Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish-born
billionaire best known for having founded the United States’ largest greek
yogurt company, Chobani, has ties to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, the
Clinton Global Initiative, Clinton campaign
chairman John Podesta, and a host of other globalist corporatist
figures including Warren Buffet. Chobani’s factory in Twin Falls –
the world’s largest yogurt factory – has been at the center of Breitbart News’
investigative series into the small town’s refugee resettlement program.
According to CNN Money:
starting in 2008, Chobani began to hire refugees to work in its upstate New
York plant – and listening to Ulukaya speak at events like the Clinton Global
Initiative and Davos, one can tell that the issue closest to his heart is
refugee resettlement.
The Chobani billionaire’s many speeches and
soliloquies on the issue of refugees combined with his extensive political
connections may explain why establishment politicians, both Republican and
Democrat, have swooned over Ulukaya, positively giddy to form “business /
government partnerships” with him and to support his position on refugees.
Many people first heard about the Twin Falls
refugee resettlement program when a five-year-old girl was raped at
the hands of three refugee boys. More recently, a Muslim refugee
molested a mentally
retarded woman. Those stories led to a look at the wider
conditions that led to refugee resettlement in the state of
Idaho, a situation connected to the drive for cheap labor by the local food
processing industry that Chobani is a major part of.
Who is Hamdi Ulukaya? His Forbes bio
says:
Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish founder of America’s
most popular Greek yogurt, Chobani, came to the U.S in 1994 to study business.
Seeing that yogurt wasn’t as natural and nutritious as it was at home, Ulukaya
created his own recipe and has since made a fortune from the nation’s Greek
yogurt craze. He started by buying a Kraft Foods yogurt plant in central New
York state with a loan from the Small Business Administration in 2005.
Although he’s hailed as an entrepreneur, in the era
of globalism, big government and big business are intermeshed and the rise of
Chobani is a prime example of this new reality. Hamdi Ulukaya has used local,
state and federal resources of the United States government at every stage
of his business growth.
Even since the $800,000 Small Business Administration loan that Ulukaya
took out to open his first factory, Ulukaya’s love affair with oligarchy
has only grown.
Take a major source of revenue for Chobani:
the federal school lunch program. Chobani is the main supplier of Greek yogurt
for the federal school system, and Ulukaya had no problem greasing the
wheels to make that happen, as the Albany Times Union reported last year:
With encouragement from (New York Senators) Schumer
and Gellibrand, Ulukaya and other New York Greek yogurt players entered the
Washington fray in 2012. They wanted to get into the USDA‘s $15 billion school lunch, breakfast and summer food
programs.
But access to those programs is more than just a
matter of a senator making a phone call to the secretary of agriculture.
Federal regulations spell out a lengthy bureaucratic process for gaining
admission.
Ulukaya and Chobani took the lead, enlisting a
lobbying firm, Cornerstone Government, and the National Yogurt Association to help them through the
technicalities. Agriculture experts on the staffs of Gillibrand and Schumer
pitched in as well.
According to the website Open Secrets, Chobani has spent over $700,000
on their lobbying efforts since 2012.
In December 2012, Chobani opened its second U.S. production facility – the
world’s largest yogurt plant in Twin Falls, Idaho – an announcement
that brought out local politicians from the Twin Falls city Council, like
then-Mayor Greg Lanting – who recently
apologized for his attack on the family of the five-year-old
refugee rape victim – as well as Idaho’s Republican Governor “Butch”
Otter.
But one of Ulukaya’s biggest fans appears to be
Bill Clinton. As Chobani’s owner began spending cash on lobbying and hobnobbing
with the globalist smart set, he garnered effusive praise from the former
President:
“It’s an astonishing story … it’s an amazing story
… it’s breathtaking,” gushed former President Bill Clinton during a 2013 Clinton Global Initiative
(CGI) panel discussion featuring Ulukaya.
Ulukaya has made a number of appearances at CGI,
including a one-on-one with Bill Clinton in 2015 where Al-Monitor reported that Ulukaya spoke about advancing
refugee migration into the U.S. and around the world, saying that “writing
checks is not enough.”
Being an invited guest of the Clinton Global
Initiative to push a refugee agenda wasn’t Ulukaya’s only globalist gig.
In January 2016, CNN Money reported that Ulukaya officially launched his
Tent Foundation, “a personal foundation focused on helping refugees,” listing
its founding partners as including such big-name companies as “Airbnb, Ikea
Foundation, MasterCard, LinkedIn, UPS Foundation and Western Union.” Also in
January 2016, PR News Wire put up a press release stating that the Tent
Foundation’s main three focuses will be some combination of “direct giving”,
“generating employment opportunities for refugees”, and “incentivizing partners
to source products and services from companies that employ refugees and their
host communities, or support refugee causes.” This would include Chobani,
Ulukaya’s own company.
Ulukaya used oligarchy buzzwords to say he founded
the Tent
Foundation, “a platform for corporate leaders to join forces to more
effectively leverage the support, ingenuity and dynamism of the world’s
businesses to help end the refugee crises.“ In September 2015, The
Tent Foundation released a publication with Clinton campaign Chairman John
Podesta’s Center for American Progress titled Crisis in Context about
the current state of refugee affairs around the world, according to CAP.
Longtime Clinton associate John Podesta is
currently one of the key leaders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for
President.
Ulukaya lives in the rarefied world of the “doing
well while doing good” crowd, a loose affiliation of millionaires and
billionaires whose supposed altruism always seems to pay off handsomely for
them.
In May 2015, Chobani’s owner joined forces with
the Giving Pledge: Now a billionaire, Ulukaya pledges the majority
of his personal wealth “to help refugees and help bring an end to this
humanitarian crisis.” He does this through the Giving Pledge, an organization
started by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. As a recent story by reporter Michael
Patrick Leahy points out, Buffet also helped finance the local Twin
Falls newspaper the Times-News, which has defended the refugee program and
repeatedly attacks critics of the refugee program as racist:
The daily paper, which operates as, in effect, a
local monopoly in the small southern Idaho city at the center of a sexual
assault of a 5 -year-old American-born girl involving three Muslim refugee
boys, is owned by Lee Enterprises, which received a $2.1 million loan in 2012 and another $9 million loan in 2013 from a subsidiary of Berkshire
Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by globalist billionaire
Warren Buffett, an ardent supporter who endorsed Hillary Clinton in December.
Though both loans appear to have been paid back,
Berkshire Hathaway had a four percent ownership interest in Lee Enterprises in
2012, an equity interest which has diminished to less than one percent in 2016.
Refugee advocate Hamdi Ulukaya is also on the boards of
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – while still being a
Turkish citizen – and has been named Eminent Advocate for the United
Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). In January 2016, the BBC reported
that Ulukaya made an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he
called on more businesses to begin taking in refugees as workers, stating that
it is “mind-blowing” how little firms are doing to economically integrate
refugees.
Years of stroking the establishment paid off once
again though for Ulukaya earlier this year when Presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton released an official statement from the campaign
praising Ulukaya, giving his company a vast amount of free media:
When Hamdi Ulukaya founded Chobani in upstate New
York more than a decade ago, he knew that to build a strong company, he needed
a strong workforce. That’s why from the beginning, he paid his employees
salaries above minimum wage and offered health and retirement benefits, and
hired hundreds of refugees who came to America, as he did, looking for a
brighter future.
For those who think you can’t buy that kind of
advertising, it seems that perhaps you can, after all.
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