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2008 Presidential Elections

Clinton’s $109 million includes desi donor

By: Santosh :+: Under: 2008 Presidential Elections, Brown in America, Maccaca Crimewatch, Opinion, Politics
On: ⋅ April 7, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

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By now you’ve probably heard of the $109 million earnings of the Clintons since they left office in 2001, which some pundits predict could put the final nail in the coffin of a struggling Hillary Clinton campaign.

One the major donors of the Clintons’ fortune is InfoUSA founder, Vinod Gupta.
From TOI

An Indian-American technology entrepreneur, whose connections and largesse to the Clintons has been under scrutiny, is once again in the news following voluntary disclosure by the former First Couple that have earned $109 million in the eight years since they left the White House.

Vinod Gupta, whose own rags-to-riches, Nayala (UP) village to Nebraska tycoon story, is part of the Indian immigrant lore, paid Bill Clinton nearly $3.5 million on behalf of his firm InfoUSA, as the former First Couple parlayed their debt-laden exit from the White House into a $100 million-plus bonanza after 2000.

So who is this Vinod Gupta, you ask?

From Forbes:

Founder/CEO/Chairman of the Board/Director at
InfoUSA, Incorporated
Omaha, Nebraska
SERVICES / MARKETING SERVICES
Vinod Gupta founded the Company in February 1972 and has been Chairman of the Board of Directors since its incorporation. Mr. Gupta served as Chief Executive Officer of the Company from the time of its incorporation in 1972 until September 1997 and since August 1998. Mr. Gupta holds a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and an M.S. in Engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Nebraska. Mr. Gupta also was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nebraska and an Honorary Doctorate from the Indian Institute of Technology. Mr. Gupta was nominated and confirmed to be the United States Consul General to Bermuda. Then, the President nominated him to be the United States Ambassador to Fiji. Due to business commitments, he withdrew his name from consideration. He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a Trustee of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Mr. Gupta is also a director of a mutual fund in the Everest mutual fund family.

Impressive resume there, and the Clinton connection shows up even on his business profile.

Gupta gave $2 million to IIT Kharagpur and has a management school there named after him. He also gave $1 million to the same institution to setup the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law. [Wiki]

Vinod Gupta was also involved in the controversial SalesGenie SuperBowl commercial from earlier this year. [NYT] [Über Desi]

As for Gupta’s firm , InfoUSA through which he contributed money to the Clinton campaign, the firm has, in the past, been accused of exploiting senior citizens.
2007 story on SAJAForum:

Two desi connections to a sad, maddening investigative story in Sunday’s NYT story by Charles Duhigg - “Bilking the Elderly, With A Corporate Assist” - about lonely old people (including a 92-year-old army veteran named Richard Guthrie) being cheated by scam artists. The first connection is in the opening sentence:
The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India. Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.
The second is the company that is implicated (though not formally charged) in this, infoUSA.

Some quick notes from the entire situation:
The wealth made by the Clintons appears to be controversial for two major reasons, that they made such a huge amount in a relatively short period (a large portion of money also came from book sales and speeches made by Bill Clinton) and a portion of the money appears to be from allegedly “tainted” sources like Vinod Gupta. Hillary Clinton, herself, is running on a broad range of social issues including appointing a “poverty czar” to combat poverty. Irrespective of what my feelings are on issues like amassing wealth and whether it is the government’s job to solve poverty, I have one major gripe with this entire situation. Normally I would not have a problem with someone amassing wealth or where their campaign money came from as long as the candidate (or their team) collected it legally. But Hillary Clinton is running on a populist platform of providing low cost/free health care and combating poverty. Yet she continues to funnel campaign money from sources that have been accused of scamming the same people, she claims to be fighting for and that, in my opinion, is a problem.

I put it forth to our readers. Please share your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below and keep it clean.

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