Hillary Clinton is No Progressive Hero

Additional leaked emails show that her campaign considered and rejected a Carbon tax – not because it was a bad policy, but because of politics; it was deemed “lethal in the general election.” And that’s despite many polls indicating that more people would be inspired to vote for a candidate who came out strong for Global Warming action than would be put off by one.

Our president should be a leader – seeking to change public opinion when they disagree with a good policy, rather than simply following the polls to do whatever is considered politically expedient. This could possibly be excusable if it were her “public” position while her “private” position included working behind the scenes to make it happen, but it’s not. Rather, what the emails show is that she has no interest in taking on the fight.

Her advocacy for a no-fly zone in Syria is playing dangerously close to a war with nuclear Russia. On the 10/10/16 episode of “Democracy Now!,” Rashid Khalidi pointed out that the no-fly zone airspace is only about 7-seconds of air space, which would virtually guarantee that we’d be faced with shooting down Russian war planes. US National intelligence director James Clapper said he fears Russia could shoot down our planes as well.

Her support of the Iraq War is frightening. During the primary, Hillary-supporters loved to criticize Bernie-supporters who brought this up, saying that it made us “not serious” because Hillary has ‘apologized’ for her support. However, she always qualifies her regret such that she’s not rejecting the fundamental premise of the Iraq War or future such wars – that is, the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes and wars of regime change. Just 8 years after the nation agreed that supporting the war was disqualifying for a presidential candidate, now we’re faced with both major candidates having supported it – and we’re supposed to be accepting because one is a Democrat? Maybe after the war she’ll get us into with Russia she’ll apologize for that too, and then everything will magically be fine – just like Iraq.

It’s telling that Hillary is being endorsed by many of the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War, such as Paul Wolfowitz. On one hand, yes, Trump is a particularly terrible prospect, and he’s driving many Republicans away from the party; however, it’s much easier for them to do so when the other option is a war hawk like Hillary. On the 9/22/16 episode of Democracy Now!, noted foreign policy journalist Allan Nairn commented: “It is sad that these are the choices we have in this country. [It] is a sad state of affairs – the candidate of the supposed American left is extremely hawkish, and demonstrably so. Whoever wins this – if either Trump or Clinton win this election – mass-murder will win. The national security bureaucrats, those of the mass-killing bureaucracy, tend to support Clinton, but Cheney and Rumsfeld – the two leading murder adventurers – they are backing Trump.”

In addition to her vote of support for the Iraq War, she also voted for George W. Bush’s terrible Patriot Act (and its subsequent reauthorization). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has pointed out that “while most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.” Further, she has actually defended the NSA’s domestic spying program.

While Secretary of State, Hillary gave exemptions to South Sudan so they could continue arming children to be used as soldiers. The Intercept pointed out: “Clinton had spent years vowing to defend the rights of children worldwide […] yet she does not appear to have publicly explained her role in allowing South Sudan and other countries to receive military support despite using children as combatants. In fact, the State Department played a central role in issuing the controversial waivers, according to two sources, including a former State Department official.”

Also while Secretary of State, Hillary made weapons sales to Saudi Arabia a “top priority,” such as the $29.4 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets, made by Boeing, to Saudi Arabia in 2011. These jets have since been used to launch a massive bombing campaign in Yemen, which had killed at least 2,800 Yemeni civilians as of earlier this year. Not only that, but Saudi Arabia is guilty of egregious human rights violations; in leaked emails and speeches, Clinton acknowledged that “the Saudis have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth over the course of the last 30 years,” and “the Saudis in particular are not necessarily the stablest regimes that you can find on the planet.”

Haiti – both Hillary and Bill have had their hands all over Haiti. Bill Clinton famously (or infamously) used his power as President to force Haiti to import Arkansas’ excess rice, which basically destroyed Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient (rice is their staple crop). For Hillary’s part, she was a key proponent for suppressing a minimum wage increase up to $5/day from $1.92. While she was not the sole architect of the plan, her State Department fervently fought against the wage increase, which was seen as detrimental to wealthy American business interests (such as Fruit of the Loom) who profited off the backs of the exploited Haitian workers.

Just before she announced her 2016 candidacy, she secured a $12 million donation to the Clinton Global Initiative from the King of Morocco on the understanding that she’d go there to give a talk. Bill and Chelsea went in her place as a way to avoid ‘negative optics’ as she was announcing her candidacy, and there’s no evidence of a “pay for play” scandal that the conservative media tried to gin up. However, Miriyam Aouragh recently said that the agreement was clearly meant as a way for the Moroccan King to ‘build a facade’ to whitewash his regime’s oppressive and abusive policies by making it appear that they are a friend of the ‘great democracy’ of America. That Hillary either couldn’t see this, or didn’t care that she was contributing to it, is extremely troubling.

Earlier in 2016, Hillary tried to defend her role in the illegal coup to oust democratically-elected Honduran President Mel Zelaya that took place in 2009, and did so by “baldly lying.” On the 4/13/16 episode of ‘Democracy Now!’, human rights expert Dana Frank explained: “the fact that [Secretary Clinton] says that they did it legally, that the Honduras judiciary and Congress did this legally, is like, oh, my god, just mind-boggling. […] I want to make sure that the listeners understand how chilling it is that a leading presidential candidate in the United States would say this was not a coup. […] She’s baldly lying when she says we never called it a coup.”

Additionally, Frank explained what Hillary did after the Honduran coup: “she played out the strategy—Obama and Clinton played out the strategy—that they would delay negotiations. They treated Micheletti (the post-coup dictator) as an equal partner to democratically-elected President Zelaya, and moved the negotiations into a sphere they could control, and then delayed until the already-scheduled elections in November. The problem, as you say, is that almost all the opposition had pulled out of that election. All international observers, like the Carter Center or the U.N., had pulled out, refusing to observe that election—the only observers were the U.S. Republican Party—and saying that this was not a legitimate election. And then, the very first—that day, even before the polls close, the U.S. recognizes the outcome of the election. And this is what we used to call a demonstration election: let’s just have any election, and call that election legitimate. […] It’s incredible this woman is a presidential candidate [when] she’s doing like things like this.”

In 2015, six years after Hillary’s involvement in the illegal military coup and subsequent shame election in Honduras, the US was facing a humanitarian crisis with thousands of children crossing the border from Honduras and other war-torn countries. Even though virtually all of them qualified for humanitarian relief, Secretary Clinton called for them to be deported.

LGBT rights, Abortion rights, and Religion

Despite being endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, during Bill’s presidency, Hillary was very supportive of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  In a interview with Rachel Maddow during the primary in late-2015, she tried to explain away her support of DOMA by claiming that it was meant as a pro-gay measure to cut off the momentum of the anti-gay side that was close to getting a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. That was not true. There was no momentum for the amendment by that time, which was pointed out even by Clinton-supporting Hilary Rosen. Rather, her support in the 90s follows her not-yet “evolved” stance back then that “marriage is between one man and one woman.”

In her book, Living History, she proudly touted her affiliation with the secretive and conservative religious group known as both “The Family” and “The Fellowship,” an organization I previously wrote a blog post about. In her book, she said that Fellowship leader Doug Coe “is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.”  She also wrote that, as First Lady, she took solace from “daily scriptures” sent to her by her Fellowship prayer cell, along with Coe’s assurances that she was right where God wanted her. This connection is incredibly disturbing – the Family, of course, was behind the “Kills the Gays” legislation in Uganda and Nigeria, and has been a driving force of conservative politics in the US and abroad for decades. I want The Family as far away from the White House as possible.

Her connections to The Family led her to collaborate with some of the Senate’s most extremely conservative Republicans that were Family members, including Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Rick Santorum (R-PA). In a excerpt from Mother Jones: “Clinton joined the GOP on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn’t condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act.” Note that the ACLU spoke out against the Workplace Religious Freedom Act as “legalized discrimination.” Later that same year, she introduced a bill that would have made flag-burning a felony.

Clinton is pro-choice (a position that Mother Theresa chastised her for at one of the Family’s National Prayer Breakfasts the Clintons attended with her), and has pointed out that she has championed decreases in teen pregnancy rates decreased (i.e “Putting Prevention First Act”), but she was seemingly unable to distinguish fact from conservative propaganda when the anti-choice group Operation Rescue released a highly edited and deceiving video purporting to show Planned Parenthood selling body parts for profit.  Of course, this was not what was happening; in the 1990s, Congress legalized voluntary tissue donation for things like stem cell research, and that’s the process that Operation Rescue hacked up to make it seem like something shady.  However, of the videos, Clinton called them “disturbing,” and said that “if there’s going to be any kind of congressional inquiry, it should look at everything and not just one [organization].” For contrast, Bernie Sanders immediately and forcefully said that the videos were deceptively edited, and that there was no scandal – no investigation was needed because Operation Rescue was lying.

The Mother Jones article linked above summarizes the trouble with Hillary’s religious tendencies: “Then, as now, Clinton confounded secularists who recognize public faith only when it comes wrapped in a cornpone accent. Clinton speaks instead the language of nondenominationalism—a sober, eloquent appreciation of ‘values,’ the importance of prayer, and ‘heart’ convictions—which liberals, unfamiliar with the history of evangelical coalition building, mistake for a tidy, apolitical accommodation, a personal separation of church and state.”

Criminal Justice

Her continued support of the death penalty is troubling, and her refusal to acknowledge her and Bill’s role in the mass-incarceration of people of color is inexcusable.

It is no secret that lethal injection drugs have become virtually non-existent, causing states to come up with their own mixtures, which have caused horrific and brutal executions… and that’s even assuming that the “real” drug cocktail was “humane” to begin with. One of the troubling aspects of Republican nominees over the recent years has been the unrelenting support of the death penalty; in 2012, Rick Perry said  that he does not lose sleep over possibly innocent people being killed in Texas, and Trump famously called for the later-exonerated Central Park Five to be executed. And Hillary continues to support the death penalty.

In her 1996 support of Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime bill, she callously referred to some youths of color by the term “super predators,” and described them as “[having] no conscience, no empathy.” She concluded her statement by saying that  we “have to bring them to heel.” Hillary said she ‘regrets’ using the term when asked about it during the 2016 Democratic primary, but she has continued to side-step the actual implications of the Crime Bill that she was defending by using it.

When asked about it at the first debate with Trump, Hillary dismissed the resulting mass-incarceration (disproportionately affecting black communities) as “unintended consequences.”

Princeton professor Eddie Glaude said that such a characterization is “just a gross understatement.” He continued: “when we think of the expansion of the carceral state under Bill Clinton’s administration […] this is precisely what is wrong with Hillary Clinton’s outreach to the black community; she won’t speak forcefully about the state of policing in this country.”

Carol Anderson (professor of African American studies at Emory University) had this view point: “Bill Clinton went the route of the Southern strategy, which was to play to blacks as criminals and welfare cheats. So this is where you see his welfare reform, and his hyper-policing through ‘super predators,’ and it fed into the mass incarceration of the black population. […] The way that his policies worked were very anti-black. And the way I see Hillary is that she was there with him […] but now she sees that the demographics of the Democratic Party have changed, and that racial coding doesn’t play as well.”

Black Lives Matter activists interrupted her campaign event in February 2016 to point out: “Hillary Clinton has a pattern of throwing the Black community under the bus when it serves her politically. She called our boys ‘super-predators’ in 1996, then she race-baited when running against Obama in 2008, now she’s a ‘lifelong civil rights activist.’ I just want to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from 1996, 2008, or the ‘new’ Hillary?”

Neoliberalism and “Getting Things Done”

To date, Hillary has not offered her plan for dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress. She just says she “knows when to stand her ground, and when to find common ground.”  I have no interest in “finding common ground” with Republicans who wish to destroy the planet.  During the primary, Bernie understood exactly what was needed; he said clearly that the way to deal with obstructionist Republicans is to “not appeal to Mitch McConnell.” Rather, we need to appeal to the American people, and rally them to the polls to vote out the obstructionist Republicans.

We have compromised too much already. Our planet is dying. We can no longer pretend that small steps forward are enough. We cannot be fooled into thinking that 1 step forward and 3 steps back is moving us in the right direction.

No Republican-controlled Congress will work with a Democratic president. This election is as much, if not more so, about how the president would react to a Republican-controlled Congress rather than what their agenda is. Republicans have been investigating Benghazi for longer than any other congressional investigation in history; they’re not going to turn around to Hillary and say “I know we’ve basically framed you for murder and conspiracy, but let’s get to work on what you want to do.”

In this regard, Hillary falls in the tradition of the ever-compromising Democrats like Obama and Bill (DOMA, DADT, NAFTA). Yes, she would get some things done just like Obama has, but the the things she’d get done would be compromises that do not go far enough – just like Obama has.

For decades – from Carter to Bill Clinton to Gore to Kerry to Obama – the Democratic party has been defined by this centrist moderate neoliberalism – the massive tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing, and wage suppression furthered along by Democrats is simply unacceptable from a supposed left-wing party. It can no longer be acceptable for these policies to be defended on the basis that “Republicans would be worse.” These cannot be our only two options; if we refuse to stand up and fight for a new way, that’s what is shameful. That is indefensible. We cannot resign ourselves to that defeatism.

We need a president who will go to the people and point out that Republicans are lying, and rail against the do-nothing Congress. Nothing big can happen – no matter who is in the White House – unless we get progressive majorities in Congress, and the best way to do that is to stop giving in to Republicans in a futile attempt to bring them to our side. The time for compromise is over.

Refusal to acknowledge Hillary’s negatives is dangerous

When I have talked about this in social media, I have been accused of spending my time “looking for reasons not to vote for Hillary,” but that’s not true. Rather, I have simply decided not to turn a blind-eye when the reasons not to vote for her are revealed.

These are not conspiracy theories or lies; they are legitimate concerns that progressives should take a hard look at before supporting the next “center-left to center-right” Democrat — as Hillary described herself in a private meeting with Wall Street donors just months before she breathlessly defended herself against Bernie Sanders calling her a moderate.