Clinton Sheds Progressive Façade with Bold Rightward Lurch
11/19/2015
by Sarah Lazare
Common Dreams


"I don't take a backseat to anyone when it comes to progressive experience and progressive commitment," former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the Democratic debate in October. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

From her call for a major air and ground war against ISIS to her attack on single-payer, observers note that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is rapidly shedding her "progressive" façade as she grows increasingly confident she has the Democratic nomination locked down (an assumption which, evidence shows, is debatable).

This trend comes despite her declaration during the first Democratic debate in October, after being pressed by the CNN moderator: "I don't take a backseat to anyone when it comes to progressive experience and progressive commitment."

Growing more hawkish by the day

In case there was any doubt, Clinton's much-anticipated foreign policy speech on Thursday makes it clear she plans to run on her hawkish credentials.

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Clinton called for a "new phase" in the fight against the Islamic State (referred to as ISIS or IS), including a major intensification in a bombing campaign; "ground forces actually taking back more territory;" an "intelligence surge;" and no-fly zones over Syria. "Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS," she said, in an implicit criticism of President Barack Obama as being too tepid on military intervention—and a signal that she intends to tack far to his right.

Since working under Obama's White House—hardly the image of restraint—that's exactly what Clinton has been doing. As Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss recently pointed out last year, Clinton used her secretary of state role to consistently advocate escalation of military force, from Afghanistan to Libya to Syria, making her the pro-war wing of the Obama administration.

Clinton has only moved further in the militarist direction after exiting the administration, expressing skepticism of the nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, escalating her rhetoric towards Russia, and proclaiming an "unbreakable bond" with the widely-reviled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Clinton has stated publicly that she believes that her vote in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was wrong and has been pressed on this issue during the campaign, including during Saturday's Democratic debate, where she admitted: "I don't think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now."

But as many others have pointed out, in the years since Clinton cast her vote in favor of the Iraq War, she appears to have learned nothing. "If Hillary Clinton wins her party's nomination," Vox's Zack Beauchamp warned in April, "she'll be the most hawkish Democratic nominee since the Iraq War began."......

........Speaking in Dallas on Tuesday, Clinton launched an unbridled attack on Bernie Sanders' plan for a single-payer, publicly-funded, universal healthcare program. "I don’t see how you can be serious about raising working and middle class families' incomes if you also want to slap new taxes on them—no matter what the taxes will pay for," she said.

Her statements were followed up by those of top Clinton aides speaking to media outlets. "If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes," spokesperson Brian Fallon told Politico.

The push captured the ire of single-payer advocates, including National Nurses United. "Any politician that refuses to finance guaranteed healthcare has abandoned my patients, and I will never abandon my patients," said NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN.

According to Slate staff writer Jim Newell, Clinton is "essentially red-baiting about Bernie Sanders’ Wacky Taxes in her dismissal of a policy that, on paper, draws plenty of support among Democratic voters."

Newell argued that Clinton, in fact, is going further than many in her own party by "appropriating one of the right’s central talking points against government-funded universal health insurance: Think of the taxes!

She’s not just saying that a single-payer system is a political nonstarter with conservatives. She’s reciting the actual conservative talking point that would make a single-payer system a political nonstarter."...........

..........Also on Saturday, Clinton—despite her vows to tackle Wall Street—reiterated her opposition to the Glass Steagall Act, which was repealed by her husband in 1999 and would break up big banks by splitting investment and commercial banking. Her position, in fact, is popular with Wall Street, but increasingly unpopular with those demanding economic equality and accountability for the financial institutions behind the 2008 financial crisis.

"The big six banks in this country have 43 percent more deposits, 81 percent more assets and three times the amount of cash they had before the financial crisis," author and Demos fellow Nomi Prins said last month. "A major reason America has such an inequality problem is that it has a highly concentrated, establishment-supported casino banking system that disperses capital toward more risky endeavors than infrastructure building and small and mid-size business support."

Meanwhile, Walmart workers on Wednesday took their demands for $15 an hour to the Brooklyn headquarters of Clinton, who refused their request for all candidates to address their demands at last week's debates...........

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/19/clinton-sheds-progressive-facade-bold-rightward-lurch

In particular, Sanders connected his contemporary vision to the one outlined by FDR in the 32nd president’s 1944 appeal for a “Second Bill of Rights” that would guarantee:

 The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

......Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they're not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they've started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.

No company has bought more houses than the Blackstone Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms. (Its many investments include Hilton Hotels, the Weather Channel, and SeaWorld. Among its institutional investors are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase.) Through its subsidiary, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has picked up houses through local brokers, at foreclosure auctions, and in bulk purchases. Last April, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. In Phoenix, some neighborhoods have a Blackstone-owned home on just about every block. As of November, Blackstone had acquired 40,000 houses, most of them foreclosures, worth $7.5 billion. Today, it is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation.

Blackstone's deep pockets—$248 billion in assets under management and a $3.6 billion credit line arranged by Deutsche Bank for buying houses—allow it to outbid individual buyers, driving up local real estate prices and pushing families out of the market. "You can't compete with a company that's betting on speculative future value when they're playing with cash," says Alston. "Institutional investors are siphoning the wealth and the ability for wealth accumulation out of underserved communities," adds Henry Wade, cofounder of the Arizona Association of Real Estate Brokers.

But buying houses cheap and then waiting for them to appreciate isn't the only way Blackstone is making money on these deals. It wants your rent check, too. In November, after many months of hype, the firm released the first-ever rated bond backed by securitized rental payments........

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives

Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Common Dreams
The Hidden Villain of Global Warming—The Pentagon
by
Gar Smith

.......snip.........

From November 30 to December 11, delegates from more than 190 nations will convene in Paris to address the increasingly visible threats of climate disruption. The 21st Conference of the Parties (aka COP21) is expected to draw 25,000 official delegates intent on crafting a legally binding pact to keep global warming below 2°C.

But it is difficult to imagine the delegates reaching this goal when one of the largest contributors to global-warming has no intention of agreeing to reduce its pollution. The problem in this case is neither China nor the United States. Instead, the culprit is the Pentagon.

The Pentagon occupies 6,000 bases in the US and more than 1,000 bases (the exact number is disputed) in 60-plus foreign countries. According to its FY 2010 Base Structure Report, the Pentagon's global empire includes more than 539,000 facilities at 5,000 sites covering more than 28 million acres.



The Pentagon has admitted to burning 350,000 barrels of oil a day (only 35 countries in the world consume more) but that doesn't include oil burned by contractors and weapons suppliers. It does, however, include providing fuel for more than 28,000 armored vehicles, thousands of helicopters, hundreds of jet fighters and bombers and vast fleets of Navy vessels. The Air Force accounts for about half of the Pentagon’s operational energy consumption, followed by the Navy (33%) and Army (15%). In 2012, oil accounted for nearly 80% of the Pentagon's energy consumption, followed by electricity, natural gas and coal.

Ironically, most of the Pentagon's oil is consumed in operations directed at protecting America's access to foreign oil and maritime shipping lanes. In short, the consumption of oil relies on consuming more oil. This is not a sustainable energy model.

The amount of oil burned—and the burden of smoke released—increases whenever the Pentagon goes to war. (Indeed, human history's most combustible mix may well prove to be oil and testosterone.) Oil Change International estimates the Pentagon's 2003-2007 $2 trillion Iraq War generated more than three million metric tons of CO2 pollution per month.

Yet, despite being the planet's single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels, the Pentagon has been granted a unique exemption from reducing—or even reporting—its pollution.

The US won this prize during the 1998 Kyoto Protocol negotiations (COP4) after the Pentagon insisted on a "national security provision" that would place its operations beyond global scrutiny or control. As Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat recalled: "Every requirement the Defense Department and uniformed military who were at Kyoto by my side said they wanted, they got." (Also exempted from pollution regulation: all Pentagon weapons testing, military exercises, NATO operations and "peacekeeping" missions.)

After winning this concession, however, the US Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Accord, the House amended the Pentagon budget to ban any "restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol," and George W. Bush rejected the entire climate treaty because it "would cause serious harm to the US economy" (by which he clearly meant the U.S. oil and gas industries).

Today, the Pentagon consumes one percent of all the country's oil and around 80 percent of all the oil burned by federal government. President Barack Obama recently received praise for his Executive Order requiring federal agencies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, but Obama's EO specifically exempted the Pentagon from having to report its contribution to climate chaos. (As a practical matter, the Pentagon has been forced to act. With battlefield gas costing $400 a gallon and naval bases at risk of flooding from rising seas, the Pentagon managed to trim its domestic greenhouse-gas emissions by 9 percent between 2008-2012 and hopes to achieve a 34 percent reduction by 2020.)

According to recent exposés, Exxon executives knew the company's products were stoking global temperatures but they opted to put "profits before planet" and conspired to secretly finance three decades of deception. Similarly, the Pentagon has been well aware that its operations were wrecking our planetary habitat.

In 2014, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel identified climate change as a "threat multiplier" that will endanger national security by increasing "global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict." As far back as 2001, Pentagon strategists have been preparing to capitalize on the problem by planning for "ice-free" operations in the Arctic—in anticipation of US-Russian conflicts over access to polar oil.

The Pentagon's role in weather disruption needs to become part of the climate discussion. Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival. If we hope to stabilize our climate, we will need to start spending less money on war.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/17/hidden-villain-global-warming-pentagon

Dear Ms. (Riverlover):

Thank you for getting in touch with me about natural gas drilling.

I share many of your concerns over energy development in our state. Ohio is poised for an energy boom. Previously unreachable natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shales can now be recovered through hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” If done right, the push for Ohio’s natural gas can mean cleaner air, good paying jobs, and an influx of much needed economic activity in rural and Appalachian Ohio.

However, before rushing head-first into a new round of energy development, we must ensure that natural gas development guarantees safe environmental practices, good jobs for Ohioans, a fair deal for landowners, and sustainable, long-term economic growth for our communities. We cannot afford to settle for the environmental degradation, unemployment, and boom and bust economy that has too often followed energy development in our state.

The Marcellus and Utica shale deposits are not going anywhere. They will be developed. Now is the time to ensure that jobs are created for Ohioans, our environment is protected, landowners are treated fairly, and our state receives its fair share of natural gas revenues.

I appreciate hearing your concerns on this topic and welcome your suggestions for how these critical resources can be developed in our state’s best interests.

Thank you again for writing.

Sincerely,

Sherrod Brown

United States Senator

Instant poll has Bernie Sanders winning debate with whopping 83 percent support

..... Time magazine conducted an online instant poll following the debate on Nov. 14, and viewers were in the corner of the senator from Vermont.

With 83 percent of the vote as of press time, Sanders was the obvious winner according to over 21,000 people who cast their vote. Clinton was far behind with 12 percent support, and O'Malley finished in last with five percent of the vote.....

http://www.examiner.com/article/instant-poll-has-bernie-sanders-winning-debate-with-whopping-83-percent-support