Hillary Clinton: Not Lesser Evil, Just Evil

" . . . the potential first female president represent[s] a purely cosmetic form of diversity that works against the structural changes that need to be made at every level of culture and politics to expose and depose a political class that has acted with impunity to promote policies that benefit wealthy donors and powerful multinational corporations."
                                      -----Professor Catherine Liu

"Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the terrible policies of the Bush Administration, but she is responsible for following in lock-step with those policies during her tenure as Secretary of State under the Obama Administration."

                                   -----Robin D., Tits and Sass

"That's a wicked woman."
                                   -----Minister Louis Farrakhan 

It is a staple observation of modern feminism that a woman has to be twice as capable as a man to go half as far in her career, which should mean that in the negative profession of U.S. politics a woman has to be four times as evil as a man in order to capture the presidency. With this in mind we can certainly agree that Hillary Clinton is "far more qualified" than Donald Trump to be president. The only question is how many more years the human race can be expected to survive such "qualified" leaders.

Apparently suffering from a permanent case of what used to be called "the vapors," liberals aghast at Donald Trump's "racism" continually overlook the fact that Hillary backed Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill, which railroaded an entire generation of young blacks into prison on the pretext that they were "super-predators," (Hillary's term), a reformulation of the Jim Crow era's "bestial black brutes," always supposedly in need of a good lynching or (nowadays) a long prison term. No surprise that Hillary has close ties to the private prison industry, which grows fat on the crushed lives of the desperately poor, all too many of them black.

Recall that Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency lecturing blacks about "personal responsibility," playing on racist stereotypes that they were hyper-actively and irresponsibly sexual, an amazing display of chutzpah given his own predilections. Furthermore, his deliberate distortion of Sister Souljah's remarks about black lives not mattering (*Clinton claimed Souljah was calling for the murder of white people when in fact her point was that IF black gang members killed whites instead of each other a racist media would at least cover the story, which it does not do when blacks are doing all the dying) was a transparent attempt to put blacks at the back of the Clinton victory bus, which he clearly thought was their "place." Such is the thinking of "New Democrats," and Hillary is one of them.

Hillary also strongly supported president Clinton's 1996 "welfare reform," which plunged another million American children into poverty (a disproportionate number of them black children) at a time when the U.S already had the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. The Children's Defense Fund (which Hillary worked for fresh out of law school) condemned the Clintons publicly for this, with founder Marian Wright Edelman opining that Bill Clinton's "signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children." By 2002 Hillary was so proud of welfare reform that she bragged, "These people are no longer deadbeats, they're actually out there being productive" (italics added). Note her language - deadbeat - which is a synonym for sponger, and virtually identical to Adolf Hitler's "useless eaters." Note as well that the majority of welfare beneficiaries have always been children, prevented by child labor laws from being "productive."

In other words, her feminism is a fraud. She staunchly opposes welfare, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and Medicare for all, establishment stances that keep millions of women mired in dismal poverty. And she loves war, which always increases rape, and champions military interventions that strengthen ISIS, famous for practicing femicide and sex slavery as masculine ideals.

During her husband's terms in the presidency, Hillary crafted his "triangulation" strategy and helped advance Republican orthodoxy across the board: "social" spending for police, prisons, and war; NAFTA, which off-shored 682,000 American jobs; a racist drug war (penalties for crack cocaine favored by black users were far harsher than those for powder cocaine used by whites); an expansion of capital punishment; a massive assault on the First Amendment via the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, budget austerity; Star Wars; runaway prison construction; the dismissal of unions and unemployment as policy concerns; the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit default swaps from regulation and helped usher in economic collapse.

As Secretary of State she focused laser-like on the needs of corporate capital, which she confused with the national interest. According to the Wall Street Journal, she "redefined the job in ways that promoted the interests of U.S. business." Among recent secretaries the Journal found her "one of the most aggressive global cheerleaders for American companies," lobbying foreign governments to "sign deals and change policies to the advantage of corporate giants" like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, and Microsoft." According to an analysis by the paper, at least sixty companies that lobbied the State Department during Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State also donated over $26 million to the Clinton Foundation "charity."

How did Hillary do as Secretary of State? A Stanford-NYU study soon after she left office concluded that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012 U.S. drone strikes killed thousands of people in Pakistan alone. Meanwhile, U.S.-brokered arms sales rose to an all-time high on her watch, to $66.3 billion in 2011, more than 75% of the global arms market, driven by major deals with autocratic Persian Gulf states. President Obama said that the arms deals would be good for jobs and the State Department said that in such an insecure region it would be good for security. But what kind of security? A 2009 cable published by WikiLeaks offers a hint. The document has Hillary admitting that Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. arms recipient, is "the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." In short, "security" means sending more fuel to the arsonists who want to burn our house down.

 All of which makes it difficult to take seriously Hillary's advocacy of "smart power," which  simply means using every conceivable means to advance Washington's world hegemony. "Human rights" is a favorite theme, even as Washington continually tramples on international law and the sovereignty of nations to achieve it. Most alarming is Clinton's continual portrayal of Vladimir Putin as "Hitler," thus dismissing any role for genuine diplomacy. When Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Southeastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board, Hillary immediately blamed Putin and urged European countries to attack Russia, though there was no evidence to back up her claim. "There should be outrage in European capitals," she said, adding the brain-dead Cold War adage that "the only language [Putin] understands" is toughness. She declared that Putin was "pushing the envelope as far as he thinks he can," suggesting that the Russian president had deliberately shot down the plane in order to test Western resolve. To this day she maintains that Putin "must be punished," a policy that obviously runs a high risk of nuclear war. By comparison, Donald Trump's call for the U.S. and Russia to "get along" and solve problems through negotiation seems stunningly brilliant.

In spite of her dismal record, Hillary shamelessly affects great concern for the fate of "women and girls" around the world, but as with all her other high-minded rhetoric, it rings hollow. Not quite a year before her "good friend" Madeleine Albright declared to Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes that killing 500,000 Iraqi children via economic blockade was "worth it" because of the perceived political gains involved, Hillary intoned that, "It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are girls." Note that the motive, not the killing, is what she finds reprehensible. If you kill girls not because they are girls, but simply for being Iraqi, that's OK. And you can kill hundreds of thousands of them.

No surprise, then, that Hillary believes the solution to the humanitarian crisis of Syrian refugees is to obliterate their country with bombs.

The 2011 destruction of Libya was at Hillary's initiative, as she convinced a reluctant Secretary Gates and President Obama to intervene, reducing a country that had had the highest standard of living in Africa to a chaotic ruin presided over by ISIS gangs, who now roam the beaches beheading people. At the same time as Hillary was arguing that U.S. military intervention was justified because the Libyan government was using violence against its political opponents, Washington's head-chopping allies in Saudi Arabia were sending thousands of troops into Bahrain in support of a monarchy doing the same thing. Hillary told the Bahranian crown prince, "Violence is not and cannot be the answer. A political process is." But not in Libya, which U.S. bombs devastated perhaps beyond repair.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, one of the four U.S. diplomats killed in Benghazi, revealed what all the talk of Qaddafi being a "dictator" was really about. He said Qaddafi was getting tough with U.S. oil companies because he wanted to use more oil for Libyan purposes, like funding regional development to prevent terrorism, and to establish an independent African alternative to the United States African Command. In other words, Qaddafi wanted Libyan national resources to support Libyan purposes, which conflicted with the needs of foreign investors and the U.S. military, so he had to be overthrown and killed. Cables from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli confirm that the U.S. objected to the Libyan government's belief that the United States African Command was a "vehicle for latter day colonialism."

The world is plastered with U.S. military bases and awash in U.S. sponsored bloodbaths, but we're not colonialists, and we'll kill anyone who says we are, unless they let us govern their country for them.

By all accounts, Hillary is up to the job.

Sources:

Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire - Unmasking Imperial Illusions From The "American Century" to The "War on Terror," (Common Courage, 2001)

Diana Johnstone, Queen of Chaos - The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, (Counterpunch, 2015)

Liza Featherstone, ed. False Choices - The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, (Verso, 2016)