Throughout this election season, corporate media have discounted and marginalized Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy while ignoring the serious failings in Hillary Clinton’s record. And the Democratic Party apparatus jiggered primaries and caucuses to suppress or not count Sanders votes. The choice was preordained.
Now, as Republicans dissect Clinton’s record, Sanders voters are urged to fear Donald Trump, choose the “lesser evil” and commit to Clinton – now, months before Election Day, lest they get other ideas and stray.
Yes, Trump espouses bigotry, protofascism and sexism and denies climate change; he’s not to be trusted to recognize the general welfare, much less how to serve it. At best, he occasionally recognizes nonsense (the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bullying provocations abroad), questions our foreign meddling and would talk with North Korea.
But Clinton’s unmentioned record grips me. It’s short on service of the common good and long on Wall Street complicity and neoconservative violence and skullduggery:
• Hillary and Bill Clinton’s “ending welfare as we know it” scuttled a passable safety net. More recently, Hillary Clinton rejected single-payer health care in favor of for-profit care.
• Hillary Clinton’s influence gave us Madeleine “We think the price is worth it” (half a million Iraqi dead) Albright and needless Serbia bombing. (War criminal Henry Kissinger is another valued adviser.)
For millions, Colin Powell’s “evidence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction only confirmed their recognition that he did not; Clinton voted for war in Iraq.
In 2008, she promised war on Iran if elected. She led the false flag charge on Moammar Gadhafi, repeating the Iraq misadventure by replacing rogue order in Libya with chaos and misery. She promoted the destabilization of Syria – 350,000 dead, many killed with our weapons.
• Nearer home, the Clinton-led State Department opposed a minimum-wage increase in Haiti! Ignoring unanimous Latin American condemnation of the 2009 elitist Honduras coup we funded and promoted, Clinton blessed democracy’s replacement in that country, who ushered in tyranny, drug violence, corruption and numerous assassinations of worker and environment advocates. After NAFTA’s big hit on jobs here and family farms in Mexico, sending millions northward, she promoted the TPP.
• After 67 years of Israel’s systematic denial of any security, dignity or freedom to millions of Palestinians, the world is losing patience with its relentless push to steal what little is left of Palestine not already stolen under the guise of security. Clinton still cannot see Palestinians and would extend their misery.
• In response to our existential environmental crisis, Clinton promoted fracking worldwide. (Pushed to take a position on the Keystone pipeline, she finally came out against it last fall – though she’d previously said she was “inclined” to support it.)
• Clinton claims that her Wall Street speaking fees were freely offered. No, her asking price was $225,000 plus a chartered plane and her entourage’s expenses. Her chief party operative, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, kowtows to payday usurers.
• Ever the warrior, Hillary Clinton would give the military-industrial complex more profitable and deadly airings, further shortchanging America’s burgeoning poor and creating more refugees.
The situation: Trump, a loose cannon, has, with deft strokes and empty promises, marshaled the anger and frustration of white males, their supremacy doomed by demography, victimized by the 1 percent. Wall Street’s repudiation of him effectively makes Clinton both parties’ status quo candidate.
Why, then, should true Democrats vote for the “lesser evil”? Rejection of a fusion “Republicrat” candidate is the lesson the sold-out new Democrats need. Unmasked, they cannot continue to muster black, women and aged voters to block the common-good revolution that Bernie Sanders’ campaign joined to address the environmental crisis, U.S. militarism run amok and an economy designed to serve greed and bleed everybody else.
If Trump wins? For all of his bigotry, bluster and impulsive postures, he has no record of mass murder, tyranny creation and impoverishment. His mercurial presidency should force Congress and the Supreme Court to become responsible.
If Clinton survives? She will stubbornly go her neoconservative way in the face of a growing revolution and, a tragically wrong leader for the time, see her wayward and sclerotic party abandoned wholesale in 2018.
My guess is that many Sanders voters will go Green, for a candidate who recognizes the common good, and elect a Green president in 2020 – if we are still around.
Or, finally, consider Trump naming Supreme Court justices intolerable and drink the Kool-Aid.
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