What Really is Going on With Hillary Clinton?

The mainstream corporate press has been full of stories about how Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president is failing, she’s being investigated for storing classified emails on a non-secure computer server, Bernie Sanders is gaining on her in the polls, and Joe Biden is tantalizing us with the prospect of running himself.  There are also rumors that Obama is not turning over his campaign staff or donor records etc. to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

What on earth is all this about?

The thing that you must never forget, is that the mainstream corporate press is not a free press, but a propaganda machine run to a tight script that is generated by maybe fewer than a dozen people who mostly all play golf with each other.  Negative stories about Hillary Clinton don't just magically appear on CNN or FOX news, unless the right people have approved them first.

Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, performed yeoman service to his wealthy patrons in selling out the national interest for money.  Hillary herself is nothing if not joined at the hip with Wall Street, and – empty campaign slogans aside – has always come down on the side of the super-rich against the interests of the middle class.  From her support of anti-worker anti-American trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, cheap-labor immigration policies, letting Wall Street loot the public treasury, etc.etc., she’s been a reliably corrupt grifter. 

So from the point of view of the 0.01%, what’s not to like?

If the real players in our society liked Hillary, you would not be hearing this negative press – it would all be sunshine and sparkles, her utterly dishonest press releases about wanting to help the middle class given uncritical glowing exposure by a sycophantic corporate press.  The executive branch is now almost utterly lawless – look at how the nation’s immigration laws are increasingly being flat-out broken.  If the people in charge wanted the business of the classified state department emails to go away, they would go away and you and I would never have heard of them.  But why?

Of course I don’t really know.  But it must be for a reason, and we can speculate.

1. Hillary don’t golf.  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama always spent a lot of time golfing and palling it up with their wealthy patrons.  And just as Charley don’t surf, Hillary don’t golf.  I have also heard strong rumors that, in person, Hillary can be a real nasty piece of work.  So some of this might just be personal – the old boy network doesn’t like her.  Still, the old boys know that business is business, and if they felt that Hillary would be the best agent to advance their agenda I’m sure they could swallow their personal dislike of her.

But on the other hand, it might be more than personal dislike – by not playing golf and schmoozing in general, the oligarchs might wonder if they are really all on the same team.  It could be a trust issue, which leads me to:

2. Hillary is not playing by the rules.  The game according to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama is this: you lie through your teeth during the campaign about wanting to help the middle class and the poor.  Then when elected you dutifully serve the interests of the super-rich while totally screwing over the nation as a whole.  Then, AFTER leaving office, you cash in.  That’s how it’s done.

But Hillary isn’t going along with this.  As Secretary of State she spent a lot (maybe most?) of her time making deals selling out the national interest to enrich herself and her family and foundation.  WHILE STILL SECRETARY OF STATE.  Now, the rich don’t give a damn about public figures selling out for money – hey, it’s how the rich keep getting richer, because they can outbid the rest of the nation for the services of government officials.  But, Hillary was not a good little servant.  She acted like she was already a major player – she was looking to advance her own interests up front, instead of advancing the interests of the oligarchy and then getting paid off. 

This must worry a lot of the people in charge. What really will Hillary do if she gets her hands on the increasingly unchecked power of the US presidency?  Will she do as she’s told, or will she try to grab everything for herself and her foundation and step on a lot of powerful toes?  That must worry the people with powerful toes.

And then there is the feminism angle.  The elites are happy to let little people deal with affirmative action and racial and gender quotas and squabble amongst each other for scraps, but these agendas are not to ever ever apply to the elite, who remain mostly rich white men.  Could Hillary apply gender quotas to the real players here?  That would not do.  Such things are only for little people.

3. Obama must be starting to sweat. In the old days of the US constitutional republic, presidents would retire and live out their lives in peace.  In dictatorships, that doesn’t happen – executives with absolute power don’t typically retire willingly, because if they do they are always going to be a potential threat to their successors.  Thus, retired/deposed dictators tend to be assassinated/jailed/investigated/executed etc. 

Now Congress has increasingly signed away it’s power to the executive branch, and the judiciary has become little more than a rubber stamp that will approve anything as long as national security or executive privilege is invoked.  So the president can start and continue to fight wars all over the planet almost without restraint, can spend billions undermining foreign governments, can sign binding treaties without 2/3 congressional approval, can completely make up immigration law out of who cloth, can arrest and imprison US citizens indefinitely without charge, can classify any piece of information, can freeze anyone’s bank accounts on a whim, can refuse to enforce any law, he can lock down entire city centers so his rich banker friends can throw a party…. you get the idea.

So what happens when Obama retires, and Hillary gets all that power?  Maybe she’ll play nice.  Or maybe she won’t.  The point is that once Obama steps down, and Hillary steps up, Obama will give up all that power.  Oh, he’ll still have powerful friends, but they will have other issues to attend to than protecting Obama, and Hillary will have all the leverage.  If she wanted to, she could investigate him on any number of obscure violations of the federal code real and imagined, she could make his life hell.  Is there any bad blood between Obama and Hillary?  Is she still bitter about 2008?  Payback’s a bitch, and so's Hillary.

Or maybe it’s more of a turf war – Hillary could suck up so many donations into the Clinton foundation that Obama’s competing foundational power center could be left gasping for oxygen.

Either way, Obama would sleep a lot easier knowing that team-player Joe “The Senator from Mastercard” Biden was in charge.  Biden is a moronic mean-spirited gaffe-monster, but he knows enough to do as he’s told. 

4. Hillary might be crazy enough to scare even our elites.  When one considers the devastation and unforced strategic errors of Dubya and Obama, one could be forgiven in thinking that the elites no longer care about competency in foreign affairs.  Sure, throw trillions of dollars away attacking the wrong countries, arm islamic fanatics who then promptly turn on us.  The rich are now so powerful that they must feel invulnerable - hey, the entire nation can go up in flames and they'll just hop on their private 757 jet and go to their private island.  

But Hillary's tenure as Secretary of State might actually be scaring some of the people who count.  I mean, here was a guy, who lately had made nice with the US, was cooperating with us on terrorism etc., and ran the country with the highest standard of living in Africa.  Hillary armed islamic jihadists, attacked the Libyan central government, and turned the place into a post-apocalyptic wasteland that threatens to drag down not just a large chunk of the middle east and Africa, but maybe a lot of Europe as well.

Perhaps even our elites have come to realize that, maybe, there are still limits to the stupidity and evil that they will tolerate in government.

5. The Republicans might not be following the script.  What the rich really want is that, come election day, the American public has a heads-the-rich-win tails-the-workers-lose choice. Hillary vs. Jeb, Hillary vs. Rubio, it’s all good.  One sometimes hears complaints about those high-priced campaign consultants (like Karl Rove) that lost a lot of elections but still keep getting paid big bucks.  They didn’t lose.  They played their part in stage managing a false campaign where the rich won.  So of course they keep getting paid – where it really counts, they keep winning!

Now the Democrats have an edge over the Republicans, in that their base is completely demoralized and adrift from any sense of sanity.  Obama can stab them in the back time and again, and liberal democrats will continue to support him and whine that it’s all those evil Republicans fault for having a divided Congress (as if Congress even mattered any more, and when it does – like the vote for Obamatrade – Congress rapidly falls into line).  The Republican base, however, is still in some measure of contact with reality.  When a politician campaigns one way and then, after being elected, does the opposite, the base gets angry. 

So if it were Hillary vs. Trump or Hillary vs. Santorum, the rich won’t sweat it.  The Republican party will fight amongst themselves, as oligarchy-approved forces battle it out with the grass roots.  So Hillary would automatically get the Democratic vote: a Trump or a Santorum would be so slandered in the mainstream press and attacked from all sides, that they would be lucky to poll more than 40% in the general election.

But what if Trump (against all odds, I’m still not very optimistic) manages to pull it off?  What if he actually makes headway with black voters, that hey, all these bad trade agreements and illegal and legal immigration are stealing your jobs?  And ditto with many American citizens of Latin American descent?  And what if the slanders that he’s a racist make him not weaker, but even stronger?  This might not spin out the way the rich want after all.

And if Trump ends up running against Bernie Sanders... well... all bets are off.

6. So is Biden the oligarchies’ backup plan?  As I said before, Biden is a disgusting nonentity of human being.  But he’s a proven team player, and won’t shaft Obama after the latter retires.  Look for sycophantic press coverage – nonstop pushing about how he’s the champion of the American worker (barf) how his son begged him to run for president on his deathbed (did Spielberg script that one?), that he’s got the “Joe-mentum”, etc.

Never underestimate how the rich can take someone with zero percent in the polls and, with constant manufactured press coverage, push them to the front.  That happened with Bill Clinton, and John McCain, and Barack Obama – all going nowhere until the deal was struck.  So don’t laugh, Biden for president could happen.

And watch the Republican side as well.  If the rich can find a more pliable ‘outsider’ who talks pretty in public but promises to betray the nation when elected, such a person will get a lot of glowing press.  Yes I am thinking of you, Ben Carson.  Carson is surfing on the anti-establishment vibe, but if you look at his website and listen to his press releases, he's effectively for unlimited illegal cheap-labor immigration.  I read a lot on his site about abortion and keeping 'gitmo' open, but nada about all these anti-American trade deals, or how hedge fund managers are being taxed less than truck drivers etc.   Sounds to me like Mr. Carson is toeing the big-money establishment line.  Rile the proles up with social issues and let the big money continue to rip us off.

Beware of ‘outsiders’ saying what you want to hear, that are somehow not being slandered as racist far-right goons. 

If they can’t beat Trump directly, they can try to wear him down with slander and deflect the anger of the American people with a more acceptable ‘outsider’.  Watch for it.

Remember how good Obama sounded in 2008?  Well, don’t forget how that ended up.

Benedict Arnold was a War Hero Too

The American General Benedict Arnold was a war hero, who fought bravely and effectively on the side of the American revolutionaries – until he changed sides and plotted to betray his forces to the British.  Now, in the United States, his name is synonymous with betrayal. Nobody in this country would call Benedict Arnold a hero, or allow his previous service to immunize him from any criticism.

Consider then John McCain.  Certainly his joining to fight in Vietnam showed bravery and patriotism, although unlike Benedict Arnold, he displayed a remarkable lack of skill as a warrior.  He had great trouble keeping his planes in the air – which is a bad thing for a pilot – and the reports are that his incompetence very nearly destroyed an entire aircraft carrier.  ‘War Hero’ or not, criticizing this is surely fair game?  Shall he be immunized from all criticism because of his ‘War Hero’ record?

I note that the noncombatant George W. Bush and his supporters had no trouble making fun of John Kerry’s alleged lack of skill in commanding patrol boats in Vietnam.  How did Bush get away with that?  Does the simple act of volunteering for dangerous duty automatically makes one a ‘hero’ – regardless of how incompetent in battle one is?  Should anyone who criticizes John Kerry (or any other soldier) be widely declared to be politically finished, and forced to apologize not just to John Kerry, but to all military veterans and active duty personnel?  Rubbish, right?

The entire episode of Trump insulting McCain is yet more political theater.  It’s how the establishment beats down anyone that might oppose them in anything other than empty rhetoric.  If Trump had been on the side of his fellow oligarchs, and McCain someone like Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan, it would likely not even had made the news.  It certainly would not have been pounded on like it is.

Consider Hillary Clinton.  She has committed Gaffe after gaffe, at least as many as Trump, but she’s a proven servant of the oligarchy, so she gets away with it.  Consider her astonishingly bad record as Secretary of State: she spent a lot of time in office finding new ways to sell out the national interest for cash (with her husband’s speaking tours serving to launder much of her winnings).  When she could be bothered to do anything other than cash in, she was the primary driving force bethind the invasion of Libya.  Now Muammar Gaddafi was not a saint, but lately he had made nice with the US, helping to fight Islamic extremism.  Under his rule, Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa.  So of course Hillary orchestrated an invasion, and now Libya is a failed state and a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

When Gaddafi was captured by the rebels, he was tortured (apparently sodomized with a knife) and then killed.  So what was Hillary’s reaction to this brutal death, and to her trashing of a nation with which we had no quarrel?  “We came, we saw, he died” was her giggling epitaph.  And people say that Trump is toxic?  Excuse me?  How many nations has Trump destroyed?

After McCain came back from Vietnam, the betrayals began.  It started with him abandoning his crippled wife for a rich floozy, but from there it has included doing everything possible to prevent the enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration.  The single most important thing that any government can do is protect the populace from foreign invasion: in selling out the national interest to the cheap labor lobby, this is treason at least as great as that of Benedict Arnold.  And it goes on.  Giving trillions of dollars of public money to Wall Street.  Signing off on trade agreements – NAFTA, MFN for China, Obamatrade, etc. – that have hollowed out the nation’s industrial base, and that soon look to destroy America’s sovereignty as unaccountable corporate lawyers meeting in secret are allowed to over-rule our laws.  Squandering our military assets in endless pointless wars, and then shafting the veterans by cutting VA funding.  And so on.

During his 2008 campaign John McCain starting singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” – I mean, whatever one thinks of Iran, at the time we were not at war with them.  For a US senator and presidential candidate to start singing this in public is, dare I say it? Crazy.  And yet, while his opponents did use it against him, McCain nevertheless was not ‘finished’ and continues to be treated as a serious person.

OK Trump didn’t choose his words well, but I don’t think that he owes McCain any apologies.  I think that McCain owes the entire nation an apology for having sold us out over the years.

There is one ray of hope here.  The media pile-on over a single gaffe is supposed to destroy a candidate.  However, Trump is not backing down, and a substantial fraction of the population isn’t buying the whole ‘Trump is finished’ meme.  A common reaction seems to be something like ‘hey I don’t care what Trump said about McCain I want the border sealed and the illegal immigrants arrested and sent back to their own countries’. 

The American people not thinking the way that the corporate press is telling them to think!  The American people keeping their eyes on the prize and refusing to be distracted by ephemera!  I still think that we are probably doomed, but whatever happens to the Trump campaign, this is a refreshing development.

Do not care about minor gaffes blown out of proportion.  Do not let traitors to the republic like John McCain get away with their treason just because they are ‘war heros.’  Focus on the issues.  Focus on the important.  And when evaluating a politician, always always look at the record.

A Bully can Tolerate no Successful Challenge to Their Authority

This is an old meme.  The schoolyard bully rules through fear – once a single person stands up to them and avoids punishment, the bully’s power is gone.  So with states: Montesquieu has written that for a despotism there can be no cracks in the façade of invincible central authority: let there be one unbowed challenger to the order and it all comes crashing down.

An excellent example is the old Soviet Union.  A rigid dictatorship, where any criticism of the status quo was met with overwhelming force.  It looked like the Soviet Union would last forever – and then Michael Gorbachev allowed some dissent, and it all turned into dust.

In the United States we now face a similar issue.  They say that the United States is a nation of immigrants, but this is a meaningless statement.  Every nation on the face of this planet is peopled by immigrants and the descendants of immigrants, and many more recently than the United States.  Until 1970 the United States enforced the laws against illegal immigration, and thus, illegal immigration was until then utterly negligible.  Legal immigration was similarly low: yes there was a small (yes, SMALL) surge in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which nevertheless drove wages down and profits up, but it was eventually closed down by progressives.  In the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s there was hardly any immigration into the United States, and wages shot up and profits fell.  How terrible.

The United States is not special because it is a ‘nation of immigrants’.  It is (or used to be) special because, relative to its resources and developed capital, it has so few immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

But the rich want their cheap labor.  They want the United States to be like India, a miserably impoviershed land where most people slave away for sub-poverty wages and the rich live in private skyscrapers.  So the rich have opened the floodgates to the overpopulated third world.  Post-1970 immigration has already increased the population of the United States by about 100 million, and the pace is accelerating.  Wages are going down, rents are going up, and the lack of water in California is a harbinger that the days of Americans having abundant resources are coming to a close.

However, the rich don’t want any discussion of this.  Therefore they have used their power to intimidate anyone from speaking out.  Say that you are against Mexican nationals coming across the border: you must hate legal immigrants!  You must be a racist!  You must hate people of Latin American ancestry!  You must be a xenophobe, extreme far-right, a Nazi!  You can’t say that!

Certainly the rich have no problem enforcing the laws against trespassing on their vast estates and country clubs.  The rich have no problem carefully screening the children in their local public schools to make sure that no poor American ‘in search of a better life’ enrolls their kids there.  They only object to the average American having the same rights. 

The rich demand that Americans sacrifice all that they have achieved to make room for an endlessly swelling tide of third-world refugees.  Yet, the rich themselves offer to make no sacrifice at all, and indeed, look to make a lot of money.

There is little so disgusting as a rich person pushing policies that will make them even richer, at the expense of making everyone else poorer, and then claiming the moral high ground. 

So how do the rich get away with it?  Obviously by buying the legislature and the media and the universities, but also through bullying.  Anyone speaking truth about this will be hammered down and made an example of.

Thus it is that post-1970 immigration has doubled California’s population from 20 to 40 million, but nothing can be said by anyone about how this affects traffic congestion or the availability of fresh water.  Hundreds of thousands of medically unscreened children from countries with endemic diseases are brought in and distributed to (non-wealthy!) public school, and suddenly diseases that are rare or unknown in the United States break out – and we can’t talk about that.  (It must be an act of God).  American engineers are being forced to train their replacements from India – oh poor job prospects must be because automation is reducing the need for labor.  All rubbish.

No, there can be no deviation from this script.  Nobody dares to speak out, in fear of retaliation.

And now comes Donald Trump.  He dares.  And this makes him a deadly threat to the rich and powerful and their desire to turn the United States into yet another overpopulated third-world sweatshop. 

The elites want Trump crushed.  Not deflected, not settling for third in the Republican primary, but crushed.  If he is allowed to continue on his course unbroken, he might change the entire terms of the debate.  Sure he’s a billionaire, but he’s only one billionaire.  Massive forces will be brought to bear on him.  He will be variously slandered, ignored, ridiculed, harassed, sued, you name it.  Because this is a big deal.  It’s the biggest deal of the campaign. It’s the biggest deal in politics in a generation – perhaps, the biggest political deal in this nation’s history ever.  Because it's about whether there will even be a  recognizable nation left in a century or so.

What’s done is done: even if the border were sealed today, demographic momentum would increase the population of the United States to at least 400 million.  The old days of American exceptionalism and abundant resources will be gone forever, but that’s still not so many people that you can’t adapt and have a decent standard of living.  But the alternative is to shoot up to a billion and beyond, and become like India: where half the children are growing up chronically malnourished.  It can happen here, and if nothing is done to change policy, it will.  If you are under 20, you will live to see it.  Whatever your age, your grandchildren will live to see it.

We need to get past the idea that politics is about ideas and position papers and personalities and how well someone comports themselves on a stage.  I wouldn’t watch any debates at all: they mean nothing.  Barack Obama was a wonderful speechmaker: all of it was a lie.  Hillary Clinton has some wonderful position papers on how she’s going to boost the middle class: all rot.  Don’t bother.

Care only about the record.  The record is clear that Clinton and Jeb and Rubio and Walker are going to stab you in the back.  Period.  Trump is a little more dicey: he doesn’t have a record of stabbing you in the back, but he also doesn't have a record of following through. 

Still.  Normally I would shy away from the importance of symbolism in politics (Santorum is actually better than Trump on immigration overall - notice how he's been ignored in the media?), but here I make an exception.  What is important is if Donald Trump can brave the firestorm of attacks and make it possible to talk sensibly about population policy again.  The odds are still against him, but if anyone has the ego and resources to pull this off, he does.  I urge that you support him, and more importantly, to do so publicly and without shame.  Forgive him his eccentric personal style: you are not voting for best actor, but for your interests.  Don’t worry if he makes the occasional gaffe. If the person standing up for your interests is on the crude side, and the person who’s going to stab you in the back is smooth and suave, well, who’s your daddy?

A modern liberal will cheerfully march into hell if only they are led by someone that the New York Times declares to be respectable.  Don’t make that mistake.

Trump for President.