Tim Stanley

Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website iswww.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter@timothy_stanley.

The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for Bill and Hillary

By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: August 14th, 2013

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An internal review of the Clinton Foundations' workings has proved troubling

Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation – that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

Over a year ago Bill Clinton met with some aides and lawyers to review the Foundation's progress and concluded that it was a mess. Well, many political start-ups can be, especially when their sole selling point is the big name of their founder (the queues are short at the Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center). But what complicated this review – what made its findings more politically devastating – is that the Clinton Foundation has become about more than just Bill. Now both daughter Chelsea and wife, and likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton have taken on major roles and, in the words of the NYT "efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs Clinton’s political future." Oh, they're entangled alright.

The NYT runs the scoop in its usual balanced, inoffensive way – but the problem jumps right off the page. The Clintons have never been able to separate the impulses to help others and to help themselves, turning noble philanthropic ventures into glitzy, costly promos for some future campaign (can you remember a time in human history when a Clinton wasn't running for office?). And their "Ain't I Great?!" ethos attracts the rich and powerful with such naked abandon that it ends up compromising whatever moral crusade they happen to have endorsed that month. That the Clinton Global Initiative is alleged to have bought Natalie Portman a first-class ticket for her and her dog to attend an event in 2009 is the tip of the iceberg. More troubling is that businessmen have been able to expand the profile of their companies by working generously alongside the Clinton Foundation. From the NYT:

Last year, Coca-Cola’s chief executive, Muhtar Kent, won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton, discussing the company’s partnership with another nonprofit to use its distributors to deliver medical goods to patients in Africa. (A Coca-Cola spokesman said that the company’s sponsorship of foundation initiatives long predated Teneo and that the firm plays no role in Coca-Cola’s foundation work.)

In March 2012, David Crane, the chief executive of NRG, an energy company, led a widely publicized trip with Mr. Clinton to Haiti, where they toured green energy and solar power projects that NRG finances through a $1 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative.

This is typical Clinton stuff. The second thing I ever wrote for this website was about how corporations invest in politicians as a way of building their brand and raising their stock price. It can lead to some funny partnerships. This, from 2011:

Just this month, bedding manufacturer Serta announced that it will be sponsoring Bill Clinton’s keynote address to an industry conference in August. "To us,"’ said the head of the company, "Clinton represents leadership. This appearance shows Serta is a leader and is taking a leadership position. This singles us out." Some might say that it is beneath a former president to basically endorse Serta’s new "Perfect Sleeper" line, even with its "revolutionary gel foam mattress".

The cynical might infer from the NYT piece that the Clintons are willing to sell themselves, their image, and even their Foundation's reputation in exchange for money to finance their personal projects. In Bill's case, saving the world. In Hillary's case, maybe, running for president.

It's nothing new to report that there's an unhealthy relationship in America between money and politics, but it's there all the same. While the little people are getting hit with Obamacare, high taxes and joblessness, a class of businessmen enjoys ready access to politicians of both Left and Right that poses troubling questions for how the republic can continue to call itself a democracy so long as it functions as an aristocracy of the monied. Part of the reason why America's elites get away with it is becuase they employ such fantastic salesmen. For too long now, Bill Clinton has pitched himself, almost without question, as a homespun populist: the Boy from Hope. The reality is that this is a man who – in May 1993 – prevented other planes from landing at LAX for 90 minues while he got a haircut from a Beverley Hills hairdresser aboard Air Force One. The Clintons are populists in the same way that Barack Obama is a Nobel prize winner. Oh, wait

New revelation explains why no Benghazi air support? Attorney for whistleblowers speaks out

1 Klein Online by Staff  /  3h  //  keep unread  //  preview New revelation explains why no Benghazi air support? Attorney for whistleblowers speaks out +TAG By Aaron Klein Does a new claim from an attorney representing Benghazi whistleblowers explain why air support was never sent to the doomed Benghazi facility the night of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack? The claim may also help to explain why it took hours for an American-provided C-130 cargo plane to take off from Tripoli for the short flight to Benghazi to help evacuate survivors. Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney who represents Benghazi whistleblowers, stated 400 surface-to-air missiles were “taken from Libya” during the attacks and that the U.S. fears the missiles can be used to down aircraft. DiGenova told WMAL radio in Washington, D.C., he “does not know whether [the missiles] were at the annex, but it is clear the annex was somehow involved in the distribution of those missiles.” KleinOnline was first to report that in a largely unnoticed speech to a think tank seven months before the Benghazi attack, a top State Department official described an unprecedented multi-million-dollar U.S. effort to secure anti-aircraft weapons in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gadhafi’s regime. The official, Andrew J. Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, explained that U.S. experts were fully coordinating the collection efforts with the Libyan opposition. He said the efforts were taking place in Benghazi, where a leading U.S. expert was deployed. Now diGenova is connecting the missiles to the Benghazi attack He said his information “comes from a former intelligence official who stayed in constant contact with people in the special ops and intelligence community.” He stated the Obama administration is worried the missile can target airliners. “They are worried, specifically according to these sources, about an attempt to shoot down an airliner,” he claimed. He continued: “And it’s pretty clear that the biggest concern right now are 400 missiles which have been diverted in Libya and have gotten in the hands of some very ugly people.” Anti-aircraft missiles in the hands of the Libyan rebels or other jihadists would have served as a major threat to any incoming U.S. aircraft sent to aid the American targets during the Benghazi attack. Such missiles also may have threatened the cargo plane that sat on the tarmac for hours in Tripoli before finally being dispatched in the early morning hours. The State Department had stated the plane took off only after securing it from the Libyan transitional government. MANPADS prompted Benghazi attacks? Shapiro conceded that the Western-backed rebels did not want to give up the weapons, particularly Man-Portable-Air-Defense-Systems, or MANPADS, which were the focus of the weapons collection efforts. The information may shed light on why the U.S. special mission in Benghazi was attacked Sept. 11, 2012. According to informed Middle Eastern security officials speaking to WND, the Benghazi mission was a planning headquarters for coordinating aid, including weapons distribution, to the jihadist-led rebels. After the fall of Gadhafi, the arming efforts shifted focus to aiding the insurgency targeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Two weeks after the Benghazi attack, KleinOnline broke the story that murdered U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens himself played a central role in arming rebels and recruiting jihadists to fight Assad’s regime in Syria, according to Egyptian security officials. In November 2012, Middle Eastern security sources further described both the U.S. mission and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi as the main intelligence and planning center for U.S. aid to the rebels that was being coordinated with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Many rebel fighters are openly members of terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida. Speaking to KleinOnline, Middle Eastern security officials further stated that after Gadhafi’s downfall, Stevens was heavily involved in the State Department effort to collect weapons from the Libyan rebels. The weapons were then transferred in part to the rebels fighting in Syria, the officials stated. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., last March disclosed in an interview with Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to keep weapons caches, particularly MANPADS, from falling into the hands of terrorists. Fox News host Bret Baier asked Graham why Stevens was in the Benghazi mission amid the many known security threats to the facility. Graham replied, “Because that’s where the action was regarding the rising Islamic extremists who were trying to get their hands on weapons that are flowing freely in Libya.” The senator stated, “We were desperately trying to control the anti-aircraft missiles, the MANPADS that were all over Libya, that are now all over the Mideast.” ‘Biggest MANPADS collection effort in U.S. history’ Now, Shapiro’s largely unnoticed remarks Feb. 2, 2012, may shed further light on the activities taking place inside the attacked Benghazi facility. Of note is that the U.S. facility itself was protected by the February 17 Brigades, which is part of the al-Qaida-allied Ansar Al-Sharia group. That group also was in possession of a significant quantity of MANPADS and was reluctant to give them up, Middle Eastern security officials told KleinOnline. In his speech seven months before the Benghazi attack, Shapiro stated that “currently in Libya we are engaged in the most extensive effort to combat the proliferation of MANPADS in U.S. history.” Shapiro was addressing a forum at the Stimson Center, a non-profit think tank that describes itself as seeking “pragmatic solutions for some of the most important peace and security challenges around the world.” Shapiro explained Libya had “accumulated the largest stockpile of MANPADS of any non-MANPADS producing country in the world.” Shapiro related how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton committed to providing $40 million dollars to assist Libya’s efforts to secure and recover its weapons stockpiles. Of that funding, $3 million went to unspecified nongovernmental organizations that specialize in conventional weapons destruction and stockpile security. Inside Benghazi facility The NGOs and a U.S. team coordinated all efforts with Libya’s Transitional National Council, or TNC, said Shapiro. The U.S. team was led by Mark Adams, a State Department expert from the MANPADS Task Force. Tellingly, Shapiro stated Adams was deployed in August 2011, not to Tripoli where the U.S. maintained an embassy, but to Benghazi. The only U.S. diplomatic presence in Benghazi consisted of the CIA annex and nearby facility that were the targets of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. Shapiro expounded on the coordination with the TNC. “A fact often overlooked in our response to events in Libya, is that – unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan – we did not have tens of thousands of U.S. forces on the ground, nor did we control movement and access,” he said. “This meant we did not have complete freedom of movement around the country. Our efforts on the ground therefore had to be carefully coordinated and fully supported by the TNC.” He said the rebels were reluctant to relinquish their weapons. “Many of these weapons were taken by militias and anti-Gadhafi forces during the fighting,” he said. “Furthermore, because many militias believe MANPADS have some utility in ground combat, many militia groups remain reluctant to relinquish them.” Shapiro said the U.S. efforts consisted of three phases. Phase I entailed an effort to rapidly survey, secure and disable loose MANPADS across the country. “To accomplish this, we immediately deployed our Quick Reaction Force, which are teams made up of civilian technical specialists,” he said. Phase 2 efforts were to help aid the Libyan government to integrate militias and veterans of the fighting, including consolidating weapons into secure facilities and assisting in the destruction of items that the Libyans deemed in excess of their security requirements. Such actions were likely not supported by the jihadist rebels. The third phase would have seen the U.S. help ensure the Libyans met modern standards, including updating storage facilities, improving security and implementing safety management practices. The U.S. efforts clearly failed. In April, the United Nations released a report revealing that weapons from Libya to extremists were proliferating at an “alarming rate,” fueling conflicts in Mali, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere.

Dear Obama – Please Hike Up Your Skirt

What do you get when you cross a screech owl with a rattlesnake?  Why, Hillary Clinton of course.  Now, how did so many of you get the right answer so quickly?

I guess there’s no sense in asking what you get when you introduce a Kenyan National to 1960’s American radicals like Bill Ayers, but that’s who is sitting in the Ovulating Office.  This president is so timid, with an ego so fragile it needs stroking on an hourly basis.  Here we are, faced with enough intelligence to close 35 embassies, and he decides to go on the Tonight Show to schmooze with Jay Leno instead of addressing the nation.  PR does not mean public relations, Mr. Obama.  It’s called presidential responsibility, of which you have none, nor do you give us any reason to believe you’ll “grow” any during your remaining days in office.  The clock you should be monitoring is not for your remaining days in office, but instead, until the time you are impeached for dereliction of duty and abdication of responsibility.

Contributing Author Dan Bubalo. Rumor has it he has a direct line to Vladimir Putin and Oprah. Two soup cans and a string of course, to thwart the NSA.

First, your inability to take decisive action against a fellow Muslim with respect to the Fort Hood Massacre is inexcusable.  Don’t hide behind your supposed law degree and say the legal process must run its course.  Don’t call it a “workplace incident.”  The jihadist just opened his self-defense by admitting he killed 13 people and wounded 32 others on behalf of Allah.  Case closed.  Trial over.  Use your abuse of executive privilege to have the guy shot by a firing squad this afternoon.  You like working outside the lines of the legal process, you enjoy bypassing Congress, so show some brass.  Call an end to the trial instead of giving a terrorist a platform to advance the cause of radical Islam.  Excuse my redundancy; there is no such thing as radical Islam.  “Islam” says it all, just like the way you pronounce the name of the country we call Pack-is-stan.  To a good muslim boy, I guess that country becomes PAH-kee-stahn.  Remember when you traveled there as a student at Columbia when Americans were forbidden from going there unless they were a foreign national?  Oh, wow.  If you actually went there, that means you weren’t born in America, correct?  Or, would it mean you lied about your ethnicity to receive privileged treatment for admission to private universities?  Or, does it mean you just can’t handle the truth and live a life of lies?  I’m not sure.  There’s never been a president before you who has a “body man” named Reggie Love.

These inconvenient facts are just like everything else, aren’t they El Presidente?  Benghazi is just a “bump in the road”, nothing more than a “side show”, the results of your own jihad on the United States you qualify as “phony scandals.” Your puppets like Elijah Cummings tell us to just move on as if he’s addressing rubberneckers at an accident scene.  Well, sorry.  You’re running low on fuel and nobody’s coming to your booth at the carnival any longer because you’re finally being seen for what your really are.

Separately, I have a question.  What’s your golf handicap, not that any of us will believe it.  You have sanctioned numerous pictures to be released with your feet on government furniture as a symbol of how you regard the country, there are numerous pictures of you scratching your forehead with your middle finger, as if nobody can see through that façade.  So, why no pictures of your golf swing, for you’re willing to have yourself, wife, and daughters mailed into the press ad nauseuam?   My guess is you can’t hit a ball out of your own shadow.  I’ve seen footage of JFK’s golf swing.  You’re not JFK.

On what might you wish to leave your imprint?  You have approximately 1200 days left in office, short of impeachment, so how would you like to be remembered?  As the Drone-Strike-King?  For screwing up the delivery of health care?  For getting the goods on a Supreme Court Justice thanks to Fourth Amendment violations and extorting a vote for new taxation under the guise of “affordable health care?”  Oh, and by the way, how does it feel to be punked by Putin?

The American press for reasons unknown to me has given you a pass, but you cannot labor under the assumption nor hide from the fact that foreign intelligence sources do not know who you are or from where you were manufactured.  There has been no credible news reporting as to why Putin has insulted you and our country, but it doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out why.  Why?  Because they have the goods on you.  So does Israel, and that’s why you run like child if you have to meet Netanyahu.  It’s why The Vlad makes you come to a meeting wearing Depends.

Do you think he really cares you won’t attend the G-20 conference?  Of course not.  He just smacked you in the face again and you’re too afraid to do anything about it.  Cuba knows who you really are.  China knows who you really are.  The Japanese aren’t too pleased, and the punk in North Korea has the same intel.

That’s why you have no sway, and that’s why our country is being dismissed like a bloated guy at a prom dance.  Much has been made about the violation of our sovereign rights and the NSA spying on citizens.  What’s been conspicuously left out of the conversation is that our country gets spied upon, too, and in the relentless intelligence gathering of the opposition, they unabashedly have pantsed you, you know they have, and that is why you show up for every international event carrying a pea-shooter instead of a pistol.

You’re a mockery, and we’re all going to have to wear the sweater for your weakness.

There are remedies, but I believe you too weak to embrace them.  You could develop our own resources instead of impeding their development.  By doing so you would energize the economy.   If you energized the economy you could depart office as a legend, as a hero, but you do not have that capacity, nor will your ego permit it, so we must ask the ugly question as to why.

You don’t love this country.  We’ve had bad presidents before, certainly more capable than you, but they were just bad administrators with bad ideas.  They weren’t necessarily bad people.  (can you hear me, Bill and Jimma?)   So what’s it going to be?  Let’s get off the teleprompter.  Let’s get off the talking points.  Quit stuttering  when you don’t have a lackey feeding you lines, and for God’s sake, quit going on the Tonight Show.  Popularity isn’t the goal, Scooter.  Leadership is.  You have a golden opportunity in front of you provided you can prove who you pretend to be.

Man-up or hike up your skirt, but do something for the nation.

And that nation isn’t Saudi Arabia.

SUDDEN FLOOD OF ASYLUM REQUESTS AT U.S./MEXICO BORDER

At the Otay crossing near the San Diego border last Monday, about 200 people coming from Mexico gained entry to the United States all using the same key phrase; they claimed they had a 'credible fear' of drug cartels. According to KSAZ FoxPheonix:

So many were doing this that they had to close down the processing center and move the overflow by vans to another station.

"They are being told if they come across the border, when they come up to the border and they say certain words, they  will be allowed into the country," said a person who did not want to be identified on camera.  "We are being overwhelmed."

This apparent new shift in tactics to enter the United States comes at a time when theAssociated Press is reporting a spike in the number of asylum requests in the past few years:

According draft testimony for USCIS Associate Director Joseph Langlois that was to be submitted for a congressional hearing on asylum requests last month, USCIS received more than 19,119 asylum requests through the end of May. The agency anticipates receiving more than 28,600 by the end of the fiscal year.

According to the testimony, during the 2009 budget year the agency received just 5,369 such requests.

However, this new phenomenon is out of all proportion, even with this spike. To put those numbers in perspective with the 200 people making asylum requests on one day at one border crossing, 200 people a day equals 73,000 people a year -- close to three times the total number received all year, at all border crossings.

KSAZ reports the new tactic could easily overwhelm the immigration system, quoting immigration attorney and former immigration official Pete Nunez:

"To make our system even more ridiculous than it has been in the  past," he adds. "There are no detention facilities for families, so the family would have to be split up. We don't want to split families up, so we end up releasing people out into the community on bond, on bail."
Nunez says, "It's a huge loophole."

"There has to be a policy change, something implemented, an emergency implementation that will stop this, or otherwise we will have thousands coming in."

The goal, however, may be to overwhelm the system. This apparent new tactic comes on the heels of widely publicized activism by a group called 'The Dream 9' who also used a claim of asylum to gain re-entry to the country. As leftist organization Colorlines reported last week:

All nine of the activists have now established credible fear, a step toward an asylum hearing. Supporters are now hoping the Dream 9 will be eligible for parole, which would allow them to return to the United States until their asylum hearing dates.

This connection between the 'Dream 9' and the tactic of asylum was made by Spanish-language news source La Opiniòn. They report (translation by Google Translation) in an article entitled El asilo se volvió un sueño (in English: The asylum becomes a dream):

Following the release of nine Dreamers prisoners in Arizona, after a protest at the border, others have taken the path of asylum as a way to solve their deportation.

Media reports in San Diego are reporting that "hundreds of foreigners are trying to enter the country in the same way" and even that immigrants are being taught to use key phrases that they can stay in the country.

Reports tell of cases in the Port of Entry Otay Mesa, where 199 people have argued a 'credible fear "to the drug cartels in Mexico.

And the validation of Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) of the status of "credible fear", which allowed young people to stay at home and return to their families seems to have generated more of a headache for Immigration.

La Opiniòn goes on to quote Marshall Fitz, the immigration policy expert the liberal Center for American Progress, who points out that many would not qualify and it's not a good 'long term strategy' for those attempting to cross the border.

Inside the Hyperloop: the pneumatic travel system faster than the speed of sound

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10235261/Inside-the-Hyperloop-the-pneumatic-travel-system-faster-than-the-speed-of-sound.html

It is called “The Hyperloop” and, according to the designer, it will be a revolutionary “fifth mode” of transport, eclipsing trains, planes, boats and automobiles.

By Nick Allen, Los Angeles

6:39PM BST 10 Aug 2013

496 Comments

The “cross between Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table” will deliver passengers between US cities faster than the speed of sound.

The history of transport is replete with dreamers who have concocted such schemes for getting people from A to B in previously unimagined haste. And many of them have remained just that, impractical ideas on a drawing board that will never see the light of day.

^{The Hyperloop: the pneumatic travel route faster than the speed of sound}

But the latest mysterious project, which has had the technology world buzzing for months, has one crucial difference. Its backer is a Silicon Valley wunderkind with a proven track record of turning science fiction into reality.

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Billionaire Elon Musk’s CV is impressive, to say the least. He made his initial fortune from PayPal, the online secure payment system, before going on to launch spaceships. Last year his SpaceX venture became the first private operation to dock a cargo capsule with the International Space Station.

^{Elon Musk (Getty Images)}

Back on Earth, Mr Musk also founded Tesla, which has made electric sports cars viable and profitable.

The mercurial, fictional character of Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr in the Iron Man films, is reputedly based on him.

So when Mr Musk, 42, announced that he would be publishing plans for the Hyperloop on Monday, August 12 - tomorrow - scientists were sent into a tailspin.

They will have to wait for Mr Musk to post his “alpha design” on the internet then but he has dropped several hints about its features, including that the system will be powered by solar panels.

Mr Musk will not be patenting the design and it will be “open source”, meaning anyone can modify it, or try to build it.

The fevered speculation about what it would actually look like has ranged from wild theories on Star Trek-style teleportation to more achievable ones involving cars being pushed through vacuum sealed tunnels using magnets.

Mr Musk has denied it will be a so-called “vactrain”, a concept that is already being pursued by a company in Colorado. His idea “does involve a tube, but not a vacuum tube”, he said, adding: “Not frictionless, but very low friction.”

In recent weeks a large part of the mystery appeared to have been solved. A technology enthusiast in Canada called John Gardi published a diagram of how the Hyperloop might work. He went on to ask Mr Musk on Twitter: “Can you give me some basic clues? What diameter of tube so I can start designing stations and throughways?”

To his extreme surprise Mr Musk replied: “Your guess is the closest I’ve seen anyone guess so far. Pod diameter probably around 2m.”

Mr Gardi, who describes himself modestly as a “tinkerer”, came up with a tunnel 9ft in diameter, raised above the ground on pylons. His tube could be made from materials already used for sewer pipes. It would form a continuous loop between two destination points. Giant turbines would blast a stream of air into the tube. The two-metre wide pods, carrying people, would be moved by a rail gun - a tube that uses magnets to accelerate material passing along it.

As they approach their journey’s end they would be routed out of the air stream and slowed down using a magnetic braking system.

In an extensive analysis published on the website Motherboard, Mr Gardi concluded: “I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building.

“They’ve been around for over a century, though not so much these days. One reason I think Hyperloop is simpler than folks think is that Elon Musk has resurrected another technology from the depths of time, one that was a contender once, too - the electric car!”

Mr Musk’s intended location for the first Hyperloop is California, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. His motivation for the project came from disillusionment with the Golden State’s high speed rail project, which has been dubbed the “bullet train to nowhere” after a series of setbacks.

He believes the Hyperloop could be built for a tenth of the cost and deliver passengers between the two cities in just 30 minutes, compared to three hours for the bullet train.

The bullet train is currently estimated to be costing $68 billion and may not be completed until 2028. It would reach top speeds of only around 130mph. In a survey seven in 10 people said, if the train ever does run, they would “never or hardly ever” use it anyway.

In an internet conversation this week with Sir Richard Branson, Mr Musk said: “I originally started thinking about it when I read a thing about California’s high speed rail project, which was somewhat disappointing. It is actually worse than taking the plane. I get a little sad when things are not getting better in the future.

“Another example would be like the Concorde being retired and the fact there is no supersonic passenger transport. I think that is sad. You want the future to be better than the past, or at least I do.

“The Hyperloop is something that would go effectively faster than the speed of sound. Conceivably you could live in San Fran and work in LA.”

Mr Musk said the Hyperloop would be best used between paired cities less than 1,000 miles apart, and would be safer than air travel.

However, Mr Musk said last week that he is too busy with space to build it himself. He added: “I think I kind of shot myself in the foot by ever mentioning the Hyperloop, because I’m too strung out. Obviously I have to focus on core Tesla business, and SpaceX business, and that’s more than enough.”

Mr Gardi has confidence though. He said: “Building Hyperloop’s main line for a tenth the cost of high speed rail is not only feasible, it’s doable.”

Not banks, but still lending and drawing investors

In one sense, much of Internet commerce is largely a matchmaking service, connecting people looking for relationships, taxis and spare bedrooms. One of the hottest areas now is the market for personal loans, which is attracting money from venture capital investors, spurred by the fast growth of the largest online platform, Lending Club, and the paper profits for its early backers.

In their simplest form, these lending marketplaces link borrowers who want to refinance high-interest credit-card debt of 20 percent or more with investors looking to beat paltry bank savings-account yields of less than 1 percent.

At Lending Club, borrowers pay annual interest of about 14.5 percent, depending on their credit scores, for three- or five-year personal loans. Investors can earn interest rates of about 8.5 percent, the company says. The difference comes from defaults, which reduce annual returns by 3.5 percent, and the company's annual fees of 2.5 percent.

Some of Lending Club's earliest investors, including Norwest Venture Partners,Canaan Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures, are showing paper profits of more than 10 times their investment, based on Lending Club's most recent valuation of $1.55 billion in an investment led by Google in May. Lending Club hopes to make an initial public offering next year.

That success has drawn the interest of venture capital firms looking for similar results.

"Investing in the networks that light up the sharing economy certainly looks like a good idea," Fred Wilson, the managing partner of Union Square Ventures, said in a post on his Web site in July. Union Square invested in Lending Club in 2011 and has put money into multiple platforms. Last year it backed Funding Circle, which offers small business loans in Britain. This year it financed the personal-loan marketplace Auxmoney in Germany.

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"There is a platform proliferation out there," said Frank Rotman of QED Investors, a group of former executives of Capital One Financial that has invested in four platforms. "Usually that happens when you see one company succeed and people say they want to find the next one. Right now everyone is trying to find the next Lending Club. They don't want to feel like they missed the opportunity."

The number of significant lending platforms has already grown to roughly 50 worldwide, according to Disruption Credit, an investment firm. The main personal loan platforms in the United States are Lending Club and Prosper Marketplace. On Deck and Kabbage do small-business lending. Overseas, Zopa Ltd. and RateSetteralso do consumer lending in Britain, as does SocietyOne in Australia. And student-financing platforms include Social Finance, CommonBond, Pave and Upstart.

Disruption Credit's chief executive, Michael Parekh, says such platforms can disrupt Wall Street and traditional banks much as Google has taken on old-style media companies and Amazon.com has taken business from traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. Disruption and other experts cite a vast $2.8 trillion consumer credit market up for grabs.

Lending Club itself, which just passed the $2 billion mark in total loans made, already plans to expand into small-business and student loans, and may pursue credit cards, insurance and mortgages. It may also expand globally.

In addition to its original base of individual investors, Lending Club has attracted the participation of a few community banks as well as institutional funds that invest in the loans. It also attracted a later-stage investment in 2012, at about one-third the current value, from the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partner Mary Meeker joined its board. Other directors include John J. Mack, a former chief executive of Morgan Stanley, and Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury secretary. Kleiner's China fund is also backing CreditEase, an online small-business consumer lender in China.

If Lending Club can complete an I.P.O. on schedule next year, "I believe this will be the financial-tech version of the Facebook I.P.O., a coming-of-age event just like Facebook was for social media," said Dan Ciporin, general partner of Canaan Partners, Lending Club's second-largest shareholder with a 15 percent stake.

Lending Club expects revenue could roughly triple, to $100 million in 2013 from $36 million in 2012, and could grow to $400 million by 2015. One Wall Street banker said other fast-growing online services like LinkedIn and Priceline trade at 7 to 10 times revenue expected for the following year. At that rate, he says, Lending Club could be worth more than $3 billion in an I.P.O. next year.

"I think this is viewed by venture capitalists as incredibly disruptive and rapidly scalable," said Ron Suber, head of institutional sales at Prosper Marketplace.

Pat Grady, a partner at Prosper's chief venture backer, Sequoia Capital, said big banks might be hobbled by their "legacy infrastructure" and "incumbent inertia." He added, "In some ways the sky's the limit. There's nothing that says the banks of yesteryear have to be the banks of tomorrow."

At a presentation in June at the inaugural Lendit conference for the nascent sector in New York, Lending Club's founder and chief executive, Renaud Laplanche, compared its rapid embrace by customers to the adoption of electricity, color television, stoves and washing machines, saying he plans to "transform the banking system."

Doubts among investors

Kyu Oh | E+ | Getty Images

Some platforms are adept at gleaning online data about their customers. Borrowers, for example, must agree to allow Lending Club to obtain data from their employers' payroll processors. And the small-business lender On Deck has developed methods for evaluating borrowers based on dozens of online sources.

But some investors still have doubts.

One skeptical venture investor notes that such lending sites have flourished in an environment of a pullback by banks from unsecured consumer lending, an improving economy and a steep decline in interest rates on other investments, starting with savings accounts. Other experts note that banks have a big advantage in their rock-bottom cost of funds.

"There's been an explosion of new companies using the Internet to originate loans," said Josh Koplewicz, founder of Thayer Street Partners, an investment firm that focuses on technology and financial services. "The barriers to entry are low. There are people setting up shop with a couple hundred thousand dollars." But aside from a few big names like Lending Club, he says, it may be difficult for many to create enterprise value without some edge in access to borrowers.

Indeed, some venture firms' investments have already shown paper losses. For example, venture firms including Accel Partners and Benchmark, which invested in Prosper Marketplace Inc. between 2005 and 2010, lost their stakes in January when Sequoia rebooted the company with a new round of financing and a new management team.

Prosper, which started offering loans in 2006, just before Lending Club, had offered higher rates and riskier loans, which led to investor losses during the 2008 market collapse. Prosper also clashed with securities regulators over whether its offerings should be subject to disclosure rules.

Both Prosper and Lending Club temporarily curtailed their loan offerings in 2008 after the Securities and Exchange Commission required that loans offered to average investors be registered publicly; Prosper recently reached an agreement to settle a class-action investor lawsuit over the losses. Amid the economic slump, Zopa in Britain abandoned its own costly push into the United States market. And some fledgling entrants like Loanio and Pertuity Direct shut down.

Even after meeting the S.E.C.'s requirements, Lending Club and its rivals have had run-ins with regulators. Lending Club can offer its loans to investors in only 26 states but thinks those limits would melt away after an I.P.O. Both Florida and Missouri fined the company $100,000 each last year for selling unregistered securities because Lending Club had allowed its registrations there to lapse.

In June, Ohio securities regulators filed charges against SoMoLend, an online small-business lender, accusing it of securities fraud and unregistered securities sales. SoMoLend, which declined to comment on pending talks with the regulators and a hearing set for October, has halted transactions with individual investors in the state.

Some Lending Club investors and executives are hedging their bets, taking some chips off the table even before an I.P.O. Both Canaan and Morgenthaler sold some of their shares in the $125 million stock sale in May. About 30 Lending Club employees, including Mr. Laplanche, sold an average of less than 5 percent of their stock as well. Insiders also sold in a recent On Deck financing.

At the moment, the market wind is at Lending Club's back. With broad United States market indexes up about 18 percent this year, social media and social commerce stocks have been surging even more.

Facebook, up 45 percent this year, recently regained its I.P.O. price after 14 months below that level. The real estate marketplace Zillow has tripled this year, and the business network LinkedIn and business-review site Yelp have doubled. Even the discount-deal service Groupon, which replaced its chief executive after its shares plunged 87 percent from the I.P.O. price, has risen 79 percent this year.