by Ralph
Nader
Bernie Sanders is far too easy
on Hillary Clinton in their debates. Clinton flaunts her record and experience
in ways that Sanders could use to expose her serious vulnerabilities and
disqualifications for becoming president. Sanders responds to Clinton’s points,
but without the precision that could demolish her arrogance.
For example, she repeatedly
says that Sanders has not levelled with people about the cost of full Medicare
for all, or single-payer. Really? In other countries, single-payer is far
simpler and more efficient than our present profiteering, wasteful,
corporatized healthcare industry. Canada covers all of its citizens, with free
choice of doctors and hospitals, for about $4,500 per capita, compared to the
over $9,000 per capita cost in the U.S. system that still leaves tens of
millions of people uninsured or underinsured.
Detailed studies in the New
England Journal of Medicine show big savings from a single-payer system in our
country.
It is Hillary Clinton who is
not levelling with the people about the costs of maintaining the spiraling U.S.
costs of drugs, hospital stays and insurance premiums that are the highest in
the world. The costs include: 1) the waste of well over $1 trillion a year; 2)
daily denials of coverage by the Aetnas of the corporate world; 3) about forty
thousand Americans dying each year, according to a peer-reviewed Harvard
Medical School study, because they cannot afford health insurance to get
diagnosed and treated in time; and 4) daily agonizing negotiations over
insurance company denials, exclusions and bureaucratic paperwork that drive
physicians up the wall.
Clinton hasn’t explained why
she was once for single-payer until she defined her “being practical” as
refusing to take on big pharma, commercial hospital chains and the giant
insurance companies. She is very “practical” about taking political
contributions and speaking fees from Wall Street and the health care industry.
As one 18 year-old student
told the New York Times recently about Clinton, “sometimes you get this feeling
that all of her sentences are owned by someone.”
This protector of the status
quo and the gross imbalance of power between the few and the many expresses
perfectly why Wall Street financiers like her so much and prove it with their
large continuing monetary contributions.
Hillary Clinton is not
“levelling with the American people,” when she keeps the transcripts (which she
requested at the time) of her secret speeches (at $5,000 a minute!) before
large Wall Street and trade association conventions. Her speaking contracts
mandated secrecy. Clinton still hasn’t told voters what she was telling big
bankers and many other industries from automotive to drugs to real estate
developers behind closed doors.
She has the gall to accuse
Bernie Sanders of not being transparent. Sanders is a presidential candidate
who doesn’t take big-fee speeches or big donations from fat cat
influence-peddlers, and his record is as clean as the Clintons’ political
entanglements are sordid. (See Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer.)
But it is in the area of
foreign and military affairs that “Hillary the hawk” is most vulnerable. As
Secretary of State her aggressiveness and poor judgement led her to the White
House where, sweeping aside the strong objections of Secretary of Defense,
Robert Gates, she persuaded President Obama to bomb Libya and topple its
dictatorial regime.
Gates had warned about the
aftermath. He was right. Libya has descended into a ghastly state of chaotic
violence that has spilled into neighboring African nations, such as Mali, and
that opened the way for ISIS to establish an expanding base in central Libya.
Her fellow hawks in Washington are now calling for U.S. special forces to go to
Libya.
Whether as Senator on the
Armed Services Committee or as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton has never met a
war or raid she didn’t like, or a redundant, wasteful weapons system she was
willing to aggressively challenge. As president, Hillary Clinton would mean
more wars, more raids, more blowbacks, more military spending and more profits
for the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower so prophetically
warned about in his farewell address.
So when Bernie Sanders
properly chided her for having as an advisor, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of
State under Richard Nixon, she bridled and tried to escape by asking Sanders to
name his foreign policy advisors.
In fact, Kissinger and Clinton
do have much in common about projecting the American Empire to brutal levels.
Kissinger was the “butcher of Cambodia,” launching an illegal assault that
destabilized that peaceful country into the Pol Pot slaughter of millions of
innocents. She was the illegal “butcher of Libya,” an ongoing, unfolding
tragedy whose blowbacks of “unintended consequences” are building by the week.
In a devastating recounting of
Hillary Clinton’s disastrous war-making, Professor of Sustainable Economies at
Columbia University, Jeffrey D. Sachs concludes that Clinton “is the candidate
of the War Machine.” In a widely noted article
Professor Sachs, an advisor the United Nations on millennium development
goals, called her record a “disaster,” adding that “Perhaps more than any other
person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from
West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens U.S. security.”
The transformation of Hillary
Clinton from a progressive young lawyer to a committed corporatist and
militarist brings shame on the recent endorsement of her candidacy by the
Congressional Black Caucus PAC.
But then, considering all the
years of Clintonite double talk and corporate contributions going to the Black
Caucus PAC (according to FEC reports January through December, 2015), and the
Black Caucus conventions,
why should anybody be surprised that Black Lives Matter and a growing
surge of young African Americans are looking for someone in the White House who
is not known for the Clintons’ sweet-talking betrayals?
See Michelle Alexander’s
recent article in The Nation, “Hillary
Clinton Does Not Deserve Black People’s Votes” for more information on
this subject.
This work is licensed under a
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Ralph
Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The
Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books
include, The
Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting
Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and "Only
The Super-Rich Can Save Us" (a novel).
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