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"Hillary Clinton and the Manipulation of Populism"--The Essence of American Politics
I understand that Paul Street can be Very Harsh..but, thought it an interesting read for whatever it is worth in observation as we Dems try to move forward to a more Populist View for America in the coming election.-----------
Hillary Clinton and the Manipulation of Populism
By Paul Street
“The Essence of American Politics”
May 25, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Znet" - Fifteen years ago, the then still left Christopher Hitchens published a short and pungent study of Bill and Hillary Clinton titled No One Left to Lie to: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 1999, 2000). The book’s first chapter, titled “Triangulation,” contained a memorable passage that summarized the duplicitous “essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens noted:
“which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently ‘elitist.’ It is no great distance from Huey Long’s robust cry of ‘Every man a king’ to the insipid ‘inclusiveness’ of [Bill Clinton’s slogan] ‘Putting People First,’ but the smarter elite managers have learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished by a reserve’ tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers. They have also learned that it can be imprudent to promise voters too much.”
Later in the same chapter, Hitchens noted that “At all times,” the Clinton administration’s “retreat from egalitarian and even ‘progressive’ positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.”
Hitchens provided a useful take on the militantly corporatist, Wall Street-friendly core of the Clintons’ first two terms in the White House. The “co-presidents” served the “bankrollers and backers” with such Big Business-pleasing policies as the regressive and anti-worker North American “Free Trade” (investor rights) Agreement (NAFTA), repeal of the New Deal’s separation of commercial and investment banking, sponsorship of oligopolistic hyper-conglomeration in the mass media (the 1996 Telecommunications Act), and the non- and de-regulation of Wall Street’s growing financial derivatives sector.
Bill Clinton apologized to corporations for the high U.S. taxes they supposedly endured. He warmed CEO hearts by proclaiming that “the era of big government is over” and pursuing a “balanced budget” even while tens of millions of Americans were still mired in poverty and economic inequality climbed towards “Second Gilded Age” levels. Clinton kept the gigantic Pentagon system of corporate welfare fully intact despite the disappearance of the Soviet nemesis that had provided the critical Cold War pretext for massive “defense” (Empire) spending. The Clintons did all this and more to satisfy the elite “donor class” that put them in power while claiming to speak and act on behalf of everyday working people and wrapping themselves in the outwardly progressive clothes of politically correct multicultural tolerance and diversity. Never mind the Clinton administration’s vicious liquidation of the disproportionately Black, Latino/a, and Native American poor’s entitlement to basic family cash assistance and its promotion and signing of legislation that accelerated the nation’s epic mass hyper-incarceration of Blacks.
A Blunt Lesson About Power and Money
For what it’s worth, the Obama administration has been an epitome of the same basic formula: fake-populist service to the wealthy few wrapped also in the false rebels’ clothes of identity-politicized diversity and tolerance. With the technically Black Obama in the White House, the corporate Democrats have dampened protest from multiculturalist liberals and “progressives” reluctant to question and challenge an actually “first Black president” (Black comedian Chris Rock’s amusing description of Bill Clinton). (Anticipation of such a “politically correct” windfall was always part of Obama’s special appeal to the donor class.) Beneath the surface spectacle of “change” (a black family in the White House, with a Muslim-sounding name to boot) lay more of the plutocratic same, consistent with the elite liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page’s (Northwestern) finding that the U.S. has become “an oligarchy” in which wealthy elites and their corporations “rule” regardless of technically irrelevant public opinion and of which party holds nominal power in Washington. The venerable liberal-left commentator William Greider put it well in a March 2009 Washington Post column titled “Obama Told Us to Speak But is He Listening?”: “People everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They have watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests who caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend – when the right people want it” (emphasis added). And little to spend on the rest of us, the wrong people, soon to be known as “the 99%,” left to ask “where’s my bailout?” During Obama’s first term, 95% of the nation’s income gains went to the nation’s top 1 percent – a shocking statistic that provides some interesting context for right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin’s question: “how’s that hopey-changey thing working out?”
“Tell Me Something Interesting”
A technically female Hillary Clinton presidency promises a similar dividend and disguise for the nation’s corporate and financial oligarchy, this time with gender rather than race providing the main identity-politicized sheen of historic correction and change. Hitchens’ volume contained a chapter documenting Mrs. Clinton’s richly triangulation-ist history along with much to suggest that she (like her husband) is a power-mad sociopath. Especially memorable was Hillary’s response, in her role as head of the White House’s health reform initiative, to Harvard medical professor David Himmelstein, head of Physicians for a National Health Program. Himmelstein told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer “Canadian style” health plan, supported by more than two-third of the U.S. public. Beyond backing by a U.S. citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation’s 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on offer.”
“David,” Hillary commented with fading patience before sending him away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.” Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the co-presidents decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” (Obama would of course do the same exact same thing in 2009.) What she advanced instead of the Canadian system that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly developed system called “managed competition.” Mrs. Clinton’s plan went down in flames, thanks in no small part to her inflexible arrogance.
New Democrat Pioneers
No One Left to Lie To and other left critiques of the Clintons did little to dissuade liberal and “progressive” New Yorkers from backing Hillary’s successful, cynical, and carpet-bagging 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate – a body wherein she would offer “liberal” support for George W. Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq. What about 2015-16, with the Clintons poised for a return White House engagement? Will truthful, hard-hitting reporting and commentary make any differences her chances? An excellent article by the incisive Left commentator Doug Henwood in Harper’s last fall bears the title “Stop Hillary!” Henwood provides a clever and concise catalogue of Mrs. Clinton’s conservative, corrupt, corporate-neoliberal, and imperial record from her years at Yale Law and the Arkansas governor’s office (held by Bill for all but one 2-year term between 1978 and 1992) through her stints in the U.S. Senate (2001-2009) and atop the Department of State (2010-2013). Henwood’s essay is particularly valuable on how the Clintons during their tenure in Arkansas helped “lay…the groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the New Democrat movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).”
The essence of the DLC was dismal, dollar-drenched “neoliberal” abandonment of the Democratic Party’s last, lingering commitments to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial equality, the poor, and environmental protection in abject service to the “competitive” bottom-line concerns of Big Business. The Clintons helped launch the New Democrat/DLC juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas’ teacher unions (Hillary led the attack) and refusing to back the repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law – this while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which “represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas” (Henwood). Connection with one of the sleazier players among those interests, a Savings and Loan charlatan named Jim McDougal, got them involved in the Whitewater scandal, which involved the Arkansas Governor’s spouse (Hillary) doing legal work at Rose (work about which Hillary lied upon outside investigation) for a shady land speculator (McDougal) who had enticed the governor and his wife (the Clintons) to foolishly invest in a badly leveraged development project.
When the Arkansas-based community-organizing group ACORN passed a ballot measure lowering electrical rates residential users and raising them for commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose sent Hillary into court to argue a business-backed challenge. As Henwood notes, Hillary “helped to craft the underlying legal strategy, which was that the new rate schedule amounted to an unconstitutional ‘taking of property’…now a common right-wing argument against regulation…” (Harper’s, November 2014)
CONTINUED AT:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/hillary-clinton-and-the-manipulation-of-populism/
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