What Hillary Clinton wants you to forget: Her disastrous record as a war hawk

[Jack Rabbit]

49. Mrs. Clinton wants us to forget more than that

It isn't just Mrs. Clinton's disastrous record as a war hawk, but her disastrous record as a neoliberal.

Neoliberalism is the colonialism department of neoconservatism.

-- Granny D (Doris Haddock 1910-2010)

The late, great American citizen, Granny D got the formula backward. Full spectrum dominance is the stated goal of the infamous PNAC latter, meaning control of the world's natural resources on behalf of US-based corporation and the military power to seize them from unwilling foreign states. As we know, the Bushies lied the people of the nation into war with Iraq with charges of Saddam's complicity with terrorists and the existence of his secret biochemical arsenal with a capability of striking the US, neither of which had any credible foundation known to the national intelligence community. Even if the Bushies didn't know their case for war was made up of falsehoods, they went to extraordinary lengths, including outing a CIA officer, to maintain the fiction that hey had good reason to believe it was true. The goal was never so much to oust Saddam, but to make sure ExxonMobil could get at their oil laying under the Iraqi people's sand.

Thus, neoconservatism is the enforcement department of neoliberalism.

We must not think that neoliberalism is nothing more than just the colonial occupation of defiant resource-rich nations. like Iraq under Saddam any more that we should mistake Saddam as a wise and benevolent leader. It is the entire regime of deregulation and free trade, rules rewritten for the world's largest corporation and the executives who hide behind the corporate logos, like the con artist hiding behind the curtain in Emerald City. Democracy is a system of government that is supposed to protect the people from shady businessmen and common criminals alike, but democracy is not perfect. When the people, who supposedly consent to be governed by those they choose are lulled to sleep and become lax in the vigilance required to maintain democracy from being undermined by clever men with evil spirits. then it is undermined. A bribe becomes a campaign contribution, and if you think you're not naive enough to think there's any difference, then just to prove it is true in all cases. Sophistry like that leads us to the nonsense of Citizens United v. FEC, where corporations have human rights and money is free speech.

Under the neoliberal regime, co-extensive with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and each of his successors, regardless of party, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act "modernized" the banking industry and made it legal to use the savings of small depositors in commercial banks in risky ventures that were once handled by investment banks, whose depositors were fully aware of the risks and had more to fall back on should the venture fail. Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley, some small savers lost everything they had, including their homes and retirement funds. The obvious answer is to repeal Gramm-Leach-Bliley and reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, preventing banks from using Mom-and-Pop's saving in risky ventures until Gramm-Leach-Bliley replaced it in 1999.

Only nine years into the regime of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, reckless behavior by Wall Street banks resulted in the global meltdown of 2008. Congress used taxpayers' money bail out the banks because they had become "too big to fail." Today, those banks are even bigger and still making risky investments using small savings. What happens if their continued reckless behavior caused another global meltdown? They expect another taxpayer bailout so they continue operating on the "modernized" business model. Nevermid that it is an unsustainable business model.

Mrs. Clinton, who gets an awful lot of free speech from Wall Street banks, not only to her political campaign, but in exorbitant speaking fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation, has expressed opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall. Her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, supports reinstating Glass-Steagall. Wall Street doesn't give a lot of money to Senator Sanders; Senator Sanders depends on small contributions from the kind of people who maintain small savings accounts in banks that used to be safe until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act replaced Glass-Steagall.

It isn't just her coziness with Wall Street banks along with her support for foreign policy misadventures like Iraq (when she was in the Senate) and Libya (when she was Secretary of State). She has supported free deals like NAFTA; she supported the TPP until she opposed it, and not because it contains the ISDS provision that threaten the deal crippling fines to any state that passes regulations that a panel of corporate shysters find inhibit expected future corporate profits. We must assume that since she has been silent on the ISDS issue that she's OK with it. I feel differently. Any deal with such a provision in it should be opposed regardless of what else is in it. As Secretary of State, she greased the skids for the fracking industry, an all-around bad idea. And in just the last week, she threw under the bus the concept of universal healthcare, which she championed as First Lady. Senator Sanders, on the other hand, is suspicious of use of military power just because we can, is opposed to free trade on principle, opposed to an environmentally destructive technique which would produce more unhealthy fossil fuels, and has been over the years an unwavering supporter of universal healthcare, unequivocally declaring that access to healthcare is a human right.

Senator Sanders is accused by some on this board of not being a real Democrat and making a career of bad-mouthing Democrats. If he has bad-mouthed Democrats it is because they opened themselves to criticism by supporting corporate interests in a clear betrayal of public trust, from supporting job-killing free trade deals to supporting an unsustainable and anti-consumer banking model to support for destructive environmental policies, like fracking or more oil drilling. As an independent, he's been a better Democrat than those who took those positions. He deserves our support.

Mrs. Clinton, on the hand, would like us to forget about all the past and present stands she's taken on the wrong side of issues important to Democrats.