By David A. Fahrenthold, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman June 2, 2015
Chevy Chase was on the plane with Bill Clinton. So was a former president of Brazil. The founders of Google. A former president of Mexico. And John Cusack.
They were all going to Davos, the Swiss resort that holds an annual conclave of the wealthy and powerful. The jet — arranged by a Saudi businessman — provided a luxurious living-room setting for a rolling discussion: Couldn’t the big names at Davos be doing more to solve the world’s big problems?
In the background, a Clinton staff member named Doug Band had an idea that would change the ex-president’s life.
“Only Bill Clinton could bring a group like this together,” Band thought.
Bill Clinton didn’t need Davos. He could do this himself.
Bill Clinton, center, talks with members of a for-profit farming cooperative in Haiti in February. (Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters)
From that revelation came the Clinton Global Initiative — an annual gathering of the wealthy and powerful centered not on a place but on a man. In the decade since, that program has become the public face of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the sprawling organization that is now at the center of the Clintons’ public and professional lives and a springboard for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Today, the Clinton Foundation is unlike anything else in the history of the nation and, perhaps, the world: It is a global philanthropic empire run by a former U.S. president and closely affiliated with a potential future president, with the audacious goal of solving some of the world’s most vexing problems by bringing together the wealthiest, glitziest and most powerful people from every part of the planet.
The evolution of the foundation, which began as a modest nonprofit focused largely on the ex-president’s library in Arkansas, is a nearly perfect reflection of the Clintons themselves. It was not designed as a master plan but rather has grown, one brainstorm at a time, in accordance with the ambitious, loyal, restless and often scattered nature of its primary namesake. Many programs were sparked by chance encounters in Bill Clinton’s life. A meeting with a Harlem shopkeeper. A friend’s plan to fight AIDS. The flight to Davos. Emergency heart surgery.
moreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee of course
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-inside-story-of-how-the-clintons-built-a-2-billion-global-empire/2015/06/02/b6eab638-0957-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html
| 
