You have the rich braggart with an inferiority complex so large it dwarfs Saturn using racism, sexism, nationalism and a generalized fear of The Other to elbow his way toward the nomination. You have the rich political aristocrat who votes for war, total surveillance and thinks fracking is the greatest thing since glazed donuts trying to pass herself off as some sort of transformative populist while cashing Wall Street checks by the fistful.
It is madness, but it is madness by design. The Republican Party and its media allies have spent several decades fomenting a sense of terror within their voting ranks -- fear of the immigrant, fear of the Black man, fear of a woman's power to choose, fear of the terrorist hiding under the bed. They have diligently trashed the basic functions of government so they can go on the Sunday talk shows and blather about how government doesn't work. The Democrats, for their part, have been in full moral retreat over those same decades, fleeing the legacy of FDR and their own alleged principles to such a vast degree that a candidate who voted like a conservative every time the chips were down is about to grab the brass ring.
This is the best we can do, really? This is what we have become. The only reason people will vote for Trump in the general election is because they have been trained to be afraid. The only reason people will vote for Clinton in the general election is to thwart Comb-Over Mussolini and his dreams of glory; once again, people will be voting against instead of voting for, because "she can win," allegedly (Pitt 1-2).
A party beholden to corporate power cannot simultaneously be the party of ordinary working people, and thus we can see the Democrats' dilemma. Though the party distinguishes itself from the GOP in some ways - Democrats are more liberal on social issues, for example, and more inclined to defend programs like Medicare and Social Security - there can be no question that corporate money has undue influence on both major parties, not just the GOP. When Hillary Clinton was seen as the inevitable 2016 Democratic nominee, there was no reason to believe this status quo would be challenged. But the rise of Bernie Sanders changes everything.
The genius of the corporate coup that has overtaken US democracy is not that it dominates the GOP - the party that has long favored corporate power anyway - but that it has maneuvered even the opposition party into submission as well. …
Clinton, who once served on the board of Walmart, the gold standard of predatory corporatism, is so tight with corporate power that she's now making efforts to downplay her relationships. CNBC reports that she is postponing fundraisers with Wall Street executives, no doubt concerned that voters are awakening to the toxic influence of corporations on politics and government. Already in the awkward position of explaining six-figure checks from Wall Street firms for speaking engagements and large charitable donations from major banks, Clinton realizes that she must try to distance herself from her corporate benefactors.
And the fat cats fully understand. "Don't expect folks on Wall Street to be offended that Clinton is distancing herself from them," CNBC reports. "In fact, they see it as smart politics and they understand that Wall Street banks are deeply unpopular."
Indeed, everyone knows the game, and few are worried that Clinton - whose son-in-law is a former Goldman Sachs executive who now runs a hedge fund - is any kind of threat to the power structure. This explains why a leading banking executive called Clinton's tough talk about Wall Street "theatrics" made necessary in response to the Sanders campaign, adding that he predicts she'll be known as “Mrs. Wall Street” if elected.
These realities show that the "rigged system" concerns of ordinary voters are not overblown. In a stroke of strategic brilliance, corporate power has created a playing field where even its perceived opponents are advancing its agenda. And the fiction is propagated with impressive expertise, as moderate, corporate-friendly Democrats are portrayed in the mainstream media as "flaming liberals." Even though Barack Obama, for example, filled his administration with Wall Street veterans and stalwarts after his election in 2008 - including Tim Geithner, Michael Froman, Larry Summers and a host of others - he is frequently described as a liberal not just by those on the right, but even in mainstream media.
… If she wins, conservative commentators will react with alarm and relentlessly lash out at her as a "dangerous liberal," but corporate overlords will sleep well at night knowing everything is fine.
This is what has happened during the centrist Obama administration, which bailed out Wall Street without prosecuting even one executive responsible for bringing about the 2008 economic collapse. It also happened in the centrist administration of Bill Clinton, who was attacked by conservatives as an "extreme liberal" while doing little to earn the designation. The Clinton administration, with vocal support from the first lady, deregulated telecommunications and the financial sector, pushed hard for passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement - a tremendous gift to corporate interests and a major blow to the working class - and passed legislation on crime and welfare that was anything but liberal.
Such is the role that corporate America wants Hillary Clinton to play today. Defined as a liberal, she is in fact a consummate establishment Democrat: a hawkish corporate apologist who happens to be pro-choice. Yes, she is to the left of the GOP candidates - she doesn't deny climate change, wants to preserve Obamacare and won't entertain outlandish ideas like privatizing Social Security - but she's still well within the bounds of acceptability to the US corporate oligarchy that does not want fundamental, systemic change. Rest assured, under her watch the system will stay rigged (Niose 1-3).
What is troubling about Clinton's record is that she has left behind a trail strewn with failures and even catastrophes. Indeed, her highest profile undertakings almost universally ended in disaster -- and a person's record should matter when voters are deciding whether to entrust him or her with the most powerful office on earth.
In other words, it's not just a question of her holding one prestigious job or another; it's also how well she did in those jobs. …
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... is Hillary Clinton really a can-do leader? Since she burst onto the national scene with her husband's presidential election in 1992, she has certainly traveled a lot, given many speeches and met many national and foreign leaders -- which surely has some value -- but it's hard to identify much in the way of her meaningful accomplishments.
Clinton's most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing in its complexity and -- because of the secrecy -- it lacked sufficient input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.
Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because of Hillary Clinton's health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.
In Clinton's next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush's Iraq War. Clinton did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.
Both in her support for the war in the early years and her politically expedient switch -- along with a grudging apology for her "mistake" -- Clinton showed very little courage.
When she was supporting the war, the post-9/11 wind was at Bush's back. So Clinton joined him in riding the jingoistic wave. By 2006, the American people had turned against the war and the Republican Party was punished at the polls for it, losing control of Congress. So it was no profile-in-courage for Clinton to distance herself from Bush then.
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… the Iraq War "surge" ... dispatched 30,000 more US troops to Iraq in 2007. The "surge" saw casualty figures spike. Nearly 1,000 additional American died along with an untold number of Iraqis. And despite another conventional wisdom about the "successful surge" it failed to achieve its central goal of getting the Iraqis to achieve compromises on their sectarian divisions.
Yet, the mainstream press didn't get any closer to the mark in 2008 when it began cheering the Iraq "surge" as a great success, getting spun by the neocons who noted a gradual drop in the casualty levels. The media honchos, many of whom supported the invasion in 2003, ignored that Bush had laid out specific policy goals for the "surge," none of which were achieved.
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… the goals were never achieved, either during the "surge" or since then. To this day, Iraq remains a society bitterly divided along sectarian lines with the out-of-power Sunnis again sidling up to Al Qaeda-connected extremists and even the Islamic State.
But Clinton didn't have the courage or common sense to recognize that the Iraq War "surge" had failed. After Obama appointed her as Secretary of State -- as part of a naïve gesture of outreach to a "team of rivals" -- Clinton fell back in line behind Official Washington's new favorite conventional wisdom, the "successful surge."
In the end, all the Iraq War "surge" did was buy President Bush and his neocon advisers time to get out of office before the failure of the Iraq War became obvious to the American public. Its other primary consequence was to encourage Defense Secretary Gates, who was kept on by President Obama as a gesture of bipartisanship, to conjure up another "surge" for Afghanistan.
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Clinton's enthusiasm for "surges" also influenced her to side with Gates and General David Petraeus, a neocon favorite, to pressure Obama into a "surge" for Afghanistan, sending in an additional 30,000 troops on a bloody, ill-fated "counterinsurgency" mission. Again, the cost in American lives was about 1,000 soldiers but their sacrifice did little to shift the war's outcome.
Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton's hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration's debate in favor of a "regime change" mission in Libya to urging direct US military intervention in Syria in pursuit of another "regime change" there.
On the campaign trail, Clinton seeks to spin all these militaristic recommendations as somehow beneficial to the United States. But the reality is quite different.
Regarding Iran, in 2010, Secretary Clinton personally killed a promising initiative sponsored by Brazil and Turkey (at President Obama's request) to get Iran to swap much of its low-enriched uranium for radiological medical tests. Instead, Clinton followed the path laid out by Israel and the neocons, ratchet up pressure on Iran and keep open the "bomb-bomb-bomb Iran" option.
It is noteworthy that the diplomatic agreement with Iran to restrain its nuclear program and to give up much of its low-enriched uranium required Clinton's departure from the State Department in 2013. I'm told that Obama understood that he needed to get her out of the way for the diplomacy to work.
But Clinton's signature project as Secretary of State was another war of choice, this time the "regime change" in Libya resulting in the grisly murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the descent of Libya into a failed state beset with terrorism, including the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other US diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, and more recently the emergence of the Islamic State.
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Over the next five years, Libya -- a once prosperous North African country --descended into anarchy with dozens of armed militias and now three competing governments jockeying for power. Meanwhile, the Islamic State expanded its territory around the city of Sirte and engaged in its signature practice of beheading "infidels," including a group of Coptic Christians slaughtered on a beach.
Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her instigation of the Libyan war, disputing any comparisons between it and the Iraq War by rejecting any “conflating” of the two. Yet, the two disasters -- while obviously having some differences -- do deserve to be conflated because they have many similarities. Both were wars of choice justified by false and misleading claims and having terrible outcomes.
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So, is Hillary Clinton "qualified" to be President of the United States? While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record -- a litany of misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes -- may say something else (Parry 1-4).
… It would be wrong to deny that she made certain mistakes which crippled her bid, particularly in the period between when she left the State Department and when she announced her candidacy, for example in taking large sums of money from financial institutions for paid speeches—which was legal, but she seemed oblivious to how it looked. These seem like misdemeanors compared with what Trump has been up to, but they did matter to voters, and Clinton ought to have recognized that. Instead, she lived her life as if she were going to be running against Jeb Bush, a candidate as burdened by charges of dynasticism and political profiteering as she was. When she protested that everything she did was done according to “the rules,” what voters appear to have heard was an admission that the entire system was built in a way they didn’t like (Sorkin 2).
Liberals like me (Harold Titus) recognized readily Hillary’s flaws and resented being forced to choose between her and Trump. Some of us refused to make that choice, electing instead not to vote or to vote for a third party candidate. I did vote for her because supporting Trump was so abhorrent. I believe that the letter I wrote (see below) to my hometown newspaper in April 2016 was reflective of what most liberals felt.
One of Hillary’s major weaknesses is the perception shared by many that she is shifty, that like her husband she places expediency above integrity. Bill, a leader of the Democratic Leadership Council of the 1990s, a “new Democratic,” was a friend of large corporations. He vigorously promoted NAFTA. He signed into law the GOP legislative repeal of Glass-Steagall, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. Because a majority of Americans now recognize the great injury done to them by large corporations and because Bernie Sanders is her primary-season challenger, Hillary has become suddenly a critic of the TPP trade agreement, the Keystone XL pipeline project, big banks, the fossil fuel industry, and Big Pharma. It was expedient for her both to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to declare in 2007 that that decision had been a mistake. It is expedient for her now to campaign as a progressive Democrat and to wrap herself around President Obama to curtail Bernie’s criticism of certain policies that she asserts she and the president share.
Needing also to separate herself from Bernie, she portrays herself as a pragmatic doer. She agrees with Bernie’s diagnoses (because she has to), but “his numbers don’t add up.” He makes promises; she delivers! … Her preference of a $12 an hour minimum wage and her declaration that natural gas -- its quantity the result of fracking -- is the bridge to clean energy are examples of Democratic Party incrementalism, a cutting around the edges of a serious problem, for corporations a protective backfire to arrest a raging forest fire. By donating campaign funds and paying speaking fees to Democratic Party enablers, corporations are able to hedge their bets.
Bernie declared that we should be thinking big, not small. His reference to European countries that provide their citizens the health care, work benefits, and education that we do not is a telling indictment of the virulent economic system that controls the levers of American political power. To the argument that Congress would never enact Bernie’s policies, I answer, “They didn’t Obama’s. Why would they Hillary’s?” If we ever break the exploitative stranglehold locked upon us, it will be due to a movement started by a straight-arrow champion of regular people, not by an individual who will do whatever it takes – pander, employ three-quarter falsehood attacks, change policy positions – to win a presidential election (Titus 1).
Works cited:
Niose, David, “Hillary Clinton, Corporate America and the Democrats' Dilemma.” Truthout, February 21, 2016. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/with-hillary-clinton-corporate-america-defines-the-limits-of-acceptable-opinion/
Parry, Robert, “Is Hillary Clinton "Qualified?" Consortium News, April 11, 2016. Web. https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/08/is-hillary-clinton-qualified/
Pitt, William Rivers, “Tuesday Night Massacre: The Looming Trump v. Clinton Debacle.” Truthout, April 27, 2016. Web. https://truthout.org/articles/tuesday-night-massacre-the-looming-trump-v-clinton-debacle/
Sorkin, Amy Davidson, “Donald Trump’s Stunning Win.” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016. Web. https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/trumps-stunning-win?intcid=mod-latest
Titus, Harold. Letter to the Editor of the Siuslaw News, April 23, 2016. Print.
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