The article Hillary Clinton doesn't wany you to see: [View All]

[Bread and Circus]

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-earmarks10dec10,1,2408915.story

Clinton rolls a sizable pork barrel
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The senator embraces 'earmarks' as a way to help N.Y. She's received campaign funds from project beneficiaries.
By Tom Hamburger and Dan Morain, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
December 10, 2007
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — It's a real estate developer's sugar-plum dream: a mega-shopping mall complete with 10 Broadway-style theaters, an indoor river, a Tuscan village and a 39-story luxury hotel sheathed in green solar panels shaped like giant blades of grass. Plus as much as $1 billion in government-backed financing, thanks in part to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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In the case of Destiny, she teamed up with other New York lawmakers to secure federal backing for the private investment project. And she collected tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the developer and others associated with the project.

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Her record stands in contrast with others in the Senate seeking the presidency, particularly John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.). McCain, who has long opposed earmarks, does not write them. Obama has used the device, but now declines to earmark funds for private companies; he uses earmarks only to secure funds for government projects such as road building and hospital construction. Other senators seeking the presidency provide earmarks to home-state constituents and collect donations from recipients of the federal largesse. But The Times review found that Clinton does it on a different scale.

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"This pattern shows that Clinton has made aggressive use of the pay-to-play earmark game," said Keith Ashdown, research director for the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

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Clinton supported those basic reforms, but she and other Democratic senators running for president balked at a proposal by Obama that would have required members to disclose their proposed earmark requests, not just those that were enacted into law.

If you folks think Hillary will change things, you've got another thing coming. Clinton understands one thing, and that is power politics. And in this country money is power. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals have power. That's her constituency. There is nothing in her record to suggest that she will make a strong fight against corporate abuse, lobbyist abuse, pork barrel abuse, or the status quo.

She will throw you a progressive bone or two and she will increase the overall competence in our Government (not hard to do after Bush). However, if you think you will get real change, you are wrong.

We may have a return to Clintonomics and we will play a shell game for another 8 years. Things will look better... for a while. But nothing will be fundamentally improved.

You will not get more transparency in government. You will not get more accountability of the monied interests. You will in fact, get Republican-lite with a lot of window dressing.

And if Clinton wins the Presidency, she will be running for 2012, ON DAY ONE. And like Michael Moore said she is not going to want to be perceived as "soft on terrorism". The last significant time she used that in her political calculus for her long running ambition for ultimate power, she helped Bush rush to war with a public statement and a vote that she still has never apologized for.

And if you think it will "take a woman" to fix the mess that "the men" have gotten us into, remind yourselves of Condoleeza Rice and Margaret Thatcher. Gender and race, are no substitute for character.

Look at Clinton's record, look at what big choices she's made in life. It seems like a lot of time, she takes the choice of what makers her big $$$ and what gives her a bigger springboard to the next political hoop.

She's done some things for women and children, she's not all bad. Her voting record is very respectable except on some major issues of the day, the IWR being the main one.

However, on the balance of her life she is just another power-hungry politician who glad hands and greases palms of those that can move her pieces forward on the the chessboard.

Will she be better than Bush, Romney, or McCain. In many ways yes.

But don't come crying if in 4 or 8 years you didn't get the true social justice you seek and thirst for.