War and Wall Street: Clinton's Bleak Record

Powerful, well articulated, and incredibly important. Please read this and share. Yes, the neofascist narcissist Trump must be stopped. I am very, very clear about that. My perspective is that it is also profoundly important that, even as we come together to stop Trump, that we don't engage in fooling ourselves by buying into the propaganda that Clinton is the peace and justice candidate. She is not. This article spells out the hard truths about what may be the first woman American president. How tragic that she is also a deeply wounded person. True, she is not the madman that Trump is. But she is still deeply dangerous. We need to know this. We need to see the hard work that is required of us all as we strive together to transform the American plutocracy into an authentic democracy. We have a long ways to go. We are all in this together. 

Peace ~ Molly

Hillary Clinton takes the stage to accept the party's presidential nomination, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016. (Josh Haner / The New York Times)

By Timothy Scott, Mythos: Education, Political Economy and Culture | News Analysis

This essay documents Hillary Clinton's history and record as an agent of Wall Street, war, racial violence and inequity, economic inequality and conservative ideology. While Clinton's early Republican Party history is well documented, it is unfair to judge her (or anyone) based on the political views of her youth. Like Clinton, all people are heavily influenced by the beliefs and values of their parents, local communities, religion, cultural and social identities as well as US dominant culture. Based on various factors, many people with conservative backgrounds are able to develop progressive and humanistic world views over time based on personal struggle, a capacity for empathy, and an expanded sense of consciousness through education and life experience. None of this appears to have happened for Hillary Clinton. Instead, she stayed the course as she and her husband pioneered the "New Democrat" (Centrist Democrats) movement and steered the party toward a neoliberal "Third Way" (dogmatic free-market and moderately liberal social policies). Yet, when it comes to the Clintons, many of their social policy positions are also distinctly conservative.

While incomplete, this post seeks to assist liberals and progressives in recognizing that when they support Hillary Clinton, they are in fact supporting violently oppressive and undemocratic interests. All of the information that follows is part of the public record.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Party's foreordained 2016 presidential candidate, is both a champion for -- and member of -- the top one-tenth of the one percent. As such, she is duplicitously held up by party leaders and supporters as an advocate of social equity and fair-minded economic pragmatism. As the first woman to be a viable presidential candidate (a second time around), Clinton promotes herself, along with other prominent white neoliberal feminists, as a status recognition trailblazer for all women; despite the fact that every position she has taken, or role she has been in, has disproportionately inflicted considerable harm to women across the globe (especially dispossessed Black, Brown and Indigenous women). In her Salon article titled, The unexpected side effect of Hillary 2016: How she transformed Democrats into "new" Republicans, Sophia A. McClennen writes: 

…within the Clinton campaign there is a real issue with "the woman card." Of course, it is historic that she may well be the Democratic nominee. But that fact has nothing to do with whether or not she is feminist. It just means she is a woman who broke a barrier. Margaret Thatcher broke that barrier in her nation in 1975 and no one confused that with an advance for feminism… Having Clinton supporters like Gloria Steinem suggest that women who don't support Clinton are just looking for sex, suggests that the Clinton camp has some pretty confused ideas about what feminism means.

Hillary Clinton has a net worth of 31.3 million dollars and is a long-time darling of corporations and elite financial investors. Clinton served as a Walmart board member between 1988-1992, during which time she conspired with the company when it waged a major anti-union campaign against Walmart workers who attempted to unionize. Her top contributors over the course of her political career include Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, along with many other corporations and financial firms. During the 2016 primary election cycle, Clinton has portrayed herself as an advocate for income equality and an opponent of Wall Street greed. Yet, as the Washington Post reported in February 2016:

Even as Hillary Clinton has stepped up her rhetorical assault on Wall Street, her campaign and allied super PACs have continued to rake in millions from the financial sector, a sign of her deep and lasting relationships with banking and investment titans. Through the end of December, donors at hedge funds, banks, insurance companies and other financial services firms had given at least $21.4 million to support Clinton's 2016 presidential run.

Clinton's pick for Vice President is Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, whose campaign donors include the oil, gas and coal industries, the Israeli lobby, the finance and technology industries, defense contractors, agribusiness and more. He has thus been a champion of free-trade (TPP), bank deregulation, education reform (via EdTech), offshore drilling, hawkish foreign policies and union-busting. Kaine was also a supporter of a policy known as Project Exile, which was a federal crime and gun reduction strategy "championed by Republicans and Democrats alike and by both the top US gun lobby group and gun-control advocates." According to Nicole Lee, a Black civil-rights attorney, "Project Exile broke black families… This is not a benign thing to be for. These measures were not used against white kids in the suburbs with guns, they were used against black kids in the cities."

Please continue this article here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37054-hillary-clinton-s-record-a-us-horror-story