2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumClinton in 2011: Greek austerity is necessary "chemotherapy" to give Greece a "strong economy".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/clinton-greece-hillary-austerity_n_901304.html?ref=twOf course we all know the actual result. 25% drop in GDP, 25% unemployment, untold suffering by the Greek people and absolutely no prospect of repaying the debt under the original terms with a badly shrunken economy.
Economists like Paul Krugman, Dean Baker and Joseph Stigletz warned this would be precisely the result of Friedmanesque austerity measures in Greece. Washington conventional wisdom was wrong, taking a stand in favor of massive cuts despite the human costs. Hillary Clinton was squarely on the side of Washington conventional wisdom.
As president will she be willing to break with the Washington consensus when it is clearly wrong? Has she done so in the past?
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)CTBlueboy
(154 posts)Maybe optimist ,but Sen. sanders might be our Alexis Tsipras
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)They should be doing so by cutting military spending and taxing the rich, not by cutting wages and pensions.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)this, despite the face that elderly Greeks have been committing suicide for years now because the pensions have been cut below survivability levels.
azmom
(5,208 posts)BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)Austerity is for peasants. Who cares if the little people starve?
azmom
(5,208 posts)Will get her votes.
She makes speeches to key groups, but doesn't really say much. The 2015 version of "I feel your pain." I hope as you say that the Republican racists saying all this crazy shit about Latinos gets everyone interested in their options on the Democratic side. Because they do have options and shouldn't just rely on name recognition. It's going to be a very tough race.
Indepatriot
(1,253 posts)Trickle Down Economics- When the rich piss down our backs and tell us it's rainin'...
pa28
(6,145 posts)"Chemotherapy" stood out in particular.
bvf
(6,604 posts)Exactly who was that supposed to resonate with?
pa28
(6,145 posts)By inference the "cancer" is pensions, state owned enterprises, publicly held assets (such roads and schools) and subsidies for things like food or fuel.
When you use keywords straight out of the Milton Friedman bible you are talking directly to the capital interests who benefit from lower taxes and public commons being sold off at pennies on the dollar.
There's definitely a cancer here and if Hillary Clinton is the doctor I think I want a second opinion.
And guys like this:
MisterP
(23,730 posts)use of Chicagoid or Pub language bolsters it: ditto her flag-burning-ban amendment proposal, or any time a Dem takes any point from the Contract With America
Scuba
(53,475 posts)She will stick to this new belief with passion and ferver, at least until she is elected President, then it'll be back to Lloyd and Jamie.
pa28
(6,145 posts)I have not been able to find her current position on the Greek austerity she advocated for so strongly just a few years ago but perhaps she's "evolved" on this too.
Rosa Luxemburg
(28,627 posts)especially on the current issues foreign and local. Hillary was Secretary of State.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)wasn't keen on letting the public know her true position on anything.
With her own private server, she didn't have to.
Thankfully, Chelsea Manning's release of secret State Department cables shed some light on actions.
Bonobo
(29,257 posts)She got her own server cause that's just so much more convenient to set those up.
cstanleytech
(26,227 posts)no further debt relief would have been needed but the Greek government didnt do that so they ended up in the mess they are in.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Pensions have been so low for years that the elderly have been committing suicide because they can't survive on them.
How could anyone demand that Greece make even more sacrifices?
This situation was solely the responsible of the Greek oligarchy...not the people.
cstanleytech
(26,227 posts)Summary: At the last review in May 2014, Greeces public debt was assessed to be getting back on a path toward sustainability, though it remained highly vulnerable to shocks. By late summer 2014, with interest rates having declined further, it appeared that no further debt relief would have been needed under the November 2012 framework, if the program were to have been implemented as agreed. But significant changes in policies since thennot least, lower primary surpluses and a weak reform effort that will weigh on growth and privatizationare leading to substantial new financing needs. Coming on top of the very high existing debt, these new financing needs render the debt dynamics unsustainable. This conclusion holds whether one examines the stock of debt under the November 2012 framework or switches the focus to debt servicing or gross financing needs. To ensure that debt is sustainable with high probability, Greek policies will need to come back on track but also, at a minimum, the maturities of existing European loans will need to be extended significantly while new European financing to meet financing needs over the coming years will need to be provided on similar concessional terms. But if the package of reforms under consideration is weakened furtherin particular, through a further lowering of primary surplus targets and even weaker structural reformshaircuts on debt will become necessary.
Divernan
(15,480 posts)and less macho, warlike, aggressive? That seriously was what I used to think. I thought that any woman who had her own child or children would identify with other mothers and children, whatever their color, nationality, etc. That she would use her elective office to be protective - that there would be some genetic trait of motherliness, for want of a better word. Basically, that a lack of testosterone would make for a more humane, calm, measured and reasoned approach to governing, both domestic and internationally. Instead of a dick-waving, mine is bigger than yours, I've got the biggest military strike force approach to international diplomacy. I hope that all of us are educated enough to KNOW that testosterone is scientifically linked to aggression.
Obviously, Hillary Clinton does not meet my expectations in this regard. Of the many possible examples of her insensitivity to children, let us consider cluster bombs, land mines and economic sanctions against Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/03/13/cluster-bombs-are-not-good-children-hillary
HEADLINE:
Cluster Bombs Are Not Good for Children, Hillary
(Ditto for Landmines and Sanctions)
The human soul is difficult to fathom. One person alone is capable of both compassion and cruelty.
In her autobiography, Living History, Senator Hillary Clinton portrays herself as an advocate for children, a defender of women and human rights. In fact, the Clintons have a long history of sacrificing the rights, even the lives of children, for political expediency. It is time to set the record straight.
On September 6, 2006, a Senate bill--a simple amendment to ban the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas--presented Senator Clinton with a timely opportunity to protect the lives of children throughout the world.
The cluster bomb is one of the most hated and heinous weapons in modern war, and its primary victims are children. Senator Obama voted for the amendment to ban cluster bombs. Senator Clinton, however, voted with the Republicans to kill the humanitarian bill, an amendment in accord with the Geneva Conventions, which already prohibit the use of indiscriminate weapons in populated areas.
All senators are expected to inform themselves on the issues before they cast a vote. The evidence is overwhelming. It is hard to believe that Senator Clinton was unaware of the humanitarian crisis when she voted to continue the use of cluster bombs in cities and populated areas. A U.N. weapons commission called cluster bombs "weapons of indiscriminate effect." For years the international press reported the horrific consequences of cluster bombs on civilians. On April 10, 2003, for example, Asia Times described the carnage in Baghdad hospitals: "The absolute majority of patients are women and children, victims of shrapnel, and most of all, fragments of cluster bombs." Reporting from a hospital in Hillah, The Mirror, a British newspaper, became graphic: "Shrapnel peppered their bodies. Blackened the skin. Smashed heads. Tore limbs. A doctor reports that 'all the injuries you see were caused by cluster bombs. The majority of the victims were children who died because they were outside.'"
Even after wars subside, after treaties are signed, after belligerents return home, cluster bombs wreak havoc on civilian life. Up to 20 percent of the bomblets fail to detonate on the first round, only to become landmines that later explode on playgrounds and farmlands. Children are drawn to cluster bomb canisters, the deadly duds that look like beer cans or toys before they explode.
Clinton on Landmines
Of course Senator Clinton did not expect her vote on cluster bombs to become an issue in a presidential campaign. But that vote is one of many examples in a pattern of indifference to the welfare of children in the Developing World.
Because Clinton is now taking credit for the White House years, when she was a partner in power, we should also look closely at the Clinton policy regarding landmines, an issue of great concern to parents, to all those who care for children. The U.S. is the leading manufacturer of landmines. For families across the rest of the globe, landmines are buried terror. More than 100 million landmines are deployed in over 60 countries worldwide--nine million in Angola, 10 million in Cambodia. About 20,000 M14 antipersonnel mines are buried in the mountain areas of Yong-do, South Korea. According to U.N. estimates, 26,000 people, mostly civilians in developing countries, are killed or mutilated by landmines every year. In rural areas landmines are so ubiquitous and lethal, peasants risk their lives to earn a living tilling the soil and planting crops.
The worldwide movement to ban landmines burgeoned in the Clinton years. It was a visionary U.S. citizen, Jody Williams of Vermont, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the ignominy of landmines. And it was primarily in defense of children that Princess Diana, speaking from a minefield in Angola, raised international awareness about devastation caused by weapons from the West.
In December 1997, 137 nations, more than two-thirds of the world, signed the Ottawa treaty, an agreement to ban the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel landmines. How did the Clintons respond to world opinion, to the humanitarian movement against landmines?
President Clinton flat out refused to become party to the Ottawa convention. As he put it, "I could not sign in good conscience the treaty banning landmines." In "good conscience"?! Are landmines good for children?
The Clinton Sanctions Were Calamitous
Senator Clinton is currently trying to build a campaign around her experience in the White House, but she refuses to take responsibility for the most inhumane and disastrous foreign policy operation of the Clinton years: the infamous economic sanctions against Iraq. The sanctions, a colossal failure, formed the centerpiece of Clinton foreign policy. While the sanctions began with Bush senior in 1990, they were carried out and enforced with a vengeance by the Clinton Administration. The second war against Iraq actually began long before George Bush launched the shock-and-awe bombings in 2003. The Clinton sanctions afflicted the entire Iraqi population. Child mortality, as well as the death rate for the elderly and the chronically ill, skyrocketed. Malnutrition debilitated the country. Irrigation and sanitation systems collapsed. Common diseases multiplied. The Iraqi medical services, the most advanced medical system in the Mideast prior to the sanctions, fell apart. Farmers ran out of fertilizers and machine parts. Thousands of trained professionals fled the country. The sanctions, combined with surprise bombing raids, destroyed the entire infrastructure.
As the full magnitude of the calamity became public knowledge, humanitarian organizations, like Voices in the Wilderness, made appeals to the White House. Denis Halliday, former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, resigned in protest in 1998. (His successor, H.C. von Sponeck, later resigned as well). Contemptuous of human rights and world opinion, President Clinton blocked Russian and French proposals to end the sanctions.
The Premise of Foreign Policy
It was Madeline Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, who fully revealed the Clinton Administration's cold indifference to human rights. In her notorious interview on national TV with Leslie Stahl, Albright said that Clinton policy objectives were worth the sacrifice of half a million Arab children, children who were dying of disease and malnutrition as she spoke. For the record, Albright did not deny that half a million children under the age of five perished as the result of sanctions. When Stahl asked: "Is the price worth it?" Albright said without qualification: "We think the price is worth it."
Half a million children under five is a genocidal number. Of course, Albright was talking about Arab children, not Europeans. Had she made a similar remark about British or German children, she would have been fired and denounced within an hour. Albright's candid statement uncovered the essentially racist view of Arabs common among foreign policy experts--all men and women of experience, to be sure--in Washington.
The premise of U.S. foreign policy under Clinton and Bush is unmistakable: Arab peoples have no rights which the U.S. is bound to respect. When historians sum up the sanguine events between 1992 and 2008, Clinton's economic sanctions against Iraq and the Bush occupation of Iraq will be grouped together as part of a single, catastrophic process.
Senator Clinton has never disavowed the sanctions or the racist attitudes that made them possible. In fact, she is now calling for sanctions against another country in the Mideast--Iran.
I have no doubt that Senator Clinton is sincere when she promotes domestic programs for children--projects to reduce childhood obesity, plans to curtail teenage smoking. And like Obama, she advocates full health care insurance for all American children. All well and good.
But it is clear from her record--her voting record and her White House experience--that Senator Clinton, like her husband, does not measure human rights by one yardstick. The lives of Arab and Iranian children are measured on a different scale. We need a president who cares for all God's children, not just the white kids depicted in her Red Phone ad.
It is not experience itself, but the capacity to learn from experience, that should determine who should lead, and who should be deprived of power over the lives of others.
Paul Rockwell is a national columnist living in the Bay Area. (rockyspad@hotmail.com)
pa28
(6,145 posts)I can find plenty of examples of Hillary Clinton acting as a hard line advocate for the Washington conventional wisdom. Plenty of examples of her being a military hawk on par with John McCain.
I just can't seem to think of any examples where Hillary Clinton takes a principled stand against that conventional wisdom even when it was clearly wrong. The gulf war and gay marriage being two examples.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)you get this sort of Victorian, identitarian bottom-scraping "feminism" on Tumblr or Crystal Gail Mangum fans
winter is coming
(11,785 posts)PatrickforO
(14,558 posts)Which is, of course, why I'm supporting Sanders.
SoapBox
(18,791 posts)The average Greek citizens are ticked off.
The average American is ticked off.
See what happens when the citizens have had enough of Bankster Bullshit...they VOTE.
Go Bernie!
Divernan
(15,480 posts)Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It's the kind of imagery right-wing military officers in Latin America use when they plot coups against elected left governments.
And this is especially troubling regarding Greece, given that HRC's role-model, LBJ. murdered democracy there in 1967.
99Forever
(14,524 posts)This IS what she is all about, the campaign rhetoric is just a bunch of talk talk.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)Besides, Sanders is a gun nut I hear.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)morningfog
(18,115 posts)nc4bo
(17,651 posts)F that.
Austerity for who if I may ask? For Wallstreet? Billionaires? Corporations?