Sunday, February 28, 2016

The Wall Street Candidate

So Hilarity Clinton won South Carolina with a campaign based upon her political experience. She is the ultimate status quo candidate. Hillary has accepted that she can’t really make any significant changes, and she’s not going to waste time trying. She’s ready and willing to preside over the present corrupt system. Hillary Clinton is a good investment for a billionaire. She poses as a progressive and even sometimes as a populist but she is neither. Witness her offense at Sanders referring to her as “a moderate,” a term she readily uses to describe herself when speaking to affluent audiences.

As First Lady she promoted health care reform, without success. She also took a keen interest in foreign policy, as she had since supporting the Vietnam War in college as a Goldwater Girl. She’s always boasted about being “strong” on what she calls “national defense.” She urged her husband Bill to bomb Yugoslavia, in 1995 and 1999 as that country split up. For the first time since World War II a European capital, Belgrade, was bombed—by NATO forces. The results have been disastrous: failed states in Bosnia and Kosovo, more ethnic cleansing, refugees, heroin trafficking.

What about  experience as a U.S. Senator? In her two terms she sponsored 713 pieces of legislation. Three passed, all unanimously. One established a National Historic Site in New York, another renamed a post office, another renamed a highway. More importantly: while in the Senate, Hillary voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002. She defended that vote all the way up to 2014, when she finally called her vote a “mistake.”

As Secretary of State, Hillary supported a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, even though the Bush administration and the Iraqi government had agreed that all troops would be withdrawn by 2011. Hillary just didn’t want to get out.

When mass protests erupted in Syria in 2011, Hillary advocated arming Syrian opposition forces, to bring down the government by force. But these forces were dominated by al-Qaeda aligned factions. Many arms the U.S. provided are now in the hands of al-Nusra and ISIL. And she wanted to set up a no-fly zone in Syria—more bombing.

As Secretary of State she advocated bombing Libya, claiming falsely that Col. Gadhafy was about to commit genocide. The U.S./NATO bombing, which was supposed to be for humanitarian purposes, became an instrument for regime change and the murder of Gadhafy, sodomized by a knife while jihadis cheered. “We came, we saw, he died.” Libya today is a country in ruins, with two governments, ethnic cleansing, and rule by militias including those loyal to al-Qaeda or ISIL. Hillary bears much responsibility for this.

Hillary Clinton chose as her Under Secretary of State for Eastern Europe a close aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, the neocon Victoria Nuland, who like Hillary pressed for the expansion of the NATO alliance to surround Russia. Her State Department boasted that the U.S. has invested five billion dollars in an effort to support the so-called “European aspirations of Ukraine.” This was an investment in regime change. It led to the violent overthrow of an elected government in 2014. The point was to install a leader who would not just bring Ukraine into the EU but into NATO and drive the Russians out of the Crimean Peninsula where their fleet has been headquartered for over 200 years. Ukraine hasn’t benefitted from the coup. Neo-fascists who played a decisive role in the coup have been empowered like nowhere else in Europe. Ethnic minorities have come under attack. The economy has collapsed. The country is in a state of civil war.

Hilarity has boasted that the war-criminal Henry Kissinger has praised her, saying she’d run the State Department better than anyone had run it in a long time. Warmongers warm towards Hillary Clinton. She is one of them.

The simplistic gender identity argument for Hillary that she is female and “it’s time to have a woman as president” ignores the terrible impact of the Clintons’ domestic and foreign policies on women (poor and non-white women especially) at home and abroad – from the vicious 1996 welfare “reform” (the elimination of poor families’ prior entitlement to basic federal cash assistance, heartily applauded by First Lady Hillary) to the U.S. wars. There’s also the highly organized identity politics of race, whereby the African-American bourgeois elite rally the vote for corporate and police-state Clinton.


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