Whenever Hillary Clinton makes decisions people are hurt, become poor or die. Her decisions, in word, are atrocious (like her family friend Henry Kissinger's pro-Genocide polices & stances over the years) and she shouldn't be allowed to make these decisions with her Co-President Bill Clinton (not to mention that fact that it's just against the spirit of the law to have these Co-Presidents run for a third term).
Here is an outline of her ATROCIOUS record by independent journalists;
Salon: Dems, stop lying to yourselves about Hillary: Sure, she “gets s*** done” — atrocious s***, that is - The argument that Clinton can navigate the nightmare of D.C. better than Bernie is simply wrong
The smokescreen at its most basic level is that Hillary Clinton is a pragmatic realist who will be able to work with Republicans, while Bernie Sanders is an uncompromising idealist whose proposal for a socialist utopia is dead on arrival. There is not much explanation as to why Clinton is more likely to reach a compromise with a group of House Republicans led by a man who has consideredAyn Rand “required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.” But never mind.
The next line of attacks is designed to put Sanders supporters back on their heels: Clinton is a realist, warts and all, because she is a woman: “YOU DON’T LIKE THAT SHE PLAYS THE GAME? THAT SHE HAS TIES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT? FOR ONE THING, THAT’S HOW SHIT FUCKING GETS DONE. FOR THE OTHER THING, THE BIGGEST THING, A WOMAN DOESN’T GET THE FUCKING OPTION *NOT* TO PLAY THE GAME.”
To recap, Clinton voted to invade Iraq, backed job-killing trade agreements, suggested that black women on welfare were “deadbeats” who were “sitting around the house doing nothing,” called for “more police” and “more prisons” and “more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” and bases not only her campaign finances but her entire social universe on and amid the superrich who she resides among in Westchester and the Hamptons — because she is a realist who can get things done.
Or because she had to do it this way because she is a woman. Or both.
No matter Sanders’ legion of women supporters, including many outspoken socialists. This argument renders those women invisible in an effort to inoculate pro-Clinton women’s arguments from criticism. The fact that a Sanders supporter might also be a big fan of Elizabeth Warren, and in many cases initially lobbied for her to run for president, is also an automatic nonstarter, as Rebecca Traister made clear: “spare me the wistful paeans to Elizabeth Warren…citing a fondness for her as a get-out-of-sexism card is a dodge.”
“Bernie’s attractiveness as a candidate relies on the premise of purity — a political value as ancient as politics itself,” wrote The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, dismissing her youthful cohort for their naivete before knocking them for not even being very cool young people to begin with. “When his campaign tweets that it’s ‘high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,’ you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.”
Anger at Wall Street in 2016. How out of touch!
At the end of the day, all arguments against Clinton or in defense of Sanders can and will be reduced to something unrelated to their politics. Take Cedric Johnson, a professor of African American studies, who recently penned a careful and historically-grounded article. It critiqued Ta-Nehisi Coates’ argument for reparations and the ensuing knock on Sanders by defending socialism’s track record of building mass movements that brought economic gains to black people and fought white supremacy. In response, Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic’s Washington Bureau Chief,dismissed it as “Marxplaining.”
As a growing number of black leaders on the left endorse Sanders, the liberal commentariat finds itself in a bind. So expect more articles — citing, say, the Cuban Revolution’s record on race — contending that Sanders’ campaign is fundamentally incompatible with black aspirations.
Whatever the argument, the entire edifice of the giant anti-Sanders-trolling machine has been constructed on one basic and incorrect premise: Clinton has the battle scars to prove she would actually get “shit” done, while Sanders has the privilege of tromping through fantasyland. But what shit would Clinton actually want to get done? More to the point, what shit has she gotten done? Therein lies a rhetorical sleight of hand: the notion, as Mark Joseph Stern repeated in a recent article, that substantive differences between the candidates are limited to “mostly minor policy disputes.”
In other words, Clinton and Sanders want the same things, and simply differ on how to get there. If that’s true, then people must have some really terrible motivations for opposing Clinton, who if elected would be the first woman president.
In reality, a pragmatic approach would be proposing left policies, meeting the opposition halfway, and agreeing to still-pretty-good measures as a solution. The shitthat Clinton has gotten done, in reality, has often been pretty shitty. Namely, she has supported anti-worker and racist policies that benefit economic elites. Clintonites reaching across the aisle brought us the Iraq War, Wall Street deregulation, the destruction of welfare and NAFTA.
Those things don’t qualify as worthy if flawed compromises but rather as things that leftists dislike and find to be inconsistent with their values. When Democrats and Republicans have agreed on things in recent decades—from so-called education reform to further skewing the global economy towards the interests of capital—they played out to the advantage of elites and to the detriment of poor and working people. What compromise has meant for decades is that Democrats work with Republicans to pass reactionary legislation, and in doing so moved the goal posts yet farther to the right.
Supporters like Sanders because he wants single-payer healthcare, free college for all, and is calling for a political revolution to overthrow plutocracy. To put it simply, people on the left dislike Clinton because she is a plutocrat with a track record to match.
Many Clinton supporters seem resistant to the idea that there is a political left in the United States, however battered and diminished it might have become in recent years. Crucially, in the 1990s, it was an anti-Clinton Administration left, protesting NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, mass incarceration and the destruction of welfare. And then came Bush, and demonstrations were launched against the Iraq invasion (and the one of Afghanistan too). Then there was the financier-inflicted crash, historic income inequality, and Occupy Wall Street.
If there was one basic idea uniting the left during these decades in the wilderness it was an opposition to the turn toward corporate-aligned neoliberalism, from Bill Clinton to Tony Blair, as the sole alternative to a xenophobic, ruthlessly austerian and neoconservative right wing. But certain liberals are ideologically incapable of understanding that there is a segment of people to their left who are, as Andrew O’Hehir once put it, their political opponents. This is a two-party system and the left has nowhere else to go: as establishment liberals never tire of reminding the left, voting for Nader didn’t work out. So here we are, having a robust if too often confused debate in a primary.
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.
Salon: Hillary’s atrocious race record: Her stances over decades have been painful and wrong - "The idea that she is or ever has been a stalwart advocate for black empowerment is absolutely ludicrous"
As an African-American, I have struggled to understand why so many of my black brothers and sisters seem to prefer Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
Some have argued that black people are terrified at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency, and so they rally around Clinton under the belief that she is more electable in the November general contest. However, looking at the election results so far it seems clear that Bernie Sanders actually stands the best chance of prevailing over Trump.
Then there’s the notion that Hillary Clinton is somehow preserving Barack Obama’s legacy: just a few short months ago she was going out of her way to distance herself from the Obama administration because she believed it was politically expedient to do so. Now, under threat from Sanders’ insurgency, she is cynically trying to sell herself as Obama’s right hand. But of course, the moment she locks down the nomination she’ll go back to drawing contrast–the Clintons have always been leaders at “vote capturing.”
But perhaps the most disturbing of all is the insinuation that Hillary Clinton has some kind of proud and storied legacy in the service of black empowerment. She doesn’t. Consider the comparative records of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders:
The Chicago Years
While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders served as a chapter chairman for the Congress for Racial Equality. In this capacity, he worked to end segregation in schools and housing—activities for which he was arrested.
What was Hillary Clinton doing while Sanders was organizing sit-ins and demonstrations? Well, she was also living in Chicago at the time, but she was working for the other team: in 1963-64, Clinton was a volunteer and supporter for the campaign of Barry Goldwater.
For those who don’t know, Goldwater’s claim to fame is that he was the first Republican to win the Deep South since Reconstruction. He achieved this feat byvowing to undermine enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, and to prevent further erosion of white privilege. His campaign was so disgusting that many Republican leaders, such as George Romney and John Rockefeller, refused to endorse his candidacy even after he won his party’s nomination. A good deal of the Republican electorate, who had traditionally championed civil rights and civil liberties, also refused to support him. As a result, those aforementioned Deep South states were literally the only contests he won other than his home state of Arizona in one of the most dramatic landslide losses in U.S. presidential history. Yet, this is the man who inspired Hillary Clinton to get into politics. And she was campaigning for him while Bernie was campaigning for desegregation.
The trend continues: in 1984 and ’88, Bernie Sanders endorsed and supported Jessie Jackson’s bids for the White House, which would have made him America’s first African-American president. Rather than endorsing this movement, Bill Clinton infamously sought to elevate himself among white Southern and Rust Belt voters at the expense of Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition.
Of course, it’d be easy to write this off–after all, it was a long time ago. However, the Clintons’ tenure in the White House doesn’t look so great in hindsight either:
The Clinton Administration(s)
Bill Clinton’s deregulation of banks and Wall Street helped bring about the 2008 financial collapse that profoundly and disproportionately obliterated black wealth. In the wake of this disaster, and despite their long and sordid history of discrimination and predatory practices against people of color, Hillary Clinton continues to defend the institutions responsible (and is richly rewarded for doing so).
Bill Clinton’s welfare reform further contributed to extreme poverty—particularly for African-Americans and other communities of color. While Bernie strongly resistedthese measures, Hillary staunchly advocated for them—referring to people on welfare as “deadbeats” who were largely responsible for their own continued poverty.
And then, of course, there are the Clinton-era “tough on crime” measures, whichHillary Clinton actively lobbied for. While Sanders ultimately voted for the bill for the sake of its assault rifle ban and domestic violence protections, he first took to the senate floor to passionately denounce the draconian sentencing provisions contained therein, which he aptly predicted would be exercised primarily against America’s poor, largely people of color. In contrast, Hillary Clinton referred to the criminalized as animals, describing them as “super-predators” which have to be “brought to heel.”
Extracts from an earlier post on Hillary's racist tactics ;
Views of most respondents to the hash tag #HillarySoQualified on twitter;
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Hillary’s Hypocrisy: Clinging to Obama After Her Racist Dog Whistles in 2008
Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.
In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.
As anyone who has read the two major recent biographies of Hillary Clinton (Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.; and A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein) knows all too well, she will do whatever she has to do and say whatever she has to say in the unbridled (and unscrupulous) pursuit of power. The ash heap of her duplicity sprawls across decades and across various regions of this country — from Arkansas to the White House, from Illinois to, well, now, Pennsylvania.
Clinton is an inveterate liar — I am sorry, there is truly no other word for it — and as her ill-fated presidential campaign tumbles toward its inevitable demise, the personal deception that is at the core of her personality, and of her career, continues to reveal itself.
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True. This is Hillary supporting Bill Clinton's Crime Bill as wife & Co-Presidents in 1994
Recently Hillary cut her ties with money from the private prison industry... in other words, she destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and got paid for it! Who cares if she cuts off her ties years after making money from it and destroying people. It's an election. Her reason for cutting her private prison money ties is obvious (i.e. votes).
As one journalist put it: To recap, Clinton voted to invade Iraq, backed job-killing trade agreements, suggested that black women on welfare were “deadbeats” who were “sitting around the house doing nothing,” called for “more police” and “more prisons” and “more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders,” and bases not only her campaign finances but her entire social universe on and amid the superrich who she resides among in Westchester and the Hamptons — because she is a realist who can get things done.
Hillary's racism still persists today and one has to wonder why the media isn't covering this in more detail and with more scandalous tones (we DID just have a black President are we gonna continue with GOP racist politics again?)
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