Lipsky Defends Clinton’s Pardon of Marc Rich « Tikun Olam-תיקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Lipsky Defends Clinton’s Pardon of Marc Rich

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 12:26 AM and is filed under Mideast Peace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Lipsky Defends Clinton’s Pardon of Marc Rich”

americangoy says:

December 8, 2008 at 7:58 PM

“As for whether Bill Clinton was channeling the founding fathers when he gave Marc Rich a free pass–that’s true only if the latter were greedy, unprincipled SOBs who believed doing favors for their friends, allies and fixers took precedence over the national interest. Only if the founders believed that lobbying by foreign powers and those associated with them should take precedence over sound judicial practice.”

Bravo Mr. Silverstein.

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mia says:

December 9, 2008 at 3:03 PM

I was curious about Marc Rich’s philanthropic activities on behalf of Arabs and Palestinians. According to the Rich Foundation Web site “over 20 years more than $135’000’000 were allocated to approximately 4000 projects and individuals engaged in non-profit work in education, culture, social welfare and healthcare all over the world.” The global scope of the Rich Foundation’s activities is kind of staggering and while Israel is very well represented in their list of beneficiaries, the Foundation definitely helps a lot of people. I noted a program aimed at creating sign language for deaf Arabs, another that promoted expanded educational opportunities for Israeli Druze and Bedouin and funding to UNESCO, the Palestine Authority, Morocco, Kuwait and Uzbekistan. That’s not bad, even for an indicted tax evader.

I don’t know what drives Marc Rich, but whatever he is accused of having stolen from the US tax payer, he sure seems hell bent on trying to make up for it.

Nonetheless, Rich should have gone to trial. Now he can claim that he was never convicted – and he never was – and with the ill-advised Presidential pardon, the presumption of innocence weighs in his favor, no matter how distasteful.

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