Miriam,
Sounds like I read the same book. I seem to be better at remembering
generalizations than specifics.
Maybe Hillary has been less changed than I thought. Only her Party,
which is actually more closely compared with the old Republican Party.
Although I doubt either Republicans or Democrats from the 1940's, 50's
and even 60's would recognize their Party today.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/23/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
At some point, many years ago, I read a biography of Hillary. I can't
remember anything about it. However, I do think that she came from a middle
income family, Republican, from the Mid West. Bill came from a less
well-to-do family than she did. Neither of them were from really wealthy
backgrounds. But she was very much a Republican back when there was a
difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 8:05 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton is Now a Victim of
'Socialists'
Miriam,
I read it a little closer. I love Hillary's remark, "...I'm asked 'Are you
a capitalist?' and I say, 'Yes, but with appropriate regulation and
appropriate accountability."
And I bet that none of her advisors told her that such language is exactly
why she lost.
Hillary is Hillary. Perhaps in her circles she is a good and decent person.
But she is not now, nor has she ever been a friend of the Working Class.
Even in her idealistic youth, she championed Causes that sounded fine and
Patriotic, but of which she had no real sense, nor any real commitment.
I hold no ill will toward Hillary, Bill, Barack, Jimmy or any of the wealthy
"Liberals". They have good reason to believe and behave the way they do.
It's paying off...at least in the short run. But accepting their position
is not the same as agreeing with their life style or their values. I never
forget that my People are Working Class People.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/23/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
The article sort of says that, and more. Paul Street writes really
good articles so whenever I see one, wherever it is, I read it and try
to post it if I can. This article quotes some things she said to her
wealthy supporters about why she lost, and it gives a clear and
concise history of the Clintons' service to the wealthy.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 5:21 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Hillary Clinton is Now a Victim of
'Socialists'
Disclaimer!!!
I just skimmed this article.
But that never stops me from heading off down the old Warpath.
In a sane world, Hillary Clinton would be seen as a Hawkish
Conservative Corporate Candidate.
Like so many politicians who tend to hug the middle of the road,
Hillary counted on receiving a large percentage of the Left, Liberal
vote. So she played for the wide Middle, catering to both White
Collar Workers and the Upper Class Liberals. But she lost much of the
Liberal vote to Bernie, and much of the White Collar and Upper Class
Liberals to Donald. And she lost in part due to her own politics.
She, along with Bill and Barack, cleaned out the Middle Class, forcing
most of that breed to turn Working Class and vote for the likes of
Bernie. In my humble opinion, Hillary was defeated by her own
stupidity, as shown by the very act of attempting to pass the blame off to
just about everyone else.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/23/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
