Singapore Company That Was Scamming Its Employees

The Internet was littered with scam warnings from small-time contractors who claimed they had been ripped off by Singapore-based UNI Strategic, but that didn’t seem to bother the State Department or Bill Clinton.

The agency, headed at the time by Hillary Clinton, signed off on a Nov. 14, 2010, speech delivered by the former president on behalf of UNI at the Presidential World Economic Forum held in Taipei, Taiwan.

The payday: $400,000.

Clinton’s speech was not remarkable, but it probably didn’t have to be. He spoke about the global economy, economic inequality and global warming in front of an audience of around 2,000 — eager to hear from an American politician of Clinton’s stature.

But while UNI could afford to pay Clinton a one-percenter’s annual salary, the company was ripping off a slew of contractors it had hired to provide training in various Asian nations.

Internet message boards, scam alert websites and independent blogs show up at the top of searches for UNI, which was founded in 2002 and specializes in workshops for governmental organizations and multinational corporations on a variety of topics.

It is unclear if UNI’s dastardly deeds were as well-known in 2010, but complaints stretch back to well before Clinton’s speech, and would seemingly have been easy to discover by anyone who cared to look.

Via: Daily Caller

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US drops to 18th most economically free country

At its pinnacle in 2000, the United States ranked second in the world for economic freedom. In the latest report on world economic freedom from the Fraser Institute, the U.S. has now dropped all the way down to 18th, falling behind countries like Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Estonia, Taiwan and Qatar.

The decline did not happen overnight. “This entire decade we’ve been sliding towards this 18th ranking,” report author Joshua Hall explained to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2005, the United States had already dropped to eighth in economic freedom. In 2009, the U.S. fell behind welfare state countries like Denmark, Finland and Canada.

“When people think of Canada, they think of socialized medicine, but in many facets of life, Canada is a lot more economically free than the United States,” said Hall.

The annual report uses 42 different variables that can be categorized into five distinct categories: size of government, legal system and property rights, sound money, freedom of trade internationally and regulation.

The growth of government and less secure property rights have the most to do with the United States’ drop.

“I think we think of the underlying causes of our decline in legal system and property rights, the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision [over eminent domain], the war on terror, and things related to the rule of law, things like TARP and the bail outs, have all contributed to the decline of scores in areas one and two,” Hall explained.

The Daily Caller

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