Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > For Fear of Finding Something Worse
________________________________________
For Fear of Finding Something Worse
By John R. MacArthur [1] / Le Monde diplomatique [2]
August 1, 2016
Why is Hillary Clinton so unpopular? David Brooks, a columnist at the New
York Times, asked in May. Rather than looking at her political record, he
examined her psyche: Can you tell me what Hillary Clinton does for fun? If
Hillary lacks appeal, he suggested, it is because of her temperament: She is
completely absorbed in her career. Her unpopularity is akin to the
unpopularity of a workaholic, and her formal, career-oriented persona puts
her in direct contrast with the mores of the social media age, which is
intimate, personal, revealing, trusting and vulnerable. This goodwill is
surprising in a columnist who is usually close to the Republican Party. But
rejection of Donald Trump is such that strange alliances are being formed.
According to Brooks, Hillary seems like a new arrival on the political
scene, though she has been first lady, a US senator and secretary of state.
Have people forgotten her support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, her
three speeches to bankers at Goldman Sachs (for each of which she was paid
$225,000), her backing of free trade agreements, and her support for the
overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi? What of her conflict of interest
with the Clinton Foundation a family-owned philanthropic multinational
when she was part of the Obama administration? According to the New York
Times, Foundation directors managed, after lobbying secretary of state
Clinton, to have money earmarked for a US federal programme to combat AIDS
in Rwanda transferred to a training programme set up by the Foundation.
Then there are Hillarys links to Wall Street, which finances both her
campaign and the Foundation. Even Trump has donated to the Foundation: more
than $100,000 in 2009. Trump was friendly with Bill and Hillary for many
years, and invited them to his third wedding, in 2005. They sat in the front
row, and their broad smiles suggested they were enjoying the evening. Thats
what Hillary does for fun.
Voting for Hillary in November in fact means voting for a couple, each the
others closest adviser. Hillary has already shown her hand. If she wins,
Bill will be in charge of revitalizing the economy, because, you know, he
knows how to do it.
According to the image she promotes, Hillary has been a keen defender of
childrens interests for more than 30 years; when Bill was governor of
Arkansas, she allied herself with charitable organisations such as the
Childrens Defense Fund, with a view to establishing a reputation as a
caring person. But most of her time in the South was devoted to the Rose Law
Firm, where she worked from 1977 to 1992, specialising in patent law and
intellectual property. Rose, which embodies the collusion between politics
and business in Arkansas, had among its clients Walmart, known for its
hatred of trade unions and love of low-cost goods made in countries where
the labour force can be exploited.
Hillarys track record as a lawyer gained her a place on Walmarts board,
where she served from 1986 to 1992, receiving a salary of $18,000 a year
($31,000 today, allowing for inflation). She has always avoided mentioning
in public anything that might upset Walmart, especially its policy of wage
compression. (Its hard to raise children on $19,427 a year, todays average
pay for a Walmart sales associate.) After travelling through the Deep South
in 2013-4, Paul Theroux wrote that he had found towns in South Carolina,
Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas that looked like towns in Zimbabwe, just
as overlooked and beleaguered. He mocked the Clinton Foundation for running
a Partnership to Save Africas Elephants a flagship programme while
ignoring poor black families in Arkansas.
From the start of his first term as president, Bill was keen to improve the
financing of Democratic election campaigns, which had depended too much on
major industrial trade unions, and set about shifting his party to the
right. He promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as
popular with multinationals as it was unpopular with Democrat voters.
Hillary never opposed the agreement. In September 1992 she attended a
crucial meeting in Arlington, Virginia, when Bill decided to support the
agreement, which had been negotiated by President George H W Bush. She then
helped define the strategy for getting recalcitrant Democratic
Representatives on board. According to Tom Nides, a former member of the
Clinton team, this was member by member figuring out what was in their
district, figuring out who we could influence, how we could work it. In
November 1993 NAFTA was ratified with the help of Newt Gingrich, then
Republican number two in the House of Representatives. In March 1996, she
said: I think NAFTA is proving its worth.
Emboldened by his free-trade success, Bill began to go back on some
principles of the US welfare state, created in the 1930s with Roosevelts
New Deal. With the help of Gingrich, who had become speaker of the House of
Representatives after the Democrats defeat in the 1994 midterm elections,
he imposed a reform of the US welfare system, depriving more than 11
million poor families of aid. In protest, Peter Edelman husband of the
founder of the Childrens Defense Fund resigned as assistant secretary for
planning. He wrote: [The new law] does not promote work effectively, and it
will hurt millions of poor children by the time it is fully implemented.
Hillary was silent about the fact that children (notably black and Latino)
were being penalised by Bills policies.
Bill later deregulated Wall Street with the help of his Republican rivals:
In November 1999 he signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which since
1933 had separated commercial and investment banking, to discourage banks
from speculating with small depositors money. Republican John McCain, and
others, are now proposing a new Glass-Steagall Act. Not Hillary: her
economic adviser Alan Blinder said last year: Youre not going to see
Glass-Steagall.
Hillarys political career really started in 2000, when she stood in the
election for US senator for New York, parachuted into a state where she had
never resided by her husband and his powerful allies in the Democratic
Party. Once elected, she got on well with the Bush administration. In a
speech to the Senate in October 2002, she confirmed her support for the
invasion of Iraq, repeating the White Houses lies about Saddam Husseins
weapons of mass destruction. She defended a preventive war, drawing a
parallel with the bombing of Yugoslavia, which Bill had decided in 1999, to
stop the dislocation and ethnic cleansing of more than a million Kosovar
Albanians ... And perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of
experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the White House,
watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation. Not the
words of a feminist, but unsurprising from a candidate whose Twitter profile
begins wife, mom, grandma.
Hillarys 2002 speech was remarkable for its banality of language, but it
would be unfair to suggest that she wrote it herself. She frequently uses
ghostwriters, who are rarely credited; Professor Barbara Feinman Todd
complained that she was not mentioned in It Takes a Village(1996), Hillarys
bestseller about lessons children teach us. It is not even certain Hillary
wrote her own memoirs: to tell the story of her time as secretary of state,
she used a book team, whom she barely mentions.
The record of Hillarys four years in charge of US foreign policy does not
inspire confidence. In 2011, when the Libyan rebellion was growing, she was
cautious: Im one of those who believes that absent international
authorisation, the United States acting alone, would be stepping into a
situation whose consequences are unforeseeable. Then she changed her mind:
I got an earful about military intervention from Sarkozy. He is a dynamic
figure, always full of ebullient energy, who loves being at the center of
the action ... Sarkozy was also influenced by the French public intellectual
Bernard-Henri Lévy ... They were both genuinely moved by the plight of the
Libyan people, suffering at the hands of a brutal dictator. Seduced by the
Frenchmen, and to avoid a humanitarian disaster, she joined the
interventionist camp and, with President Obama, led the US into a new war
without seeking congressional approval, though the constitution requires it.
Fortunately, it all ended well: Over the next 72 hours, Libyas air
defences were successfully destroyed and the people of Benghazi were saved
from imminent devastation. The rest of the book is in the same vein.
Hillary knows that her rightwing image is the final obstacle to winning over
the supporters of Bernie Sanders. Drawn to the left by her socialist
rivals success in the primaries, she has recently put forward progressive
measures: taxing banks that have too much debt, increasing the minimum wage
to $12 an hour, regulating university tuition fees according to family
income. Her U-turn on free trade has been spectacular. In November 2012 she
praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership: This TPP sets the gold standard in
trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade. But the criticism
by Trump and Sanders of free trade seem to be convincing voters, and in
October 2015 Hillary said: As of today, I am not in favor of what I have
learned about it. I dont believe its going to meet the high bar I have
set. On 7 July her allies blocked an effort by the Sanders campaign to have
the Democratic Party officially oppose a congressional vote on TTP.
Hillary seems more predictable than Trump, who has increased his verbal
attacks on radical Islamists and immigrants. Her calm and sense of
proportion have even won over some Republicans. Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett
Packard, who was finance co-chair of presidential candidate Mitt Romneys
exploratory committee, has openly declared her support, as has
neoconservative Robert Kagan, a former Romney adviser. The Bush family have
said they will abstain in the election.
Hillary also has the unfailing support of the media establishment, which
presents her as the last line of defence against barbarism. David Remnick,
editor of the New Yorker, asked: Has a presidential election ever suggested
more vividly divergent candidates than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? ...
Clinton will have to campaign with unwavering poise against the most
dangerous and unpredictable variety of opponent a demagogue who is willing
to trespass every boundary of decency to win power.
This recalls the confrontation between President Jacques Chirac and Front
National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, when the French left was obliged
to support a rightwing candidate to protect the country from the fascist
danger. But Chirac was more progressive than Hillary, especially on foreign
policy. The US presidential campaign is more like a contest between Angela
Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi, in which the US left has decided to support
Merkel.
John R. MacArthur is an American journalist and author of books about US
politics. He is the president of Harper's Magazine. Translated by Charles
Goulden.
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[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-r-macarthur
[2] http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on For Fear of Finding
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > For Fear of Finding Something Worse
For Fear of Finding Something Worse
By John R. MacArthur [1] / Le Monde diplomatique [2]
August 1, 2016
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Why is Hillary Clinton so unpopular? David Brooks, a columnist at the New
York Times, asked in May. Rather than looking at her political record, he
examined her psyche: Can you tell me what Hillary Clinton does for fun? If
Hillary lacks appeal, he suggested, it is because of her temperament: She is
completely absorbed in her career. Her unpopularity is akin to the
unpopularity of a workaholic, and her formal, career-oriented persona puts
her in direct contrast with the mores of the social media age, which is
intimate, personal, revealing, trusting and vulnerable. This goodwill is
surprising in a columnist who is usually close to the Republican Party. But
rejection of Donald Trump is such that strange alliances are being formed.
According to Brooks, Hillary seems like a new arrival on the political
scene, though she has been first lady, a US senator and secretary of state.
Have people forgotten her support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, her
three speeches to bankers at Goldman Sachs (for each of which she was paid
$225,000), her backing of free trade agreements, and her support for the
overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi? What of her conflict of interest
with the Clinton Foundation a family-owned philanthropic multinational
when she was part of the Obama administration? According to the New York
Times, Foundation directors managed, after lobbying secretary of state
Clinton, to have money earmarked for a US federal programme to combat AIDS
in Rwanda transferred to a training programme set up by the Foundation.
Then there are Hillarys links to Wall Street, which finances both her
campaign and the Foundation. Even Trump has donated to the Foundation: more
than $100,000 in 2009. Trump was friendly with Bill and Hillary for many
years, and invited them to his third wedding, in 2005. They sat in the front
row, and their broad smiles suggested they were enjoying the evening. Thats
what Hillary does for fun.
Voting for Hillary in November in fact means voting for a couple, each the
others closest adviser. Hillary has already shown her hand. If she wins,
Bill will be in charge of revitalizing the economy, because, you know, he
knows how to do it.
According to the image she promotes, Hillary has been a keen defender of
childrens interests for more than 30 years; when Bill was governor of
Arkansas, she allied herself with charitable organisations such as the
Childrens Defense Fund, with a view to establishing a reputation as a
caring person. But most of her time in the South was devoted to the Rose Law
Firm, where she worked from 1977 to 1992, specialising in patent law and
intellectual property. Rose, which embodies the collusion between politics
and business in Arkansas, had among its clients Walmart, known for its
hatred of trade unions and love of low-cost goods made in countries where
the labour force can be exploited.
Hillarys track record as a lawyer gained her a place on Walmarts board,
where she served from 1986 to 1992, receiving a salary of $18,000 a year
($31,000 today, allowing for inflation). She has always avoided mentioning
in public anything that might upset Walmart, especially its policy of wage
compression. (Its hard to raise children on $19,427 a year, todays average
pay for a Walmart sales associate.) After travelling through the Deep South
in 2013-4, Paul Theroux wrote that he had found towns in South Carolina,
Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas that looked like towns in Zimbabwe, just
as overlooked and beleaguered. He mocked the Clinton Foundation for running
a Partnership to Save Africas Elephants a flagship programme while
ignoring poor black families in Arkansas.
From the start of his first term as president, Bill was keen to improve the
financing of Democratic election campaigns, which had depended too much on
major industrial trade unions, and set about shifting his party to the
right. He promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as
popular with multinationals as it was unpopular with Democrat voters.
Hillary never opposed the agreement. In September 1992 she attended a
crucial meeting in Arlington, Virginia, when Bill decided to support the
agreement, which had been negotiated by President George H W Bush. She then
helped define the strategy for getting recalcitrant Democratic
Representatives on board. According to Tom Nides, a former member of the
Clinton team, this was member by member figuring out what was in their
district, figuring out who we could influence, how we could work it. In
November 1993 NAFTA was ratified with the help of Newt Gingrich, then
Republican number two in the House of Representatives. In March 1996, she
said: I think NAFTA is proving its worth.
Emboldened by his free-trade success, Bill began to go back on some
principles of the US welfare state, created in the 1930s with Roosevelts
New Deal. With the help of Gingrich, who had become speaker of the House of
Representatives after the Democrats defeat in the 1994 midterm elections,
he imposed a reform of the US welfare system, depriving more than 11
million poor families of aid. In protest, Peter Edelman husband of the
founder of the Childrens Defense Fund resigned as assistant secretary for
planning. He wrote: [The new law] does not promote work effectively, and it
will hurt millions of poor children by the time it is fully implemented.
Hillary was silent about the fact that children (notably black and Latino)
were being penalised by Bills policies.
Bill later deregulated Wall Street with the help of his Republican rivals:
In November 1999 he signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which since
1933 had separated commercial and investment banking, to discourage banks
from speculating with small depositors money. Republican John McCain, and
others, are now proposing a new Glass-Steagall Act. Not Hillary: her
economic adviser Alan Blinder said last year: Youre not going to see
Glass-Steagall.
Hillarys political career really started in 2000, when she stood in the
election for US senator for New York, parachuted into a state where she had
never resided by her husband and his powerful allies in the Democratic
Party. Once elected, she got on well with the Bush administration. In a
speech to the Senate in October 2002, she confirmed her support for the
invasion of Iraq, repeating the White Houses lies about Saddam Husseins
weapons of mass destruction. She defended a preventive war, drawing a
parallel with the bombing of Yugoslavia, which Bill had decided in 1999, to
stop the dislocation and ethnic cleansing of more than a million Kosovar
Albanians ... And perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of
experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the White House,
watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation. Not the
words of a feminist, but unsurprising from a candidate whose Twitter profile
begins wife, mom, grandma.
Hillarys 2002 speech was remarkable for its banality of language, but it
would be unfair to suggest that she wrote it herself. She frequently uses
ghostwriters, who are rarely credited; Professor Barbara Feinman Todd
complained that she was not mentioned in It Takes a Village(1996), Hillarys
bestseller about lessons children teach us. It is not even certain Hillary
wrote her own memoirs: to tell the story of her time as secretary of state,
she used a book team, whom she barely mentions.
The record of Hillarys four years in charge of US foreign policy does not
inspire confidence. In 2011, when the Libyan rebellion was growing, she was
cautious: Im one of those who believes that absent international
authorisation, the United States acting alone, would be stepping into a
situation whose consequences are unforeseeable. Then she changed her mind:
I got an earful about military intervention from Sarkozy. He is a dynamic
figure, always full of ebullient energy, who loves being at the center of
the action ... Sarkozy was also influenced by the French public intellectual
Bernard-Henri Lévy ... They were both genuinely moved by the plight of the
Libyan people, suffering at the hands of a brutal dictator. Seduced by the
Frenchmen, and to avoid a humanitarian disaster, she joined the
interventionist camp and, with President Obama, led the US into a new war
without seeking congressional approval, though the constitution requires it.
Fortunately, it all ended well: Over the next 72 hours, Libyas air
defences were successfully destroyed and the people of Benghazi were saved
from imminent devastation. The rest of the book is in the same vein.
Hillary knows that her rightwing image is the final obstacle to winning over
the supporters of Bernie Sanders. Drawn to the left by her socialist
rivals success in the primaries, she has recently put forward progressive
measures: taxing banks that have too much debt, increasing the minimum wage
to $12 an hour, regulating university tuition fees according to family
income. Her U-turn on free trade has been spectacular. In November 2012 she
praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership: This TPP sets the gold standard in
trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade. But the criticism
by Trump and Sanders of free trade seem to be convincing voters, and in
October 2015 Hillary said: As of today, I am not in favor of what I have
learned about it. I dont believe its going to meet the high bar I have
set. On 7 July her allies blocked an effort by the Sanders campaign to have
the Democratic Party officially oppose a congressional vote on TTP.
Hillary seems more predictable than Trump, who has increased his verbal
attacks on radical Islamists and immigrants. Her calm and sense of
proportion have even won over some Republicans. Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett
Packard, who was finance co-chair of presidential candidate Mitt Romneys
exploratory committee, has openly declared her support, as has
neoconservative Robert Kagan, a former Romney adviser. The Bush family have
said they will abstain in the election.
Hillary also has the unfailing support of the media establishment, which
presents her as the last line of defence against barbarism. David Remnick,
editor of the New Yorker, asked: Has a presidential election ever suggested
more vividly divergent candidates than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? ...
Clinton will have to campaign with unwavering poise against the most
dangerous and unpredictable variety of opponent a demagogue who is willing
to trespass every boundary of decency to win power.
This recalls the confrontation between President Jacques Chirac and Front
National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, when the French left was obliged
to support a rightwing candidate to protect the country from the fascist
danger. But Chirac was more progressive than Hillary, especially on foreign
policy. The US presidential campaign is more like a contest between Angela
Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi, in which the US left has decided to support
Merkel.
John R. MacArthur is an American journalist and author of books about US
politics. He is the president of Harper's Magazine. Translated by Charles
Goulden.
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Source URL:
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/john-r-macarthur
[2] http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on For Fear of Finding
Something Worse
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
