Hillary Clinton is Now a Victim of 'Socialists'
May 20, 2018
Hillary Clinton is incapable of coming to terms with her loss and now finds
fault with greedy capitalists who are turning young people into socialists,
as Paul Street explains.
By Paul Street Special to Consortium News
Hillary Clinton's take on "what happened" in the 2016 election is a running
tale of victimization. She was the casualty of FBI Director James Comey and
of Vladimir Putin and WikiLeaks. She was unjustly loathed by that "basket"
of racist, sexist, nativist, and homophobic "deplorables" that is supposedly
the American "heartland," white working-class and rural population - people
she recently painted (at an elite globalist gathering in Mumbai, India) as a
bunch of "pessimistic," slow-witted and retrograde losers. She was
victimized by Bernie Sanders, who (Hillary complained) wasn't even a "real
Democrat" but had the unmitigated chutzpah to let his primary campaign
challenge her prearranged coronation as the Democratic Party's presidential
candidate.
Never mind the series of stupid, arrogant, and largely unforced errors that
crippled her uninspiring and policy-bereft insider campaign that was under
her command. And never mind her own epic unpopularity before and during the
campaign - disapproval earned over her many years of functioning as a cold
and transparently elitist Establishment agent of the wealthy corporate and
financial Few.
Now the endlessly put-upon (yet fabulously wealthy) and eye-rolling Hillary
has found some more scapegoats for her epic fail: first, "socialists" in the
activist cadres and primary and caucus electorate of the Democratic Party,
then younger voters, and finally greedy corporate chieftains whose greed has
turned good Democrats into "socialists." The "lying neoliberal warmonger"
says she was victimized because of her identification as a "capitalist"
after big business executives' have sadly given capitalism a bad
name-especially with young people.
In an interview with Time Inc. brands executive Alan Murray this month, she
said that her economic policies were "probably" a tough sell with primary
voters: "It's hard to know, but I mean if you're in the Iowa caucuses and 41
percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I'm
asked 'Are you a capitalist?' and I say, 'Yes, but with appropriate
regulation and appropriate accountability.' You know, that probably gets
lost in the 'Oh my gosh, she's a capitalist!'"
Take that, Henry Wallace.
Pity the plight of the poor enlightened capitalist, Hillary Clinton, whose
position high in the American Oligarchy's permanent political class has
permitted her to accumulate a net worth of at least $45 million.
Earlier in the same day as her interview with Murray, Hillary complained to
the posh "Shared Value Leadership Summit" that "the reputation of capitalism
is pretty much in tatters for young people" since powerful U.S. companies
are "disrupting our democracy" (what democracy?) by worsening income
inequality.
Phillips: Dems love capitalism too.
The way to fix this problem? Vote Republicans out of office in 2018, Hillary
said - and vote in the Democrats, who Richard Nixon's onetime political
strategist Kevin Phillips rightly called "history's second most enthusiastic
capitalist party."
Poor Hillary
Among the many things Hillary left out of her latest "poor me" whine, two
deserve special mention here. First, the insufficiently regulated and
excessively amoral business behavior that she says turned young people and a
bunch of Iowa Dems into "self-declared socialists" is just capitalism being
capitalism, not some weird aberration of the profits system.
Contrary to the Clintonian fable of "inclusive capitalism," an oxymoronic
concept the Clinton campaign rolled out in early 2015, the United States'
leading corporations and financial institutions have never placed workers
and the public on an equal footing with investors and the bottom line. It
was first and foremost the rise of a momentarily powerful and significantly
Left-sparked industrial workers' movement - rooted largely in the special
workplace bargaining power of mass-production workers, not some imaginary
corporate benevolence - that created a new and rising floor for
working-class incomes during the "Golden Age" of American capitalism that
the faux-populist Donald Trump absurdly but effectively promised to restore.
At the same time, the gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made
possible by the uniquely favored position of the United States economy (and
empire) in the post-WWII world - a reflection (among other things) of
Europe's long suicide between 1914 and 1945. When that position was
significantly challenged by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic
competition in the 1970s and 1980s, the comparatively egalitarian trends of
postwar America were reversed by capitalist elites who had never lost their
critical command of the nation's core economic and political institutions.
Working- class Americans have paid the price ever since. For the last four
decades, wealth, income, and power have been sharply concentrated upward,
birthing a New Gilded Age of abject oligarchy and brazen plutocracy.
Piketty: Return to historic norm.
This "Great U-Turn" (By Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison) dates from the
finance- and policy-designed onset of the neoliberal era in the mid-1970s It
goes back to the Carter years. And it marked a return to capitalism's
historical norm, as Thomas Piketty showed in his widely read tour de force
Capital in the Twenty First Century (2014). The neoliberal era and its
current New Gilded Age capstone is the profits system returning to its long
and militantly inegalitarian pattern.
Second, the Clintons have long stood precisely in the vanguard of the
neoliberal deregulation of capitalism - in the lead of the shift to savage
inequality and ubiquitous economic insecurity (the ruthless "betrayal of the
American dream") that has pushed millions of U.S. Americans, younger ones
especially, to the left. After graduating from the ruling-class training
ground that is Yale Law School, the Clintons went to Arkansas to help
"lay.the groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the
New Democrat movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC)," according to writer Doug Henwood. The essence of
the DLC was the "neoliberal" abandonment of the Democratic Party's last
lingering commitments to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial
equality, the poor, and environmental protection in service to the
"competitive" bottom-line concerns of Big Business.
DLC: Origins in Attacking Arkansas Teachers
The Clintons helped launch the New (neoliberal corporatist) Democrat
juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas' teacher unions (Hillary led the attack)
and refusing to back the repeal of the state's anti-union "right to work"
law - this while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which
"represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas," Henwood wrote. When the
Arkansas-based, community-organizing group ACORN passed a ballot measure
lowering electrical rates for residential users and raising them for
commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose deployed Hillary to shoot down
the new rate schedule as an unconstitutional "taking of property." Hillary
later joined the board of directors at the low-wage retail giant and
union-busting, Chinese import platform Wal-Mart.
On the board of union-busting, Chinese import platform.
During the Clintons' time in the White House, Bill Clinton advanced the
neoliberal agenda beneath fake-progressive cover, in ways that no Republican
president could have pulled off. Channeling Ronald Reagan by declaring that
"the era of big government is over," Clinton collaborated with the
right-wing Congress of his time to end poor families' entitlement to basic
minimal family cash assistance. Hillary backed this vicious welfare "reform"
(elimination), which has proved disastrous for millions of disadvantaged
Americans.
Mr. Clinton then earned the gratitude of Wall Street and corporate America
by passing the arch-global-corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act (which had mandated a necessary
separation between commercial deposit and investment banking), and by
de-regulating the burgeoning super-risky and high-stakes financial
derivatives sector.
'Tell Me Something Interesting'
Hillary took the lead role in the White House's efforts to pass a
corporate-friendly version of "health reform." Along with the big insurance
companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the "co-presidents"
decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative -
single payer - from the national health care "discussion." (Barack Obama
would do the same thing in 2009.)
Who can ever forget Hillary's weary and exasperated response - as head of
the White House's health reform initiative - to Harvard medical professor
David Himmelstein in 1993. Himmelstein was head of Physicians for a National
Health Program. He told the First Lady about the remarkable possibilities
of a comprehensive, single-payer "Canadian-style" health plan, supported by
more than two-thirds of the U.S. public. Beyond backing by a citizen
super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive
coverage to the nation's 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in
doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as
the most cost-effective plan on offer. "David," Hillary said as she
dismissed Himmelstein, "tell me something interesting."
Mrs. Clinton's service to the rich and powerful continued into the current
millennium. As a U.S. Senator, she did Wall Street's bidding by voting for a
bill designed to make it more difficult for consumers to use bankruptcy laws
to get out from crushing debt. As Secretary of State (2009-2012), she voiced
strong support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - a secretive, richly
corporatist 12-nation Pacific "free trade" (investor rights) agreement that
promised to badly undermine wages, job security, environmental protections,
and popular governance at home and abroad.
Out of Step with the Majority
There's nothing new about Mrs. Clinton and other neoliberal Democrats
standing to the de facto moderate, Republican right of "socialist" (well,
progressive and left-leaning) public opinion that has long been exhibited,
not just by most Democrats but by most people in the U.S. Poll after poll in
the current millennium has shown that most U.S. citizens are egalitarian
social democrats, not capitalists, and certainly not neoliberals. Majorities
have long backed single-payer health insurance, seriously progressive
taxation, the restoration of workers' right to organize powerful unions,
collective bargaining rights, sound climate policy, strong environmental
regulations, major reductions in the "defense" (empire) budget, and an
expansion of the pubic social safety net.
Sanders: Could've won. (NBC photo)
This is the majority sentiment that Bernie Sanders ran in accord with in
2016. He would have won the Democratic presidential nomination and very
possibly defeated Trump but for big-money Hillary's corrupt and advance
control and rigging of the Democratic National Committee, the primary race,
and the Democratic National Convention.
Hillary is likely no longer a threat to poison the waters with another
presidential run. The bitterness of her recent, Middle America-shaming
remarks in India suggest that she's finally thrown in the towel. Even a
political figure as arrogant and removed from ordinary working people as
Hillary Clinton must know that such comments (which Senate Minority Whip
Dick Durbin (D-IL) had to rush to distance his party from) do not square
with another run for the White House.
While Hillary may be political history, however, the Democrats are still
ruled by the same neoliberal and Clintonite ideology that Barack Obama was
able to channel and sell in charismatic and outwardly likable ways that icy
Hillary could not match. Under the cover of Russia-gate, launched by
Clinton and Obama Democrats to provide an external, conspiratorial, and
neo-McCarthyite explanation for the failures of their own right-wing
corporate and imperial politics (and to keep the fires burning under the New
Cold War), the party's leadership continues to stand well to the starboard
side of majority progressive ("socialist") opinion. The dollar-drenched
Dems' candidate roster for the upcoming Congressional mid-terms is loaded
with right-wing Democrats (including an unprecedented usual number with
military and intelligence backgrounds) masquerading as progressives.
Another Fake Progressive Leader?
Harris: Next fake progressive leader?
Do the corporate and imperial Democrats have another Obama or young Bill
Clinton in the wings, someone with the silver-tongued charm to manipulate
populist sentiments on behalf of corporate and financial elitism? If so,
their next faux-progressive pretender has yet to make his or her identity
known.
Iowa progressives should start keeping an eye out Democratic Senator Kamala
Harris, backed by neoliberals Clinton, Obama and Nancy "We're Capitalist and
That's Just the Way It Is" Pelosi (net worth of $83 million) The money is on
Harris, I am told by people in-the-Wall-Street-know. She should attend this
year's Iowa State Fair, where she can talk about Ethanol subsidies and
listen to hog and soybeans farmers' issues.
Young people, meanwhile, must deal with the ferocious economic disparity,
abject plutocracy, permanent imperial war, and deadly environmental
destruction passed on by older corporate and imperial, capitalist Democrats
as well as radically reactionary and regressive capitalist Republicans -
"two wings of the same bird of prey" (as Upton Sinclair said in 1904).
No wonder a majority of 18 to 29-year-olds tell posters they do not support
capitalism.
Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher,
journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and
Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of seven books. His
