Elizabeth Warren On Hillary Clinton's Hypocrisy Concerning Wall Street (Bill's Legacy)
Hillary & Bill Clinton Make BAD Decisions 3 - Against & THEN For LGBT Rights
With all the positions Hillary is taken in response to Bernie Sanders she now stands at polar opposites with her own husbands "legacy". She now opposes her husbands legacy of mass incarceration (which she helped with) though the outcry for Latino rights isn't so high yet so Hillary supported a slavery like bill for Hispanics. This will come back to haunt her in a second term run if she ever becomes President.
First, lets look at Hillary's claim to her progressive credentials and other such lies...Salon: The establishment looks like this: The real reason why Clintons always push our politics to the right Hillary and Bernie have two different visions. You can make a case for either -- but they're not the same
How The Clintons Pulled The Party To The Right—And Lost Congress, Too
With this important distinction added to the mix, Sunkara’s account is most refreshingly clear: the Clinton’s arrived as part of the New Democrats cohort whose notion of “progress” was away from the New Deal and the Great Society, not toward perfecting what they had begun, which is how Hillary Clinton defines herself today. But that’s not at all how she came to power. As Sunkara explains:
According to the New Democrats, blue-collar whites were wary of “big government.” By crafting policies palatable to these voters, Clintons and their allies, the story goes, were able to capture the White House and at least guarantee some form of progressive governance, albeit watered down, after the era of Reagan.But much of this conventional wisdom is wrong. As political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers note in “Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics,” in 1979 close to 80 percent of Americans polled thought there was too much power concentrated in large corporations. A majority in the same survey thought that business was making too much and supported a cap on corporate profit.What the Clinton Democrats actually did was build a coalition based around the interests of business, not those of most voters.
The disastrous results of this coalition were immediately obvious: after the passage of NAFTA, Democrats lost the House of Representative for the first time in 40 years, and they’ve only held it for four years ever since, despite the fact that Republicans have only won the popular presidential vote one time since 1988. Loses in state legislatures were similarly unprecedented. The New Democrats’ program was a disaster for the Democratic Party, though it did work out well for the Clintons and a newly consolidating party elite, which now endorses Hillary almost universally. At the time, Sunkara notes:
As first lady, Hillary Clinton echoed the administration’s tough-on-crime rhetoric and strongly supported landmark achievements such as the 1996 welfare reform bill, which placed onerous new restrictions and requirements on recipients of the program, and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The TPP is based off of the Clinton's NAFTA and is designed what all such policies are designed to do, give all rich people a chance to compete for the worlds labor at prices that suggest there are no national borders and thus no standards.
Politifact: Hillary Does A Full Flop On Policies She Helped With In Her Husbands Turn At The Presidency;
Salon: Trans-Pacific Partnership: Written by and for the rich to further enrich themselves at our expense Don't be fooled by the reports gushing that TPP will increase real incomes in the U.S. They don't mean your income
But that reality hasn’t stopped their PR campaign, pitching their “salad” as good and good for you! For example, a recent article touted a study blaring the happy news that TPP will increase real incomes in the U.S. by $133 billion a year. Even if that were true (and plenty of other studies show that it’s not), it’s a statistic meant to dazzle rather than enlighten, for it skates around the real bottom line for the American public: An increase in income for whom?
Fine, but who’s behind that? We’re not told, even though that information is key to understanding the upbeat interpretation of the TPP trade scheme. Readers would likely be less reassured by the positive spin if they knew that the Peterson Institute is largely funded by the major global corporations that would gain enormous new power over consumers, workers, farmers, our environment and the very sovereignty of America if Congress rubber stamps this raw deal. In fact, many of the multinational giants financing the institute were among the 500 corporate powers that were literally allowed to help write the 2,000-page agreement they’re now trying to shove down our throats — including Caterpillar, Chevron, IBM, GE, Deere & Company, General Motors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Oh, and what about this Peterson guy — is he some sort of unbiased scholar? Hardly. Pete Peterson is a Wall Street billionaire, one of the 400 richest people in the country, and the founding chairman of his eponymous institute. He’s also a reactionary, anti-government, anti-public-spending ideologue who was Nixon’s commerce secretary. Hailed by the establishment as one of “the most influential billionaires in U.S. politics,” he uses that influence (and his fortune) to demonize such for-the-people programs as Social Security and to push policies to further enrich and enthrone the billionaire class over the rest of us. TPP would be his ultimate political coup against us commoners.
We don’t need any institute to tell us who would benefit from TPP. All we need to know is that it was negotiated in strict secrecy with global corporate elites while we consumers and workers were locked out. Remember, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
Don’t be bamboozled by glittery studies. TPP was written by and for the superrich to further enrich themselves at our expense, exacerbating the widening gulf of inequality in America. For information and action tips, go to Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch at www.citizen.org/trade.
In Australia in 2012, Clinton delivered remarks on the general topic of the U.S.-Australia relationship. Here’s everything she said about the TPP in that address, with the "gold standard" comment in bold.
"So it's fair to say that our economies are entwined, and we need to keep upping our game both bilaterally and with partners across the region through agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. Australia is a critical partner. This TPP sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field. And when negotiated, this agreement will cover 40 percent of the world's total trade and build in strong protections for workers and the environment."
So it seems Clinton is saying the TPP does, definitevely set the gold standard -- as opposed to Clinton hoping it will.
Maddow: Sanders gives liberals a mainstream voice Rachel Maddow remarks on the lack of liberal representation in mainstream politics and notes that Bernie Sanders has given voice to a new generation of liberals who don't have to feel excluded from mainstream politics.
Salon: Hillary Clinton’s progressive problem: The real policy differences between her and Bernie Sanders can actually be quantified Both Clinton and Sanders are laying claim to the word "progressive." Trouble is, they both actually have records
In the immediate aftermath of the Iowa caucus, both Democratic candidates and their supporters have become engaged in an argument over who’s more progressive. That in itself would surely be a good thing—far better than competing over who’s most moderate. But the way the Clinton team is initially pursuing their side of the argument is both inherently self-contradictory, and unlikely to sufficiently connect with and motivate voters in the general election, should she be the nominee.
The two problems are not unrelated. The self-contradictory argument is founded in her self-branding as “a progressive who gets things done.” When it’s rolled out into an argument against Sanders it becomes: (a) she’s really more progressive than Sanders, and (b) she can get things done, because she’s not as wild-eyed—i.e. as progressive—as Sanders is. When Sanders challenges the obvious contradiction here, its unsustainability forces Clinton’s fall-back into the second problem: Clinton’s response is to treat anything Sanders says to challenge her argument as an attack against President Obama. That may be a savvy way to win the primary, but a profoundly counter-productive approach in the long run.
Don’t let me put words in Clinton’s mouth. Here’s how she responded in CNN’s town hall when Anderson Cooper asked her about being a moderate or a progressive:
I said that I’m a progressive who likes to get things done. And I was somewhat amused today that Senator Sanders has set himself up to be the gatekeeper on who is the progressive because under the definition that was flying around on Twitter and statements by the campaign, Barack Obama would not be a progressive, Joe Biden would not be a progressive, Jeanne Shaheen would not be a progressive, even the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone would not be a progressive.
Twitter chatter aside, when it comes to judging who’s more progressive than who, political scientists have an app for that—at least for those who’ve served in Congress, as Sanders and Clinton both have. It’s the DW-Nominate first dimension, scaled from +1 to -1, which explains the lion’s share of how members vote. [Explanation|Data]. For the two years when they served in the Senate together, Sanders had a score of -.717, making him far and away the most liberal member. Number two, Sheldon Whitehouse had a score of -.507, while number 15, Hillary Clinton had a score of -.403. The difference between Sanders’ score and Clinton’s was greater than the difference between Clinton and Evan Bayh, the second-most conservative member of the Democratic caucus at the time. So in short, the difference between them in terms of who is most progressive is both objective and huge.
The difference can be seen internationally as well. Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist, and regularly points to countries that fully embody that philosophy, such as the Nordic countries of Denmark and Sweden. These serve as objective embodiments of what his politics aims to achieve—and they can be used to contrast with Clinton’s objectives as well. In his groundbreaking book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Gøsta Esping-Andersen identified three distinctly different models for welfare state organization, each driven by a different logic. The socialist or social democratic model seen in Nordic countries is based on the logic of social solidarity, to provide maximal protections for all; the conservative model, typified by Germany and seen elsewhere throughout continental Europe, aims to consolidate the existing social order and its hierarchical relations in various ways; the liberal model, typified by English-speaking countries from Britain to the U.S., Canada and Australia, aims to deal with imperfections in the market system with minimal interference to the basic system. As I explained in an article here about Sanders’ campaign last June:
If it’s somehow a secret that Clinton has moved left in response to Sanders, it’s the worst-kept secret in D.C. When Sanders takes note of it, that’s just what he’s doing—taking note. He’s not attacking her, he’s not making things up, and he’s not setting himself up as the world’s sole authority on who is or is not a progressive Indeed, he’s often said that he and Clinton share much in common, even as there are sharp differences as well.
Salon: Hillary is her own worst enemy: No amount of progressive rebranding can change her record Clinton has spent years serving a neoliberal agenda. Democratic voters are no longer buying what she's selling
The writing has been on the wall all along. It started the moment stories appeared in June 2014 on Hillary Clinton’s stunning speaking fees – mind you, not the ones paid by Goldman Sachs, but by cash-strapped U.S. public universities.
The way in which these stories, appearing in the New York Times at the time, described the absolute arrogance and imperiousness of her staff in arranging for $225,000 plus fees, along with painstaking minutiae for the event itself.
NOT OF US
To this day, her attitude on these speaking fees is one of complete nonchalance, if not flipness. Her best justification is “because I can.” And her protestations today that she had not decided to run for President at the time is completely unconvincing as well. Nobody but true believers buys that.
At a minimum, caution should have prevailed. If Hillary’s much-professed concern about the Republican attack machine had one practical effect on her life and political career, it was to make her more circumspect. And yet, she decided to throw caution to the winds.
At a minimum, the raft of stories about her fees portrayed a politician who had lost her moral anchor. It was as if she had to prove to herself that she should command such high fees. Or that she simply wanted to cash in, as older politicians are wont to do, before retiring.
Impervious to advice
It is unlikely that Mrs. Clinton was not forewarned at the time by senior advisers. It was clear that such fees would not go down well in a presidential election campaign, given that we live in a decade when most people are treading water financially (which ironically is an integral part of her stump speech).
Nor did the Clintons need the money. Bill has raked in plenty of dough, enough to make the Clintons a permanent part of the (in)famous 1%.
Video: Clinton-Sanders rivalry gets heated on eve of debate - A day before the first head-to-head debate of the 2016 cycle, the Clinton and Sanders campaigns went back and forth over who deserves the progressive mantle.
First, some background (first time Liberals have had a voice and it's not because of the Clin
tons);
Maddow: Sanders gives liberals a mainstream voice Rachel Maddow remarks on the lack of liberal representation in mainstream politics and notes that Bernie Sanders has given voice to a new generation of liberals who don't have to feel excluded from mainstream politics.
Miscellaneous Hillary Lies;
Top Hillary Clinton Advisers and Fundraisers Lobbied Against Obamacare and Dodd-Frank
Hillary Clinton is campaigning as a guardian of President Barack Obama’sprogressive policy accomplishments. In recent weeks, she has called the Affordable Care Act “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” and promised that she is “going to defend Dodd-Frank” and “defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street.”
Meanwhile, however, Clinton’s campaign has been relying on a team of strategists and fundraisers, many of whom spent much of the last seven years as consultants or lobbyists for business interests working to obstruct Obama’s agenda in those two areas.
Consultants associated with the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying firm that has been retained by business interests to defeat a variety of progressive reforms, are playing a major role in the Clinton campaign. Charles Baker III, the co-founder of Dewey, is a senior strategist and the campaign’s chief administrative officer. Michael Whouley, another Dewey co-founder, played an early role in advising Clinton’s plan for the current campaign by convening some of the very first strategy sessions. Senior Dewey officials Jill Alper and Minyon Moore are also close advisers and fundraisers for Clinton, while at least four other Clinton officials have worked at Dewey within the last four years. In addition, disclosures show that Clinton’s Super PACs Priorities USA Action and Correct the Record have also paidDewey Square Group for a variety of services in this election.
Undermining Obamacare reforms
Dewey, for instance, worked on behalf of the health insurance industry during the health reform debate, specifically to block the changes to Medicare Advantage that were critical for financing the Affordable Care Act. Medicare Advantage, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to use plans administered by private insurers, had long served as a cash cow for the health insurance industry. By one estimate, insurance companies over-billed the government by nearly $70 billion in improper payments over just a five year period. Dewey, which had been tapped to by health insurers to block cuts from the program starting in 2007, continued during the Obama era to lobby to protect Medicare Advantage, even as such reforms became a major part of how Democrats and the Obama administration sought to finance the Affordable Care Act.
One of the more deceptive components of the Dewey lobbying strategy was uncovered when an editor at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Eagle-Tribune realized that the firm had worked quietly to place letters to the editor against cuts to Medicare Advantage under the names of elderly Massachusetts residents without their knowledge or consent.
U.S.News: Clinton's Health Care Attack Makes No Sense - The Clinton camp is lambasting Bernie Sanders' health care plan, but its critique is blatantly dishonest;
Clinton is lambasting Sanders' proposal for a universal, single-payer health care system. And she's doing it in a pretty dishonest way.
"His plan would take Medicare and Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act health care insurance and private employer health insurance and he would take that all together and send health insurance to the states, turning over your and my health insurance to governors," Clinton said. "We had enough of a fight to get to the Affordable Care Act. So I don’t want to rip it up and start over."
Clinton's daughter Chelsea got in on the act, too, in an even worse manner, claiming that Sanders wants to "dismantle Obamacare." She said: "I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we'll go back to an era, before we had the Affordable Care Act, that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance."
Clinton's daughter Chelsea got in on the act, too, in an even worse manner, claiming that Sanders wants to "dismantle Obamacare." She said: "I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we'll go back to an era, before we had the Affordable Care Act, that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance."
This is mostly rank nonsense. A single-payer system, like it does in many other countries, would cover everybody, period. To say otherwise is either willfully misunderstanding how it would work or simple scaremongering.
Hillary Clinton, jumping on a line in an old Sanders bill that says his plan would be administered by the states, is attempting to tie him to the failure of many Republican governors to embrace Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which has resulted in millions of people being denied health insurance. But that's very different from single-payer: Sure, Republican governors could maybe try to weasel out of whatever a President Sanders had in mind, but to think he would design a plan that governors could just ignore is silly. (For the record, Sanders' camp emphatically says the plan would apply to everyone.)
Image of Think Progress article;
Hillary Clinton Is Using GOP Fear Tactics Against Bernie Sanders’ Health Care Plan
A collection of lies from Polifact in image form (screenshots);
Salon: The Clintons really don’t get it: False attacks and failed strategies as Hillary repeats 2008 They're distorting Sanders
At this point she might have decided to curtail the personal attacks, but alas, no. In a public television debate two days after the primary, she waited till the last second to launch an attack, this time on Sanders’ alleged disloyalty to Obama. It seems this will be a principal theme going forward, so in case you missed, a sample:
Today Senator Sanders said President Obama failed the presidential leadership test…. he has called him weak. He has called him a disappointment. He wrote a forward for a book that basically argued voters should have buyers’ remorse when it comes to President Obama’s leadership and legacy it is the kind of criticism I expect from Republicans. Calling the president weak… [Saying] several times he should have a primary opponent when he ran for re-election…
Much of this is flat-out false; all is shorn of context and rife with what Politifact called “half-truths.” Bill Press wrote a book criticizing Obama, but Sanders didn’t write the foreword (just a blurb that doesn’t criticize Obama). He never called Obama weak or a disappointment, though he once said Obama showed weakness in budget negotiations. Talking to a radio host who wanted Obama primaried, Sanders said open debate was a good thing. But notice in the above quote how Clinton, the Mary Lou Retton of syntax, made it seem Sanders said all these things.
When Clinton at last holstered her weapon, moderators Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill, who’d done yeoman’s work to that point, said there wasn’t time for Sanders to answer her final fusillade, but that he could do so in his closing remarks. Off balance for the first time all night, he split the difference, which made for a weak finish to an otherwise strong performance. Too bad; he deserved a chance at a full rebuttal even if it meant shaving a minute or two off “Antiques Roadshow.”
Clinton’s playing an explosive game, especially since she herself spent much of 2015 sniping at Obama. When Obama described his foreign policy as “Don’t do stupid stuff,” she ridiculed him. When he wouldn’t violate international law by declaring a no-fly zone in Syria, she broke with him. She talks a lot about being commander in chief. She must know it’s hard to be one when your old secretary of state is taking shots at you. Ironically enough, on foreign policy Sanders has been more loyal to Obama than Clinton, but the irony doesn’t end there.
As Hillary laced into Sanders, Bill was miles away lacing into Obama. In a listless swipe at the banking system, he said, “Yeah, it’s rigged, because you don’t have a president who’s a change maker.” It’s what Hillary accuses Bernie of saying. (Note too, the tacit admission that Bernie’s right on Dodd Frank.) All in all, Hillary looks cunning, not loyal. Because integrity is for her what intelligence was for Dan Quayle, she can ill afford to appear hypocritical or be caught doctoring the truth.
Clinton’s ad hominem attacks — call it the politics of personal destruction — poison the air around her. Just before New Hampshire, deservedly beloved feminist icon Gloria Steinem told Bill Maher that young women join Sanders’ campaign to meet guys. Steinem got taken to the Internet woodshed for making a lighthearted, self-deprecating joke, on a comedy show, no less, but only because the tone of Clinton’s campaign is so rancid. Clinton must see how her scorched-earth policy hurts her family, her friends and her campaign, but for her there’s never any turning back.
In another reminder of 2008, Clinton has added race to the mix. On primary night on CNN, Clinton ally Michael Nutter slyly accused Sanders of subtle racism, terming his call for criminal justice reform “mildly offensive” because, Nutter falsely charged, Sanders never talks about other African-American issues. For some reason— it can’t be ratings — CNN lets commentators with clear conflicts of interest mouth thinly veiled partisan message. This is worse. Nutter is no more “offended” than Hillary is “concerned” or Bill “shocked” to discover trolls on the Internet. They want us to think Bernie does what they do, but of course he doesn’t.
The most striking thing about the debate, other than the low blow Clinton struck at the end of the last round, was that Sanders got the better of her on foreign policy. Has any other presidential candidate ever told the American people that Iran doesn’t “hate us for our freedom” but because we engineered the violent overthrow of their democratically elected president and installed a vicious tyrant in his place? The rest of the world knows, why not us? Is Clinton’s jingoism about not talking to Iran the signal we want to send to thousands of Iranians who joyously took to the streets to celebrate the nuclear weapons pact? Shouldn’t Clinton’s airbrushing of the hyper-secretive, lawbreaking Kissinger concern us? Has anyone but Bernie ever said Henry Kissinger’s China opening may have cost us some jobs? Clinton mocks him for citing her Iraq vote but he now casts a wider net. Pundits citing her foreign policy cred should feel honor-bound to tell us why she’s right and he’s wrong.
The press doesn’t understand any better than Hillary what made New Hampshire historic. They’re great at figuring out who’s ahead in South Carolina, but awful at grasping — let alone conveying –the terms of the new debate.
It’s too soon to describe that debate whole, but among Democrats at least it has begun to clarify. A word about it, and what it means to this race.
Thirty years ago, reeling from the Reagan Revolution, elite Democrats rebranded their party, which had long championed both economic and cultural liberalism. They kept cultural liberalism, but ditched economic liberalism for “neoliberalism”; a blend of economic deregulation, free trade, smaller government and targeted tax cuts. Few said it out loud, but it was the end of the Roosevelt coalition, which had been built on economic issues of universal appeal and which had lasted 50 years.
Neoliberalism appeals to the rich. Neoliberal Bill Clinton was the first Democratic presidential nominee to outspend a Republican. In 2008 Obama outspent John McCain 2-to-1, breaking a record set in 1972 by Richard Nixon. But neoliberalism is killing the middle class. It’s why both parties rely on cultural issues to hold their bases. If you back abortion rights, same sex marriage and gun safety you’re a Democrat. If not, you’re a Republican. On economic issues it’s more complex. If you hate big banks and political corruption, you could be for Sanders or Trump. It’s why Sanders talks so much about these things; they’re what the election’s all about.
When Clinton isn’t calling Sanders a traitor, she says she shares his goals. But she doesn’t. Clinton was part of the neoliberal revolt that destroyed the Roosevelt coalition and she is as we’ve seen, a woman of markedly fixed views. She may be Obama’s heir, but Sanders is FDR’s. She campaigns as she does out of habit, and to hide the very real choice. The neoliberal experiment is over. Democrats, proud heirs to Franklin Roosevelt, are ready to come home.
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